On 24 August 1802, the Haitian revolutionary general Toussaint Louverture entered the Fort de Joux, a foreboding medieval castle located in the Jura Mountains near the French-Swiss border. Born a slave in the French colony of Saint-Domingue (Haiti), Louverture had played a leading role in the Haitian Revolution and become governor general for life of the colony by 1801. But his meteoric career had come to an abrupt end when he was deported to France in June 1802 because the first consul of France, Napoléon Bonaparte, suspected him of marching for independence.
The Fort de Joux. The fort was renovated extensively in the late 19th century, but Toussaint Louverture’s cell can still be visited.
Photograph by Christophe Finot, from commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Fort_de_ Joux_-_05
One after the other, Louverture crossed five successive layers of fortifications. Each gate closed behind him with the sharp snap of a coffin slamming shut until he found himself in his cell, a dank and dark room tucked behind the keep. A small window that gave onto a courtyard where other prisoners took their daily walks was his only link to the outside world. To prevent an escape, it was obstructed with two sets of iron bars, bricks, wire netting, and storm shutters.1 He felt, he later wrote, as if he had been buried alive. He was right: Aside from visits to the neighboring cell for his daily shave, Louverture never again crossed these doors alive.
Despite his difficult material circumstances, Louverture was initially hopeful that he could obtain a court-martial and secure his release. To do so, he employed a potent tool that this previously illiterate man had learned to master: the written word. As August turned into September, he wrote a lengthy text addressed to his captor Bonaparte that is his main political and literary legacy. This is the memoir that is analyzed, reproduced, and translated in this book.
Louverture’s memoir is an important primary source for historians who generally struggle to retrace the history of the Haitian Revolution and other slave revolts because the vast majority of documents were authored by the dominant classes. The memoir gives a voice to the people victimized by slavery and racism, starting with Louverture, arguably the most relevant historical figure of African descent in world history, but also a complex man whose past and personality remain largely a matter of debate and speculation.
Though the memoir was written by a man who could not be fully frank because he was in captivity, it contains important information about Louverture’s career and political agenda. Scholars have long debated whether Louverture, who grew up at the intersection of African, American, and European influences, should be seen as a black nationalist, a Creole, or a son of the French Revolution; the memoir helps us better understand how he juggled these multiple identities. Because Louverture was a former slave and a planter who both combated and enabled forced labor, scholars have also debated whether he should be seen as a herald of emancipation or a reactionary figure: He defended his labor policies in his memoir. Finally, because Louverture claimed much political autonomy as governor yet never declared independence, historians disagree on whether his long-term goal was the creation of Haiti: Louverture addressed that question directly in his memoir.
The memoir is also a layered literary work that Louverture painstakingly crafted, revised, and copied during his captivity. It is a rare example of a French-language slave narrative, a genre that is more common in the English language. But this is a slave narrative with a twist because it incorporates few of the typical ingredients found in slave narratives like the one by Frederick Douglass.2 Louverture did not describe his upbringing, the moment when he became aware of being a slave, or the circumstances of his manumission. He chose to focus on his actions as the leader of a post-emancipationist world rather than commiserate on the abuse he had suffered as a slave. And yet, the memoir is also a very personal work enlivened by genuine and forceful cris du cœur.
Last but not least, the memoir is a linguistic artifact from an era in which French and African languages combined to form Kreyòl, the vernacular of Haiti and many former French colonies today. Because few written samples of early Kreyòl have survived—especially substantial texts written in their own hand by native Kreyòl speakers—the memoir is a veritable Rosetta stone that allows us to plunge into the prehistory of Haitian Kreyòl.
“I was a Slave, I dare to declare it.” Such is the only mention of Toussaint Louverture’s origins in his memoir. The statement, with its capitalized “Slave” and its forceful “dare,” was a defiant reminder of Louverture’s humble past, but it stood surprisingly isolated in the text, as if Louverture chose not to let his past enslavement define his life. Other sources indicate that he was born on the Breda sugar plantation near Cap-Français (Cap-Haïtien) around 1743, the son of two slaves imported from the kingdom of Allada (present-day Benin) as part of the Atlantic slave trade.3
The Bréda plantations (c. 1789). Toussaint Louverture was born on the Bréda plantation in Haut-du-Cap (immediately southwest of Cap-Français) and lived there until the outbreak of the Haitian Revolution.
Map by Philippe Girard and Jean-Louis Donnadieu
During his years as a slave, Louverture coped by creating an extended kinship network that he later tapped during the Haitian Revolution. Several of his relatives are mentioned in the memoir, starting with “a respectable father aged one hundred and five.” This passage may seem perplexing since archival documents indicate that both of Louverture’s parents actually died in 1774. But Louverture was instead referring to his godfather Pierre Baptiste, who played a central role in his life and whom he regarded as a surrogate father.4 Other relatives mentioned in the memoir include his wife and children, his brother Paul, his nephews Charles Belair and Bernard Chancy, and his niece’s husband André Vernet, all of whom became officers in his army during the Haitian Revolution.
Sometime before 1776, Louverture was manumitted in circumstances that have yet to be elucidated. He then acquired at least one slave and leased a dozen others from his son-in-law, including possibly Jean-Jacques Dessalines, who later became his most prominent general and the first leader of independent Haiti.5 He mentioned none of this in the memoir and his other writings, possibly because he wished to remain a convincing champion of abolitionism in the eyes of the general public. Similarly, the narrative of the British abolitionist Olaudah Equiano may have falsely included a Middle Passage scene to hide the fact that Equiano was born in the New World, not Africa, and that he had owned slaves.6 Memoirs are as much the creation of a convenient identity as a faithful retelling of the past.
Though a freedman, Louverture remained on the plantation where most of his relatives continued to live in bondage, including his sons Placide and Isaac and his wife Suzanne, whom he often mentioned in his memoir. During his captivity, he also explained to an envoy of Bonaparte that “he had lost 11 children, including six girls” and that he had only five children left, two of them born out of wedlock. He did not reveal the identity of these two illegitimate children in his memoir, possibly for fear that they would be arrested by the French, but one suspects that they were his children Gabriel and Marie-Marthe, who were actually the legitimate offspring of a previous marriage he never mentioned in public.7
Some historians claim that Louverture learned to read while he was still a slave and that he was taught by his master or by his godfather, who himself had been educated by Jesuits. There are indeed striking similarities between the handwriting of Louverture and that of Pierre Baptiste and his wife Suzanne, a relative of his godfather. Alternatively, a contemporary thought that Louverture had been taught by a French soldier visiting the Breda plantation. But there is no definitive evidence that Louverture could read and write, or even sign his name, before the Haitian Revolution.8
According to his son Isaac, it was only after this revolution began in 1791 that Louverture learned how to read from a French officer; indeed, the first signature that is undoubtedly his dates from late 1791, when he was almost 50.9 Louverture’s belated education (one of the memoir’s most important sub-themes) was clearly on his mind when in 1797 he questioned the black race’s alleged mental shortcomings. “Blacks surely are ignorant and crude, since the lack of education can only produce ignorance and crudeness,” he replied to a racist planter. “But should we hold the blacks responsible for their lack of education, or should we blame those who prevented them from acquiring it with threats and terrible punishments?”10
In his memoir, Louverture claimed that he was worth “about six hundred and forty-eight thousand francs” by the time the Haitian Revolution broke out. Such a sum seems enormous for a man generally assumed to have been a freedman of modest means in the 1780s. One possible explanation for the discrepancy is that, when mentioning the beginning of the “Revolution,” Louverture was not referring to the August 1791 slave revolt that is now viewed as the beginning of the Haitian Revolution, but to the August 1792 storming of the Tuileries palace in France, by which point he had indeed begun the political and financial ascent that would make him a wealthy man in subsequent years.11 For Louverture to cite Louis XVI’s overthrow rather than the slaves’ rebellion as the true beginning of the Haitian Revolution is revealing of his monarchist leanings, which were evident in his early career.12 Some Freudian slips in the memoir also underline how much Louverture was shaped by the pre-revolutionary world of the Ancien Régime. He occasionally wrote of “Port-au-Prince” even though the city’s name was republicanized to “Port-Républicain” in the 1790s. More surprisingly, he used the qualifiers “le nommé” and “sieur,” which had been used before the Revolution to underline a person’s racial background, even though such pejorative terms were no longer supposed to be used in the more egalitarian era of the Revolution.
Louverture’s role in the major slave revolt that broke out in Saint-Domingue in August 1791 remains mysterious. Contemporaries variously alleged that he waited to see how events would unfold before committing to the cause of abolition, or that he was part of a royalist conspiracy. Louverture later claimed that he had actually been a partisan of emancipation from the outset, but he did not belabor that point in his memoir, probably because he did not want to come across to Napoléon Bonaparte as a radical firebrand.13
In 1793–94, two years into the Haitian Revolution, Louverture joined the Spanish army operating out of nearby Santo Domingo (today’s Dominican Republic) when a war broke out between revolutionary France and monarchist Spain. For obvious reasons, he did not remind his French captors in the memoir that he had once served in a foreign army. He instead chose to emphasize his 1794 switch to the French army (around the time France abolished slavery) and the ensuing years he spent battling a joint Spanish and British invasion of Saint-Domingue, which bolstered his case as a loyal servant of the French Republic. This also allowed Louverture to spend much time retracing his various faits d’armes, which he did with the evident relish of an elderly general.
The 1790s saw Louverture’s wealth increase, his military exploits multiply, and his political clout grow. The decade was also the time when he affirmed himself as an author. Hundreds of letters and proclamations from this period bear his name. But virtually all of these documents were drafted by secretaries and merely signed by Louverture, who had only recently learned how to read, and we know of only eight documents that he personally wrote in Saint-Domingue. In practice, Louverture wrote in his own hand only for practical reasons (he had no secretary with him), for minor issues (such as grocery lists), for personal issues (one letter was apparently intended for his mistress), and when the subject was too sensitive to involve a third party (two of the letters deal with a plot to expel a French agent in October 1798).14
Some illiterate officers like Louverture’s nephew Moïse could be deceived by secretaries who misrepresented their ideas, but Louverture was educated enough to retain control of his prose even when he did not personally pen a letter. A French visitor who met him in Cap-Français was impressed by his “literary intelligence. I saw him orally explain in a few words the summary of his letters, refashion poorly drafted sentences, and face several secretaries who would alternatively present their drafts to him.” “He would never have signed a letter without first understanding or weighing each word,” noted another witness.15 Louverture did not employ secretaries because he could not write, but because he could not write well: He wanted his letters to Parisian officials to be couched in formal French, a language he never fully mastered in writing. So self-conscious was Louverture about his lack of formal schooling that he mentioned it three times in the memoir.
It was to ensure that the next generation of Louvertures would be fully fluent in French that in 1796 Toussaint Louverture sent his sons Placide and Isaac to a government-financed school in France. “I am most grateful for the instruction that [the minister of the navy and the colonies] also chose to give my children,” he wrote in 1797, “because if I cannot leave them a fortune, they will have, thanks to the government, a fine education that is worth more than the most brilliant fortune. If I had not myself received a Christian education. . . I would be lost among the crowd.” “You negroes, try to learn the manners” of white colonists, he proudly told his black officers. “This is what you get from being educated in France; my children will be like that.”16
By the time the British evacuated their last troops from Saint-Domingue in 1798, Louverture had become the leading political and military figure in the colony, where this former slave eventually claimed the title of governor. Over the following three years, he attempted to revive the plantation economy of Saint-Domingue, once the most prosperous in the New World, but severely affected by revolutionary violence and the abolition of slavery. The stern manner with which he treated former slaves made him unpopular with plantation field hands, but he emphasized the success of his labor policies in the opening lines of his memoir. “Agriculture and commerce were flourishing, the island had attained a degree of splendor that no one had ever seen previously, and all of this I dare to say was the result of my labors.” His economic accomplishments reflected well on his record as governor, but the state of the colonial economy was also a litmus test for the merits of emancipation. Reactionaries were adamant that no sugar could be produced without slaves, so by insisting that plantations were doing well (better, even) since the official abolition of slavery in 1794, Louverture was trying to prove the economic viability of free labor. Though his claims of unprecedented prosperity were somewhat exaggerated (the plantation economy had only begun to recover), they clearly struck a chord: Looking back years later on his decision to remove Louverture from office, Bonaparte acknowledged that he should probably have left this efficient administrator in place.17
Other steps taken by Louverture to secure his power were more controversial. From 1798 to 1801, he conducted a secret diplomacy with Great Britain and the United States that could easily have been construed as treason (both countries were at war with France) and thus went unmentioned in the memoir.18 He also exiled several French envoys that were his direct superiors, invaded the neighboring Spanish colony of Santo Domingo against the wishes of Bonaparte, and drafted a daring constitution that made him governor general for life, without seeking France’s prior approval. In his memoir, Louverture could not omit such events, of which Bonaparte was well aware, but he tried to justify his decisions as the well-intended policies of a French public servant who had to make decisions without daily guidance from the distant metropolis because the ongoing state of war in Europe had interrupted normal communications by sea. He cleverly explained, for example, that it had become necessary to issue a constitution because Bonaparte had left the colony in a state of legislative abandon. “Yes, it is true, I made a mistake,” he confessed during his captivity. “But my intentions were pure.”19
An allegorical rendering of the presentation of the 1801 constitution. Toussaint Louverture stands at the center.
Library of Congress LC-USZ62-7861
Late in 1801, concerned that Louverture was rapidly positioning himself for independence, Bonaparte sent a massive expedition to unseat his wayward governor and perhaps restore slavery.20 Led by Bonaparte’s brother-in-law Victoire Emmanuel Leclerc, the expedition landed near Cap-Français in February 1802. Fighting soon erupted between Leclerc, who was itching for a fight that would bring him riches and glory, and Louverture, who refused to yield his post and suspected that Bonaparte’s ultimate goal was the restoration of slavery. The city of Cap-Français, once known as the “Paris of the Antilles,” was burned to the ground when Leclerc tried to land his troops. To justify why he had fought a French army led by Bonaparte’s own brother-in-law, Louverture’s memoir described in considerable detail the circumstances that surrounded the arrival of the Leclerc expedition. Leclerc, he explained, had caused the outbreak of fighting by violating proper procedure and landing unannounced.
Louverture went on to give a first-person account of the ensuing campaign between his and Leclerc’s armies in the spring of 1802, including the battles of Ravine-à-Couleuvre (figure 4) and Crête-à-Pierrot, which have remained the high-water mark of Haiti’s military history. Louverture took this opportunity to accuse French troops of summarily executing some rebel prisoners, as indeed happened. Less truthfully, he declined all responsibility for the massacres of white civilians that plagued the campaign, even though he had actually ordered his subordinates to kill white planters.21
The battle of Ravine-à-Couleuvre (1802). During this battle, Louverture’s forces ambushed a French column led by General Donatien de Rochambeau.
