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Toussaint Louverture Revolutionary Lives Toussaint Louverture Revolutionary Lives Series Editors: Sarah Irving, University of Edinburgh; Professor Paul Le Blanc, La Roche College, Pittsburgh Revolutionary Lives is a series of short, critical biographies of radical figures from throughout history. The books are sympathetic but not sycophantic, and the intention is to present a balanced and, where necessary, critical evaluation of the individual’s place in their political field, putting their actions and achievements in context and exploring issues raised by their lives, such as the use or rejection of violence, nationalism, or gender in political activism. While individuals are the subject of the books, their personal lives are dealt with lightly except insofar as they mesh with political concerns. The focus is on the contribution these revolutionaries made to history, an examination of how far they achieved their aims in improving the lives of the oppressed and exploited, and how they can continue to be an inspiration for many today. Also available: Salvador Allende: Sylvia Pankhurst: Revolutionary Democrat Suffragette, Socialist and Scourge of Empire Victor Figueroa Clark Katherine Connelly Hugo Chávez: Paul Robeson: Socialist for the Twenty-first Century A Revolutionary Life Mike Gonzalez Gerald Horne W.E.B. Du Bois: Percy Bysshe Shelley: Revolutionary Across the Color Line Poet and Revolutionary Bill V. Mullen Jacqueline Mulhallen Frantz Fanon: Ellen Wilkinson: Philosopher of the Barricades From Red Suffragist to Government Minister Peter Hudis Paula Bartley Leila Khaled: Gerrard Winstanley: Icon of Palestinian Liberation The Digger’s Life and Legacy Sarah Irvin John Gurney Jean Paul Marat: Tribune of the French Revolution Clifford D. Conner Toussaint Louverture A Black Jacobin in the Age of Revolutions Charles Forsdick and Christian Høgsbjerg First published 2017 by Pluto Press 345 Archway Road, London N6 5AA www.plutobooks.com Copyright © Charles Forsdick and Christian Høgsbjerg 2017 The right of Charles Forsdick and Christian Høgsbjerg to be identified as the authors of this work has been asserted by them in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN 978 0 7453 3515 5 Hardback ISBN 978 0 7453 3514 8 Paperback ISBN 978 1 7868 0028 2 PDF eBook ISBN 978 1 7868 0030 5 Kindle eBook ISBN 978 1 7868 0029 9 EPUB eBook This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully managed and sustained forest sources. Logging, pulping and manufacturing processes are expected to conform to the environmental standards of the country of origin. Typeset by Stanford DTP Services, Northampton, England Simultaneously printed in the United Kingdom and United States of America For Robert A. Hill and Janet Alder Contents Illustrations viii Acknowledgements xi Introduction 1 1. Toussaint Unchained: c. 1743–91 14 2. Making an Opening to Liberty: 1791–93 32 3. Black Jacobin Ascending: 1793–98 54 4. The Black Robespierre: 1798–1801 81 5. The Harder They Come, The Harder They Fall . : 1801–03 104 6. One and All: 1804– 128 Notes 151 Index 173 vii Illustrations Map and Figures Map of Saint-Domingue/Haiti ix Frontispiece: Portrait of Toussaint Louverture by Nicolas Eustache Maurin x 1. Portrait of Toussaint Louverture by Pint van der Benjamin (ca 1798) 79 2. Karl Girardet & Jean Jacques Outhwaite, ‘Saint Domingo, from the Ravine-à-Couleuvres [“Snake Gully”]’ 112 Plates 1. Édouard Duval-Carrié – ‘Le Général Toussaint Enfumé’ (General Toussaint Wreathed in Smoke, or Pretty in Pink) 2. François Cauvin – ‘Toussaint L’Ouverture’ 3. Ulrick Jean-Pierre – ‘Cécile Fatiman’ 4. Lubaina Himid – ‘Scenes from the life of Toussaint L’Ouverture, 5’ 5. Kimathi Donkor – ‘Charles and Sanité Belair’ 6. Charlot Lucien – Caché à l’histoire: Toussaint Louverture enfermé au Fort de Joux’ (Hidden from history: Toussaint Louverture imprisoned at the Fort de Joux) 7. Haitian mural of Jean-Jacques Dessalines (1991) 8. Haitian mural paying homage to Toussaint Louverture (1986) viii CUBA Atlantic Ocean Port-de-Paix Atlantic Ocean SAINT- DOMINGUE SANTO Place (HAITI) DOMINGO Môle Saint-Nicolas Saint Michel d’Armes Cap Français (Le Cap) Port Margot Haut de Cap Limbé Caribbean Sea Gros-Morne Acul Plaine du Nord Fort Dauphin Plaisance (Fort-Liberté) Grande Rivière O Marmelade Dondon Ounaminthe G Gonaïves Ennery Saint Raphael N Ravine-à- Couleuvre I R iv er A M rt ib Saint Marc C o Crête-à- n i t a e Pierrot h O o s ix M D o Gonâve u n Island t a Mirebalais i n s O Jérémie Bay of T Port-au-Prince Grand Boucan N Anse nd Léogane Gra La Port-au-Prince A Petit-Goâve (Port-Républicain) S Jacmel 0 10 miles C aribbean Sea Map of Saint-Domingue/Haiti. Toussaint Louverture Frontispiece: Portrait of Toussaint Louverture