Toussaint Louverture, a hero for our time
Audio 48:30
Bust of Toussaint Louverture offered by Haiti to the city of Bordeaux, a former slave port located on the French Atlantic coast.
© Wikimedia Commons
By: Céline Develay Mazurelle
52 mins
Leader of the insurgents of 1791 and father of Haitian independence, this former slave who became governor of Santo Domingo stood up to Napoleon Bonaparte until his last breath, universal freedom as the standard and the abolition of slavery at the end. of the sword.
Publicity
On the occasion of the bicentenary of the death of Napoleon Bonaparte, which occurred since his exile on the island of Saint Helena, the French government commemorated, on May 5, 2021, the memory of the one who in 1802, when he was First Consul, took an unworthy decision, fraught with meaning and consequences: the reestablishment of slavery in the French colonies.
In the writing of this national novel, there are therefore imposed figures and others that must be invited ... This is what we are going to do to discover Toussaint Louverture, hero of Haitian independence and the 'abolition of slavery. The one we have nicknamed pell-mell the black Spartacus, the father of blacks, the Bonaparte of the Antilles or even the black George Washington has long haunted the history of France, between bad conscience and unthought colonial, to finally enter the Pantheon symbolically. , where an inscription was unveiled in 1998 in his honor.
But his fate is still little known in France. To understand the extraordinary rise of this former slave who became governor of Saint-Domingue then nicknamed the pearl of the Antilles, until his fall in 1802 and the betrayal of Bonaparte who sent him to languish in the frozen jails of Fort de Joux, he It is necessary to take into account the particularly complex and disputed period which saw it emerge. Also get closer to the politician, a Creole republican steeped in the Enlightenment and the ideals of the French Revolution but also of voodoo culture and African descent Allada, torn between a certain loyalty to France and values who, little by little, moved him away from a metropolis full of racist prejudices, political inconsistency and largely influenced byperiod by the colonial lobby.
The first black model, Toussaint Louverture was a self-taught military strategist and a political architect resolutely ahead of his time, dreaming of a post-racial society in a world that was not yet ready to tolerate it.
Even today, after having inspired abolitionist or decolonial struggles, he remains a hero for our time, to be celebrated and shared.
Travel through the history and memory of this great Creole chef, in the company of Sudhir Hazareesingh, British historian born in Mauritius, professor at Oxford and author of a masterful biography of Toussaint Louverture published in France, by Éditions Flammarion in 2020.
To read:
- “Toussaint Louverture”, Sudhir Hazareesingh.
Flammarion editions.
2020
- "The Black Jacobins", CLR James.
Amsterdam Publishing.
1938. Reissue 2017
- "Toussaint Louverture: the French Revolution and the colonial problem", Aimé Césaire.
African presence.
1960
- “Monsieur Toussaint”, Édouard Glissant.
Gallimard editions.
1998.
To discover:
-
The Foundation for the memory of slavery
which aims to make this memory known
-
The Institut du Tout-Monde
founded in 2006 by Édouard Glissant.
© Editions Flammarion
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