Library of Congress LC-USZ62-17250
The spring campaign ended in a draw in May 1802 when Louverture and Leclerc, their armies exhausted by three months of brutal combat, met in Cap-Français and signed a truce. In keeping with the general arc of his argument, Louverture implied in his memoir that he could easily have kept on fighting but had agreed to a ceasefire to avoid further bloodshed and save the colony. In reality, he had been abandoned by most of his subordinates and had no hope of a quick victory.22
The ceasefire granted immunity to Louverture, who retired to his plantations near Ennery in western Saint-Domingue. A month later, however, Leclerc had him arrested and deported to France. Louverture dedicated many pages of his memoir to his arrest, an event that was still fresh and painful in his mind. He emphasized the pillages that preceded and followed his capture and the treachery of the French officers who arrested him after giving him their word of honor that he would be safe, accusations that are consistent with the historical record (Louverture, on the other hand, seems to have been unaware that his subordinate Dessalines had denounced him to Leclerc, because he described him in very positive terms throughout the memoir).23 Louverture also denounced as a fake a letter seized by Leclerc in which Louverture allegedly expressed his intention to resume his revolt at a later date.
Louverture hoped that the pillages, Leclerc’s promise, and the lack of evidence would prove that his imprisonment was illegitimate and thus secure his release. More personally, the memoir was also an opportunity for Louverture to comprehend how he could have fallen for Leclerc’s simple trap, a surprising lack of foresight that has puzzled historians ever since. “It was to deceive me, then,” he mused aloud. “And if [Leclerc] wanted to deceive me why did he not use ruses and finesse only, and not his word and the protection of the French government?” What Louverture did not know was that the deportations were actually part of a larger plan by Bonaparte to deport all leading officers of color from the French Caribbean and that the first consul fully agreed with Louverture’s summary arrest. Among the many victims of the racist turn in Bonaparte’s colonial policies, one may cite Thomas-Alexandre Dumas, a mixed-race Dominguan general and father of the novelist who, after a stay in prison, was taken off active duty despite his written pleas to Bonaparte.24
Louverture and his family reached the military port of Brest in western France in July 1802. He immediately dictated letters to complain about his arrest and to beg French authorities to take good care of his relatives. “If my wife [Suzanne] had not been forced to follow her spouse” in exile, he wrote Leclerc, “she could have helped the large family we have in Saint-Domingue, most of whom are girls. Left on their own, without guides, what will become of these unfortunate persons?” “A fifty-three year old housewife deserves the indulgence and goodwill of a liberal and generous nation,” he wrote Bonaparte. “I alone must be responsible for my conduct.”25 Taking full responsibility for his actions in the hope of shielding his loved ones from the French government’s reprisals remained one of Louverture’s main goals when drafting his memoir.
Louverture’s pleas fell on deaf ears. After a month’s delay, his son Placide, who had fought by his side during the spring 1802 campaign, was sent to a prison in nearby Belle Ile. There, he shared a cell with Jean-Baptiste Belley, who in less prejudiced times had been the first black deputy to the French National Assembly. Louverture’s other relatives were sent to Bayonne and ultimately Agen in southwestern France. Though they were treated humanely, they were subjected to a lifelong exile; only his niece ever returned to Haiti. Louverture was never informed of his relatives’ whereabouts, nor they of his, which caused understandable anguish.26
For fear that a formal court-martial would create political unrest in Saint-Domingue, Bonaparte decided that Louverture would be held without trial in the Fort de Joux, where he would be unlikely to find means of escape since this prison was located far from France’s Atlantic ports. The procedure was far from unusual: Under Bonaparte, both metropolitan France and the colonies saw the multiplication of measures aimed at placing criminal and political prisoners beyond the reach of normal laws in a kind of 19th-century Guantánamo.27
At dawn on 13 August 1802, Louverture was discreetly transferred ashore in Landerneau, northeast of Brest. Worried that sympathizers might help him abscond on the way to Joux, French authorities whisked him away at full speed through provincial roads in an enclosed carriage. Several authors mention that Louverture spent a night at the Temple prison in Paris, not far from where Bonaparte worked, but he actually passed far to the south of the capital.28 The historic meeting between the first consul and the man often described as the “black Napoléon” never took place.
As Louverture traveled all the way to Joux on the opposite side of France, each local military commander was tasked with providing a large escort while the convoy crossed his district. In the Loire region, General Paul Thiébault was so eager “to see this man who was extraordinary in his way” that he woke up at 2:00 A.M. when Louverture’s carriage stopped in Tours to change horses. Believing that his destination was Paris, Louverture explained to Thiébault in his “negro talk” that he was eager to meet the first consul. Noting that he wore three jackets despite the stifling heat inside the carriage, the general thought to himself, “poor devil. . . . I will let someone else reveal to you your destiny. Thankfully, you won’t suffer long, because the first cold wind that blows through the battlements of the Fort de Joux will be for you the kiss of death.”29
In comparison with the first half-century of Louverture’s life, about which very little is known, his captivity in Joux is particularly well documented. In addition to the memoir and his other writings, one can rely on a steady stream of instructions and reports by the directors of the prison, Bonaparte’s envoys, local civilian and military officials, and the French government that deal with the most minute aspects of Louverture’s daily routine. Personal recollections by witnesses who met the famous prisoner are also available.30
Security in Joux was tight. Louverture, by far the most prominent of the prisoners held in the prison, was kept in his own cell and isolated from other inmates. He was guarded by a squad of 19 riflemen and officers who had standing orders to shoot unannounced visitors on sight. Even these security measures were not deemed enough by the French government in Paris, which closely supervised the actions of local authorities. After hearing that two prisoners had recently managed to escape, the minister of war demanded that surveillance measures be doubled, and Louverture’s knife and razor were taken away.31
Louverture and his servant Mars Plaisir, the only member of his entourage who had accompanied him to Joux, relied on each other for moral support. “We feared that we would soon be dead,” Plaisir later recounted. He would do his best to lift his master’s spirits, who reciprocated when Plaisir’s own morale sank. “Seeing the grandeur of his soul, I would jump and embrace him. . . . And throughout our captivity we never ceased to talk about all of you [Louverture’s family] and cry that we could not see you.” But Plaisir was sent away just weeks after his arrival in Joux, and Louverture had to face the rest of his captivity without a familiar face.32
Despite the precariousness of his situation, Louverture remained resilient at first because he still hoped to obtain his release. As soon as he arrived in Joux, he asked for writing materials so that he could defend himself. Despite Bonaparte’s express orders, Louverture obtained paper and ink, and over the following weeks he wrote several versions of his memoir along with nine letters, with only partial assistance from a secretary. Since documents written in his own hand are exceedingly rare, the fall of 1802 was by far the single most intensive period of writing in his life.33
Thankfully for Louverture, the director of the prison, Baille, was a dutiful but humane gaoler. He fed Louverture better than other captives, gave him a daily allowance of two bottles of wine, and used his own money to buy sugar (Louverture had a sweet tooth). He also regularly brought in doctors from Pontarlier. Louverture, who was not allowed to speak to his guards or other prisoners, must have looked forward to Baille’s daily visits, when the two men spent hours discussing Caribbean politics.34
It was during one of these encounters that, late in August, Louverture announced that he had “important things” to say to the French government. Louverture meant that he wished to defend his record in person, but a jubilant Bonaparte, who had heard tales that Louverture was fabulously rich, immediately sent his aide-de-camp Marie-François Auguste de Caffarelli du Falga to Joux to enquire about the location of his secret “treasures.” Two days later, Caffarelli was in Louverture’s cell. “He is a 5’1’’ negro, slender,” he reported, “very black. . . with very prominent cheekbones, a flat nose, but quite long. . . . He seems calm, tranquil and resigned in his prison; he suffers a lot from the cold. When I introduced myself to him, he saluted me very politely, and then invited me to sit down.”35
Caffarelli expected Louverture to humbly seek the forgiveness of his French masters. He found instead a combative man who managed to portray his controversial record as governor of Saint-Domingue in a positive light. He adamantly denied having ever betrayed France. Questioned about his financial assets, he insisted that “I had a lot of animals, I own a lot of land, but I never had much cash.” “This man is very sure of himself, and he repeats exactly the same thing one or two days apart,” marveled Caffarelli. “Either he tells the truth, or he is a very deep liar who has thought about his argument for a long time.”36
Only one painful incident seemed to faze Louverture. To punish and humiliate him, the minister of war had decreed that Louverture should no longer be allowed to wear his French general’s uniform. “While he was talking, the commander of the fort [Baille] brought in the clothes that had been made for him,” reported Caffarelli. “He was surprised when he realized that it was not a uniform, and stayed for a moment without talking, then took them, put them on his bed, and resumed the conversation. But he was so preoccupied with this matter that I could not take his mind off it.” Another account is more direct. He “refused at first and insulted the officer,” remembered a guard. “Then all of a sudden he took off his jacket and threw it to the envoy, saying, ‘here, take this to your master.’ ”37 As a self-made man, Louverture was very sensitive to any social or racial slight, so this insult must have deeply hurt his pride.
The next-to-last page of the D manuscript illustrates the difference between the handwriting of Jeannin (top of the page) and Louverture (bottom of the page).
Courtesy of the Archives Nationales d’Outremer, Dossier 1, EE1734, ANOM
After six days of lengthy discussions with the prisoner, Caffarelli returned to Paris empty-handed. He had not managed to convince Louverture to confess his sins and reveal the location of his treasure. All he had to show for his efforts was a document in which Louverture had placed all his hopes: his memoir.
The memoir written during Louverture’s captivity is a 21-page, 16,000-word document. According to Daniel Desormeaux, who oversaw a French edition of the memoir in 2011, Louverture “drafted in one setting, without any corrections, Memoirs in which he emphasized, with the self-assurance typical of memorialists, his central role.” The writing process was actually far more convoluted. Four contemporary versions exist, labeled here A, B, C, and D. Manuscripts A, B, and C are in a folder at the Archives Nationales in Paris, which also contains three preparatory documents in Louverture’s hand, as well as most of the letters he wrote in captivity; manuscript D is at the Archives Nationales d’Outremer in Aix-en-Provence.38
Manuscript A was penned by a secretary. It bears many corrections and marginal notations in the secretary’s hand, particularly in its opening and closing segments, as if it had been dictated, then proofread and edited on Louverture’s orders; it is also incomplete as it does not include a final section found in other versions. It was most likely a first draft. Manuscript B, written by the same secretary, is a second version that bears a few additional marginal notations, some in Louverture’s own hand, as well as an “addendum to this memoir” that extends the main narrative by a few pages, and then a final paragraph in Louverture’s hand that was initialed by him. Manuscript D is identical to manuscript B aside from minor textual variations, a single marginal notation in Louverture’s hand, and a slightly revised closing paragraph. It was apparently the official copy sent to Bonaparte, because the secretary employed a more elegant handwriting, Louverture signed the document with his full signature, and the D manuscript is kept in the same folder as a letter in which Caffarelli mentions delivering the “enclosed” memoir to French authorities in Paris.39
Manuscript C is the only version entirely in Louverture’s hand. Its content resembles that of manuscripts B and D, but with a few notable exceptions. Louverture corrected his secretary’s factual mistakes (which largely pertain to his lack of knowledge of Dominguan politics and place names), refined a few sentences, and employed a syntax and spelling that differed markedly from his secretary’s and standard French. He deleted two passages, the first of which digressed from the account of his arrest and the second of which was an oblique criticism of the French government that he may have found too daring on second thought. He also significantly expanded the closing pages of his memoir to include anecdotes that bolstered his case. The C manuscript bears no marginal notations by third parties and is presumably the last, most authentic version, which Louverture kept for his own records (it is not signed). This is the version reproduced in this book.
Louverture wrote the bulk of his memoir between 24 August 1802, when he reached Joux, and 11 September 1802, when Caffarelli arrived from Paris to interrogate him (he may have thought of its contents during the two months he had spent at sea or in Brest, but there is no documentary evidence of this). He revised the memoir after meeting with Caffarelli, which probably explains the disorganized structure of the closing pages. The memoir was finished by the 16th of September, when he entrusted the D manuscript to Caffarelli before he left for Paris.40 Even manuscript C, the copy made by Louverture for his own records, must have been drafted before or during Caffarelli’s stay, because several segments match the D manuscript word for word.
According to a 19th-century mixed-race Haitian historian who was eager to emphasize the historical importance of his kin, it was the mixed-race general Martial Besse who helped Louverture draft his memoir, a claim often recycled since then; but Besse did not reach the Fort de Joux until after Louverture’s death.41 In his report, Caffarelli actually indicated that Louverture “dictated the memoir before I arrived in Joux to a secretary from the sub-prefecture [of Pontarlier].”42 His name was Jeannin. “I wrote memoirs dictated by [Louverture] during his captivity,” Jeannin later explained. The two men apparently developed a close relationship. “Several times I went to Pontarlier to get a doctor for him, and I arranged for him to have a bathtub to use, because no one but me and the commander of the prison could talk to him.” Jeannin’s signature, like Louverture’s, bore two lines and three dots (a symbol usually associated with freemasonry), which may explain their bond.43
Since the memoir was written with the help of a secretary, it is important to determine whether the resulting work is truly Louverture’s or whether it was largely mediated. Potential interference is a constant problem in slave narratives, a genre to which Louverture’s memoir is related: Consciously or not, white narrators can reframe issues and rub out uncomfortable truths. Such does not seem to have been the case here. Louverture’s memoir was not the testimony of an illiterate slave interviewed by an author who was his social superior, but a report that was “dictated” (per Caffarelli and Jeannin’s accounts) by a general to a secretary who played the role of a scribe, much in the same way that Bonaparte dictated his memoirs during his own captivity in Saint Helena or Christopher Columbus defended his governorship before King Ferdinand when he was jailed after his third voyage. The many marginal notations and corrections, some of them in Louverture’s own hand, indicate that he carefully proofread Jeannin’s drafts to correct occasional mistakes and ensure that the finished product matched what he had in mind word for word and even letter for letter. While dictating his memoir, Louverture had mentioned staying at a “hatte” (a cattle ranch), a Caribbean term that Jeannin had incorrectly rendered as “hutte” (a hut) in manuscript D; Louverture corrected the errant vowel in manuscript C. The arguments that Louverture used in his memoir and during his conversations with Baille and Caffarelli are also remarkably similar.44
Self-censorship is a more likely problem. Louverture, like most politicians, knew how to portray the truth in a manner compatible with his political goals. The precarious environment in which he found himself in August and September 1802 called for particular caution, since he was a prisoner who could legitimately fear being executed as a traitor if he revealed anything that was compromising; his relatives’ fate was also on his mind. This drastically limited his ability to speak his mind in a document addressed to the powerful first consul of France, who held his life in his hands. For example, he omitted in manuscript C a paragraph that criticized officials in Brest for issuing him “old, half-rotten soldier rags”; after Caffarelli’s visit and the confiscation of his uniform, he must have understood that this humiliation had been ordered by Paris itself and that it was best not to complain about the matter. Louverture also frequently used the passive voice and the indeterminate “they” (French: “on”) to avoid accusing anyone in particular, leaving General Leclerc as the only identifiable villain in the memoir, even though, as Louverture knew, he was largely the executioner of Bonaparte’s policies.
