BLACK SPARTACUS
The slave leader’s death became the subject of general horror and indignation throughout liberal Europe. “Perhaps Bonaparte hardly recollects his crime,” Madame de Staël confided to her memoirs, “because he has been less approached with it than others.” Three decades later, L’Ouverture’s first British biographer, the Reverend John Beard, hailed a Christian martyr. “The wide earth will take cognisance of what thou didst attempt and achieve,” the clergyman addressed the Haitian hopefully in his Life of Toussaint L’Ouverture (1850), “and pronounce thee a benefactor, not of thy colour, but of thy kind.”
Fifteen years later in his St Helena exile Napoleon admitted that his campaign to oust L’Ouverture and restore slavery to Haiti had been a mistake. Yellow fever had devastated his armies and some of them had even defected to the rebel cause, among them 2,500 Polish auxiliaries. After his losses in Haiti Napoleon was forced to sell his territories west of the Mississippi River, notably Louisiana, to the US. That put an end to his dream of a new world empire in the Caribbean. “Damn sugar, damn coffee, damn colonies!” he raged.
If British abolitionists were sympathetic to L’Ouverture, others described him in racist terms. In 1807, three years after L’Ouverture’s death, the German writer Heinrich von Kleist was imprisoned as a Prussian spy in the same mountain dungeon. His short story, “Betrothal in Saint Domingue” (1811), betrays an almost visceral loathing of Haiti’s revolted slaves. “No acts of tyranny perpetrated by the whites,” proclaims a French aristocrat who has lost his wife to the guillotine, “could ever justify the depths of treachery and degradation of those Negroes.”
Even Victor Hugo, a democratic republican, belittled L’Ouverture’s revolutionary example. In his lurid 1826 romance of the Saint Domingue uprising, Bug-Jargal, slaves ransack the French plantations while L’Ouverture yells brutally in Haitian Creole “Touyé blan yo toute!” (Kill all whites!) Admittedly Hugo had written the novel at 16, to be read aloud at a literary banquet, yet it remains a catalogue of horrors, including ritual decapitations.
Revealingly, it was not only Europeans who sought to undermine L’Ouverture. In his monumental seven-volume Histoire d’Haïti (1848), the Haitian historian Thomas Madiou portrayed the former slave as a “conspirator” with “Machiavellian” (even “bloodily despotic”) ambitions. Madiou, who was of mixed race, had spent a privileged childhood in France. And while he recognised L’Ouverture as a great leader, he shared the 19th-century mulatto prejudice against the descendants of African tribes.
Two centuries after independence, Haiti is the battered pauper of the Americas, unimaginably destitute and corrupt. Yet L’Ouverture’s spirit hovers over this bicentenaire, and he remains a potent symbol. Haiti’s was perhaps the most radical of 18th-century revolutions, yet Britain has shown scarce interest in its anniversary. Elsewhere, though, he has been commemorated. In Little Haiti, Miami, children revere him as the “First of the Blacks”, and Vodou shops display effigies of the Black Napoleon with his cavalry sabre and tricorn hat. At Miami’s Toussaint L’Ouverture Elementary School, meanwhile, the Haitian red and blue bicolour hangs above a plaque engraved with the liberator’s defiant words to Napoleon: “In overthrowing me, you have cut down only the trunk of the Tree of Liberty. It will spring up again by the roots for they are numerous and deep.”
Ian Thomson, 19 August 2015
Black Spartacus
18th August 2015 to 12th September 2015 – 7-7.30pm
Venue: Main House
Company: Thee Black Swan Writer: Anthony Maddalena Director: Joseph Charles Producer: Kay Hammond.
For further details go to theeblackswan.co.uk or for tickets contact ticket web on 0844 477 1000
The two photographs from Black Spartacus were taken by Mary Kay-James
