To a contemporary audience, Haiti brings to mind Voodoo spells, Tontons Macoutes, and boat people - nothing worth fighting over. Two centuries ago, however, Haiti, then known as Saint-Domingue, was the "Pearl of the Antilles," France's most valuable overseas colony, the largest exporter of tropical products in the world, and the United States' second most important trading partner after England. Haiti was also the place where in 1801-1802 Napoleon Bonaparte sent the largest colonial venture of his reign: the Leclerc expedition. His goal was to remove the famous revolutionary Toussaint Louverture from office and, possibly, restore slavery. But within two years, the remnants of Bonaparte's once-proud army were evacuated in defeated, and Haiti declared its independence. This forgotten yet momentous conflict, in which lives were consumed by the thousands, is this book's main focus. In this ambitious monograph, Philippe Girard employs the latest tools of the historian's craft, multi-archival research in particular, and applies them to the climactic yet poorly understood last years of the Haitian Revolution. Haiti lost most of its archives to neglect and theft, but a substantial number of documents survive in French, U.S., British, and Spanish collections, both public and private. In all, The Slaves Who Defeated Napoleon relies on contemporary military, commercial, and administrative sources drawn from nineteen archives and research libraries on both sides of the Atlantic. Due to its extensive archival basis, the book corrects the many factual inaccuracies that have plagued previous accounts. It also offers a more rounded view of the Haitian Revolution, going beyond mere military minutia to include the activities of U.S. merchants; the in-fighting within the French government; the diplomacy between both the French and revolutionaries with the United States, England, and Spain; and the lives of the maroons, women, and children caught up in the revolutionary struggle. This multidimensional work tells not only of barefoot black soldiers ambushing Bonaparte's columns, but also of Rochambeau's mixed-race mistresses, French child drummers, Jewish bankers in Kingston, weapon smugglers from Quaker Philadelphia, Polish artillerists, and African-born maroons struggling to preserve their freedom against both white and black opponents. Equally groundbreaking is the book's willingness to move beyond tidy ideological and racial categories to depict an Atlantic society at the crossroads of African and European influences, where Haitian rebels fought France while embracing its ideals. In the process, the reader is introduced to the extraordinary lives of multifaceted characters such as Wladyslaw Jablonowski, the son of a Polish woman and a black father who died fighting for France and white supremacy.

Here is an annotated, scholarly, multilingual edition of the only lengthy text personally written by Haitian revolutionary Toussaint Louverture: the memoirs he wrote shortly before his death in the French prison of Fort de Joux. The translation is based on an original copy in Louverture's hand never before published. Historian Philippe Girard begins with an introductory essay that retraces Louverture's career as a slave, rebel, and governor. Girard provides a detailed narrative of the last year of Louverture's life, and analyzes the significance of the memoirs and letters from a historical and linguistic perspective. The book includes a full transcript, in the original French, of Louverture's handwritten memoirs. The English translation appears side by side with the original. The memoirs contain idiosyncrasies and stylistic variations of interest to linguists. Scholarly interest in the Haitian Revolution and the life of Toussaint Louverture has increased over the past decade. Louverture is arguably the most notable man of African descent in history, and the Haitian Revolution was the most radical of the three great revolutions of its time. Haiti's proud revolutionary past and its more recent upheavals indicate that interest in Haiti's history goes far beyond academia; many regard Louverture as a personal hero. Despite this interest, there is a lack of accessible primary sources on Toussaint Louverture. An edited translation of Louverture's memoirs makes his writings accessible to a larger public. Louverture's memoirs provide a vivid alternative perspective to anonymous plantation records, quantitative analyses of slave trading ventures, or slave narratives mediated by white authors. Louverture kept a stoic facade and rarely expressed his innermost thoughts and fears in writing, but his memoirs are unusually emotional. Louverture questioned whether he was targeted due to the color of his skin, bringing racism an issue that Louverture rarely addressed head on with his white interlocutors, to the fore.

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.