Read Toussaint Louverture Online
Authors: Madison Smartt Bell
The extravagant cruelties of his successor in command, General Donatien Rochambeau, were futile, except to inspire reprisals in kind. Rochambeau had black prisoners torn apart by dogs in the public squares, as if in a Roman amphitheater, and held a macabre ball for the
femmes de couleur,
at whose climax the fresh-slain corpses of their male relations were unveiled to them. If this kind of atrocity was meant to terrify the black and colored revolutionaries into submission, it had the opposite effect. In May 1803, when England declared war on France again, the position of the French in Saint Domingue became absolutely hopeless. Once it was clear that Dessalines would capture Cap Francais, Rochambeau wisely put to sea, with the last remnant of an army that had once numbered eighty thousand, and let himself be captured by the British fleet.
On January 1, 1804, the independence of Haiti was declared. Later in 1804, Dessalines became emperor of Haiti. During the same year, on Dessalines's order, and mostly under his personal supervision, the slaughter of the surviving
grands blancs
of the old colony began.
A French survivor, Pierre Chazotte, describes Dessalines's tour of the killing grounds at Jeremie: “When they entered the prisons, they viewed many corpses, besmeared with gore; in every apartment the floor was two inches deep, encrusted with coagulated blood; the walls were dark crimsoned with the gushes of human blood, suddenly rushing from inflicted wounds. Having viewed this slaughterhouse of human bodies, they again mounted their horses, and rode to the place on the Western road, where upwards of 1,400 corpses lay, heaped one upon another, and formed two very high mounts. The blood flowing beneath had made an issue crossing the road, and formed a bar of coagulated blood 40 feet wide. The negroes from the country would not stamp their feet on that blood; they had practised a bypath, reaching the blockhouses on the southern hill, and thereby manifested their horror at Dessalines's deeds.'
7
Two hundred years later a Haitian friend told me, with a matter-of-fact solemnity, that there are certain injuries—it was understood that
the abuse of slavery was definitely among them—which can be washed away only by blood.
Appalling as it may have been, Dessalines's course of action was nothing if not logical. When Toussaint had tried to incorporate the white property owners into his vision of a new reformed society founded on universal recognition of the Rights of Man, the whites had done nothing but betray him. By comparison with Toussaint, Dessalines has often been denounced as a savage. Where the conciliatory Toussaint liked to say,
“Dousman ale Iwen,
“(The gentlest way goes furthest), Dessalines snarled a harsher order:
“Koupe tet, boule kay! “
(Cut off their heads and burn their houses!).
Severe as it was, Dessalines's consolidation of power contained an extraordinary progressive element. The massacres of 1804 were atrocious, but in fact not all the whites were slaughtered. The death sentence was mainly restricted to those associated with the old
grand blanc
slave-owning class. Others who Dessalines thought might be useful to a new Haitian society—doctors, clerks, merchants, a whole Polish regiment that had switched from the French to the Haitian side—he preserved by the simple expedient of redefining them as black. Henceforward, Haiti would be an independent black nation, and to be both white and Haitian would be a contradiction in terms. This radical measure became a matter of law in the constitution of 1805, whereby all citizens of Haiti, regardless of their pigmentation, are defined as
neg.
To this day, all foreigners in Haiti, regardless of their pigmentation, are called
blancs.
On the road from Port-au-Prince to Leogane there is a
hounfor,
or Vodou temple, arranged as many of them are to confront the outside world with the powers of both the right and the left hand. As in many spiritual traditions, in Vbdou the work of the left hand is considered to be sinister, while the work of the right is beneficent and healing. The average
houngan,
or Vbdou priest, is obliged, for the usual reasons, to “work with both hands.”
In this particular
hounfor,
if one stands in the center and faces the courtyard, the road, and the world to which the road leads, one has the Chanm Ginen (chamber of the pacific mysteries of Africa) on one's
right hand. The motto above the door reads
Dieu qui donne et Dieu qui fait
(God who gives and God who makes), a phrase which recalls Toussaints favorite proverb,
Dousman ale Iwen.
On the left hand is a more dangerous room with the motto
Fok nan pwen,
which means “There would have not to be any for me not to get some.”
