Free and French in the Caribbean: Toussaint Louverture, Aimé Césaire, and Narratives of Loyal Opposition

By John Patrick Walsh

“All the ingredients to become the next important book in the field of postcolonial studies with the emphasis on French Caribbean culture and literature.”—Daniel Desormeaux, University of Chicago
 
In Free and French in the Caribbean, John Patrick Walsh studies the writings of Toussaint Louverture and Aimé Césaire to examine how they conceived of and narrated two defining events in the decolonializing of the French Caribbean: the revolution that freed the French colony of Saint-Domingue in 1803 and the departmentalization of Martinique and other French colonies in 1946. Walsh emphasizes the connections between these events and the distinct legacies of emancipation in the narratives of revolution and nationhood passed on to successive generations. By reexamining Louverture and Césaire in light of their multilayered narratives, the book offers a deeper understanding of the historical and contemporary phenomenon of “free and French” in the Caribbean.
“A fruitful intervention in a growing body of literature and increasingly lively debate on the Haitian Revolution and the figure of Toussaint Louverture, the book also contributes to the emerging scholarship on Césaire, Francophone literature, and postcolonial theory.”—Gary Wilder, CUNY Graduate Center
“A valuable contribution to both the rapidly proliferating literature on the Haitian Revolution and the emerging revisionist appreciation of Césaire’s intellectual and political project.”—Small Axe
 
“J.P. Walsh has produced for the nonspecialist reader an excellent analysis of the historiographical discourse on Toussaint Louverture and Aimé Césaire with a focus on the meaning(s) of decolonization in the late eighteenth and mid-twentieth centuries.”—New West Indian Guide
 
“That Free and French inspires so many questions is testament to its ambition, the provocative parallel at its heart, and the richness of Walsh’s analysis.”—H-Empire

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media
• Release date: Apr 12, 2013
• ISBN: 9780253008107

Book preview

FREE AND FRENCH IN THE CARIBBEAN

BLACKS IN THE DIASPORA

Founding Editors

Darlene Clark Hine

John McCluskey, Jr.

David Barry Gaspar

Advisory Board

Herman L. Bennett

Kim D. Butler

Judith A. Byfield

Tracy Sharpley-Whiting

FREE AND FRENCH IN THE CARIBBEAN

Toussaint Louverture, Aimé Césaire, and Narratives of Loyal Opposition

John Patrick Walsh

Indiana University Press

Bloomington and Indianapolis

This book is a publication of

Indiana University Press

Office of Scholarly Publishing

Herman B Wells Library 350

1320 East 10th Street

Bloomington, Indiana 47405–3907 USA

iupress.indiana.edu

© 2013 by John Patrick Walsh

All rights reserved

No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher. The Association of American University Presses’ Resolution on Permissions constitutes the only exception to this prohibition.

The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of the American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48–1992.

Manufactured in the United States of America

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Walsh, John Patrick, [date]

Free and French in the Caribbean : Toussaint Louverture, Aimé Césaire, and narratives of loyal opposition / John Patrick Walsh.

page cm. — (Blacks in the diaspora)

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-0-253-00627-1 (cloth : alk. paper) — ISBN 978-0-253-00630-1 (pbk. : alk. paper) — ISBN 978-0-253-00810-7 (ebook) 1. Toussaint Louverture, 1743–1803. 2. Haiti—History—Revolution, 1791-1804. 3. Nationalism—Haiti—History. 4. Césaire, Aimé. 5. Martinican literature (French)—History and criticism. 6. Caribbean, French-speaking—History—Autonomy and independence movements. 7. Nationalism—Caribbean, French speaking—History. 8. Decolonization in literature. 9. Nationalism in literature. I. Title.

F1923.T69W35 2013

972.94'03—dc23

2013002202

1 2 3 4 5 18 17 16 15 14 13

Je ne dirai pas que les faits ne sont rien. Sans eux il n’y aurait pas d’histoire. Mais le plus important en histoire, ce ne sont pas les faits, ce sont les relations qui les unissent, la loi qui les régit, la dialectique qui les suscite. C’est ce que, dans le cadre de mon sujet, j’ai tâché de saisir.

[I will not say that facts are nothing. Without them there would be no history. But the most important in history is not the facts, it is the connections that bring them together, the law that governs them, the dialectic that stirs them up. This is what, in the framework of my topic, I have attempted to grasp.]

—Aimé Césaire, Toussaint Louverture: La Révolution française et le problème colonial

Personne n’a mieux connu que Toussaint Louverture le théâtre sur lequel il avait à opérer, et le caractère des individus soumis à sa jurisdiction.

