[News] The Tragedy of Toussaint L'Ouverture
Anti-Imperialist News
news at freedomarchives.org
Tue Jan 19 11:50:19 EST 2010
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/20100119/784489f6/attachment.htm>
More information about the News
mailing list