The qualities invoked by these mottoes are found together— though not mixed in our common understanding of a mixture—in most Haitians, and can be sharply polarized according to the need of an occasion. Certainly they were sharply polarized from time to time, and according to need, in the personality of Toussaint Louverture. Like most Haitians, he served more than a single spirit: Bondye or Gran Met, analogous with God the Father and Creator in the Christian faith; and various
Iwa
imported from Africa, some beneficent, some less so. A powerful strain of charismatic Christianity, completely compatible with the pacific, benevolent Esprit Ginen, runs through his career almost from the start. In the summer of 1793 he expressed his preference of the power of love to the power of force: “we receive everyone with humanity, and brotherhood, even our most Cruel enemies, and we pardon them wholeheartedly, and it is with gentleness that we coax them back from their errors.” Nine years later in the Fort de Joux, his sense of the tragedy of his own situation moved him to evoke Christ's crown of thorns.
Toussaints Christianity, though perhaps inconstant, was not feigned. The record shows that very often he was animated, powerfully, by a Christian spirit. Still, while one considers the forbearance and moderation he mainly exercised, one must also recall that many of the atrocities Dessalines committed under Toussaint's rule were probably done with Toussaints tacit approval, if not on his secret order.
For a citizen of what we are pleased to call the First World, the apparent contradictions of Toussaint's personality can be difficult to resolve. Within Haitian culture, there are no such contradictions, but simply the actions of different spirits which may possess one's being under different circumstances and in response to vastly different needs. There is no doubt that from time to time Toussaint Louverture made room in himself for angry, vengeful spirits, as well as the more beneficent
Iwa.
The name which he chose for himself, Louverture, implies that his
being was ordered by Attibon Legba, the Hermes-like figure who keeps the gates and crossroads. But Legba has his sinister analogue, an inverted reflection called Malt' Kalfou—Master of Crossroads—who has a great capacity for violence and betrayal. Through Malt' Kalfou, Legba is akin to Ghede, the spirit of death, and of sex, and of the appetites. During all of his extraordinary career, Toussaint operated along the spectrum of these spirits and the attributes they represent. In their peculiarly inverted twinship, Attibon Legba and Malt' Kalfou negotiate the no-man's-land between the spirit of
Fok nan pwen
and that of
Dieu qui donne et Dieu quifait
—between
Dousman ale Iwen
and
Koupe tet, boule kay.
According to the principles of Vodou, which has remained the actual religion of Haiti from Toussaint's time into ours (though it was not officially recognized until the 1990s, under the presidency of Jean-Bertrand Aristide), no one ever really dies. The death of the body is understood as a transition of state. In contrast to the Judeo-Christian scheme of things, the souls of the Haitian dead do not depart to any distant afterworld, but remain in invisible but close proximity to the world of the living. In aggregate they form a vast spiritual reservoir, called
Les Invisibles
or
Les Morts et les Mysteres
—a well of energy available on the other side of any mirror or beneath the surface of any pool.
This near presence of the spirits of the dead foreshortens the Haitian sense of history, so that the events of the Haitian Revolution, though two hundred years in the past, may seem to have happened only yesterday. It is as if for two hundred years the Haitian Revolution has been sleeping very close to the surface, sometimes stirring to press against the fragile membrane that separates it from the world of the present day. Particular
Iwa
express themselves from the reservoir of
Les Morts et les Mysteres,
and show their power to govern the actions and the policies of the living. The Duvalier regime, which ruled Haiti from 1957 to 1986, particularly associated itself with the spirit of Jean-Jacques Dessalines—the spirit of
Koupe tet, boule kay,
which rules by force and by terror, which could wash away racism, but only in blood.
In 1990, a democratic revolution brought a gentler, more accommodating spirit to life in the land. In 2004, Haiti's bicentennial year, this second revolution seemed to fail.
The magical work of Vodou is often done by the creation
of
SL
pwen,
an object with a spiritual force bound up in it. In the opinion of some seers, the violence of Haitian history for the past two centuries is explained by the unfortunate fact that the
pwen
for the revolution was made on the element of fire. In 2004, the revolutionary
pwen
was supposed to be done over again, on water. If the effort succeeded, the result remains to be seen.
But Haiti's history since 1804 is scarcely more violent or more troubled than that of the world at large. In the last years of the twentieth century, a priest of Borgne said to me that what Haiti needed to find a way out of its difficulties was the spirit of Toussaint Louverture. At the opening of the twenty-first century, the United States and the rest of the world could use that spirit too.
