Toussaint Louverture - Madison Bell [0]
Toussaint Louverture
“Well-researched and elegantly written…. Bell's portrait of Louverture is as honest as his overall assessment of his actions is generous.”
—The Wall Street Journal
“Absorbing and inspired…. Bell creates a world of complicated racial politics, high stakes diplomacy and a time of world change.”
—The Times-Picayune (New Orleans)
“Mesmerizing…. Moving…. Combines rich, lyrical prose with exhaustive detail.”
—Essence
“A well-researched and timely reminder that Haiti's political tra vails are no recent phenomenon.”
—The Miami Herald
“An important recounting of a little-known piece of history.”
—The Washington Post Book World
“Bell's very readable and scholarly biography unpacks the complexities of [Louverture] and his milieu.”
—The Providence Journal
“A readable and engaging narrative, one likely to become the standard biography in English about this remarkable figure.”
—The Nation
“A beautifully composed discourse on a revolutionary world, a work in a class all its own…. Like any great novelist, this biographer respects the inscrutability of human nature, thereby elevating the genre of biography to the highest level.”
—The New York Sun
MADISON SMARTT BELL
Toussaint Louverture
Madison Smartt Bell is the author of twelve novels and two collections of stories. All Souls' Rising was a finalist for the National Book Award and the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction. A professor of English and the director of the Kratz Center for Creative Writing at Goucher College, Bell lives in Baltimore, Maryland, with his family.
ALSO BY MADISON SMARTT BELL
Lavoisier in the Year One
The Stone That the Builder Refused
Anything Goes
Master of the Crossroads
Narrative Design
Ten Indians
All Souls' Rising
Save Me, Joe Louis
Doctor Sleep
Barking Man and Other Stories
Soldier's Joy
The Year of Silence
Zero db and Other Stories
Straight Cut
Waiting for the End of the World
The Washington Square Ensemble
Aux grands marrons!
Yves Benot
Gerard Barthelemy
Michel Rolph Trouillot
Toussaint Louverture, placed in the midst of rebel slaves from the beginning of the revolution of Saint Domingue, thwarted by the Spanish and the English, attached to the French, attacked by everyone, and believing himself deceived by the whole world, had early felt the necessity of making himself impenetrable. While his age served him well in this regard, nature had also done much for him … One never knew what he was doing, if he was leaving, if he was staying; where he was going or whence he came.1
—Général Pamphile de Lacroix
Does anyone think that men who have enjoyed the benefits of freedom would look on calmly while it is stripped from them? They bore their chains as long as they knew no better way of life than slavery. But today when they have left it, if they had a thousand lives they would sacrifice them all rather than to be again reduced to slavery … We knew how to face danger to win our liberty; we will know how to face death to keep it.2
—Toussaint Louverture
Contents
Acknowledgments
Introduction
ONE Opening the Gate
TWO Before the Storm
THREE Turning the Tide
FOUR Closing the Circle
FIVE The Last Campaign
SIX Toussaint in Chains
SEVEN Scattering the Bones
AFTERWORD The Image of Toussaint
Notes
Bibliography
Acknowledgments
My thanks to Laurent Dubois, Jacques de Cauna, Albert Valdman, and David Geggus for their extraordinarily generous help in straightening me out on numerous specific points … but these scholars are not to be held responsible for the conclusions I then drew. I thank Marcel Dorigny, Laennec Hurbon, Jane Landers, and Alyssa Sepinwall for their aid and comfort. Grand merci et chapeau has to Fabrice Herard and Philippe Pichot for a very educational visit to the Fort de Joux.
Introduction
As the leader of the only successful slave revolution in recorded history, and as the founder of the only independent