Ascertaining the authenticity of the memoir’s style (as opposed to its content’s) is also important because the memoir is the only lengthy piece of writing in Louverture’s hand and the only way to reproduce his manner of his speaking. As governor, Louverture had made extensive use of secretaries, but according to a contemporary, he “dictated separately to his secretaries, in Kreyòl, what they would write in French,” so the formal French employed in his official correspondence was most likely not his.45 Similarly, transcripts made in the 1790s of his conversations with French agents were airbrushed to make him speak in formal French. “Toussaint speaks only Kreyòl and barely understands French, he is perfectly incapable of employing the language that is ascribed to him,” protested a French agent after reading the transcript.46
The style of manuscript C indeed varies noticeably as the text progresses. The opening pages are written in formal, grammatically accurate French, however badly misspelled, and are reminiscent of the official letters drafted by Louverture and his secretaries during his governorship. These pages were revised extensively by Jeannin, starting with manuscript A, which explains the polished style. But some later passages differ markedly from standard French. They happen to be more fiery, as if Louverture, caught up in his narrative, forgot that he was addressing a head of state and pushed aside the sentences suggested by his secretary to employ a language that was more personal (a Frenchman who met him in Saint-Domingue noted that he would occasionally switch from French to Kreyòl when he struggled to express his thoughts).47 This is particularly true of two extended segments that Louverture wrote with little or no input from Jeannin. The first only surfaced in manuscript D, the third version of the memoir, too late to be polished by Jeannin. The second segment is unique to manuscript C and was written by Louverture entirely on his own.
Two excerpts demonstrate this stylistic shift (spelling has been corrected in the translation). The first, which appears at the beginning of the memoir, was written in formal French and is stylistically identical to Louverture’s official writings. The second, taken from the segment that first appeared in manuscript D, incorporated Kreyòl variations, such as the use of the infinitive form of verbs, and was presumably more representative of Louverture’s personal style.
It is my duty to give to the French government an exact account of my conduct. I will recount the facts with all the naiveté and the frankness of a former military man, while adding the thoughts that will arise naturally, in a word I will tell the truth even if it were against my interests. . . .
Arrested arbitrarily without hearing me or telling me why; took all my assets; plundered all my family in general; seized my papers and kept them; embarked me naked as worm; spread the worst calumnies on my account. Based on this I am thrown at the bottom of a cell.
According to his contemporaries, Louverture loved to employ metaphors, so the rich imagery that surfaces in the more authentic passages of the memoir must have been representative of his style. After complaining of being “naked as worm” in the passage above, Louverture went on to compare his captivity to dismemberment.48 “Isn’t it like cutting the leg of someone and telling him: ‘walk’?” he complained. “Isn’t it like cutting his tongue and telling him: ‘talk’?” The various anecdotes he inserted at the end of manuscript C to illustrate the concepts of preparedness and forgiveness, in the manner of a Christian parable, were a rhetorical device he often employed when speaking to plantation workers.
First page of the C manuscript. This 21-page manuscript was written entirely in Louverture’s hand.
Courtesy of the Archives Nationales, Paris, folder 1, AF/IV/1213, AN
What happened to the various versions of the memoir after they were finished remains unclear. Louverture presumably handed over the neatly written, signed D manuscript to Caffarelli so that he could hand-deliver it to Bonaparte. He probably kept with him the earlier drafts (manuscripts A and B), his personal copy (manuscript C), and personal copies of letters he had written to Bonaparte, some of which were later seized during searches of his cell. The prison commander who visited Louverture’s cell after his death, Amiot, also mentioned finding a memoir “secretly hidden under a hat on Toussaint’s head, sewn into a piece of cloth,” which was in very poor condition. Amiot made a copy for himself and sent the original to the minister of war, who passed on to Bonaparte the “papers that were found on Louverture after his death in the folds of a handkerchief that covered his head.”49 It is possible that Amiot was referring to the C manuscript, which is in the worst shape of the four surviving versions, though it does not appear to have been folded. Alternatively, the memoir found on Louverture’s body was a fifth version that was thrown away because of its poor condition. In the 1850s, an author mentioned that the French general Etienne Desfourneaux also owned a copy, which might be some unknown sixth version or possibly the copy made by Amiot for his own records.50
Mentioned by the French abolitionist Henri Grégoire as early as 1818, then published in fragments in 1845, Louverture’s memoir was first published in its entirety by the Haitian historian Joseph Saint-Rémy in Paris in 1853 under the title Mémoires du Général Toussaint l’Ouverture écrits par lui-même. Born in the French colony of Guadeloupe, Saint-Rémy was a naturalized Haitian citizen and a self-described black nationalist who wished to demonstrate Louverture’s greatness; a secondary goal was to discredit the French emperor Napoléon III by emphasizing that his uncle Napoléon I had treated Louverture dishonorably. Saint-Rémy’s edition, complete with extensive footnotes, has remained the main reference for generations of historians and casual readers ever since. It was reprinted several times in Haiti and in France; an English translation was also published in 1863 and then reprinted many times.51
However frequently used, the Saint-Rémy edition suffers from a major flaw: Though entitled Memoirs of General Toussaint l’Ouverture written by himself, it was based on the D manuscript redacted with the help of the secretary Jeannin, rather than the C manuscript in Louverture’s hand. One may suspect that Saint-Rémy, who lived in an era of rampant racism, hesitated to reproduce a version whose spelling and grammar did not conform to proper usage (to satisfy his “patriotic pride,” he even thought of rewriting the memoir entirely to better match the literary canons of his time).52 Two recent French editions include the C manuscript, but one, following Saint-Rémy’s lead, willfully modernized its spelling and content, while the other was marred by several transcription errors.53
Stylistically, the memoir falls halfway between oral and written literature, as if Louverture’s secretary had been feverishly jotting down notes while Louverture was reminiscing aloud about the Leclerc expedition. “The troops who surrendered to General Leclerc, had they received their orders from me? Had they consulted me?” he asked. “No. Well, those who did bad things had not consulted me either.” This is particularly true of the C manuscript, which, unlike Jeannin’s copies, has almost no punctuation and is not divided into paragraphs, giving a breathless feel to the text. Some sentences are long, even by French standards, in part because Louverture cited letters and related conversations in the third person while interjecting personal comments. A passage regarding Louverture’s enemy Lubin Golart contains no fewer than four distinct layers in the manner of a matryoshka doll: The account of the Leclerc expedition is interrupted by a flashback explaining that Golart had been hiding, which is interrupted by a recapitulation of Golart’s career, which is interrupted by an anecdote about an assassination attempt.
[1] If General Leclerc had had good intentions, would he have welcomed in his army the person named Golart (. . .)
[2] this dangerous rebel,
[3] who would arrange for owners to be assassinated on their plantations; who invaded the town of Môle Saint-Nicolas; who shot on General Clervaux who commanded the town, on General Maurepas and his brigadier chief; who waged war in this region; who incited the cultivators of Jean-Rabel, Moustique, and the heights of Port-de-Paix to rebel; who even had the audacity to shoot at me a bullet that cut off the feather in my cap
[4] (mister Bondère, a doctor who was accompanying me, was killed by my side, my aides-de-camp had to dismount)
[3] as I was marching against him to get him to submit to his chief and to retake the territory and the town that he had invaded; this brigand, at last, after sullying himself with all sorts of crimes,
[2] had hidden in a forest until the arrival of the French squadron.
The result is a discursive narrative that brings to mind modern stream-of-consciousness novels. Though it is better organized, the early part of the memoir, which recounts the arrival of the Leclerc expedition from Louverture’s perspective, remains intensely personal and clouded by the fog of war as Louverture explained how he attempted to react to unexpected events day by day. The segment added at the end in manuscript C, though ostensibly addressed to Bonaparte, could almost be described as the personal ruminations of a man who again and again mulled over the fact that he had been outmaneuvered by Leclerc and mistreated by the French government—daydreaming or even therapy more than official report.
The manuscript written by Louverture during his captivity in Joux is generally described as his “memoirs” after the title of the Saint-Rémy edition. The use of the plural form gives the text an autobiographical character. For Daniel Desormeaux, Louverture was a memorialist in the French literary tradition who wanted to retrace his life one last time before his death in order to leave behind a “political testament.” Deborah Jenson also used the plural “memoirs” in her book on the writings of Haitian revolutionary leaders, though her characterization of the memoir as a political tract designed to influence French policy is far more convincing. In a 2009 edition, Jacques de Cauna noted that the term “mémoires” was inaccurate, but he employed it nonetheless.54
Manuscript C actually bears the title “mémoire” in the singular form, meaning “petition” or “report” rather than “autobiography.” This was no misspelling: Jeannin also used the singular in the other three versions, and Louverture described the document as “my report” when sending it to Bonaparte.55 The title is quite apt for a text that says remarkably little about Louverture’s early life and seeks primarily to retrace his recent career in order to obtain his release. “It is my duty to give to the French government an exact account of my conduct,” he made clear from the opening line, before using the term “account” another 13 times in the memoir. Louverture did not yet know in August 1802 that he would never leave Joux alive. His primary goal was not to retrace his life for future generations but to prove to the French government that he was in the right, as he had done on previous occasions in the 1790s when he had sent lengthy printed reports to the French government to salvage his career.56
Though the memoir is at times disorganized, no doubt because it was written and revised in a few weeks, one can nevertheless identify four sections organized in the manner of a legal brief because Louverture’s stated goal was “to be brought before a tribunal or court martial, where General Leclerc will also be made to appear, and that we be judged after both being heard.”
The first and longest section is a chronological account of the period from the landing of the Leclerc expedition in February 1802 to Louverture’s arrival in Brest five months later. Its main purpose is to denounce his arrest as unjustified and irregular. Its tone is argumentative and unapologetic. Throughout, Louverture blamed Leclerc’s highhandedness for backing him into a corner but was careful to flatter Bonaparte (one suspects that Louverture’s opinion of the first consul was less complimentary, but he knew better than to insult his captor and arbiter). Aside from a few logical inconsistencies, individual points are cogent and convincing; Louverture would have made a great lawyer. “He does not answer directly the questions asked of him,” complained Caffarelli during his interrogation. “He ignores them or goes off-topic.”57
Louverture was also a skilled politician who must have understood that he was not in prison solely because he had violated the clauses of his ceasefire with Leclerc: Bonaparte had sent a large army to remove him from office and evidently objected to his policies as governor. In the second part of his memoir, which was greatly expanded in the D version (possibly after Caffarelli’s pointed criticisms during his visit to Joux gave Louverture a deeper understanding of the reasons for Bonaparte’s anger), he thus spent much time justifying the decisions that had provoked the wrath of Bonaparte, as if the memoir was one-half of a long-distance dialogue with the first consul. This section is quite chaotic as it again retraces the arrival of the Leclerc expedition, mentions his record prior to that date, and defends his 1801 constitution, only to return once again to the French landing, but its purpose is clear: to present his policies as governor as exemplary of his innate loyalty. The section fulfilled the purpose normally served by character witnesses in a trial (Louverture even listed people, like General Etienne Laveaux, who could “vouch for me”).
The third section expressly focuses on Louverture’s record prior to 1802, and particularly his military exploits against the British, so as to claim some extenuating circumstances. In the manner of a lawyer’s closing argument, the last section, entitled “addendum to this memoir,” re-emphasizes his main points and underlines the value of forgiveness before ending with a plaintive plea for the first consul’s mercy that he wrote in his own hand in manuscripts B, C, and D. It is possibly the memoir’s most moving passage. Unfortunately, Louverture’s legal efforts were doomed from the outset since Bonaparte had already decided not to hold a trial.58
Louverture, who was accused of being a traitor to France, repeatedly insisted on his loyalty in the memoir. Prudently omitting his role in the 1791 slave uprising, his service in the army of Bourbon Spain in 1793–94, and his secret diplomacy with Great Britain and the United States from 1798 to 1801, he instead reminded Bonaparte that he had helped France repulse a British invasion of Saint-Domingue in 1794–98. He also did his best to justify his controversial 1801 constitution, which turned Saint-Domingue into a quasi-sovereign dominion. Today, Louverture is widely seen as a precursor to Haiti’s independence, but his memoir is replete with references to “the colony,” “the fatherland,” and “French” colonial troops. To him, the spring 1802 campaign was not a war of self-determination but a civil war in which Leclerc had forced “Frenchmen to fight Frenchmen.” Whether he was sincere in his embrace of colonialism or hid his true intentions will forever remain a matter of debate, but it is worth noting that, judging by the linguistic and religious references in the memoir, Louverture was thoroughly assimilated into French culture.59
The memoir was not solely a defense of Louverture’s record. He occasionally went on the offensive to remind the first consul that he was being ungrateful toward a public servant who had done great things for France at a time when the colony was virtually abandoned to its own devices. His service against the British from 1794 to 1798 clearly helped him in his regard. So did his labor record.
Present-day readers might expect the last major manuscript of the leading figure of the Haitian Revolution to be an impassioned defense of universal emancipation, which France had officially abolished in a 1794 law, but “slavery” (mentioned only twice), “liberty” (mentioned only twice in this meaning), and “abolition” (never mentioned) are largely absent from the text. Louverture was of course too astute to broach this topic at a time when Bonaparte was restoring slavery in parts of the French colonial empire, but the memoir also reminds us of the more conservative aspects of Louverture’s labor record, which are often overlooked today. When he had tried to restart the plantation sector after achieving full control of the colony in 1800–01, Louverture had faced much opposition on the part of former slaves. In response, he had forced field hands to remain on the same plantation for life, much like medieval serfs.60 This was a major step back from his revolutionary ideals, which he described with astonishing frankness in a passage of his memoir that is the best and most concise summary of his social views:
If I made my people work, it was to make them appreciate the price of liberty without license, it was to prevent the corruption of morals; it was for the general happiness of the island, and in the interest of the republic, and I indeed succeeded because you could not see in the entire colony a single idle man and the number of beggars had diminished.
Louverture’s desire to restart the plantation economy—for the greater good of a colony dependent on exports of tropical crops but also to serve his personal interests as a landowning planter—explains his hostility toward the rebels who threatened the stability of the plantation sector. The memoir nominally cites Lubin Golart, “who would arrange for plantation owners to be killed on their estate” and Lamour Derance, “who incited the cultivators to rise up.” The memoir is the perfect illustration of the central divide in early Haitian society, which Michel Rolph-Trouillot has described as “the war within the war,” between an elite attached to the economic superstructures inherited from the colonial era and popular classes eager to break up the plantation system and turn to subsistence agriculture.61
Politically, Louverture’s preference was for an enlightened dictatorship run, to paraphrase Plato, by a philosopher-king. Even in this age of revolutions, many statesmen thought that the common people were too uneducated and shortsighted to know what was good for them and that, in Simón Bolívar’s terms, a “terrible power” (a strong centralized government) was needed to avoid the perils of factionalism and mob rule.62 This was the essence of the argument made by U.S. Federalists like Alexander Hamilton; Bonaparte, who had seized power to restore order after the excesses of the French Revolution, was not far behind.
