African
Revolutionary Writers, Part 1a
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.
The attached Haiti Constitution of 1801 is the best
representation we have of Toussaint L’Ouverture’s writing.
- The above serves
to introduce the original reading-text: Toussaint, Haiti
Constitution of 1801
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