Toussaint Louverture, the hero who liberated Haiti

One of the lesser known episodes of the age of the French Revolution and the Napoleonic era concerns the colony of Santo Domingo in the Caribbean .

Santo Domingo was in the eighteenth century the most profitable slave colony in the world. In fact, 500,000 black slaves worked on his plantations, which produced three quarters of the world's sugar production. In the colony, power was totally in the hands of white landowners, about 30 thousand people, who enjoyed all the privileges. In 1791, however, Toussaint Louverture (1746-1803), a freed slave who had been able to study and who knew the principles of equality of the French Revolution, led a slave revolt, determined to put an end to the domination of the colonizers over the 'island.

Leader of the people, leader, but also a despotic and ambiguous man (he did not renounce, despite everything, to own slaves in his turn), Louverture is the protagonist of the highly accurate biography " Black Spartacus " (Rizzoli, 2023, pp. 600, also e- book) written by Sudhir Hazareesingh, professor of French cultural history at Oxford.

Thanks to great interpretative acumen and in-depth research conducted on unpublished archives, Sudhir Hazareesingh reconstructs a gripping historical story full of events. In the years that saw the emergence of the figure of Louverture, Santo Domingo became the scene of a cruel war , in which there was no shortage of massacres on both sides. Toussaint Louverture, however, strengthened his position because he could count on many more men than the white owners and was also able to organize the slaves into a real army. The rebels were inspired by the principles of the French Revolution but soon found themselves fighting against the soldiers sent from France. For the French, in fact, it was one thing to make the Revolution and recognize the rights of the citizens of the Motherland, quite another thing was to lose a colony as profitable as Santo Domingo.

However, France had too many problems in Europe to continue sending troops to the Caribbean and so, in 1794, Touissant Louverture was able to abolish slavery and become governor of Santo Domingo. The war with France was not over. Indeed resumed even more violent when Napoleon decided to regain control of the colony. He sent 35,000 soldiers to subdue the ex-slaves but the expedition was a rout. Most of the French died from ambushes by Toussaint Louverture's men and from yellow fever. So at the end of 1803 the former colony declared itself independent assuming the name of Haiti. It was the second colony in the Americas to gain independence after the United States and the first ex-slave republic in the world. However, Toussaint did not have the opportunity to see the triumph of his people. Captured by the French in 1802, he died in captivity in April 1803.

In addition to historical events, Sudhir Hazareesingh especially plumbs the personality of Louverture outlining the human and political parable without hiding the shadows and contradictions. In his own way a giant of history capable of dominating and guiding the process which, over the course of twelve years, led to the proclamation of the first independent black state: he became governor, promulgated the Constitution, governed as an autocrat. Above all, he was able to channel the hybrid legacy of slave culture into his battle, also nourished by Caribbean mysticism and African traditions, merging it with the ideas of the Enlightenment and the European revolutionary movements. According to the author he was " the first black superhero of the modern era ".

Surely he was a man who changed the course of history and showed the world that nothing was immutable, neither slavery nor the supremacy of the white man.