Toussaint Louverture - Madison Bell [154]
To bury Toussaint Louverture alive seems to have been Napoleon Bonaparte's exact intention. To make a martyr of the black leader would be as dangerous as to allow him to return to Saint Domingue. There had never been any intention to offer him the stage which a military trial would have afforded. He remained in his dungeon—in the innermost circle of five enclosures, defended by its rings of moats and drawbridges. As the winter months wore on, a series of small humiliations, all ordered from Paris, harried him in the direction of anonymity. His watch was taken from him, and his last correspondence, including the letters from Leclerc and Brunet which had betrayed him into arrest. For his general's uniform had been substituted the rough woolen clothing of an ordinary French mountain peasant. “I presume,” wrote the minister of marine, “that you have removed from him everything that might have any rapport with a uniform, Toussaint is his name; that is the sole appellation which should be given him.”3
The minister ordered that Toussaint should receive “appropriate treatment, that he should be sufficiently clothed and warmed.”4 Exactly what that meant in practice can be deduced from the result. Although the records of the fortress show that more was spent on Toussaint's maintenance than on many other prisoners there, his situation was not a healthy one for an elderly man who had never before left the tropics, and it was not intended to be. Though Toussaint was not absolutely starved to death, his rations left him undernourished. Though he was not absolutely left to die of exposure, he was given meager fuel for his fire.
At the end of January 1803, he began to complain of illness, but was never treated by a doctor. On April 7, he was found dead in his chair by the hearth of his cell. An autopsy revealed signs of a fatal respiratory infection, encouraged by malnutrition and the bitter mountain cold, and probably given an initial foothold by the old wounds to his head. His body was interred in an unmarked grave in a sort of potter's field for old soldiers at the Fort de Joux. There was to be no martyrdom for Toussaint Louverture, and there would be no relics either.
These very systematic efforts to erase the existence of Toussaint Louverture proved to be completely futile. Months before Toussaint drew his last breath, Captain General Leclerc expired in Saint Domingue of yellow fever. Most of his enormous army followed him into the grave, casualties of either disease or the combat which had reopened on a grand scale in July 1802, when news arrived in Saint Domingue of the restoration of slavery in Guadeloupe. What Toussaint had predicted on the deck of L'Heros about the depth, extension, and tenacity of the roots of the tree of black liberty in Saint Domingue proved to be absolutely true. It was not enough to have removed Toussaint, as Leclerc had woefully reported. To regain mastery of Saint Domingue really would have required the extermination of most of the black population, and if the French were willing to undertake just that, in the end they were not able.
Certainly Toussaint had foreseen this outcome, and it is possible that in permitting himself to be arrested, he had intentionally sacrificed his personal career to it. That argument is undermined by all the evidence of intelligent self-interest throughout Toussaint's history—but in the end one can hardly dispute Aime Cesaire's contention that “Toussaint had the tragic sense of life: on the one hand he was a Christian, sincerely and not as a feint as some have insinuated; and on the other hand, a contemporary of the French Revolution, he saw, like so many others among its contemporaries, the modern form of destiny. To die like Brissot. Like Robespierre. For a long time, he had prepared himself for that eventuality. Still more, he knew it was inevitable.'5