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By Root 884 0

Toussaint means to assume the mantle prepared for him by the Abbe Raynal, a Catholic priest. His devotion to the Catholic religion was always a prominent feature of his public life—in spite of the fact that the Church had been banned by the Jacobin government during the middle phase of the French Revolution and especially during the Terror. When he accepted the keys to Ciudad Santo Domingo in 1801, Toussaint ordered aTe Deum to be sung— a reassuring gesture for the Spanish citizens, who had expected to confront not only a savage African but also an envoy of the godless Jacobins. He celebrated most of the key events of his career with similar Catholic ceremonies. In Port-au-Prince he had climbed into the pulpit of the principal church to warn the colored population, ex cathedra, of the dire consequences of rebellion against his rule. Cynics denounce Tous-saint's Catholicism as tartufferie, a hypocritical mask for Machiavellian scheming—but he was probably at least as sincere as any of the Borgia popes.

With the help of the Abbe Gregoire in France, Toussaint arranged for four bishoprics to be created in Saint Domingue. Prominent in the French Revolution since 1789, Gregoire had managed to hold on to his prestige through all its various phases, including the most antireligious ones. He was a longtime abolitionist with a special interest in bringing the blacks of Saint Domingue to full status as French citizens, and reform of the Catholic Church in the colony was one means to that end. New clergy came out from France to take over the new positions, but the old colonial priests (some of whom, like Antheaume, belonged to Toussaint's inner circle) protested vigorously. Toussaint compromised, sending Guillaume Mauviel, the priest who would have become bishop of Le Cap, to a post in the former Spanish Santo Domingo. The Abbe Colin, a veteran of the old colonial clergy, was named to the Le Cap bishopric in his place. At around the same time, Toussaint declared Catholicism to be the sole religion of Saint Domingue.

Complementing his Christian fervor, Toussaint's allusions to a higher power before the 1801 assemblies can be as easily read in a Vodouisant as in a Catholic context, and in that aspect they are quintes-sentially Haitian. Toussaint meant to signal to his listeners that he was invested with a spiritual force, but not necessarily or exclusively a Christian spirit. Officially, his Catholicism was strict and exclusive, but if he gave orders against the practice of Vbdou, that only made him the first of many Haitian heads of state to forbid Vodou publicly while practicing it himself in private. He knew the conspiratorial significance of the ceremony at Bois Caiman, whether or not he had been there in person, and he knew just as well how the flexible network of Vodouisant communities could function as a cellular structure for rebellion and revolution—that was why he had complained to Laveaux about Macaya beating the drum too often.

Toussaint sometimes professed to abhor Vodou, usually when talking to white Europeans, who could be expected to disapprove of and fear such African practices (though some blancs colonists dabbled in Vodou themselves). It was a way of renouncing the Devil—and in the religious context of the time, the Devil and his minions were considered to be every bit as real and tangible as God, Christ, and the community of saints. In the eyes of the Church, the pantheon of African spirits appeared as a host of demons. The African slaves of Saint Domingue, meanwhile, combined spirits and saints in unanticipated ways, seeing Legba, the Vodou spirit of gates and crossroads, in the image of Saint Peter with his key, or the warrior spirit Ogoun in the image of the horseman Saint Jacques le Majeur. The colonial priesthood ‘was an odd bunch, known for the ‘weakness of both its morals and its doctrine (especially after the expulsion of the Jesuits from Santo Domingo). In these circumstances, Catholicism tended to accommodate African beliefs more than a little, sometimes completely unwittingly and sometimes ‘with one eye