[No one understood better than Toussaint Louverture the theater over which he had to operate and the character of the individuals subject to his jurisdiction.]

—Pamphile de Lacroix, La Révolution de Haïti

Contents

Acknowledgments

Introduction

Part I. Toussaint Louverture

1 Toussaint Louverture and the Family of Saint-Domingue

2 Under the Stick of Maître Toussaint

3 Free and French: La Constitution de la colonie française de Saint-Domingue

4 Toussaint Louverture at a Crossroads: The Mémoire of the First Soldier of the Republic of Saint Domingue

Part II. Aimé Césaire

5 Césaire Reads Toussaint: The Haitian Revolution and the Problem of Departmentalization

6 Haitian Building: La tragédie du roi Christophe

Conclusion: Artisans of Free and French

Notes

Bibliography

Index

Acknowledgments

I am grateful to the many people who made this book possible. After years of graduate research on the history and literature of the French Caribbean, I arrived in Charleston for the fall semester 2007 and discovered its historical ties to Saint-Domingue. At the time, several institutions and communities were preparing to mark the bicentennial of the U. S. Abolition of the Slave Trade; the following summer, Toni Morrison came to Sullivan’s Island, the point of debarkation for millions of slaves, to commemorate her Bench by the Road project. I had recently read Césaire’s essay on Toussaint and decided to put aside another project to study the ties between the two men. My colleague Simon Lewis suggested that I locate Charleston not as a historical, southern city of the United States but as a northern port of a vast Atlantic and Caribbean economy. The director of the College of Charleston’s program for the Carolina Lowcountry and Atlantic World, where I had the privilege to present part of an early draft, Simon has been a key interlocutor throughout its writing.

I am indebted to the generations of scholars of the history and literature of Haiti and the French Caribbean. Over the course of my research, I had the great fortune to exchange ideas with a number of individuals who have inherited this legacy. Special mention must go to Bernadette Cailler, who encouraged me to continue work on Césaire. Nick Nesbitt and Deborah Jenson generously answered many queries. Daniel Desormeaux and Gary Wilder read the original book proposal with great care and made invaluable suggestions for the core argument and structure. Daniel also provided assistance in locating various copies of Toussaint’s memoir. I thank Jeremy Popkin and Françoise Vergès, who each read parts of the manuscript and gave direction at critical moments. Thank you to Aliko Songolo for including me in a panel on Césaire and to Cilas Kemedjio for his response to our panel. The final manuscript benefited greatly from the comments and questions of a team of readers. Thank you to Alex Crumbley, Lia Brozgal, Mylène Priam, Emily Beck, Téfo Attafi, Lisa Signori, and Morgan Koerner. These friends and colleagues made this a better book; any flaws are my own.

Several institutions and the people who animate them were essential to my research. I would like to thank the archivists at the Archives Nationales, in Paris, and the Archives Nationales d’Outre-Mer, in Aix-en-Provence; André Elizee and the staff at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture at the New York Public Library; Susan Hamson and Tara Craig at the Butler Library of Columbia University; and the Manuscript Division of the Library of Congress. Outside of these archives, I could not have carried out research without the assistance of Michael Phillips and his team, especially Chris Nelson and Carolyn Savage, in the office of Interlibrary Loan at the College of Charleston’s Addlestone Library.

I wish to thank Robert Sloan, Sarah Wyatt Swanson, and Tim Roberts of Indiana University Press for their help during the long transformation from manuscript to book. I am very appreciative of Sheila Berg’s copyediting. I must also include four people who added their finishing touches to the book. Thank you to my brother, Kevin Walsh, for his editorial eye and for the index. Many thanks to Madison Smartt Bell, whose insight on the array of historical images of Toussaint was crucial to the likeness that adorns the book’s cover. I am grateful to Steve Johnson for his drawings of Toussaint and Césaire, and to Doug Bell, of Kitchen Sink Studios, for his design.

A version of chapter 5 was published in Small Axe 34 (2010). I thank David Scott and Kelly Josephs, as well as Duke University Press, for granting permission to reprint a revised and longer chapter here. I also thank the anonymous readers for their extensive treatment of my article. I thank Claudine Michel and her staff at the Journal of Haitian Studies for permission to reprint a longer version of chapter 4, part of which appeared in volume 17, number 1 (2011).

