Paperback. Black and orange binding with title and Toussaint’s image on the front board.

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Black Spartacus: The Epic Life of Toussaint Louverture

Toussaint Louverture epitomized the uniqueness of Saint-Domingue’s revolution. It was the age’s most comprehensive example of radical change, combining democratic and republican goals with an emphasis on racial equality, and became a just war of national liberation which foreshadowed the anti-colonial struggles of the modern era. Saint-Domingue was also exceptional in that the driving forces of its revolution were not white bourgeois liberals but black slaves, who were partly revolting against slave-owning supporters of the French Revolution, such as the merchants of Bordeaux and Nantes. It was a revolution, too, which forced French leaders locally and in Paris to face up to the issue of slavery and proclaim its general abolition in 1794. This revolution wiped out the colony’s old ruling class, pioneered guerrilla warfare and successfully confronted the military might of European imperialism. It shook the Enlightenment’s belief in the inherent superiority of all things European – its primary agents drew on native American forms of spirituality and African political cultures and
embodied the mutinous spirit of the African American rebels who disrupted colonial authority across the black Atlantic in the late eighteenth century. In short, Toussaint embodied the many facets of Saint-Domingue’s revolution by confronting the
dominant forces of his age – slavery, settler colonialism, imperial domination, racial hierarchy and European cultural supremacy – and bending them to his will. Through his dynamism he acquired some striking epithets. His republican friends hailed him as the ‘Black Spartacus’, the modern incarnation of the legendary gladiator who led his fellow slaves against the Roman Republic; his miraculous appearance in Saint-Domingue had, in the words of one of his admirers, ‘transformed the
chaos of destruction into the seeds of new life’.