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By Root 837 0

battle with French Revolutionary forces in Saint Domingue on behalf of pan-European royalism. In 1794 he changed his name from Toussaint Breda to Toussaint Louverture and flabbergasted all observers by suddenly switching the four thousand men he now commanded from the Spanish to the French Revolutionary side of the conflict. France abolished slavery in 1794, and Toussaint permanently cast his lot with the French. As a brigadier general, fighting on several fronts at once, he expelled the Spanish and the British from Saint Domingue. As governor general of the colony, he won an ugly civil war with the mulatto faction, then took over the Spanish side of Hispaniola in the name of France. By 1801 he had emerged as the de facto ruler of the entire island. He had either militarily defeated or politically outma-neuvered all the great powers of Europe that meant to claim this rich prize for themselves. In the first months of 1802 he had fought an invasion force sent from France to a draw, and then retired with full honors from the army and the government. In the summer of that year he was arrested by the French and shipped to a prison in the heart of France, from which he would never return.

Only one other man of that time could rival Toussaint's meteoric trajectory, with its dizzying climb and precipitous fall: Napoleon Bonaparte, who in so many ways resembled the black leader whose nemesis he became.

“If I wanted to count all the services of all kinds that I have rendered to the government,” Toussaint Louverture dictated in his prison cell at the Fort de Joux, “I would need several volumes, and still I wouldn't finish it all. And to compensate me for all these services, they arrested me arbitrarily in Saint Domingue; they choked me and dragged me on board like a criminal, without any decorum and without regard for my rank. Is that the recompense due to my work? Should my conduct make me expect such treatment?”1

These lines are drawn from a seventy-five-page memoir which Toussaint composed, with the help of a French secretary, in the prison cell where he was doomed eventually to die without ever hearing any reply to any of his arguments. The Fort de Joux was a dismal place, at least from the point of view of the black general. High in the Jura mountains, in the region of Franche-Comte, near the French town of Pontarlier in one direction and the Swiss frontier in another, the ninth-century chateau is about as remote as one can get from ports and the ocean while remaining on French territory—a feature of real importance to Toussaint's captors. The man who had ordered his deportation from Saint Domingue, Bonaparte's brother-in-law Captain General Emmanuel Leclerc, wrote to the home government not long after: “You cannot possibly keep Toussaint at too great a distance from the sea, nor put him in a prison too sure; that man has fanaticized this country to such a point that his presence here would set it on fire all over again.”2

The mountains surrounding the Fort de Joux are capped with snow eight months out of twelve. The fortress has a well over five hundred feet deep, intended for use during sieges; most of the serfs who were forced to cut the shaft through the solid rock died somewhere down in those depths, never allowed to return to the surface. One of the chateau's medieval masters returned from a Crusade to find his seventeen-year-old wife, Berthe de Joux, engaged in a love affair. He locked her into a three-by-three-by-four-foot cavity, where somehow she survived for ten years. She did not have space to stand erect but she could look out through two sets of bars to see the corpse, then the skeleton of her lover, hanging from a gallows on the opposite cliff.

By the time Toussaint arrived there, the defenses of the Fort de Joux had been evolving for nearly eight centuries. The fortress was ringed by five concentric walls and three moats, each with its own drawbridge. Toussaint was imprisoned in the oldest and innermost enclosure, behind five heavy double doors at the end of a long vaulted corridor. His cell was also a low