I could not have undertaken research without the financial assistance of the College of Charleston. Two faculty research and development grants, as well as funds from the Department of French, Francophone and Italian Studies and the School of Languages, Cultures, and World Affairs, supported travel to various archives and allowed for the time necessary to complete the manuscript. I greatly appreciate the support of David Cohen, Shawn Morrison, Godwin Uwah, Robyn Holman, and Marilyn Tharp.

My mentors have left an indelible mark on this book. My gratitude to Tom Conley, in particular, is beyond measure. The depth and originality of his scholarship never cease to amaze me, and I cherish his friendship. I also owe an intellectual debt to Susan Suleiman, whose example continues to inspire me.

I would like to include a remembrance of Joseph Boromé, a lifelong scholar of Toussaint. After spending days combing through Boromé’s papers at Columbia, I came upon a couple of letters he exchanged in the early 1970s with Sidney Mintz. In the attempt to find out more about Boromé, I emailed Professor Mintz, who had known Boromé during his time at Yale, when, he remembered, Boromé would come up from New York to visit and talk. Professor Mintz wrote back the same day with this warm recollection: Such people prove by their behavior the intrinsic appeal of the past.

Finally, I dedicate this book to my family, especially to my parents, John and Ginger Walsh, who have given me everything; to Anaya and Tyan, my little readers; and to my wife, Shivika Asthana. This may not be the book for you, Shivvy, but it could not have been written without you.

FREE AND FRENCH IN THE CARIBBEAN

Introduction

Separated by nearly 150 years, the Haitian Revolution (1791–1803) and the departmentalization of Martinique, Guadeloupe, and French Guyana (1946) were defining events of the transatlantic connection between France and the Caribbean.¹ Historically, they have generally been thought of in opposing terms: the revolution marked a violent break from France, whereas departmentalization became, broadly speaking, synonymous with assimilation. An international conflict, the revolution sent shock waves around the Caribbean, north and south to the Americas, and across the Atlantic. In contrast, departmentalization, which became law soon after World War II, was a quieter, juridical transformation of colony to overseas department.

My point of departure is to question such received wisdom, especially as it has put considerable philosophical distance between the Haitian Revolution and departmentalization. In many ways, it is misleading to portray the fate of Saint-Domingue (the French colony that became independent Haiti in 1804) as distinct from that of the other old colonies of the French Caribbean. Doing so obscures the trans-Caribbean relationship of Saint-Domingue, Martinique, Guadeloupe, and French Guyana; furthermore, such a move reduces an understanding of the Haitian Revolution to an uncomplicated story of an army of former slaves overcoming their colonial masters. This is not to say that the story of emancipation should not be told, or that it no longer matters; rather, I propose a closer look at how two legacies of emancipation developed through narratives of revolution and ensuing nationhood that have been passed on to successive generations. The 1946 law of departmentalization was built on important antecedents, reaching back to the revolutionary nexus that tied France to Saint-Domingue. Therefore, the first of three central claims of this book is that a deep, historical connection exists between the two events. In order to develop this argument, I turn to the writings of the respective protagonists, Toussaint Louverture and Aimé Césaire. The second claim is that these iconic Caribbean leaders had much in common; through a series of close readings of primary texts, I examine the affinities of their projects as statesmen-authors. Both men left an abundant written record of the struggle to secure rights that the French Revolution had left behind as it sailed across the Atlantic; and, in fact, both men did much to define the complex relationship between autonomy and assimilation.

The history of the French Caribbean that I am concerned with is fraught with questions of universal rights, citizenship, sovereignty, imperialism, and nation building. These are questions that have crossed generations. Of particular interest here is the literature produced to address these issues, whether in the form of letters, reports, decrees, memoirs, essays, or plays. The third claim of this book—which ties together the first two—is that the study of these big questions too often neglects to take into account the kinds of narrative that carried and revolutionized them. This is a matter of pursuing an interdisciplinary approach that brings forward concerns of genre, textual production, and authorship to the practices of politics and historiography. Activated at the intersections of literature and history, and of literature and politics, the writings of Toussaint and Césaire call out to literary scholars, historians, and political scientists.² By reexamining the public interventions of Toussaint and Césaire under the light of their multilayered narratives, we, scholars and students of revolution and departmentalization, gain a deeper understanding of the historical and contemporary problem of free and French in the Caribbean.

