African Revolutionary Writers, Part 1a
Toussaint L’Ouverture
Toussaint L’Ouverture –
“Toussaint the Opening” – was the leader, both military and civilian, of the
slave revolt in the French West Indian colony of “Saint Domingue”, which is now
the Republic of Haiti.
Toussaint brought his country
to the brink of independence. The constitution of which he was the author
(download linked below), though not yet the constitution of an independent
republic, was enough to lead to his capture, transportation to France, and
death in captivity two years after its publication.
Toussaint’s successor, Dessalines, did achieve independence, though
on harsh terms that crippled the country with “reparations”
to the French Republic - one of the great scandals of history.
C L R James wrote a famous work about the Haitian
revolution, calling the book “The Black Jacobins”. The title
was a reference to the bourgeois take-over of the Great French Revolution that
had taken place a few years earlier, the “Terror” under Robespierre, and the
eventual bourgeois dictatorship that was the consequence of the French revolution,
and therefore by extension, also the Haitian revolution.
In other words, the freed
slaves became subordinated to a dictatorship of “their own” black bourgeoisie,
of which Toussaint was one of the first. This was hardly surprising, and
practically inevitable. The first dictatorship of the proletariat, the Paris
Commune, was not seen until seventy years later, in 1871.
Even if a “Jacobin”,
Toussaint was still an “Opening” in history, and one of the greatest of them
all. Haiti was the first black colony to gain independence, and this was nearly
one and a half centuries prior to the main wave of colonial independence that began
following the anti-fascist war of 1939-1945.
The attached Haiti
Constitution of 1801 is the best representation we have of Toussaint
L’Ouverture’s writing.
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The above serves to
introduce the original reading-text: Toussaint, Haiti
Constitution of 1801
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A PDF file of the reading texts is attached
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To download any of the CU courses in PDF files please click here.