Louverture was often accused in his time of being a devious leader, and indeed his correspondence is a study in multiple identities. His willingness to constantly adapt his public persona to survive in the Darwinian environment of the Haitian Revolution puts into question whether the principles articulated in the memoir ever reflected Louverture’s real views. His love for Bonaparte, however strongly expressed, was likely counterfeit; his opposition to independence remains a matter of debate; but his stated desire to force former slaves to continue working on plantations was probably genuine since it was consistent with the stern policies he had embraced as governor.63
Historians must check the accuracy of each of Louverture’s claims but also ask themselves why he was lying, because his misrepresentations and omissions help us divine what he was hoping to demonstrate, as if there was a shadow memoir hidden underneath the lines in the manner of a medieval palimpsest. Louverture covered topics that he knew would please Bonaparte (such as his labor policies) and issues that had so angered Bonaparte that he could not eschew them (his 1801 constitution). But he left out others for reasons we can only guess. He did not mention his African ancestry—possibly because he was ashamed of it. He did not mention his first family—possibly so that they would not be arrested.
The themes that were probably most representative of Louverture’s worldview were those he brought up repeatedly in his memoir even though they brought him no immediate benefit: honor, race, family, nostalgia, and God. Words such as “rank,” “duty,” “frank,” and especially “honor” feature prominently in the memoir, mentioned four, eight, ten, and twenty times, respectively. Louverture saw himself not as a former slave, but as a French officer abiding by a specific code of conduct, which explains the anger with which he recounted the humiliating experience of being dragged away like a captive after his arrest. “To reward me for all these services they arrest me arbitrarily in Saint-Domingue like a criminal, they tie me up and bring me on board without any regards for my rank,” he complained. This was probably Louverture’s most potent argument in the memoir, since it reminded Bonaparte that he was not treating his captive in a manner behooving an honorable officer. In a racial context in which individuals of African descent were often assimilated with barbarism, Louverture was keen to point out that he was the civilized one.
Louverture was a man who longed for “respect,” a word he used eight times in the memoir and that was part of the send-off that ended his letters (“honneur/respect” is also a traditional Haitian greeting). In this context, the confiscation of his uniform during his captivity and orders that he no longer be addressed as “general” must have hurt him considerably.64 In a subtle jibe at his captors, Louverture always referred to individuals by their proper title in the memoir; he also made a distinction between people who addressed him as “Toussaint Louverture” and those who called him “Toussaint” as if he were still a slave with no last name of his own.
Louverture was convinced that he knew the underlying reason for his dishonorable arrest and disrespectful treatment: As a black officer, he had not been judged worthy of the privileges normally awarded to a man of his rank. Four direct accusations of racism appear in the memoir. “Surely I owe this misunderstanding to my color,” he asserted, adding later that “because I am black and ignorant, I must not count as one of the soldiers of the Republic. . . . If I were a white man, after serving like I served, all these misfortunes would not have happened to me.” Louverture rarely accused his white interlocutors of racism in his official correspondence.65 Such a salvo was thus highly unusual, especially considering that Louverture was in a delicate situation and needed to assuage the first consul rather than hurl accusations, however accurate (Bonaparte was indeed in the process of reestablishing racial inequality in French colonies). This was evidently an issue that was so foremost in his mind that he could not hold back.
Aside from these bursts of anger, the memoir is tinged with sadness. References to his family abound, not surprisingly since Louverture was a doting husband and father who had high hopes for his progeny. “They make me the unhappiest man in the world by denying me my liberty and by separating me from what is dearest to me in the world,” he lamented, “from a cherished family that made my life happy.” One immediately thinks of William Wordsworth’s description of Louverture as “Toussaint, the most unhappy man of men!” in a sonnet written in August 1802, just as Louverture was laboring on his own memoir.66
Deep in his heart, a person as politically astute as Louverture must have sensed that his petition had no chance of succeeding: Bonaparte, who had sent two-thirds of the French navy to recall Louverture because of fundamental policy differences, was unlikely to be swayed by a memoir whose centerpiece was a vocal denunciation of his brother-in-law. One wonders if for Louverture the writing process was, at least subconsciously, a grieving mechanism. “By dictating this memoir,” wrote Jacques de Cauna, “the prisoner breaks out of his cell and returns to his country.”67 His memoir was filled with dispatches, decision points, and “orders,” a term that appeared 94 times, as if Louverture replaced himself in the thick of the action in order to relive his glory days vicariously. His accounts of the battles he fought against the French army of Leclerc were surprisingly numerous and precise; in some instances, vanity even led him to exaggerate his role in rebel victories such as Crête-à-Pierrot (in which Louverture played a secondary role), even though reminding Bonaparte of his armed resistance clearly undermined his case.
Louverture’s biographers have long disagreed on whether his ostentatious Catholic piety was genuine or whether he was a false Christian and a closet practitioner of Vodou. A 1785 slave register (the only known document to describe him as a slave) actually mentioned that he was very devout and “eager to proselytize,” while the memoir clearly placed him within the Euro-Christian cultural framework typical of the black elite of Saint-Domingue.68 There are two specific references to “God” in the memoir and 10 to “le mal” (which can be translated as “evil”), as well as one passage paraphrasing the Bible (Isaiah 5:20). “Africa” is never mentioned; a reference to the Carthaginian general Hannibal could be over-interpreted as an indictment of European imperialism in Africa, but it seems more representative of 18th-century European officers’ penchant for quoting Greek and Roman classics (Louverture was particularly fond of Spartacus). Louverture, to the end, portrayed himself as a member of the French cultural and political elite. His linguistic choices in the memoir confirm this.
Over the past three decades, our knowledge of the Haitian Revolution has progressed considerably, but one major problem remains: the unequal distribution of sources. White planters, bureaucrats, and generals have left behind a large archival treasure trove, but the black population of Haiti is comparatively absent from the record, except in the official correspondence of the leading black and mixed-race revolutionaries, which is usually mediated by white secretaries. Lower-class revolutionaries are mute; their leaders speak through interpreters. This archival blank spot is problematic for the linguists attempting to retrace the origins of Haiti’s main language, Kreyòl, since virtually all colonial-era documents were written in French. For lack of sources, some linguists have tried to reconstruct colonial-era Kreyòl by comparing present-day Kreyòl with European and African languages, but this roundabout method makes it impossible to determine conclusively which of several competing theories on the origins of Haitian Kreyòl is correct—specifically, whether Kreyòl descends primarily from French or from African languages.69 Only archival documents can settle the matter, which is another reason why Louverture’s memoir is so valuable: It allows us for the first time to recreate the way a Haitian revolutionary spoke.
During the colonial era, three types of languages were commonly spoken in Saint-Domingue: the West and Central African languages of the bossales (slaves born in Africa), metropolitan French (including regional variations), and Haitian Kreyòl, which belonged to a family of Afro-French languages common to all French colonies from Louisiana to Réunion Island in the Indian Ocean.
African languages should normally have predominated since bossales represented a majority of the slave population in pre-revolutionary Saint-Domingue, but this was far from the case. The diversity of African languages limited their appeal as a communication tool. Newly arrived slaves were so uprooted that they failed to preserve or impose their native tongues. Social prejudices against the bossales, who occupied the lowest rank of the colonial hierarchy, also explain the rapid demise of African languages. In practice, African languages were mostly used in mountain communities of plantation runaways (to this day, practitioners of the Afro-Caribbean religion of Vodou still employ tidbits of African languages when they are possessed by spirits).70
Educated elites in Saint-Domingue, whether white or colored, spoke standard metropolitan French, along with a few Caribbean terms that described their unique environment (such as the word “hatte” for “ranch” that so puzzled Jeannin). In many ways, standard French was even more widely used in the colonies than in France itself, where regional dialects still predominated in the provinces, because immigrants to the colony had to adopt a common tongue to understand one another.71
Kreyòl was used primarily by Caribbean-born people of color and veteran white colonists. Contrary to chroniclers visiting from Europe, who often dismissed Kreyòl as mere “jargon” and “negro talk,” Caribbean-born whites, who had grown up speaking Kreyòl with their enslaved nannies, liked to emphasize the “finesse” and the “grace” of this expressive language. Unfortunately, because Kreyòl was an oral language, early written examples are very rare and not always authentic: The most frequently cited pre-revolutionary example of Haitian Kreyòl is a song written by a French colonist according to the norms of French poetry.72
The revolutionary period is richer, but many of the Kreyòl-language documents that have survived were drafted by white authors. These include translations of proclamations by various French officials (including Bonaparte) and a guidebook for would-be colonists. Far more interesting are petitions by field laborers and transcripts of Kreyòl speeches made by Louverture and other rebel leaders, but they are short and few.73 It was only after independence that some Kreyòl-language texts written by Haitians appeared in print. Even then, the vast majority of Haitian literature was written in French well into the 20th century, when a long-delayed nationalist renaissance finally brought about the development of a written Kreyòl literature.74
One of the better-known portraits of Toussaint Louverture, which features his prominent lower jaw. Often derided as a racial caricature, this portrait is actually similar to a contemporary portrait now held by the New-York Historical Society. See Paul Youngquist and Grégory Pierrot, eds., Marcus Rainsford: An Historical Account of the Black Empire of Hayti (1805; reprint, Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2013), xlvii.
Library of Congress LC-USZ62-7862
Which of these languages did Louverture speak? According to Isaac Louverture, his father had learned the language of his Allada ancestors as a child, but Isaac’s claims that Louverture proudly spoke Ewe-Fon as an adult are not credible given his general hostility toward African mores and the absence of corroborating sources. Louverture did not speak English (contrary to his Anglophone colleague Henry Christophe, who later became king of Haiti) and does not seem to have learned Spanish (even though he served in the Spanish army for a year). He occasionally used gibberish Latin to impress his subordinates, but his knowledge of this language was minimal.75
Louverture spoke Kreyòl better than any other language, but he relegated it to the oral sphere, using it specifically to deliver speeches to the black rank and file. When addressing whites, he spoke exclusively French, a language he associated with France, formal settings, the written realm, and authority. “I was very poorly received one day when I tried to speak to him in the local patois [Kreyòl],” noted a French visitor, “because he only used it to harangue the cultivators or his soldiers.” Contemporaries were unfortunately vague when describing his French; Bonaparte’s envoy Caffarelli, who spent hours interrogating Louverture in Joux, simply explained that “his way of narrating is hard to follow because he has a hard time expressing himself.”76
However tragic on a personal level, Louverture’s exile was a linguist’s dream because his captivity and limited access to a secretary forced him to personally pen multiple letters, drafts, and particularly the lengthy C manuscript. The most obvious characteristic of the memoir to a present-day French reader is that Louverture misspelled virtually every word of it. Some of these mistakes were simply typos (“gouvernememet” for “gouvernement”) or reflected his lack of formal schooling when encountering difficult words (“piétater” for “pied-à-terre”), but a careful analysis of the text shows that there is more to Louverture’s idiosyncratic spelling than partial literacy. Many apparent mistakes were in fact phonetic approximations that allow us to recreate, two centuries after the fact, Louverture’s accent and manner of speaking, as if someone had tape-recorded his conversations with Jeannin. Such is the key to deciphering Louverture’s memoir.77
Some of Louverture’s non-standard pronunciations possibly had a physical cause since he suffered from prognathism (a prominent lower jaw) and had lost many teeth in a battle. But they also reflected old French norms, as indicated by the archaic spellings that he still employed even though they had fallen out of favor in metropolitan France (such as “isle” for “île” and “ii” for “y”). Louverture spoke in an old-fashioned way, either because he was elderly, or because he wanted to imitate the accent of the aristocrats (who occasionally refused to adopt new pronunciations), or, more likely, because old pronunciations had survived in the colonies long after they had become outmoded in metropolitan France. These remnants of 17th- and 18th-century French fashioned Haitian Kreyòl, as well as the French spoken in other colonies such as Louisiana Cajun and Québécois French.78 For example:
• Louverture often wrote “respecte” instead of “respect,” which indicates that he pronounced the final /kt/, as was common in the 18th century, instead of /ɛ/, as is the norm in modern French.
• Louverture elided many /ʁ/ (“conte” for “contre”). Such was often the case in everyday 18th-century French (“mécredi” for “mercredi”) and in present-day Kreyòl, where /ʁ/ is either eliminated (“bonjou” for “bonjour”) or becomes /w/ (“gwo” for “gros”).
• Louverture simplified some groups of consonants that he found hard to pronounce, transforming /ks/ into /s/ for example (“sancetions” for “sanctions”) or eliminating /s/ altogether (“résitance” for “résistance”). Such simplifications were common in 18th-century French and still are in present-day Kreyòl (“dezas” for “désastre”).
• Like Jeannin, Louverture systematically indicated the imperfect tense with “oi” instead of “ai” (“je marchois” instead of “je marchais”) and presumably pronounced this final syllable as /we/ instead of /e/, even though this pronunciation had fallen out of favor in metropolitan France during the Revolution. Similarly, in colonial-era Kreyòl, as well as in present-day Kreyòl and Québecois, the word “moi” is not pronounced /mwa/ but /mwe/ or /mwɛ̃/.
• Louverture added /u/ sounds or replaced /o/ with /u/ (“au goumente” for “augmenter”). This must have been a colonial remnant of an archaic French pronunciation because the sound /u/ had often been used in lieu of /o/, /y/, and /œ/ in pre-revolutionary France, a practice that is still evident in present-day Kreyòl (“nouaj” for “nuage”).
• Louverture often pronounced /œ/ as /e/ in his memoir (“jai cé” for “je sais”), which is also true of his letters (“couragé” for “courageux”) and his wife’s (“vous mé démandé” for “vous me demandez”).79 This shift, common in present-day Kreyòl, likely reflects the fact that distinctions between the sounds /œ/, /e/, and /ɛ/ had only recently emerged in metropolitan French.
• Other vowels and semi-vowels used in the memoir are also typical of present-day Kreyòl. Louverture replaced /u/, /œ/, and /yi/ with /i/ (“tiys jour” for “toujours,” “regitter” for “rejeter,” “li” for “lui”), which is still the case in present-day Kreyòl (“piti” for “petit”), especially in the countryside.
