Toussaint L’Ouverture
Toussaint L’Ouverture – Toussaint the Opening – was the
leader, both military and civilian, of the slave revolt in the French West
Indian colony of “Saint Domingue”, which is now the Republic of Haiti.
Toussaint brought his country to the brink of independence.
The constitution of which he was the author (download linked below), though not
the constitution of an independent republic, was enough to lead to his capture,
transportation to France, and death in captivity two years after its
publication.
Toussaint’s successor, Dessalines, did achieve independence,
though on harsh terms that crippled the country with “reparations” to the
French Republic - one of the great scandals of history.
C L R James wrote a famous work
about the Haitian revolution, calling the book “The Black Jacobins”. The title
was a reference to the bourgeois take-over of the Great French Revolution that
had taken place a few years earlier, the “Terror” under Robespierre, and the
eventual bourgeois dictatorship that was the consequence of the revolution.
In other words the freed slaves became subordinated to a
dictatorship of “their own” black bourgeoisie, of which Toussaint was one of
the first. This was hardly surprising, and practically inevitable. The first dictatorship
of the proletariat (The Paris Commune) was not seen until seventy years later,
in 1871.
Even if a “Jacobin”, Toussaint was still an “Opening” in
history, and one of the greatest of them.
Please download and read the text via the
following link:
Toussaint, Haiti Constitution of
1801 (3,831 words)
Further reading:
Sol Plaatje,
Native Life, Wrong Carries the Day (8662 words)
Six Lectures of Frederick Douglass (14,512 words, 24 pages)
Selections from the
writings of George Padmore (5179 words)
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