In December 1861, on the eve of the American Civil War, the abolitionist and justly renowned orator Wendell Phillips delivered a speech on Toussaint Louverture in New York and Boston. As part of his peroration he drove home this point: “If I stood here tonight to tell the story of Napoleon, I should take it from the lips of Frenchmen, who find no language rich enough to paint the great captain of the nineteenth century. Were I here to tell you the story of Washington, I should take it directly from your hearts—you, who think no marble white enough on which to carve the name of the Father of his Country. I am about to tell you the story of a negro who has left hardly one written line. I am to glean it from the reluctant testimony of Britons, Frenchmen, Spaniards—men who despised him as a negro and a slave, and hated him because he had beaten them in many a battle. All the materials from his biography are from the lips of his enemies.”
1
This passage is as subtle as it is splendid: the deft insertion of Toussaint into the peerage of the great white national heroes of his time is accomplished almost by sleight of hand. At the same time, like much of the most inspired political rhetoric, it is no better than half true. Toussaint left a considerable written record (though Phillips likely knew nothing of it): not only a copious correspondence but also
the memoir he drafted in the Fort de Joux. Moreover, he has been described, from his own time into ours, by friends and admirers as often as by foes and detractors. Yet Phillips is right enough to say that practically all firsthand reports on Toussaint come from the white, European milieu; precious few comments from his black and colored contemporaries have survived. It's also true that very few accounts of Toussaint's life and work have been nonpartisan. He is almost always depicted as absolutely a devil or absolutely a saint.
Portraits of Toussaint from his own time are reminiscent of drawings of American buffalo by European artists working from descriptions and without ever having seen a buffalo. Many of these images seem to be no more than sketches of generic African features, sometimes exaggerated into grotesque caricature. A study by Haitian scholar Fritz Daguillard suggests that two of the early portraits are at least reasonably faithful to their subject. The first, a full profile view, was probably done from life as a watercolor by Nicolas Eustache Maurin. Later rendered as an engraving by Delpech, this portrait became a model for many later artists who transported the basic image of Toussaint's profile into various other contexts. Toussaint liked the original well enough to present it as a gift to the French agent Roume, whose family preserved it. He wears full dress uniform for the occasion: a general's bicorne hat, decorated with red and white feathers and the red, white, and blue French Revolutionary cockade, a high tight neck cloth and a high-collared uniform coat, heavy with gold braid. The features in this image agree with eyewitness descriptions of the time: Toussaint is just slightly pop-eyed, his profile marked by a prominent, underslung lower jaw.
The second portrait, a three-quarter view, was singled out by Toussaint's son Isaac as the only image in which he found his father recognizable. At a glance this second portrait (by M. de Montfayon, who had served under Toussaint as an engineer) does not look much like the first. Toussaint wears a similar coat as in the Maurin portrait, with gold braid, his general's epaulettes, his right hand clasping a spyglass against a ceremonial sash. In this image he is bareheaded, his remaining hair gathered in a queue at the back, and we see that his forehead is very
high, and his cranium remarkably large. In the Montfayon image, Toussaint's features look more delicate, less typically African, than in the other; perhaps they were slightly idealized by the artist. If Montfayon makes the jaw less prominent, the difference can be accounted for by the angle of view. The more one looks at the two portraits together, the more reasonable it seems that they represent the same person, though in two different frames of mind. The full profile suggests a head-on belligerence; the three-quarter view presents a wary, intelligent observer. History has shown that Toussaint Louverture possessed both of these qualities, in abundance.
Twentieth-century biographer Pierre Pluchon declares that “Toussaint was in no way a handsome man. On the contrary, his physique was graceless and puny.”
2
To be sure, Pluchon is one of Toussaint's demonizers, but even the friendly observers agree that Louverture was, well, funny-looking, though by the time his name became known, most people had learned not to laugh at him. He was short and slight, with a head disproportionately large for the body. Most descriptions report him to have been bowlegged, and in general he seems to have had a jockeys build—and was indeed a famous horseman. His physical capacities, even when he was in his fifties (an ancient age for a slave in a French sugar colony), were very far from “puny.” According to the French general Pamphile de Lacroix, who knew Toussaint late in his career, “His body of iron received its vigor only from the tempering of his soul, and being master of his soul, he became master of his body”
3
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 and accepted on a French stage—that we will never understand.”