La Gwadloup sé tan nou! / La Guadeloupe c’est la France

Having set up these core problems, I would like to take a step back and reapproach them by way of a recent crisis that shows just how much the projects begun by Toussaint and Césaire are relevant today. Because Part I treats part of the Haitian Revolution, it is tempting to examine the historical dimension of the earthquake that ravaged much of Haiti on 12 January 2010; it is even more tempting because the revolution itself was historically described by the French as a disaster that destroyed the slaveholding foundation of colonialism on Saint-Domingue.³ If the earthquake exposed the calamitous consequences of disempowerment and impoverishment that followed the severing of colonial ties with the First French Republic, it also revealed a neocolonial relationship that has continued since independence. The destruction laid bare the tragic irony that France and the United States, countries largely responsible for two centuries of political isolation, military occupation, and economic exploitation, were now rushing to help. Much has been written about the earthquake, and I will not dwell further on attempts to make sense of the catastrophe, nor will I review the troubling reality of its man-made dimensions.⁴ What has not received anywhere near the same attention, however, is the general strike that paralyzed Guadeloupe a year before the earthquake.⁵

The crisis, which began in Guadeloupe in January 2009 and lasted for nearly two months, both magnified and minimized the distance between autonomy and assimilation, and had its origins in problems quite historical.⁶ The strikers’ articulation of these problems disrupted the most simplified understanding of the logic of assimilation, which is that the overseas departments are integral parts of greater France. This does not mean, however, that the strike was a revolutionary call for independence. That being said, it is hard to ignore that in the past four years French leaders and their Caribbean citizens have exchanged words that have a familiar ring. On 9 January 2011, in a speech in Petit-Bourg, Guadeloupe, French President Nicolas Sarkozy reminded his audience: Let it be clear among us, my dear Guadeloupean friends[,] . . . Guadeloupe is France, Guadeloupeans are French. And this is the territory of the French Republic.⁷ This affirmation belied the defensive posture that Sarkozy had assumed in order to resolve the crisis. The impetus for the speech—the reason, it could be argued, that the president declared 2011 the Année des Outre-Mer—was to repair the fragile ties between France and her overseas departments. That the French Caribbean was on shaky ground is patently clear in the admission that precedes Sarkozy’s nationalist declaration:

The last time I came to speak in front of you, it was during the Overseas Estates General, while we were in the process of finding ways, together, you haven’t forgotten, to get out of a blockage that was paralyzing your territory. . . . Guadeloupe is a territory of turmoil. Guadeloupe is a territory of pride. Guadeloupe is a territory of combat.

Sarkozy’s presence in Guadeloupe was part of continued efforts to respond to the general strike orchestrated by the Liyannage Kont Pwofitasyon (LKP; Alliance Against Exploitation). The massive mobilization eventually led to a series of negotiations, resulting in the signing of the Bino Accord (named for Jacques Bino, a union member killed during the crisis). The LKP, a coalition of forty-eight labor, political, and cultural organizations, delivered a long list of demands to the French government, which concerned low wages and the overall poor economic conditions of Guadeloupean workers but also extended to the high cost of staple goods, as well as housing and public services.⁸

This was, of course, not the first time an alliance of unions had presented a list of demands to metropolitan leaders: after the devaluation of the French franc in 1946, Césaire, then deputy from Martinique, demanded higher wages for workers. And, at once repeating historical responses and predicting future ones, the minister for the overseas departments disappointed Césaire.⁹ Sarkozy’s attempt to persuade the overseas community was punctuated by a paternalistic rhetoric similar to that which laced his infamous speech in Dakar in July 2007.¹⁰ Before he declared with a flourish that Guadeloupe is the territory of the French Republic, he acknowledged that it is also a territory of turmoil. With this statement, Sarkozy also ended up ironically sounding a lot like Hugonin, the jester of Césaire’s La tragédie du roi Christophe who declares that Haïti is a country of commotion.¹¹ The subtle shifts in the president’s language (from the possessive adjective to the indefinite article) seemed to betray not only a lack of confidence (overcompensated for by the president’s penchant for repetition) but also the neocolonial reasoning that guides the entire speech. I have understood your concern, Sarkozy assured them, "and your wish that the authority of the State be restored. I have heard your demand for a State that protects you, that accompanies you in the development of your territory. From now on, Guadeloupe needs stability and appeasement [apaisement]." Protection, stability, restoration of state authority, all building blocks of France’s colonial mission (as I demonstrate in Part I), are evoked in the name of rebuilding a relationship with an overseas department.