Louverture’s manner of speaking thus seems to have been inspired by antiquated French more than Ewe-Fon. The memoir also supports the theory that connects Kreyòl to regional variations of French, particularly the accents and dialects of western regions such as Normandy and Aquitaine that played a leading role in the settlement of the colony. Louverture seemed particularly influenced by the accent of the Aquitaine region, which provided 40 percent of Saint-Domingue’s white colonists, including his wife’s former master, the Comte de Noé, and his plantation overseer, François Bayon de Libertat.80 Norman variations are also noticeable, possibly due to the fact that some members of Louverture’s entourage, such as his ambassador Joseph Bunel de Blancamp, were from Normandy. For example:
• Louverture pronounced the final letters “t,” “s,” and “r,” which are normally silent in Parisian French but are often pronounced in southwestern France (“Brunette” for “Brunet,” “honnet gence” for “honnêtes gens,” “premiere consul” for “premier consul”). To this day, in Kreyòl, the final /s/ in “mwens” is pronounced (from the French “moins”), as is the final /t/ in “abit” (from the French “habit”).
• In southwestern France, the letter “o” is often pronounced as an open /ɔ/ rather than a closed /o/. This is reflected in present-day Kreyòl (“wòz” for “rose”). Louverture probably spoke this way, but this pronunciation is hard to detect in the memoir since French spelling does not distinguish between /o/ and /ɔ/.
• Louverture almost always wrote “geurre” instead of “guerre,” which suggests that he pronounced the letter “g” as /ʒ/ or /dʒ/ rather than a hard /g/, which would correspond to modern-day Kreyòl (“ladjè” or “lagè” for “la guerre”). Kreyòl also occasionally pronounces /k/ and /s/ as /ʃ/ or /tʃ/ (“tchè” or “kè” for “coeur,” “chonjé” or “sonjé” for “songer”), which is specific to the accent of the Auvergne region in France, but such a shift is not detectable in the memoir, possibly because Louverture, who had lost many teeth, struggled to form sounds in the upper-front part of his mouth.
• Louverture often elided certain vowels, particularly “i” (“pusque” for “puisque”) and “e” (“soulevment” for “soulèvement”), which is commonly done in Norman and popular French and is also typical of Kreyòl (“tèlman” for “tellement”).
• Louverture consistently added nasal sounds like /ɔ̃/, /ɑ̃/, /ɛ̃/, and /jɛ̃/ (“ingnoré” for “ignorer”). Nasalizing words was characteristic of 18th-century Norman speakers and remains common in present-day Kreyòl, particularly in its rural variety (“agronnom” for “agronome”). Even then, Louverture must have used more nasal sounds than was customary because he felt the need to explain that “he spoke through his nose because of a Vodou curse.”81
Present-day Kreyòl vocabulary incorporates some Spanish and English loan words, which is not surprising given the proximity of Jamaica, the Dominican Republic, Cuba, and the United States. Louverture, who was closely involved with these countries during his lifetime, was also sometimes, though infrequently, influenced by Spanish and English pronunciation and vocabulary. For example:
• Louverture consistently misspelled the name of his Grenada-born subordinate Henry Christophe (“Christopher,” “Christophete”), most likely because he tried to pronounce it with an English accent.
• Louverture employed the French word “principe,” which normally means “principle” in French, to mean “beginning,” possibly because he was influenced by the meaning of “principio” in Spanish.
• As noted above, he used /u/ instead of /y/ and /e/ instead of /œ/, which would be characteristic of a Spanish speaker.
African influences, which some scholars see as central to the formation of Kreyòl, seem absent from the memoir. Louverture employed a vocabulary that was essentially French with a few foreign loan words (such as “hatte,” derived from the Spanish “hato,” or “herd”). He did simplify French grammar and conjugation, but it is not clear whether he was consciously replicating Ewe-Fon grammatical forms, he was simply baffled by the complex rules of French grammar, or, more convincingly, he was using the speech patterns of the colonial population’s lower classes. Some white masters willfully talked down to slaves in simplified French (the way one would address a child); grammatical simplifications were also common in the popular French spoken by lower-class whites. “It is the former variety of French [plebeian speech] rather than the latter [elite French] that formed the speech input the slaves transformed into Creole,” notes Albert Valdman.82 Examples of this process abound in the memoir:
• Louverture frequently split words (“en voier” for “envoyer”). This suggests that he treated the first syllable as a distinct word that could be elided altogether, as is the norm in Kreyòl (“voye” for “envoyer”). Inversely, he treated as one word many article-noun combinations (“dumal” for “du mal”) and liaison-word combinations (“les zotre”). Both processes are understandable mistakes for a person transcribing oral French phonetically and are very common in present-day Kreyòl (“legliz” for “l’église,” “zwazo” for “oiseaux”).
• Louverture often confused the masculine and feminine forms of words (“un nasamblé” for “une assemblée”). Similarly, present-day Kreyòl has largely abandoned the distinction between masculine and feminine.
• In the passages of his memoir that deviate the most from standard French, Louverture simplified the negative form (“il m’auroit pas traité” for “il ne m’aurait pas traité”), dropped articles (“balle a raflé” for “la balle a raflé”), dropped pronouns (“nai pas resu” for “je n’ai pas reçu”), and dropped prepositions (“si grand nombre” for “en si grand nombre”), all of which are characteristic of present-day Kreyòl, as well as popular French.
• In Kreyòl-influenced passages, Louverture also stopped conjugating verbs and used the infinitive form instead (“mes plai et tre profond” for “mes plaies sont très profondes”). The use of the infinitive in Kreyòl was already well established in the colonial era and has remained the norm in present-day Kreyòl.
The language employed by Louverture in some passages of his memoir, though displaying many characteristics of Kreyòl, is not Kreyòl. It should more properly be described as “creolized French,” that is, the language of a person trying to speak French but influenced by his native Kreyòl (Jenson uses the expression “maroon French,” Desormeaux “mixed-race language,” and Saint-Rémy “negro talk”).83 It is quite different from a speech that Louverture delivered to a black audience in southern Saint-Domingue and for which he employed standard Kreyòl to establish his working-class bona fides.84
Toussaint and Suzanne Louverture reuniting with their sons Placide and Isaac in February 1802. At left is their French teacher, Jean-Baptiste Coisnon.
Library of Congress LC-USZ62-7859
Z’autres pas té connois mai ben, parceque moi te au Cap. N’a pas Nègres au Cap qui batt premier pour libre. . . . C’est Rigaud io, c’est Milatre pîtôt qui vlé faire z’autres tourner esclaves. C’est cila-io qui té gagné esclaves qui faché voir io libres. N’a pas moi qui té esclave moi-même, tout comme z’autres.
(You don’t know me because I was in Cap-Français. There is no black man in Cap who fought earlier than me for liberty. . . . Rigaud and the Mulattoes are the ones who want to make slaves of you. It is those who had slaves who are unhappy to see you free, not me, who was a slave just like you.)
That Louverture tried his best to employ standard French when writing a petition to the first consul of France is understandable (linguists describe this habit of shifting from a language to another based on the subject matter and the addressee as “code-switching”). But creolized French was his default written language even when the recipient was not French and the subject matter was not official: He employed it in a letter to his subordinate Jean-Jacques Dessalines, who spoke little French, and in a private letter to his wife Suzanne, who also wrote to her husband in creolized French rather than Kreyòl. Louverture also wrote to his children in French (through a secretary), and they replied in standard French, which they spoke and wrote fluently after studying for years in Paris.85 It is even possible, though not certain, that Louverture also spoke French to his family members, at least when others were present, because the French teacher who witnessed the moment when Louverture reunited with his children in February 1802 was able to understand their conversation (in present-day Haiti, Kreyòl is normally preferred within the informal environment of a family gathering).86
Louverture’s language of choice was thus not the Ewe-Fon of his ancestors (which he had learned as a child but did not practice because African languages were associated with the despised African-born bossales), nor Kreyòl (which he spoke fluently but used mainly when addressing lower-class laborers), nor elite metropolitan French (which he understood but could not exactly replicate), but the laborious, creolized French of an up-and-coming former slave trying to hide his humble roots. The memoir thus reveals the existence of an intermediate language between French and Kreyòl, a kind of “aspiring French” that was used by lower-class whites and upwardly mobile blacks.
Louverture’s preference for French may come as a surprise since embracing Kreyòl is a central part of Haitian nationalism these days, but it is consistent with Louverture’s social background and aspirations. Until recently, elite Haitians often favored French because they associated it with intellectual and economic superiority, and ambitious nouveaux riches who lacked education tried to hide their shortcomings in French by “hyper-correcting” (adding sounds or suffixes that they mistakenly viewed as characteristic of French).87 Similarly, Louverture added extraneous /ʁ/ sounds (“jambre” for “jambe”) and needlessly complicated groups of consonants (“sageste” for “sagesse”) and vowels (“ésiuié” for “essuyé”) to artificially “Frenchify” his memoir.
Louverture’s linguistic choices speak to the tortured relationship that he and other black revolutionaries had with the French métropole. Though it is the only truly Haitian language, Kreyòl was long denigrated as the sub-French of the slaves, and official documents like Haiti’s declaration of independence were written in formal French even though (or because?) it could not be understood by the lower classes. Similarly, urban Kreyòl, though less authentic because it is heavily influenced by French, is often seen as more elegant, or “silky” (“kreyòl swa”), while its rural counterpart, however true to Haiti’s roots, is also dubbed “rèk” and “su” (rough, acidic) because it is associated with the lower classes.88 These contradictions, at the heart of the Haitian soul, are evident in Louverture’s memoir, in which he defiantly trumpeted his antiracist message while apologizing for his lack of education in the language of his masters.
Louverture hoped that his memoir would convince Bonaparte to free him. He was sadly misguided. Bonaparte had personally instructed Leclerc to deport all leading black officers and was in no way displeased by Louverture’s exile; he had even specified that Louverture should be shot if caught with arms in hand.89 The geopolitical context did not help Louverture, since the summer of 1802 was marked in Saint-Domingue by a major labor uprising and a yellow fever epidemic that ravaged the ranks of the French expeditionary army. Deluged with dispiriting accounts of the human and financial cost of subduing the revolt started by Louverture, French officials viewed him as a criminal who should consider himself lucky to even be alive. “Make him understand the enormity of his crime,” Bonaparte had instructed his envoy Caffarelli.90
The memoir had consequently little impact in Paris. The minister of the navy concluded that “no important confession results from this report [by Caffarelli] and the memoir made by Toussaint to justify himself.”91 French officials underlined only the passages relating to Louverture’s alleged treasure and dedicated much energy pursuing leads on its possible location. When the search for the treasure reached a dead end, Bonaparte lost interest and stopped mentioning his fallen rival in his correspondence. For all intents and purposes, Louverture had now ceased to exist in his eyes.
After vainly waiting three weeks for a response, Louverture wrote again to Bonaparte on 9 October 1802 to beg for clemency in terms that recycled several themes of the memoir. “I am not educated, I am ignorant, but my father [godfather] who is presently blind has shown me the path of virtue. I beg you in the name of God and humanity to look positively upon my petition because I have been punished with a crown of thorns and the most marked ingratitude.” “Please refresh the first consul’s memory,” he also added for Caffarelli’s benefit. No reply came. During his years as governor, Louverture had often complained that Bonaparte refused to write to him directly; Bonaparte’s silence in the fall of 1802 must have been a painful reminder of past snubs. (Unbeknownst to Louverture, his godfather was drowned in Saint-Domingue around the same time).92
In the absence of a response from the first consul, Louverture continued the lonely and monotonous life of a state prisoner. He may have planned to write another memoir because he asked for one of his sons to be sent to him, “either to serve as a secretary, or to serve him and console him,” but his request was denied.93 Aside from the prison director Baille and the secretary Jeannin, his only visitors were a doctor and a surgeon from Pontarlier who regularly made the trip to Joux to pull out some of his remaining teeth. But in October, a mysterious priest managed to sneak into his cell by passing as a doctor, and Louverture lost his visitation privileges. So concerned were local authorities about a possible escape that they kept a vagabond in jail for four months simply because they found his presence in the region suspicious.94
“My friends, a man must never forget the humiliations he has suffered,” Louverture had once told his officers.95 In this context, the multiple indignities he suffered during his captivity must have left him boiling with anger. To lessen the risk of bribery and escape, Paris demanded that Louverture’s valuables be confiscated. He had to give away all the cash he had on him or undergo a body search. On orders from the minister of the navy, his watch was confiscated and replaced by “one of these cheap wooden clocks, of the cheapest kind, which are enough to indicate the passage of time.”96 Louverture, who had longed all his life to be treated with respect by his white contemporaries, described the episode as the worst “humiliation” of his life. He initially asked Baille for a receipt so that he could get back his belongings “when he would get out of jail.” Then, after thinking the matter over, he realized that this day would never come. “The day I am executed, send all my belongings to my wife and children,” he wrote sullenly.97
In a last-ditch attempt, Louverture sent yet another letter to Bonaparte on 26 October 1802 to promise that the “supreme being” (a euphemism for “God” employed by deists during the French Revolution) would reward him if he showed forgiveness.98 The first consul’s response was uncompromising: He asked that Louverture’s writing materials be taken away at once. Again threatened with a body search, Louverture had to give away nine notebooks, along with three letters he had hidden in his pants (Louverture possibly managed to hide the C manuscript under the handkerchief wrapped around his head). “He seemed very bothered by the confiscation of his papers,” noted Baille.99 Louverture had been effectively silenced. The 26 October letter is the last document he ever wrote.
For two weeks after his cell was searched, Louverture was very agitated and angry. He would bang his feet on the ground and, Baille reported, say “the most indecent things” about his foe, General Leclerc (who, he would have been happy to learn, was actually dying of yellow fever in Cap-Français at that very moment).100 Then, losing the last remnants of his combativeness, he began to complain of unceasing fevers and pains and announced that he no longer wished to get out of bed because it was too cold.101 The life of an impotent captive must have felt worse than death itself for a man who had once been absolute master of Saint-Domingue. Commanding was for him “an ecstasy, a need,” his secretary had once noted. “For such a man, death must seem preferable to becoming a nobody.”102 Death was indeed the only thing to which he could now look forward.
Loneliness and melancholy overwhelmed the homesick prisoner. Louverture “was sad and somber, he spent most of his days looking through the small window, his head resting on his hand, leaning against the iron of the grate, plunged in a dark melancholy,” a guard remembered. “The poor man thought of his country, his children! He was so desolate.”103 Some books claim that Louverture was jailed next to his fellow Dominguans André Rigaud and Martial Besse, but they only reached the prison of Joux after his death. Two other Caribbean exiles, Jean and Zamor Kina, did arrive in January 1803, but they never had a chance to meet Louverture, who did not even know that they were jailed one floor above him.104 He was truly alone.
