Toussaint Louverture - Madison Bell [159]
The contradictory reports on Toussaint prepared for the French home government by General Kerverseau (his dedicated enemy) and by Colonel Vincent (his determined friend) represent a polarization of opinion that has endured for two centuries. In 1802, as Napoleon prepared the military expedition intended to repress the slave rebellion in Saint Domingue and to humiliate its leader, a couple of propaganda pamphlets were published by Dubroca and by Cousin d'Avallon, who denounced Toussaint in much the same style as Kerverseau had done: “All his acts are covered by a veil of hypocrisy so profound that, although his whole life is a story of perfidy and betrayal, he still has the art to deceive anyone who approaches him about the purity of his sentiments … His character is a terrible melange of fanaticism and atrocious penchants; he passes coolly from the altar to carnage, and from prayer into dark schemes of perfidy … For the rest, all his shell of devoutness is nothing but a mask he thought necessary to cover up the depraved sentiments of his heart, to command with a greater success the blind credulity of the Blacks … There is no doubt that with the high idea which the Blacks have of him, seconded by the priests who surround him, he has managed to make himself be seen as one inspired, and to order the worst crimes in the name of heaven … He has abused the confidence of his first benefactors, he has betrayed the Spanish, England, France under the government of kings, Republican France, his own blood, his fatherland, and the religion which he pretends to respect: such is the portrait of Toussaint Louverture, whose life will be a striking example of the crimes to which ambition may lead, when honesty, education and honor fail to control its excesses.”4
Wendell Phillips was referring to writers like these when he said that Toussaint's story had been told only by his enemies; yet the black general's adulators were just as numerous. After his overthrow by Napoleon, his imprisonment in the Jura Mountains inspired a sonnet by William Wordsworth:
Toussaint, the most unhappy Man of Men!
Whether the whistling Rustic tend his plough
Within thy hearing, or thy head be now
Pillowed in some deep dungeon's earless den—
O miserable Chieftain! Where and when
Wilt thou find patience? Yet die not, do thou
Wear rather in thy bonds a cheerful brow;
Though fallen Thyself, never to rise again,
Live and take comfort. Thou has left behind
Powers that will work for thee; air, earth and skie;
There's not a breathing of the common wind
That will forget thee; thou has great allies;
Thy friends are exultations, agonies,
And love, and Man's unconquerable mind.
Meanwhile, Alphonse de Lamartine, as illustrious a poet in the French tradition as Wordsworth in the English, celebrated and reinforced the legend of Toussaint with a verse play named after its hero. Produced for the first time in 1850, just two years after France had permanently abolished the slavery which Napoleon had restored in 1802, the play was quite popular with the public; the critical response, however, revealed reactionary attitudes. Charles Bercelievre gave his review the sarcastic title “Blacks are more worthy than whites.”
“Can one believe,” he went on to say, “that in the nineteenth century, in a country that speaks of nothing but its nationalism and its patriotism, a man would be bold enough to present, in a French theater, a black tragi-comedy in which our compatriots are treated as cowards, as despots, as scoundrels, as thieves, and called by other more or less gracious epithets; in which one hears at every moment: Death to the French! Shame on the French! Do let's massacre the French! … That Toussaint Louverture should have success among negroes—we understand that much without difficulty, but that this anti-national, anti-patriotic work, fruit of an insane, sick brain, should be produced