Toussaint Louverture: A Revolutionary Life

Philippe Girard

Basic Books, £25

Review by Brian Morton

AN OLD engraving of Toussaint Louverture hangs over my desk. Fascination, rather than hero-worship. It shows the “Black Napoleon” from the rear, standing on a small rise of ground, wearing an extravagantly plumed uniform, sword drawn and swung away commandingly to the right, his slight frame dynamically balanced forward. This is the leader of the Haitian Revolution, the most successful, if still one of the least understood, slave revolts of modern history. Significant that he is turned away from us, because until now we’ve been beholden either to the myth-makers or the debunkers.

Much of the information in Philippe Girard’s meticulously researched biography – 60 pages of notes – has emerged since the 1970s and right up to the present decade, as a chaotic imperial archive has been slowly penetrated and absorbed. What this means is that for most of the two centuries since Toussaint’s death in 1803 he has been an icon rather than a rounded individual, a man who seems to transcend history rather than one defined by it. Girard doesn’t set out to dismantle. The facts simply speak for themselves. It appears that the freedman Louverture, who would more properly have been known as Breda after his largely absentee French owners, seems never to have been formally liberated, but simply declared his new status. It’s also troubling, though hardly surprising, to learn that the great liberator owned slaves of his own and that he once bought a young Aja woman specifically in order to ransom his surrogate mother when his second family was in danger of being dispersed. This came out in 2013. The previous year, it was discovered that the slave Jean-Jacques, who Toussaint bought for 1500 livres, was none other than the future Jean-Jacques Dessalines, future president of an independent Haiti and a figure of easily equal stature in the eyes of present-day Haitians. As Girard says, it is “as if it had suddenly been revealed that Thomas Jefferson had once been George Washington’s indentured servant”.

The episode is a further reminder not to judge the past by the standards of the present, or to believe that history is simply a chequerboard of moral verities and fixed positions. Racism was as much concerned with the maintenance of class divisions as it was with ethnicity. Saint-Domingue – as pre-independence Haiti was known – was a complex society comprised of French planters and slaves, but also “little whites” and freed slaves, whose relative positions had nothing, or little, to do with colour. Miscegenation complicated the picture even further.

Girard’s chapter headings catch Toussaint in a bewildering sequence of identities: aristocrat (African), revolutionary apprentice, family man, slave driver (shockingly), rebel, politician, diplomat and finally icon. He ended his days, betrayed by the parent country and by another diminutive leader who feared his own charisma was being challenged, in a Napoleonic jail. His death was quiet – probably a heart attack – and unheroic. The real vanquisher of the French forces sent to quell the uprising wasn’t a slave army but yellow fever. Girard rightly warns that to “anoint Louverture as an abolitionist saint is a mistake but so is [to depict] him as an elite individual completely cut off from the realities of slavery”. In the same way, easy divisions of black vs white, slave vs free, French vs Haitian simply don’t work in this narrative. The reality that Girard teases out is far more interesting, and in many respects more impressive, than the myth. Toussaint emerges as a man of extraordinary natural gifts, a shrewd negotiator, a careful temporiser when the moment didn’t yet seem to serve his needs, and one in whom courage and caution were evenly mixed.

The slave revolt of 1791 had many causes. Worsening economic conditions were the most obvious. Girard presents some astonishing figures. By 1790, Saint-Domingue was exporting 70 million pounds of white sugar (think “cocaine” to get a sense of present-day values and addictiveness), as well as 93 million pounds of brown sugar, 68 million pounds of coffee and six million pounds of cotton. We’re reminded that only a minority of African slaves (Girard quotes 6%) went to the American colonies. An overwhelming majority went either to Brazil or the Caribbean. The huge economic edifice of Saint-Domingue was, though, little more than a bubble drifting among sharp edges, just waiting to be blown. By 1790 the French Revolution had happened, promising freedom, but only to the right type and colour of man, and scarcely at all to women. Though the revolution was warmly enough greeted in Saint-Domingue, not least by Toussaint, the old monarchy, which had been trying to reform its colonies for years, still seemed like a kindlier alternative to the Committee of Public Safety. Even so, the Haitian Revolution can’t be spun as a monarchist plot. It was infinitely more subtle and random than that. Toussaint became its leader by waiting largely behind the scenes. His heroism, again, is of a conspicuously unheroic sort and marked with brutality. Likewise his aims. The younger Toussaint, far from wanting to ruin and lynch his white “employers”, actually wanted to be like them. The older man, far from being a nationalist, in the usual separatist sense, wanted nothing more than to be a figure in a new French empire. Che Guevara had the good sense to die young and leave an easily screenprinted image of himself. With Toussaint, it’s not so easy. That old engraving still hangs there, but it’s as if he has turned a little away from his unseen troops and toward us. If he’s still not quite full-face, that is no fault of Philippe Girard’s but simply a measure of how far we now are from Toussaint’s complex mind-set.