[News] The Tragedy of Toussaint L'Ouverture

[Anti-Imperialist News]

http://www.counterpunch.org/kumm01192010.html

January 19, 2010


Haiti's Robespierre


The Tragedy of Toussaint L'Ouverture

By BJÖRN KUMM

While the mass graves are being filled up in 
Haiti and international opinion devotes some 
fleeting moments of attention to this unhappy 
nation, all we hear about is misery, poverty, 
corruption, chaos. This of course was to be 
expected. Haiti is seen as simply another "failed 
state" one can only feel sorry for and which will 
need international intervention. Few people 
remember – if they ever knew – that Haiti has a 
glorious past. It was the people of Haiti 
who  two hundred years ago made the first serious 
attempt to turn the lofty principles of the French into palpable reality.

Towards the end of the eighteenth century, Haiti, 
in those days Saint Domingue, was France´s 
richest colony. Haiti´s sugar-plantations and 
Haiti´s African slaves provided the economic 
backbone also of revolutionary France. After the 
fall of the Bastille, both Haiti´s white 
slave-owners and emancipated Haitian mulattoes 
sent representatives to the revolutionary 
convention in Paris. Haiti´s slave and plantation 
owners were relieved that the French monarchy and 
French commercial controls had collapsed which 
opened up an interesting new market in 
neighboring United States. Haiti´s mulattoes were 
enthralled by French revolutionary principles. A 
Haitian mulatto leader, Lacombe, insisted that 
freedom, brotherhood and equality were principles 
which ought to be observed also in Haiti. He was 
immediately hanged by irate French slave owners.

Haiti´s popular majority, hundreds of thousands 
of African slaves, sent no representatives to 
revolutionary Paris. Instead they organized 
themselves, using the cover of voodoo sessions, 
which were tolerated by French plantation owners 
who thought their slaves were merely gathering to 
dance and worship their African gods. But, says 
the foremost historian of the Haitian revolution, 
Trinidadian author C.L.R. James, Haiti´s slaves 
were already a modern proletariat, collectivized 
by their work on the big plantations. And they 
too heard the rumors from France and the signals of the revolution.

The first Haitian slave rebellion took place in 
the month of August 1791. Twelve thousand slaves 
in the northern parts of Saint Domingue rose up, 
ransacked the plantations and hanged their 
oppressors from the nearest palm trees. And this 
is where Toussaint L´Ouverture, Haiti´s 
revolutionary leader, enters world history. He 
was a literate, black supervisor on a plantation 
where his French master seems to have been fairly 
tolerant and was protected by Toussaint   against 
rebellious slaves. For a while Toussaint was seen 
as a benign Uncle Tom, but he had read his Julius 
Caesar and realized that the slaves needed 
military organization. He raised a black army and 
had the satisfaction of defeating two European 
invasions, first the troops sent out by 
revolutionary France to quell the slave 
rebellion, after that one hundred thousand 
British soldiers, dispatched by prime minister 
William Pitt the younger. The invaders were 
thoroughly beaten by Haiti´s African defenders and by yellow fever.

In France, especially the Jacobins showed a great 
deal of sympathy for revolutionary Haiti, and in 
1793 slavery was banned. However, after assuming 
power, the First Consul, Napoléon Bonaparte, 
decided to reintroduce slavery and, as he put it, 
"rip the epaulettes off the shoulders of the 
Negroes". Napoléon sent new invasion forces. 
Haiti did survive as an independent nation but 
was under perpetual pressure from France, 
England, the United States and Spain.   Toussaint 
L´Ouverture died in a French dungeon.

Haiti, it could truly be said, drew the ultimate 
consequences of the   French revolution. In the 
United States and in France freedom was born for 
white people. In Haiti freedom was born for everybody.

But why did everything later go wrong? C.L.R. 
James in his marvellous The Black Jacobins, 
published in 1938, suggests that Toussaint 
L´Ouverture in fact remained too much of a loyal 
French citizen. He wanted the formerly  enslaved 
Haitians to become exemplary Frenchmen. He wanted 
to show the world that black men could build a 
civilized state. French should be spoken as 
correctly in Port au Prince as in Paris. And he 
intervened brutally against his own followers, 
who began wondering if they would have to go on 
slaving for French plantation owners, white and 
mulattoes, who had been invited back to Haiti by Toussaint L`Ouverture.

C.L.R. James sadly concludes that Toussaint 
L´Ouverture, Haiti´s revolutionary leader, was in 
fact a Black Jacobin, a Caribbean Robespierre, 
radical but authoritarian, not inclined to listen 
to his people. Instead of mobilizing the 
population of Haiti to claim their rights, 
Toussaint first of all wished to be accepted by 
the contemporary international establishment and 
be seen as a reliable upholder of the colonial 
economy. After Toussaint, the leaders of Haiti 
turned out to be less respectful  – concerning 
the ruthless Dessalines C.L.R. James famously 
comments: "His ties to French civilization were 
of the slenderest". But they successfully fought 
Napoleon´s forces and in 1804 declared 
independence. However. in order to be accepted by 
what has sometimes been called the civilized 
world, independent Haiti had to pay damages to 
France and to the white slave-owners who had 
already made gigantic profits from France´s 
richest colony. In order to pay, Haiti had to 
borrow enormous sums from French banks. Haiti 
remained in the hock for more than a hundred 
years, with sad consequences for the Haitian 
economy. The final payment to France was made in 1947.

We now hear Barack Obama talk about the common 
history that joins Haiti with the United States. 
Am I the only one who sees a certain resemblance 
between Toussaint L´Ouverture, struggling for 
respectability, and the current US president who 
is so overly respectful in his relations with 
Wall Street and other rulers of the world? I 
suggest Obama, in addition to Eduardo Galeano´s 
<http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0853459916/counterpunchmaga>The 
open veins of Latin America, handed to him by 
Hugo Chavez a few months ago, should also read 
C.L.R. James 
<http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0679724672/couinterpunchmaga>The 
Black Jacobins to remind him how lofty ideals 
were once translated into reality.

Björn Kumm is a journalist living in  Malmö, 
Sweden. He can be reached at <mailto:kumm at telia.com>kumm at telia.com




Freedom Archives
522 Valencia Street
San Francisco, CA 94110

415 863-9977

www.Freedomarchives.org  
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://freedomarchives.org/pipermail/news_freedomarchives.org/attachments/20100119/5d126435/attachment.htm>