But what did the LKP hope to rebuild? Beyond their immediate demands, the strike reflected the deeper desire of workers to topple the colonial structure of their relationship to France. As made clear in the preamble of the Bino Accord, the demand for better wages and an improved standard of living begins with the root of the problem: the current social and economic situation existing in Guadeloupe results from the perenniality of the model of the plantation economy.¹² The strikers, who represented a broad swath of the Guadeloupean middle and lower classes, were well aware of their place in a long line of historical confrontations with the metropole: the leader of the LKP, Elie Domota, evoked the riots in Basse-Terre in May 1967, and in February 2009 the LKP marched to commemorate the strikers who were killed during a demonstration in 1952. The unrest was not just about high gas and food prices; for the LKP, it was a protest against the systemic exploitation of a society still operating on a colonial model.

This awareness was best captured by the double meaning of the Creole word pwofitasyon, which combines exploitation and profit; in a word, it accused the largely white business leaders on the island, the békés, of continuing colonial practices. The preamble goes on to decry the obstacles to endogenous economic development and to social fulfillment and calls for a new economic order and new social relationships. Although Sarkozy met the salary demands of the strikers and traveled to Guadeloupe to discuss additional reforms, the LKP refused to meet with him and denounced the judicial inquiry into Domota, as well as the prosecution of several union members.¹³ In the view of Jean-Pierre Sainton, who took stock of the strike almost two years later in an interview with Libération, the LKP presented to France what amounted to a cahier de doléances de 1788, a long list of grievances that were, in some sense, impossible to meet. Impossible, Sainton argues, because they affect everyday life, the very structures of Guadeloupean society, public services, etc.¹⁴ Bonilla contends that even though the LKP wanted to put an end to pwofitasyon, they did not have a parallel concept for political initiatives they wanted to implement (132).¹⁵ Clearly unhappy with the current state of political integration, the LKP nonetheless did not issue a call for independence. In the immediate aftermath, the French government took control of this middle ground, as evidenced by Sarkozy’s strategic outline of steps taken to alleviate concern and to mark progress.

Four years later, little seems to have changed. While the Overseas Estates-General met throughout 2009 and various committees and workshops were formed to debate a series of reforms, the refusal of the LKP to participate in the process and the continued paternalism of the French state raise a troubling question: in the end, what did the strike achieve?¹⁶ Furthermore, given the disenchantment of the people of Guadeloupe and their distance from a forum that has taken place mainly in France proper, did Sarkozy reinforce the francocentric logic of assimilation?¹⁷ Or, does the defiant if ambiguous slogan of the strikers, La Gwadloup sé tan nou / La Gwadloup sé pa ta yo (Guadeloupe, it is ours / Guadeloupe, it is not theirs), still resonate in the face of President Sarkozy’s insistence that Guadeloupe is France? And beyond the more abstract identification of a slogan-chant, how should we understand ours and theirs? It sounds like a territorial dispute leading potentially to a separation of metropole and department; it could also be heard as an internal dispute between the island’s largely black workers and their white bosses. The ambiguity of this larger ours made its refusal both defiant and politically flexible, thus demanding radical change without, for the time being, seeking rupture from France.

Read this way, La Gwadloup sé tan nou / La Gwadloup sé pa ta yo contains an ambivalence similar to the historical articulations of the strikers’ predecessors. To be sure, the push and pull between autonomy and assimilation has gone on since the leaders of the slave rebellion on Saint-Domingue (which included Toussaint) fought initially not for emancipation but for libertés, or a few days off during the week. The back and forth continued as Toussaint later issued a constitution centered on the conflicting union of free and French. And a century and a half later, Césaire brought forward a law of departmentalization, only to push back against the dreary cultural assimilation it had become a short while later.

Free and French in the Caribbean

The forty-four-day strike, and the resulting impasse between the overseas communities and their French leader, is a cyclical problem of the French Caribbean. As a matter of politics, this means that the moment of impasse is also one of anticipation, of preparing the ground for a future articulation of the department-metropole relationship.¹⁸ Understanding the strike also requires a critical historiography of the conflicting discourses put forward by the French president and the Guadeloupean protesters. It means going back to Toussaint and the Haitian Revolution and following his proclamation free and French forward to subsequent moments of fragile or fractured unity between colony/department and metropole. In this sense, the exchange between the LKP and Sarkozy compressed time between the eighteenth century and today and sets up the comparative structure of this book, which begins with an analysis of Toussaint’s writings during the Haitian Revolution and then leaps ahead to Césaire’s struggles with departmentalization.