Nivôse, pluviôse, ventôse, the months of snow, rain, and wind in the French revolutionary calendar, came and went. For Louverture, accustomed to the endless summers of the tropics, the terrible winter of the Jura Mountains, the coldest region in France, was an endless frozen hell. He spent his days in front of a roaring fire in a vain attempt to warm up his dying body, but the light cotton clothes he had been issued to replace his uniform were not enough to protect him from the bite of the icy air. The stinginess of French officials did not help: His wood allowance was cut down in the midst of January to save a few francs.105
To make matters worse, the prison director Baille, whose personal kindness had somewhat mitigated the stern and petty measures inflicted by Paris, left his position on 1 December 1802. According to his temporary replacement, Jean Gazagnaire, “Toussaint sometimes ventures questions about his future destiny. I only gave negative answers.” Gazagnaire was replaced in January 1803 by a young and aggressive officer named Amiot. The latter routinely ordered surprise searches of Louverture’s cell in the middle of the night while the mortified captive stood by in frigid silence next to his torn-up bed.106
Amiot need not have worried about a possible escape. Louverture was an elderly and sickly man whose indomitable will had finally been broken by the vexatious measures of his captors. Time after time, he complained of fevers, headaches, stomachaches, and a dry cough that would not go away, but he no longer asked for doctors.107 He might have derived some comfort from the knowledge that the rebels of Saint-Domingue were organizing and uniting their army. England had just begun a new war with France, and in November 1803, after a last climactic battle fought outside Cap-Français, at the doorstep of the plantation on which Louverture was born, a rebel army led by his former second Jean-Jacques Dessalines would defeat the remnants of the Leclerc expedition and declare Haiti’s independence.
But Louverture never lived to see his native island gain its full sovereignty. On 7 April 1803, as prison director Amiot entered Louverture’s cell to deliver his daily food allowance, he found him sitting by the remnants of a dead fire, his head leaning against the mantle. Doctors from Pontarlier pronounced Louverture dead later that day. The autopsy attributed his death to pneumonia and apoplexy. Some rumors allege that he had been poisoned on Bonaparte’s orders or that Amiot had deliberately left him without food for four days, but there is no evidence to back such conspiracy theories. Put simply, Louverture died because his body was old and cold. He also died because his heart was broken.108
Auguste Nemours, a Haitian historian who wrote the most detailed account of Louverture’s final months, described his end in Christian terms, overtly comparing his humiliation and agony to the Stations of the Cross.109 The picture that emerges from the archives is more prosaic. The French Pontius Pilates were primarily concerned with security. Miserliness was also routine as authorities spent an inordinate amount of time calculating the expense of housing Louverture and other prisoners to the last franc and trying to locate Louverture’s alleged treasure. There was no attempt to engage Louverture in a great ideological debate on the merits of emancipation and colonization, merely some accountants’ squabbles over centimes and receipts. Humiliation was another theme, especially on the part of the minister of the navy, an insignificant and racist bureaucrat who scolded the director of the prison, Baille, for allowing Louverture to defend his record. “He only deserves the most profound scorn for his ridiculous pride.”110
A posthumous rendering of Louverture’s final hours. Louverture actually died alone because his servant Mars Plaisir had left the Fort de Joux in September 1802.
Library of Congress LC-USZ62-7863
Silencing, indifference, and neglect marked the last months of Louverture’s captivity. By denying him access to interlocutors, ignoring his letters and memoirs, and refusing to let him write, French authorities hoped to prevent him from expressing himself. This makes Louverture’s memoir all the more important since it was his final attempt to tell his story.
Louverture’s memoir is invaluable because it is a rare example of a former slave—arguably the most historically relevant former slave in world history—speaking out in his own voice. This text, first published 160 years ago, is widely known but poorly understood, particularly since few French speakers have read the more authentic C version, and English speakers only have access to an 1863 translation that is grossly inadequate. It is often portrayed as an autobiography when it was in fact a petition addressed to Bonaparte. It is a historical account, but one that must be approached with caution because of Louverture’s desire to defend his record in a difficult personal context. It is a political tract with a surprising message: To the end, Louverture presented himself as a loyal servant of the French republic, a planter, and a military man abiding by the officers’ code of honor, not as a slave rebel. He did bring race into the equation, but only to complain that racial discrimination had prevented him from being fully accepted into the French ruling sphere, not to outline a program of racial pride.
A literary critic’s work consists in digging through various layers just as a geologist uncovers ancient strata of rocks. The memoir is particularly challenging in that regard because of its composite nature. On the surface, it is an administrative report filed with a superior. It is also, one layer below, a thinly veiled manifesto against the colonial policies of Bonaparte (though it is aimed at his brother-in-law to avoid offending the first consul) and an impassioned defense of Louverture’s policies as governor. A third layer is composed of the narrative’s gaps: the many elements in Louverture’s life that he purposely omitted, which can be psychologically analyzed to try to deduce Louverture’s innermost fears and hopes.
Another conclusion to be drawn from the memoir is linguistic. By establishing a “missing link” between present-day Kreyòl and 17th- and 18th-century regional and popular French, the memoir tends to undermine linguistic theories describing Kreyòl as a descendant of African languages. The memoir also points to the existence of a creolized French spoken by aspiring black elites during the late colonial era and confirms Albert Valdman’s hypothesis that there was a “continuum ranging from that [Kreyòl] most distant from French. . . to that which shares many features with it.”111
Haitian elites are often described as diglossic rather than simply bilingual because they employ French for prestige roles (such as education, literature, and politics) while relegating Kreyòl to informal speech.112 By emphasizing that Louverture favored French in official settings while using Kreyòl to speak to social inferiors, the memoir allows us to trace back the origins of this diglossia to the revolutionary era. Louverture’s preference for French will no doubt enrich the ongoing debates between those who view him as a black revolutionary fighting French imperialism and those who think, as his linguistic profile suggests, that he modeled his behavior on the planters and officers of the Ancien Régime and the French Revolution.
One of the most important developments in recent historiography has been the rise of Atlantic history: the study of the manifold interactions between Europe, Africa, and the Americas around 1500–1800. By bringing together national histories that were often analyzed in seclusion, Atlantic history has allowed us to underline the links between events such as the American, French, and Haitian revolutions. However, because Atlantic history was constructed by historians, cross-disciplinary (as opposed to transnational) studies have been the exception. Louverture’s memoir forces historians to broaden their horizons and incorporate linguistics and literary criticism. Other approaches are possible; a political scientist, for example, might try to connect Louverture’s views on government, race, and colonialism to Enlightenment ideals or African concepts of kinship and kingship.
The memoir is important for one final, more personal reason: It humanizes Louverture. Like many public figures, he maintained a public façade that was at once stern, austere, and inscrutable. He used the formal “vous” when writing to some family members, and his closest associates confessed to being unable to know his innermost thoughts. He remains, to a large extent, a cipher, a larger-than-life historical figure who can be hard to understand and even harder to love. Even making a physical connection is difficult. Many portraits of him exist, but his appearance varies dramatically from one portrait to the other because most were made by artists who had never met him. His body has proved to be equally elusive: It was buried in Joux after his death, but subsequent renovations of the fort destroyed his tomb, and the body subsequently vanished (a half skull of dubious origin was on display in his cell in the 1850s for the benefit of tourists). The plantation where he was born, now absorbed by the suburbs of Cap-Haïtien (formerly Cap-Français), has also vanished.113
Manuscript C is the only tangible way to make a connection with Louverture. Its tone is far more personal than his official correspondence, and it brings to the fore themes, like his anger at racial discrimination and his love for his family, that he rarely evoked in public. When holding the old, stained sheets of manuscript C, which he hid on his body during searches of his cell, one can truly establish a rapport with the heartbroken leader languishing in Joux.
There is only one document comparable to Louverture’s memoir in its tone, appearance, and emotional hold. It consists of a few sentences jotted down by Napoléon Bonaparte in his spidery handwriting while he too endured the agony of exile and imprisonment on the damp island of Saint Helena. Like Louverture, Bonaparte wrote these lines in the language of his victorious foe because he was trying to learn English in his waning years (Bonaparte had grown up speaking Corsican, but he normally expressed himself in standard French, which, like Louverture, he spoke with an accent). These last sentences, written in hesitant and grammatically incorrect English, are those of a lonely husband and father longing for his wife and son:114
Lorsque je débarquerai en France je serai très content—When j shall land in France j shall be very content. . . my wife shall come near to me, my son shall be great and strong if he will be able to trink a bottle of wine at dinner j shall [toast] with him. . . . When you shall come, you shall see that j have ever loved you.
Bonaparte’s body, now interred in a grandiose tomb at the Invalides chapel in Paris, has not vanished like Louverture’s (his childhood home in Ajaccio, Corsica, also survived). But Louverture would surely have felt vindicated to learn that his captor, after being separated from his wife and offspring, experienced as much personal turmoil as Louverture did in his dying months.
1. On the cell, see Baille to Denis Decrès (28 Sept. 1802), CC9B/18, Archives Nationales d’Outremer, Aix-en-Provence (ANOM); J. F. Dubois to Henri Grégoire (25 May 1823), NAF 6864, Bibliothèque Nationale, Paris (BNF).
2. Frederick Douglass, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, An American Slave, Written by Himself (Boston: Anti-Slavery Office, 1845).
3. On Louverture’s early life, see Jean-Louis Donnadieu and Philippe Girard, “Toussaint Before Louverture: New Archival Findings on the Early Life of Toussaint Louverture,” William and Mary Quarterly 70:1 (Jan. 2013), 41–78.
4. On the death of Louverture’s parents, see François Bayon de Libertat to Pantaléon II de Breda (30 Apr. 1774), Dossier 12, 18AP/3, Archives Nationales, Paris (AN). On the godfather, see Isaac Louverture to M. de Saint-Anthoine (8 March 1842), NAF 6864, BNF; Thomas-Prosper Gragnon-Lacoste, Toussaint Louverture (Paris: Durand, 1877), 11, 15, 298.
5. On Dessalines, see Philippe Girard, “Jean-Jacques Dessalines and the Atlantic System: A Reappraisal,” William and Mary Quarterly 69:3 (July 2012), 555.
6. Vincent Caretta, Equiano the African: Biography of a Self-Made Man (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2005).
7. “Il a perdu onze enfants” from “Toussaint Louverture au Fort de Joux” (c. 17 Sept. 1802), Nouvelle Revue Rétrospective no. 94 (10 Apr. 1902), 13. On Louverture’s first family, see Jean-Louis Donnadieu, “La famille ‘oubliée’ de Toussaint Louverture,” Bulletin de la Société Archéologique du Gers 401 (Fall 2011), 357–365.
8. On learning how to read as a slave, see Thomas Madiou, Histoire d’Haïti, vol. 2 (Port-au-Prince: Courtois, 1847), 125; Gragnon-Lacoste, Toussaint Louverture, 10. For writing samples by relatives, see Jean-Baptiste to Moïse (10 Aug. 1800), Box 6:11, Borie Family Papers, (Phi)1602, Historical Society of Pennsylvania (HSP); Suzanne Louverture to Louverture (13 July 1794), 61J18, Archives Départementales de la Gironde, Bordeaux (ADGir). On a soldier as teacher, see Charles Malenfant, “Opinion sur les colonies” (c. 1801), Box 2/103, Rochambeau Papers, University of Florida, Gainesville.
9. On a French officer as the teacher, see Isaac Louverture, “Notes historiques sur Toussaint Louverture, manuscrit d’Isaac Louverture, notes intéressantes sur Banica etc.” (c. 1819), p. 55, NAF 12409, BNF. For the first signature, see Jean-François Papillon, Georges Biassou et al. to [French commissioners] (12 Dec. 1791), *D/XXV/1, AN.
10. Toussaint Louverture, Réfutation de quelques assertions d’un discours prononcé au corps législatif le 10 prairial, an cinq, par Viénot Vaublanc (Cap-Français, c. 1797).
11. See “deu puis la revolution 10 aout 90[92?] je sui de même concecutivement au service de ma patris,” in Louverture to Napoléon Bonaparte (9 Oct. 1802), Dossier 1, AF/IV/1213, AN.
12. On Louverture’s royalist leanings, see Louverture, “Reponse Sentimentale pour Servir au Sujet de la Lettre sur la revolution de St. Domingue jeudy 8 aoust 1793” (27 Aug. 1793), Dossier 1511, aa55/a, AN.
13. On Louverture’s whereabouts in 1791, see David Geggus, “Toussaint Louverture avant et après l’insurrection de 1791,” in Franklin Midy, ed., Mémoire de révolution d’esclaves à Saint-Domingue (Montréal: CIDIHCA, 2006), 113–129. For Louverture’s claim that he began the slave revolt, see Louverture, “Proclamation” (25 Apr. 1796), fr. 12104, BNF.
14. For a tentative list of documents signed by Louverture, see Joseph A. Boromé, “Toussaint Louverture: A Finding List of his Letters and Documents in Archives and Collections,” Box 1, Joseph Borome papers, Sc MG 714, Schomburg Center, New York Public Library (SC-NYPL). For pre-1802 documents in Louverture’s handwriting, see Louverture to Gabriel d’Hédouville (c. 1798), AF/III, 210, AN; Louverture to Jean-Jacques Dessalines (Oct. 1798), Autograph File T., Houghton Library, Harvard University (HL-HU); Louverture to Renne de Saba (17 Apr. 1799), Papers of Toussaint Louverture, Manuscript Department, Library of Congress, Washington, DC; Louverture to Etienne Dupuche (10 May 1800 and 24 Sept. 1801), Folder 6, Box 6, Borie Family Papers, (Phi)1602, HSP; Louverture to Augustin d’Hébécourt (6 March 1801), Ms. f Hait.69–29, Boston Public Library (BPL); Louverture to Henry Christophe (28 Apr. 1802) 61J18, ADGir. The British archives also have a transcript of a lost handwritten letter in “Council minutes” (22 Nov. 1799), CO 137/107, British National Archives, Kew (BNA).
15. On Moïse, see Philippe Roume to Louverture (21 Oct. 1799), CC/9A/26, ANOM. “Sa pénétration littéraire” from Michel-Etienne Descourtilz, Voyage d’un naturaliste et ses observations, vol. 3 (Paris: Dufart, 1809), 245. “Pour rien au monde il n’eût signé la lettre” from Pamphile de Lacroix, Mémoires pour servir à l’histoire de la révolution de Saint-Domingue, vol. 2 (Paris: Pillet, 1819), 206.
16. “L’instruction qu’il lui a plu également” from Louverture to Laurent Truguet (1 Feb. 1797), Dossier 1, EE1734, ANOM. “Vous autres nègres” from Lacroix, Mémoires, vol. 1, 400.
17. On the partial economic recovery, see Pierre Pluchon, Toussaint Louverture (Paris: Fayard, 1989), 400–422. For Bonaparte’s regrets, see Barry O’Meara, Napoléon en exil: relation contenant les opinions et les réflexions de Napoléon sur les événements les plus importants de sa vie (Paris: Garnier, 1897), 276; Emmanuel de las Cases, Le Mémorial de Sainte-Hélène, vol. 1 (Paris: Gallimard, 1956), 769.
18. On Louverture’s diplomacy, see Philippe Girard, “Black Talleyrand: Toussaint Louverture’s Secret Diplomacy with England and the United States,” William and Mary Quarterly 66:1 (Jan. 2009), 87–124.
19. “Oui, c’est vrai, j’ai fait une faute” from “Toussaint Louverture au Fort de Joux,” 10.