by Nicolas Eustache Maurin. From Iconographie des contemporains depuis 1789 jusqu’à 1829 (Paris, 1838). Clark Art Institute, Williamstown, Massachusetts. Courtesy of the John Carter Brown Library at Brown University. x Acknowledgements Our debts in writing this popular biography of Toussaint Louverture are first and foremost to those many historians of the Haitian Revolution upon whose collective labour this volume rests, though we of course take responsibility for any errors remaining and for the specific inter- pretation and arguments advanced. As will soon be apparent, we owe our major debt of gratitude here to C.L.R. James, and we have both recently had the great honour of editing The Black Jacobins Reader for the C.L.R. James Archives series with Duke University Press. We therefore felt it was only right to dedicate this work to the Jamaican historian Robert A. Hill, who as editor of that series not only generously entrusted us with The Black Jacobins Reader project but also gave us kind support and expert guidance throughout. Robert’s outstanding scholarship on the African diaspora in general and Caribbean radicals like Marcus Garvey and C.L.R. James in particular remains an inspiration. We would also like to dedicate the work to another inspiring figure, Janet Alder, whose tireless campaigning for justice for her brother Christopher, who died in police custody in Hull in 1998, is just one of many contemporary struggles to make ‘Black Lives Matter’. As Hull celebrates being UK City of Culture in 2017, much will be made no doubt of the abolitionist campaigning of local MP William Wilberforce, but one day the story of Janet Alder’s now 20-year-long struggle to try and uncover the truth about what happened to Christopher Alder will surely be recognised as just as important and significant a part of that city’s history. Thanks are also due to Talat Ahmed, Ian Birchall, Roger Norman Buckley, Margaret Busby, Pablo Butcher, Édouard Duval Carrié, François Cauvin, David Clayton, Kimathi Donkor, Lubaina Himid, Martin Hoyles, Peter James Hudson (and his superb website, The Public Archive: Black History in Dark Times), Margaret Kane, Charlot Lucien, Graham Mustin, Bill Schwarz, Ulrick Jean-Pierre and Robin Urquhart. Alan Forrest deserves special thanks for kindly reading and xi Toussaint Louverture commenting on the manuscript in draft. We would also like to thank the staff of the British Library, John Carter Brown Library, Leeds University Library and McGill University Library. This chapter was written while Charles Forsdick was AHRC Theme Leadership Fellow for ‘Translating Cultures’ (AH/N504476/1). He records his gratitude for this support. Finally, we would like to thank Jonathan Maunder for suggesting this biography in the first place, the editors of the ‘Revolutionary Lives’ series and their anonymous readers, and David Castle, Melanie Patrick, Robert Webb and the whole team at Pluto Press for their patience, support and fine work with this publication. xii Introduction Haiti is the country where Negro people stood up for the first time, affirming their determination to shape a world, a free world . Haiti represented for me the heroic Antilles, the African Antilles . Haiti is the most African of the Antilles. It is at the same time a country with a marvellous history: the first Negro epic of the New World was written by Haitians, people like Toussaint Louverture, Henri Christophe, Jean-Jacques Dessalines. So declared the great Martinican poet and activist Aimé Césaire in a 1967 interview with the Haitian poet René Depestre, stressing the inspiration for him of the Haitian Revolution of 1791–1804, a set of events that led to the birth of the world’s first independent black republic outside Africa.1 Césaire’s classic anti-colonialist 1939 poem Notebook of a Return to My Native Land was a founding poetic text of Négritude – a movement which influenced Depestre himself. It also contained a powerful tribute to the tragic heroic leader of the Haitian Revolution, Toussaint Louverture, evoking his period of imprisonment in the French Jura mountains at the hands of First Consul Napoleon Bonaparte and linking this to a more general experience of ‘blackness’: What is mine too: a small cell in the Jura, The snow lines it with white bars The snow is a white gaoler who mounts guard in front of a prison What is mine a man alone, imprisoned by whiteness a man alone who defies the white screams of a white death (TOUSSAINT, TOUSSAINT LOUVERTURE)2 From William Wordsworth’s mournful sonnet ‘To Toussaint Louverture’, written in the year of Toussaint’s arrest in 1802, up to 1 Toussaint Louverture musicians such as Sidney Bechet, Santana, Wyclef Jean, Charles Mingus and Courtney Pine,
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