Many have taken note of the similar political trajectories of Toussaint and Césaire. In some sense, the comparison became self-evident with Césaire’s essay on Toussaint, a long work on which there has been a flurry of activity in recent years.¹⁹ To my knowledge, this is the first book-length study to bring together the writings of the two men. The lack of a more thorough comparison has led to scant attention to the connection between revolution and departmentalization. Scholars had fairly criticized the silencing and disavowal of the Haitian Revolution and of the deeper ties between the vieilles colonies of the French Caribbean.²⁰ However, the past decade has seen an outpouring of scholarship on Saint-Domingue and the revolution that led to the founding of the first independent black republic.²¹ The thesis of silence needs clarification, as it applied mainly to an omission in the European and American academies. Even this disclaimer feels inadequate, especially when one considers the writings of nineteenth-century historians, playwrights, poets, and abolitionists that presented a wide range of depictions of Toussaint.²² For over a hundred years, beginning with Haitian historiographers in the mid-nineteenth century, Caribbean writers had not been silent about Saint-Domingue and Haiti.²³ The momentum continued between the two world wars and intensified from the late 1950s to the early 1960s, when a number of historical circumstances—the profound disappointment with departmentalization, the hopes for a federation of Caribbean states, the anxiety and fear of the violence in Algeria and Indochina, and the promising future of African decolonization—converged and brought a prominent group of writers, including C. L. R. James (with a second revised edition of The Black Jacobins), Jean Price-Mars, Édouard Glissant, and Césaire, to look back to Toussaint to offer a revised historiography of the troubling ties between republicanism and colonialism.²⁴ The rewriting of the past in this concatenation of texts considered alternatives to the present and future by repositioning the departments along a Caribbean spatiotemporal continuum.²⁵ And yet French commemoration of the second law of abolition in 1848 is representative of French political amnesia concerning Haiti, which has done much to erase the shared history of Saint-Domingue, Martinique, and Guadeloupe.²⁶

In Part II take time to draw out the protracted drama that was the Haitian Revolution. In order to ground this introduction it is helpful to begin with a summary. In 1791 a slave revolt broke out on the northern plain of Saint-Domingue, at the time the wealthiest and most productive colony in the world. Although their reasons for revolt differed significantly from the gens de couleur libres (a historical term meaning free persons of color, i.e., persons of African descent, either born to free parents or freed by a master; many were landowners), who initially sought political equality with the white landowners, the slaves were soon joined by them, bringing the growing insurrection to the western and southern provinces. The revolt became a more organized rebellion that toppled the Spanish and British, the two main colonial forces that, along with the United States, vied to exert influence and to control trade routes in the Caribbean. Shortly after defeating the British in late 1798—Spain had signed a peace accord with France in July 1795—the army of Toussaint Louverture, the black general who controlled the northern and western provinces and who would soon annex the eastern half of Hispaniola (ceded by Spain to France in 1795, now the Dominican Republic), engaged in a brutal civil war with the forces of General André Rigaud, who controlled the southern province. Toussaint routed Rigaud, who fled to France, and found himself in control of the entire island. In a last great effort to retake control of their former colony, the French, then under Napoleon Bonaparte, sent a large expeditionary force in late 1801. The dramatic confrontation broke out into the final war of independence that led to the founding of the republic of Haiti.

Toussaint, then governor-general of Saint-Domingue, would not live to see independence; he died while held captive in France by Bonaparte. Having risen to the leadership of an army of former slaves fighting initially on the side of the Spanish, Toussaint joined the French Republicans in May 1794; upon defeating Rigaud six years later, he was the undisputed leader of Saint-Domingue. After his tragic confrontation with Bonaparte, Toussaint would become a world historical figure of mythic proportion. In one of his many proclamations of independence, Jean-Jacques Dessalines, the new governor-general and founder of Haïti whose troops defeated Bonaparte’s army, acknowledged Toussaint as his predecessor.²⁷

Aimé Césaire, too, was exalted in mythical terms. While in Martinique during World War II, André Breton praised Césaire as a great black poet.²⁸ Having recently published his epic poem, Cahier d’un retour au pays natal, Césaire gained literary renown that earned him political prominence in his election in May 1945 as mayor of Fort-de-France and, five months later, as deputy to the French National Assembly. A volatile mix of literature and politics defined Césaire’s long life, which ended in his ninety-fifth year, in April 2008. With a brief interruption in 1957, he remained a deputy until 1993 and mayor until 2001. Like Toussaint before him, Césaire was honored as a forward-thinking leader at the crossroads of liberty and colonialism that has traversed the Caribbean from the eighteenth century to the present day.

I build on these brief biographies in the chapters that follow. However, this book is not a history of two men; it is a study of