20. On Bonaparte’s intentions, see Philippe Girard, “Napoléon Bonaparte and the Emancipation Issue in Saint-Domingue, 1799–1803,” French Historical Studies 32:4 (Fall 2009), 587–618.
21. On French atrocities, see R. Mends to John Duckworth (1 Apr. 1802), ADM 1/252, BNA; Lacroix, Mémoires, vol. 2, 150. For Louverture’s orders to kill white civilians, see Louverture to Augustin Clerveaux (c. 30 Jan. 1802), in Guillaume Mauviel, “Mémoire sur Saint-Domingue” (26 June 1805), p. 40, pièce 101, AF/IV/1212, AN; Louverture to Jean-Baptiste Domage (9 Feb. 1802), CC9B/19, ANOM.
22. On Louverture’s military problems, see Philippe Girard, The Slaves Who Defeated Napoléon: Toussaint Louverture and the Haitian War of Independence (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2011), 134.
23. On money seized from the Louvertures, see Jean-Baptiste Brunet to Donatien de Rochambeau (15 June 1802), lot 224, Vente Rochambeau, Philippe Rouillac auction house (VR-PR). On Dessalines and the arrest, see Philippe Girard, “Jean-Jacques Dessalines et l’arrestation de Toussaint Louverture,” Journal of Haitian Studies 17:1 (Spring 2011), 123–138.
24. On deportations, see Claude Bonaparte Auguste and Marcel Bonaparte Auguste, Les déportés de Saint-Domingue: Contribution à l’histoire de l’expédition française de Saint-Domingue, 1802–1803 (Sherbrooke, Québec: Naaman, 1979). On Dumas, see Alexandre Dumas, Mes mémoires, vol. 1 (Paris: Michel Lévy, 1865), 193–196, 230–234.
25. “Si mon épouse n’avait pas été contrainte” from Louverture to Victoire Leclerc (18 July 1802), Folder 3C, Kurt Fisher Collection, Howard University. “Une mère de famille, à 53 ans,” from Louverture to Bonaparte (20 July 1802), Dossier 1, AF/IV/1213, AN.
26. On the fate of Louverture’s relatives, see Alexandre Berthier to Decrès (26 July 1802), Dossier 1, EE1734, ANOM; Auguste Nemours, Histoire de la famille et de la descendance de Toussaint Louverture (Port-au-Prince, HT: Imprimerie de l’Etat, 1941). Louverture’s niece Louise Chancy made a visit to Haiti in 1821–25. For a letter enquiring about Louverture’s whereabouts, see Isaac Louverture to Decrès (9 June 1803), CC9B/18, ANOM.
27. On convict law under Bonaparte, see Miranda Frances Spieler, Empire and Underworld: Captivity in French Guyana (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2012), 82–84.
28. On Landerneau, see Joseph Caffarelli to Decrès (13 Aug. 1802), Dossier 1, EE1734, ANOM. For mistaken claims that Louverture spent a night at the Temple prison in Paris on 17 August, see Joseph Saint-Rémy, Vie de Toussaint Louverture (Paris: Moquet, 1850), 391; Victor Schoelcher, Vie de Toussaint Louverture (Paris: Ollendorf, 1889), 351; Pluchon, Toussaint Louverture, 522. On the actual route, see “Route proposée” (c. 1 Aug. 1802), Dossier 5410, F/7/6266, AN; Mars Plaisir to Isaac Louverture (3 Oct. 1815), NAF 6864, BNF.
29. “Son parler nègre” from Fernand Clamettes, ed., Mémoires du général Baron Thiébault, vol. 3 (Paris: Plon, 1893–1895), 302.
30. For official sources on Louverture’s captivity, see AF/IV/1213 and 135AP/6, AN; CC9B/18, ANOM; Sc Micro R1527, SC-NYPL; 7Yd284 and B7/6 to B7/9, Service Historique de la Défense/Département de l’Armée de Terre, Vincennes (SHD-DAT); M696, Archives Départementales du Doubs, Besançon; Nemours Collection, University of Puerto Rico (NC-UPR). For personal accounts collected by Louverture’s son Isaac, see NAF 6864 and NAF 12409, BNF; 6APC/1, ANOM. Many documents were printed in M. Morpeau, Documents inédits pour l’histoire: Correspondance concernant l’emprisonnement et la mort de Toussaint Louverture (Port-au-Prince: Sacré Coeur, 1920).
31. On security measures, see Baille, “Copie de la consigne du poste du donjon du château de Joux” (24 Aug. 1802), B7/6, SHD-DAT; Auguste Nemours, Histoire de la captivité et de la mort de Toussaint-Louverture (Paris: Berger-Levrault, 1929), 26.
32. “Cet aspect nous faisait présager une mort prochaine,” from Mars Plaisir to Isaac Louverture (3 Oct. 1815), NAF 6864, BNF. For orders to send Plaisir away, see Berthier to Philippe-Romain Menard (31 Aug. 1802) B7/6, SHD-DAT. On his departure, see Menard to Berthier (13 Sept. 1802), B7/8, SHD-DAT. On his later life, see Plaisir to Suzanne Louverture (18 Sept. 1815), TLF-2A1, NC-UPR.
33. On the request for writing material, see Baille to Menard (27 Aug. 1802), B7/6, SHD-DAT; J. de Bry to Jean-Antoine Chaptal (15 Sept. 1802), TL-2B1l, NC-UPR. For the ban on writing, see “Extrait des registres des déliberations des consuls de la République” (23 July 1802), 7Yd284, SHD-DAT. For Louverture’s writings in Joux, see Louverture to Bonaparte (16 Sept. 1802), Dossier 1, EE1734, ANOM; Louverture to Suzanne Louverture (17 Sept. 1802), ibid.; Louverture to Marie-François Caffarelli (c. 17 Sept. 1802), Nouvelle Revue Rétrospective, no. 94 (10 Apr. 1902), 17; Louverture to Bonaparte (17 Sept. 1802), Dossier 1, AF/IV/1213, AN; Louverture to Berthier (17 Sept. 1802), ibid.; Louverture to Bonaparte (9 Oct. 1802), ibid. (two copies); Louverture to Caffarelli (9 Oct. 1802), ibid.; Louverture to Bonaparte (26 Oct. 1802), ibid.
34. On Baille’s good treatment, see Baille to Menard (27 Aug. 1802), B7/6, SHD-DAT. On Louverture’s isolation, see Micaut to de Bry (10 Jan. 1803), TL-2C2b, NC-UPR.
35. “Des choses importantes” from Baille to Menard (27 Aug. 1802), B7/6, SHD-DAT. “L’existence de ses trésors” from Bonaparte to Caffarelli (9 Sept. 1802), in Jean-Baptiste Vaillant, ed., Correspondance de Napoléon Ier, publiée par ordre de l’empereur Napoléon III, vol. 8 (Paris: Plon, 1858), 39. “Un nègre de la taille de cinq pieds un pouce” from “Toussaint Louverture au Fort de Joux,” 1.
36. “Je n’ai jamais été riche en argent” from “Toussaint Louverture au Fort de Joux,” 12. “Cet homme est maître de lui” from Caffarelli to [Bonaparte] (16 Sept. 1802), Dossier 1, AF/IV/1213, AN.
37. For orders on the uniform, see Berthier to Menard (31 Aug. 1802) B7/6, SHD-DAT. “Le commandant du fort lui apporta les habits” from “Toussaint Louverture au Fort de Joux,” 15. “Toussaint refusa d’abord” from J. F. Dubois to Henri Grégoire (25 May 1823), NAF 6864, BNF.
38. “Il avait d’un seul trait” from Daniel Desormeaux, ed., Mémoires du général Toussaint Louverture (Paris: Classiques Garnier, 2011), 10. For manuscripts A, B, and C and various drafts, see Dossier 1, AF/IV/1213, AN. For manuscript D, see Dossier 2, EE 1734, ANOM. For a fifth version that is most likely posthumous, see “Mémoire du général Toussaint Louverture,” West Mss. 6, Northwestern University Library.
39. “Ci-joint” from Caffarelli to [Berthier?] (24 Sept. 1802), Dossier 1, EE 1734, ANOM.
40. On adding to the manuscript, see “Toussaint Louverture au Fort de Joux,” 4. On entrusting the manuscript to Caffarelli, see Louverture to Bonaparte (16 Sept. 1802), Dossier 1, EE1734, ANOM.
41. On Martial Besse as the author, see Joseph Saint-Rémy, Mémoires du général Toussaint-L’Ouverture écrits par lui-même (Paris: Pagnerre, 1853), 19. On Besse’s arrival in Joux, see Jean-Antoine Chaptal to Decrès (14 May 1803), 8Yd638, SHD-DAT.
42. “Ecrit sous sa dictée” from Nemours, Histoire de la captivité, 249.
43. “J’ai également écrit sous sa dictée” from Jeannin to Isaac Louverture (24 Nov. 1810), NAF 6864, BNF. Whether Louverture was a freemason remains a matter of debate among historians.
44. On the conversations, see Baille to Decrès (28 Sept. 1802), CC9B/18, ANOM; Nemours, Histoire de la Captivité, 242, 249.
45. “Toussaint dictait séparément” from Schoelcher, Vie de Toussaint Louverture, 394.
46. “Toussaint ne parle que le créole” from Léger-Félicité Sonthonax to Directoire Exécutif (30 Jan. 1798), AF/III, 210, AN. For transcripts of conversations, see Louverture, “Rapport au directoire exécutif” (4 Sept. 1797), Pièce 12, Dossier 961, AF/III, 210, AN; Jacques de Norvins, Souvenirs d’un historien de Napoléon: mémorial de J. de Norvins vol. 2 (Paris: Plon, 1896), 395.
47. On switching languages, see Lacroix, Mémoires, vol. 2, 206.
48. On Louverture’s use of metaphors, see Lacroix, Mémoires, vol. 1, 410; Pluchon, Toussaint Louverture, 431; Jacques de Cauna, ed., Toussaint Louverture et l’indépendance d’Haïti (Paris: Karthala, 2004), 102. According to Desormeaux, Mémoires, 142, Louverture was inspired by the fact that Caffarelli had lost a hand and a leg in battle, but it was actually Caffarelli’s brother Louis Marie Maximilien who suffered these wounds.
49. “Placée secrètement” from Amiot to Comte du Poul (24 Aug. 1814), 7Yd284, SHD-DAT. “Dans les plis d’un mouchoir” from Berthier to Bonaparte (2 June 1803), Dossier 1, AF/IV/1213, AN. No memoir is mentioned in the lists of Louverture’s belongings in TL-3A2 and TL-2B6q, NC-UPR, possibly because it had no monetary value.
50. On Desfourneaux’s copy, see Saint-Rémy, Mémoires, 18.
51. On Saint-Rémy, see Jacques de Cauna, ed., Mémoires du Général Toussaint-Louverture commentés par Saint-Rémy (Guitalens-L’Albarède: La Girandole, 2009), 11–15, 25; Desormeaux, Mémoires, 15–21, 51–61. For the edition and translation, see Joseph Saint-Rémy, Mémoires du général Toussaint-L’Ouverture écrits par lui-même (Paris: Pagnerre, 1853); John R. Beard and James Redpath, eds., Toussaint Louverture: A Biography and Auto-Biography (Boston: James Redpath).
52. “Amour-propre patriotique” from Saint-Rémy, Mémoires, 20.
53. For example, see p. 19, line 9 of the C manuscript: “aDi dition au presante memoire; sis le gouvernemenet a voit en voié un.” Desormeaux, Mémoires, 196 (some words unwittingly corrected): “addition au presant memoire; si le gouvernement avoit envoié un.” Cauna, Mémoires, 260 (willfully modernized): “Addition au présent mémoire / Si le gouvernement avait envoyé un.”
54. “Testament politique” from Desormeaux, Mémoires, 83. On the memoir as memoirs, see also Daniel Desormeaux, “The First of the (Black) Memorialists: Toussaint Louverture,” Yale French Studies 107 (2005), 131–145; Cauna, Mémoires, 17; Deborah Jenson, Beyond the Slave Narrative: Politics, Sex, and Manuscripts in the Haitian Revolution (Liverpool, UK: Liverpool University Press, 2011), 18.
55. Louverture to Bonaparte (17 Sept. 1802), Dossier 1, AF/IV/1213, AN.
56. For Louverture’s petitions, see Louverture, “Rapport au Directoire Exécutif” (4 Sept. 1797), Pièce 12, Dossier 961, AF/III, 210, AN; Louverture to Directoire Exécutif (12 Nov. 1798), AF/III, 210, AN.
57. “Il ne répond pas directement” from “Toussaint Louverture au Fort de Joux,” 4.
58. For the decision not to hold a trial, see “Rapport aux consuls concernant Toussaint Louverture” (23 July 1802), CC9/B23, ANOM; Leclerc to Decrès (26 Sept. 1802), B7/26, SHD-DAT.
59. On Louverture’s views on independence, see Girard, “Black Talleyrand,” 116.
60. On Louverture’s labor record, see Louverture, [Règlement des cultures] (12 Oct. 1800), in Beaubrun Ardouin, Etudes sur l’histoire d’Haïti, vol. 4 (Paris: Dezobry and Magdeleine, 1854), 247–255.
61. “War within the war” from Michel Rolph-Trouillot, Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History (Boston: Beacon Press, 1995), 40.
62. “Terrible power” from John Lynch, Simón Bolívar: A Life (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2007), 67.
63. On Louverture urging cultivators to work, see the proclamations dated 18 May 1798, 5 Oct. 1798, 15 Nov. 1798, and 4 Jan. 1800 in CC9/A/19 and CC9/B/9, ANOM.
64. “Général” from [Decrès?] to Baille (27 Oct. 1802), CC9B/18, ANOM.
65. For previous accusations of racism, see Louverture, Réfutation de quelques assertions d’un discours prononcé au corps législatif le 10 prairial, an cinq, par Viénot Vaublanc (Cap-Français, c. 1797); Tobias Lear to James Madison (17 July 1801), 208 MI/2, AN; Pluchon, Toussaint Louverture, 549.
66. William J. Rolfe, ed., Select Poems of William Wordsworth (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1889), 89.
67. “Le prisonnier s’évade” from Cauna, Mémoires, 34.
68. “Aimant catéchiser et à faire des prosélytes” from [Valsemey?], “Esclaves existant sur l’habitation de M. de Breda” (31 Dec. 1785), 261MIOM, ANOM (document communicated to me by Jean-Louis Donnadieu). On Louverture as a false Christian, see Pluchon, Toussaint Louverture, 338. On Louverture as a vodouisant, see Madison Smartt Bell, Toussaint Louverture: A Biography (New York: Pantheon Books, 2007), 288. The two religious identities are not mutually exclusive in Haiti.
