With Haiti being in the news lately for problems beyond my comprehension, I figured it was time to return to a name I briefly learned about in AP history in high school and always meant to return to: Toussaint Louverture, the Precursor of Liberty. He is not Haiti's Founding Father, as I had been mistakenly informed, though he is considered one of its Fathers—so less a Washingon, but high up there in the Haitian pantheon akin to Hamilton or Adams or I guess that shitheel Jefferson. This title is given to Liberator Jean-Jacques Dessalines (a much less pleasant and more massacre-happy figure), though as Madison Smartt Bell is quick to point out, Louverture's actions served as a major catalyst for Haiti's independence movement.
Bell, who is primarily more of a novelist, has written extensively about Haiti and Louverture even in his fiction so he is well-suited for writing this biography, which benefits from its author's voice and does a great job of showing that even the marble heroes of history have their shortcomings and war, even fought for good reasons, is not a glorious crusade as portrayed in art like 'The Charge of the Light Brigade' or the novels of Ernest Hemingway; instead, it is a brutal, dismal state of existence better encapsulated in grim stories like All Quiet on the Western Front, The Red Badge of Courage, or The Iliad, all stories where the suffering, cruelty, barbarity, and human cost of warfare take centerstage over imagined glories.
That out of the way, I'm also going to admit: this book is still difficult to keep track of. This isn't on the author. Anyone would have a difficult time telling the story of the Haitian Revolution in easy terms: on the ground, you've got the complex social system that existed within Haiti, wherein you have whites, blacks, and mixed-race people all occupying different levels of the social sphere. While mixed-race people (or, to use the common but offensive term, mulattoes—which comes from the French word for mule, apparently, so yeah, quite disrespectful) could be wealthier financially than poor whites due to being the children of wealthier planters (think Sally Hemings' children by Jefferson, but not kept as slaves which was pretty fucked up even by US standards, WTF Jefferson?), poor whites would often still be considered socially superior.
Then add in an extra layer of confusion: the slaves initially weren't fighting for universal freedom, just for a few hundred (then a few dozen), then it expanded. And France is going through the Revolution, so you've got an added layer of confusion (Who is giving a better deal, the royalists or the rebels? Who do the rebelling slaves work with?). And you can add another layer of confusion in the realm of geopolitics, because you better believe England and Spain are eyeing a weakening France like birds of prey waiting to swoop in (and later, the US as well when we were on tense terms with France during the later Washington and Adams administrations). Haiti, and Louverture, would retain their loyalty to France for a long time if for no other reason than France's impressive abolitionist credentials (though, as Tom Reiss' The Black Count about Thomas-Alexandre Dumas—yes, the father of Three Musketeers Dumas—racial tensions were very much still a lingering problem in France. Napoleon, apparently, felt quite emasculated when Egyptians assumed that Thomas-Alexandre, not he, was commander of the French forces on his quixotic Egyptian Campaign).
All of this creates a very complex and heady mixture of shifting allegiances, alliances, and really elaborate and ornate French names that are a real pain in the ass to remember and keep in order. To quote Bell, Haiti's Revolution can be described as a "three-way genocidal race war," which is just an absolutely fucking terrifying concept.
Toussaint himself can probably be best described as "enigmatic," though his tactical use of subterfuge to avoid bloodshed does bring to mind an idea of a figure a bit like a slightly-sanitized wily Odysseus. At other times, of course, his more ruthless and Machiavellian side reveals itself—one particular example of this occurs early when a note is written saying that slaves must work for their "masters" and Bell points out that about a decade later, Louverture wrote a similar letter but with "liberty" substituted for "masters."
This is, of course, a recurrent theme throughout history that comes back to the famous 'power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely.' Or, to borrow from the Who: "Meet the new boss/Same as the old boss." Caesar, Cromwell, Napoleon, hell Ataturk even arguably fits this mold: even if they began with good intentions, the power went to their heads. The red tape became maddening, so like Alexander, they sliced through the Gordian Knot to make it easier.
We even see a similar situation in US politics at the moment where people are upset about the slow pace of change or a bill working its way through the legislative process instead of the president issuing an Executive Order: the system was designed this way for a reason. We need people to challenge us and push back because living in an echo chamber of constant approval leads to dictators and tyrants who cannot fail but can only be failed. It happened with Caesar, with Cromwell, with Napoleon, and with Louverture we see this when he becomes "Governor-General for Life" ('For Life' often tends to be a big red flag for a title with tangible power). On the flip side, we also see the threat both to Napoleon (Haitian independence from France) and from Napoleon (Colonies to be ruled under "special laws," which was likely an indicator that slavery could be coming back if Napoleon retained power).
With Louverture's November 15, 1798 proclamation that every able-bodied Black on the island return to work, admittedly for wages but often on the plantations where they once labored as slaves, we begin to see a man who has grown frustrated with he red tape and mankind's dilatory nature and decided a more direct approach, imbuing himself with more power and less hindrances, was necessary. This is a very dangerous moment for any person with power: what differentiates a Caesar from a Cincinnatus?
Though I had come into this reading with the idea that Louverture had ended his life in Haiti, either in power or on the battlefield, I was surprised to find that he had, indeed, been brought back to France and withered away in a cell, denied a trial that would give him an audience, a hero's return to Haiti, or an execution to make him a martyr. He was shut up in a cell and left to rot.