5
From this inflamed passage it is very plain not only that the violent loss of Saint Domingue to its former slaves remained a very sore spot in France, even a half century after the fact, but also that despite the final end of slavery in French possessions, the assumption of black racial inferiority, which the ideology of slavery very much required, had scarcely been weakened among Frenchmen. With this play, Lamartine made an argument for the equality of the races which anticipated the black pride movements of the Caribbean basin by nearly a hundred years. He offended his contemporary critics by providing his Toussaint with linguistic powers and a rhetorical style that would have been natural to a white French hero of the theater. From the modern point of view, it seems impossible that Toussaint could be made to speak in elegant Alexandrian rhyming couplets without a very great distortion of his personality, his thought, and his actual mode of expression—yet Lamartine is sometimes ingenious in adapting statements Toussaint was known to have made to the very rigid requirements of the verse form:
Ma double autoritetient tout en equilibre:
*
Gouverneur pour le blanc, Spartacus pour le libre,
Tout cede et reussit sous mon regne incertain,
Je demeure indecis ainsi que le destin,
Sur que la liberte, germant sur ces ruines
Enfonce en attendant d'immortelles racines.
6
The Haitian people, as they named themselves, were the first to put an end to slavery in the New World, with their definitive defeat of the French in 1803 and their declaration of independence in 1804. In the course of the next half century, the “peculiar institution” died, by slow and miserable degrees or in great spasms of violence, the last of which was the American Civil War. The story of Toussaint Louverture was adopted by the nineteenth-century abolitionists, not only Wendell Phillips but also Englishmen like M. D. Stephens and James Beard, and Frenchmen including Lamartine, Victor Schoelcher, and Gragnon Lacoste, who burnished and enshrined it in legend.
Since Phillips was not constrained by a verse form or by tight theatrical unities, his Toussaint is somewhat truer to life than Lamartine's, though the American orator permits himself many small distortions of fact, and embraces apocryphal details most warmly. For Phillips, as for Lamartine, the career of Toussaint was proof of the argument—as counterintuitive in 1861 as it was in 1850—that black men were as good as white:
Now, blue-eyed Saxons, proud of your race, go back with me to the commencement of the century, and select what statesman you please. Let him be either European or American; let him have a brain the result of six generations of culture; let him have the ripest training of university routine; let him add
to it the better education of practical life, crown his temples with the silver of seventy years; and show me the man of Saxon Lineage for whom his most sanguine admirer will wreathe a laurel rich as embittered foes have placed on the brow of this negro—rare military skill, profound knowledge of human nature, content to blot out all party distinctions, and trust a state to the blood of its sons— … this is the record which the history of rival states makes up for this inspired black of St. Domingo.
7
When he generalized the concept, Phillips grew more stark. “Some doubt the courage of the negro. Go to Hayti, and stand on those fifty thousand graves of the best soldiers France ever had, and ask them what they think of the negro's sword.”
8
Emerging from the success of the Haitian Revolution, the
gens de couleur,
few in number as they were, enjoyed significant advantages of wealth and education over the vast black majority. The first Haitian historians—Beaubrun Ardouin, Celigny Ardouin, Saint Remy Thomas Madiou—came from this class, as did Toussaint's first Haitian biographer, Pauleus Sannon, who served as Haiti's foreign minister during the World War I era. The colored historians who wrote in the early nineteenth century had a rather ambivalent attitude toward Toussaint, whose army had won a fairly well-deserved reputation for brutality during the vicious civil war which pitted the newly freed blacks against the
gens de couleur
and which ended in 1800 with the colored party's being crushed. Though Toussaint's importance to the overthrow of slavery and the independence of Haiti was incontestable, Madiou and the other mulatto historians could hardly help seeing him, and portraying him, as an oppressor of their tribe; Sannon, with a century's distance from the events, described the black general with a greater objectivity and with less strangled rancor.
In the twentieth century, the story of Toussaint was taken up by the writers of Negritude, a pan-Caribbean movement of black cultural pride. The Martinican writer Edouard Glissant, who hails from another
former French sugar colony, wrote a play called
Monsieur Toussaint,
which situates the black general in a newly evolving Caribbean literary tradition rather more securely than Lamartine had managed to locate him in the French. Aime Cesaire, best known for his poetry, wrote a book which is part biography, part political analysis, mythologizing Toussaint in a somewhat different way—as the first person to embody a solution to the problem of colonialism.
The Black jacobins,
by a historian from Trinidad, C. L. R. James, was until recently the standard work on the Haitian Revolution; James, writing in the late 1930s, has the attitudes of a fairly dogmatic Marxist, yet the avowed Marxist disbelief in the power of “extraordinary men” to influence history simply evaporates in James's portrait of Toussaint Louverture.