69. For Kreyòl as an heir to French and regional languages, see Jules Faine, Philologie créole: études historiques et étymologiques sur la langue créole d’Haïti (Port-au-Prince, HT: Imprimerie de l’Etat, 1937); Albert Valdman, Le créole: structure, statut et origine (Paris: Klincksieck, 1978). On Kreyòl as a primarily African language, see Suzanne Sylvain, Le créole haïtien: morphologie et syntaxe (Port-au-Prince: Self-published, 1936); John Holm, Pidgins and Creoles (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1988–1989). On Kreyòl as a mixture, see Robert Hall, Pidgin and Creole Languages (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1966). On Kreyòl as an embodiment of deep-rooted linguistic processes, see Derek Bickerton, The Roots of Language (Ann Arbor, MI: Karoma, 1981). On Kreyòl as the heir to pidgins used by slave traders, see Morris Goodman, A Comparative Study of Creole French Dialects (The Hague: Mouton, 1964), 130; Gwendolyn Midlo Hall, Africans in Colonial Louisiana: The Development of Afro-Creole Culture in the Eighteenth Century (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1992), 190.
70. On the demographic weight of bossales, see David Geggus, “The French Slave Trade: An Overview,” William and Mary Quarterly 58:1 (Jan. 2001), 130. For a rare mention of the “langage guinéen,” see Descourtilz, Voyage, vol. 3, 190. On pale langaj and Vodun, see Althéa de Puech Parham, ed., My Odyssey: Experiences of a Young Refugee from two Revolutions (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1959), 26; Joan Dayan, Haiti, History, and the Gods (1995; reprint, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998), 52.
71. For a rare example of the use of a French regional language (provençal), see Jean-Baptiste Lemonnier-Delafosse, Seconde campagne de Saint-Domingue du 1 décembre 1803 au 15 juillet 1809 (Le Havre: Brindeau, 1846), 14.
72. “Jargon” from Justin Girod-Chantrans, Voyage d’un Suisse dans différentes colonies d’Amérique (Neuchatel, CH: Société typographique, 1785), 191. “Finesse” and the Kreyòl song from Médéric-Louis-Elie Moreau de Saint-Méry, Description topographique, physique, civile, politique et historique de la partie française de l’isle Saint-Domingue, vol. 1 (Philadelphia, 1797), 64–67. For other pre-revolutionary examples of Kreyòl, see Du Simitière, “Vocabulaire créole” (c. 1770s), 968.F.9, Du Simitière Collection, Library Company of Pennsylvania; Marie-Christine Hazaël-Massieux, Textes anciens en créole français de la Caraïbe, histoire et analyse (Paris: Publibook, 2008).
73. For revolutionary-era Kreyòl documents, see Agence du Directoire Exécutif à Saint-Domingue, “Arrêté concernant la police des habitations” (24 juillet 1798), CC9A/19, ANOM; S. J. Ducœurjoly, Manuel des habitans de Saint-Domingue, vol. 1 (Paris: Arthus-Bertrand, 1803), vi and ibid. vol. 2, 283–294; Anon., Idylles, ou essais de poësie créole (New York: Hopkins and Seymour, 1804), Shaw-Shoemaker Fiche 6530, Massachusetts Historical Society; Paul Roussier, ed., Lettres du Général Leclerc (Paris: Société de l’histoire des colonies françaises, 1937), 64; Aletha Stahl, “ ‘Enfans de l’Amérique:’ Configuring Creole Citizenship in the Press, 1793,” Journal of Haitian Studies 15:1–2 (2009), 171; Jeremy Popkin, You Are All Free: The Haitian Revolution and the Abolition of Slavery (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 143. For a petition by field laborers, see Mhalick Ghachem, “The Colonial Vendée,” in David Geggus and Norman Fiering, eds., The World of the Haitian Revolution (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2009), 169. For speeches by Jean-François and Louverture, see P., “Mon Odyssée” (c. 1798), 85-117-L, Box 1, Historic New Orleans Collection; Pélage-Marie Duboys, Précis historique des Annales de la Révolution à Saint Domingue, vol. 2, p. 80, NAF 14879 (MF 5384), BNF.
74. For post-independence texts, see Juste Chanlatte, L’entrée du roi dans sa capitale en janvier 1818 (Cap Haïtien, 1818); Albert Valdman, “Haitian Creole at the Dawn of Independence,” Yale French Studies 107 (2005), 151, 156. On present-day Kreyòl, see Bambi Schieffelin and Rachelle Charlier Doucet, “The ‘Real’ Haitian Creole: Ideology, Metalinguistics, and Orthographic Choice,” American Ethnologist 21:1 (Feb. 1994), 188.
75. On Ewe-Fon, see Antoine Métral, Histoire de l’expédition des Français à Saint-Domingue sous le consulat de Napoléon Bonaparte (1802–1803), suivie des mémoires et notes d’Isaac l’Ouverture (1825; reprint, Paris: Karthala, 1985), 326; Gragnon-Lacoste, Toussaint Louverture, 9, 126. On Latin, see Lacroix, Mémoires, vol. 1, 402.
76. “Je fus un jour très mal écouté” from Descourtilz, Voyage, vol. 3, 251. “Sa manière de narrer” from “Toussaint Louverture au Fort de Joux,” 17. On Louverture’s oral French, see also Sonthonax to Directoire Exécutif (30 Jan. 1798), AF/III, 210, AN.
77. For a full discussion of the linguistics of the C manuscript, see Philippe Girard, “Quelle langue parlait Toussaint Louverture? Le mémoire du Fort de Joux et les origines du kreyòl haïtien,” Annales 68:1 (Jan. 2013), 109–132.
78. On old spellings, see Claude Buffier, Grammaire françoise sur un plan nouveau. . . (Paris: Bordelet, 1754), 329, 341; L. M. P. Favre, “Rèflèxions intèrèssantes sur la prononciation de la langue française. . . (Lyon, FR: Cizeron, 1771), 6. On old pronunciations, see also M. Viard and Luneau de Boisjermain, Les vrais principes de la lecture, de l’orthographe, et de la prononciation françoises (Paris: Delalain, 1773); Charles Thurot, De la prononciation française depuis le commencement du 16ème siècle (Paris: Imprimerie Nationale, 1882). On regional French, see Favre, Rèflèxions intèrèssantes; Henri Doniol, les patois de la basse Auvergne (Paris: Maisonneuve, 1877). On Kreyòl, see Sylvain, Le créole haïtien; Valdman, Le créole; Goodman, A Comparative Study of Creole; Hall, Pidgin and Creole; Schieffelin and Doucet, “The ‘Real’ Haitian Creole.”
79. Louverture to Bonaparte (9 Oct. 1802), Dossier 1, AF/IV/1213, AN; Suzanne Louverture to Louverture (13 July 1794), 61J18, ADGir.
80. On the demographic weight of Gascons, see Jacques de Cauna et al., Bordeaux au 18ème siècle: le commerce atlantique et l’esclavage (Bordeaux: Le Festin, 2010), 117.
81. Madiou, Histoire d’Haïti, vol. 2, 91.
82. “It is the former variety” from Doris Y. Kadish, ed., Slavery in the Caribbean Francophone World: Distant Voices, Forgotten Acts, Forged Identities (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2000), 150.
83. Saint-Rémy, Mémoires, 88; Jenson, Beyond the Slave Narrative, 304; Desormeaux, Mémoires, 9.
84. “Z’autres pas té connois mai ben” from Duboys, Précis historique vol. 2, 80.
85. For letters to/from Suzanne and Dessalines, see Suzanne Louverture to Louverture (13 July 1794), 61J18, ADGir; Louverture to Jean-Jacques Dessalines (Oct. 1798), Autograph File, T., HL-HU; Louverture to Suzanne Louverture (17 Sept. 1802), Dossier 1, EE1734, ANOM. For letters to/from his sons, see Louverture to Isaac and Placide Louverture (10 June 1798), AF/III, 210, AN; Louverture to Placide Louverture (13 Aug. 1800), Ms. Hait. 79-3, BPL; Placide to Toussaint and Suzanne Louverture (12 Aug. 1802), Dossier 1, AF/IV/1213, AN. On the sons’ fluency, see Norvins, Souvenirs d’un historien, vol. 2, 31.
86. On Louverture reuniting with his sons, see Jean-Baptiste Coisnon to Leclerc (11 Feb. 1802), 61J18, ADGir; Coisnon to Decrès (20 Feb. 1802), in Moniteur Universel, no. 212 (22 Apr. 1802).
87. On hyper-correction, see Valdman, Le créole, 295, 323.
88. On Kreyòl variations, see Michelson Hyppolite, Les origines des variations du créole haïtien (Port-au-Prince, HT: Imprimerie de l’Etat, 1949); Valdman, Le créole, 286–299.
89. Bonaparte, “Notes pour servir aux instructions à donner au capitaine général Leclerc” (31 Oct. 1801), in Roussier, Lettres du général Leclerc, 271.
90. “L’énormité du crime” from Bonaparte to Caffarelli (9 Sept. 1802), in Vaillant, Correspondance de Napoléon, vol. 8, 39.
91. “Il ne résulte du rapport” from Decrès to Leclerc (16 Oct. 1802), Dossier 1, EE 1734, ANOM. On the search for the treasure, see also ibid. (17 Dec. 1802).
92. “Ge ne sui pas instruire” from Louverture to Bonaparte (9 Oct. 1802), Dossier 1, AF/IV/1213, AN. On past snubs from Bonaparte, see Jean-Baptiste Michel to Pierre Forfait (26 Dec. 1800), Dossier 6, AF/IV/1213, AN. On the godfather’s death, see Ramel, “Notes” (c. 1803), in Alphonse de Lamartine, Toussaint Louverture (Paris: Levy, 1850), xviii.
93. “Soit pour lui tenir lieu de secrétaire” from Menard to Berthier (22 Oct. 1802), B7/8, SHD-DAT.
94. On Dormoy, see Menard to Berthier (15 Oct. 1802), B7/8, SHD-DAT; Bry to Baille (15 Oct. 1802), TL-2B4a, NC-UPR. On François Pothier, see Baille, [Interrogation account] (23 Nov. 1802), Dossier 1, AF/IV/1213, AN; Gomet to Bry (18 March 1803), TL-2C1c, NC-UPR.
95. “Mes amis, l’homme ne doit jamais oublier” from Madiou, Histoire d’Haïti, vol. 2, 125.
96. “Une de ces horloges de bois” from [Decrès] to Baille (27 Oct. 1802), CC9B/18, ANOM.
97. “Rien n’est plus fort que l’humiliation” from Louverture to Baille (c. 18 Oct. 1802), CC9B/18, ANOM. “Lorsqu’il sortirait de prison” from Menard to Berthier (22 Oct. 1802), B7/8, SHD-DAT.
98. “Lettre suppreme” from Louverture to Bonaparte (26 Oct. 1802), Dossier 1, AF/IV/1213, AN.
99. On confiscating papers (including three letters sent by Gen. Brunet before Louverture’s arrest), see Baille to Decrès (6 and 18 Nov. 1802), CC9B/18, ANOM; Ménard to Berthier (27 Nov. 1802), Dossier 1, AF/IV/1213, AN. “Il m’a paru très affecté” from Baille to Decrès (14 Nov. 1802), CC9B/18, ANOM.
100. “Les choses les plus indécentes” from Baille to Decrès (6 Nov. 1802), CC9B/18, ANOM.
101. On Louverture’s despondency, see Baille to Decrès (30 Oct. and 14 Nov. 1802), CC9B/18, ANOM.
102. “Une jouissance, un besoin” from [Pascal], “Mémoire secret,” (c. 1801), Reel 8, Sc. Micro R-2228, SC-NYPL.
103. “Triste et sombre” from J. F. Dubois to Henri Grégoire (25 May 1823), NAF 6864, BNF.
104. On other captives, see Claude Régnier to Decrès (14 May 1803), 8Yd638, SHD-DAT; David Geggus, “Slave, Soldier, Rebel: The Strange Career of Jean Kina,” Notes d’histoire coloniale, no. 20 (1980).
105. On the fire, see Baille to Decrès (30 Oct. 1802), CC9B/18, ANOM. On the clothes, see “Extrait des minutes déposées à la sous-préfecture de Pontarlier. . . ” (3 May 1803), TL-2B6q, NC-UPR. On the wood, see Bry to Micaut (22 Jan. 1803), TL-2B6h, NC-UPR.
106. “Toussaint hasarde parfois des questions” from Jean Joseph Gazagnaire to Decrès (5 Dec. 1802), Dossier 1, EE 1734, ANOM. On Amiot, see Amiot to Decrès (3 Jan. 1803), CC9B/18, ANOM; Ménard to Bry (2 March 1803), TL-2B6i, NC-UPR.
107. On Louverture’s health, see Ménard to Berthier (7 March 1803), B7/9, SHD-DAT; Amiot to Decrès (19 March 1803), TL-2B7g, NC-UPR.
108. On Louverture’s death, see Amiot et al., “L’an onze de la république française. . . ” (7 Apr. 1803), TL-3A1, NC-UPR; Amiot to Decrès (9 Apr. 1803), CC9B/18, ANOM. For the conspiracy theories, see Saint-Rémy, Vie de Toussaint Louverture, 402–406; Auguste, Les déportés de Saint-Domingue, 95. For evidence to the contrary, see [Amiot?], “Toussaint Louverture” (c. Apr. 1803), TL-2A1, NC-UPR; J. F. Dubois to Henri Grégoire (25 May 1823), NAF 6864, BNF.
109. Nemours, Histoire de la captivité, 23.
110. “Quand il se vante d’avoir été général” from [Decrès] to Baille (27 Oct. 1802), CC9B/18, ANOM.
111. “Continuum” from Kadish, ed., Slavery in the Caribbean Francophone World, 157.
112. On diglossia, see Valdman, Le créole, 314–317, 367; Michael Largey, Vodou Nation: Haitian Art Music and Cultural Nationalism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006), 6, 10.
113. On Louverture’s distant relationship with family members, see Paul Louverture to Louverture (4 Feb. 1802), Reel 5, Sc. Micro R-2228, SC-NYPL; Charles Belair to Louverture (1 Apr. 1802), ibid. On Louverture’s inscrutability, see Pascal to Louverture (12 Apr. 1799), Reel 5, Sc. Micro R-2228, SC-NYPL. On Louverture’s appearance, see David Geggus, “The Changing Faces of Toussaint Louverture: Literary and Pictorial Depictions,” http://www.brown.edu/Facilities/John_Carter_Brown_Library/toussaint/index.html (accessed on 4 June 2013). On the body, see John Bigelow, Retrospections of an Active Life, vol. 1, 1817–1863 (New York: Baker and Taylor, 1909), 238; Nemours, Histoire de la captivité, 18, 116, 140–164. When I visited the site of the Bréda plantation in November 2013, the last standing walls of the Bréda plantation had been razed to make way for a high school.
114. For Bonaparte’s lines, see Autograph manuscript, Inv. 1153, Fondation Napoléon, Paris; Peter Hicks, “Napoleon’s English lessons,” at http://www.napoleon.org/en/reading_room/articles/index.asp.
