In June 1802, the Haitian revolutionary hero Toussaint Louverture
was captured by special order of Napoleon Bonaparte and deported to
mainland France, where he spent the remainder of his life in
captivity in the prison of Fort de Joux. But Louverture, who had
managed to rise from humble slave to governor of the richest of
France's colonies, went down fighting. To defend his name and
secure his release, he wrote a vivid account of his career.
Historian Philippe Girard presents an annotated, scholarly,
multilingual edition of the memoir, based on an original copy in
Louverture's hand. Girard's introductory essay, based on archival
research in France and the Caribbean, retraces Louverture's career
in Haiti and provides a detailed narrative of the last year of
Louverture's life. Girard analyzes the significance of the memoirs
from a historical, literary, and linguistic perspective.
Louverture's writing provides a vivid alternative perspective to
anonymous plantation records, quantitative analyses of slave
trading ventures, and slave narratives mediated by white authors.
Though Louverture kept a stoic facade and rarely expressed his
innermost thoughts and fears in writing, his memoirs are unusually
emotional. He questioned whether he was targeted because of the
color of his skin, bringing racism, an issue that Louverture rarely
addressed head on with his white interlocutors, to the fore. The
full transcript of these memoirs in both Louverture's idiosyncratic
French and English helps paint a powerful yet nuanced portrait of
the Haitian Revolution's most famous son as a gifted leader, a
passionate advocate of slave emancipation, a loving family man, a
compromising politician, a tragic hero, and an evocative author and
user of Kreyol, Haiti's national language.
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