The definitive modern biography of the great slave leader, military
genius and revolutionary hero Toussaint Louverture The Haitian
Revolution began in the French Caribbean colony of Saint-Domingue
with a slave revolt in August 1791, and culminated a dozen years
later in the proclamation of the world's first independent black
state. After the abolition of slavery in 1793, Toussaint
Louverture, himself a former slave, became the leader of the
colony's black population, the commander of its republican army and
eventually its governor. During the course of his extraordinary
life he confronted some of the dominant forces of his age -
slavery, settler colonialism, imperialism and racial hierarchy.
Treacherously seized by Napoleon's invading army in 1802, this
charismatic figure ended his days, in Wordsworth's phrase, 'the
most unhappy man of men', imprisoned in a fortress in France. Black
Spartacus draws on a wealth of archival material, much of it
overlooked by previous biographers, to follow every step of
Louverture's singular journey, from his triumphs against French,
Spanish and British troops to his skilful regional diplomacy, his
Machiavellian dealings with successive French colonial
administrators and his bold promulgation of an autonomous
Constitution. Sudhir Hazareesingh shows that Louverture developed
his unique vision and leadership not solely in response to imported
Enlightenment ideals and revolutionary events in Europe and the
Americas, but through a hybrid heritage of fraternal slave
organisations, Caribbean mysticism and African political
traditions. Above all, Hazareesingh retrieves Louverture's rousing
voice and force of personality, making this the most engaging, as
well as the most complete, biography to date. After his death in
the French fortress, Louverture became a figure of legend, a beacon
for slaves across the Atlantic and for generations of European
republicans and progressive figures in the Americas. He inspired
the anti-slavery campaigner Frederick Douglass, the most eminent
nineteenth-century African-American; his emancipatory struggle was
hailed by those who defied imperial and colonial rule well into the
twentieth. In the modern era, his life informed the French poet
Aime Cesaire's seminal idea of negritude and has been celebrated in
a remarkable range of plays, songs, novels and statues. Here, in
all its drama, is the epic story of the world's first black
superhero.
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