Napoleon, from exile, wrote about regrets regarding his treatment of Louverture—but documents like this must be taken with a grain of salt and these remarks might not indicate a change in Napoleon's racial attitudes as much as him lamenting his own loss of power and torturing himself with thoughts of, "What if?"
Ultimately, France would restore slavery to the colonies and the disgustingly brutal methods used in an attempt to repress the uprising by France provoked further fury. Haiti would gain its independence New Year's Day, 1804, but it did not bring peace with it. Though he was dictatorial, Louverture was among the least violent of the Haitian revolutionaries, especially in comparison to the murder-happy Dessalines. It's tempting to imagine that a steady hand at the stern, even if unfortunately dictatorial at the time, might have worked out akin to South Korea and merely been a stopgap on the way to becoming a thriving democratic nation. For better or worse, that's not the world we live in.
For his part, Bell seems to disagree with the above analysis; to quote the ending of the book: "Appalling as it may have been, Dessalines's course of action was nothing if not logical," before going on to explain that when Louverture tried to work with white property owners, it had not worked out so well. While that might be true, any number of headaches are worthwhile to find a way to avoid a road blocked by "upwards of 1,400 corpses... the blood flowing beneath had made an issue crossing the road, and formed a bar of coagulated blood 40 feet wide." The description goes on. It's disgusting.
All in all, Toussaint Louverture is a well-written and coherent biography, but I wouldn't say it stands out among the biographies I've read so I strugle to put it above a solid, average 3/5—especially since most people aren't probably too drawn to Haitian history and might very well get bogged down by the number of pesky French names and the geopolitics of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.
Miscellaneous thoughts:
—I have used "Haiti" throughout—technically, the appropriate term as I understand it would be to use 'Saint Domingue' which is the name of the then-colony and how it's referred to throughout the book. I can say this is due to confusion or to help with readability, so please accept those excuses because the real reason is that I already wrote the entire damn thing and don't plan to go back now and pick apart when to use Haiti vs. Saint Domingue cause I'm a lazy fuck.
—I shouldn't have been, but was surprised by the links the author makes between Haiti and Vodou. This was a surprising link back to Buried Secrets though I am a bit confused: it always seemed to me that Humes described a syncretistic trail from Africa—>Haiti—>US, but history indicates that more often the transmission was US—>Haiti, not vice versa. The sugarcane plantations were notoriously brutal, after all, and this is why even in Huck Finn or Gone with the Wind, it is mentioned that being sold "down river" or even worse, to the sugarcane fields, was about as bad as it could get for a slave. The route didn't often go with slaves climbing up and out of Haiti.
——Louverture was a devout Catholic by all accounts who, despite trying to stamp out Vodou toward the end of his life, likely still practiced it behind closed doors. This is compared to other Haitian leaders who have done the same. His aversion to it later in life quite likely could have come from a superstitious concern opponents might try to use it to curse him or send malevolent spirits his direction. Interestingly, a similar reasoning is described in O'Donnell's Pagans regarding why the Romans had such harsh punishments for those who were believed to be trying to do similar to the emperor, in particular.
—The Bois Caiman Ceremony, the first meeting of enslaved Blacks to help kick off the revolution, was a Vodou ceremony. Interestingly, Bell suggests a local superstition that the rebellion calling upon "fire" spirits rather than more peaceful "water" spirits is responsible for Haiti's continued chaos in the ensuing centuries. As ever, a superstition, but still, interesting to hear these unique little tidbits.
—The Breda Plantation was Toussaint's original home; he was a coachman, so kinda important/step above other slaves as he carried messages (and a sword).
—Much of the defense of Haiti was put into the hands of freed Blacks. Freeing slaves was frowned upon and penalized, but this penalty could be avoided with military service, meaning that these brilliant white people were putting military training, weapons, and the defense of the nation into the hands of freed slaves who had every reason to hold animosity, especially since even as freedmen they were oppressed and treated as social inferiors. Writing's on the wall for how that turned out.
—Louverture means "the opening" apparently and Bell offers a few apocryphal stories for how he got this name before linking it to Vodou and the spirit Legba who, via syncretism, is associated with St. Peter and Hermes of Greek mythology—two other figures who stand for opening doors/gateways: St. Peter at the pearly gates, Hermes as messenger of the gods. While an interesting theory, seems a bit far-fetched without documentation to back up and a bit more like a high thought than an academic one. Even if accurate, seems like there could've been an interesting insight into his character/psychology here; alas.
—Louverture and Napoleon did end up in a power struggle. This was not helped by the fact that Napoleon appeared to intend to restore slavery and to have Black leaders sent to France. If the two had cooperated and Napoleon had been a bit more far-sighted, then instead of competing as military dictators, Bell suggests the slave revolt spreading to French colonies in US and a very different alt-history conception. In real life, we got Jefferson and he, of course, was heavily opposed to the liberated slaves of Haiti (the Louisiana Purchase also would push against France's ability to spread into the continent).
—God, I hope I didn't make too many mistakes or leave too many errors or "Come back to" bits, because I am a bit sick and my eyes are not cooperating for proofreading.
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