Toussaint Louverture

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François Louverture Appletons' Toussaint Dominique François signature.png
Toussaint L'Ouverture , 1870, sculpture by the American sculptor and poet Anne Whitney
Haiti. A Drama of the Black Napoleon. Play by the black civil rights activist WEB Du Bois . 1938 poster for the Federal Theater Project in Boston .

François-Dominique Toussaint Louverture (born May 20, 1743 in Cap-Haïtien as Toussaint Bréda , † April 7, 1803 in Château de Joux , incorrectly Toussaint-Louverture or Toussaint L'Ouverture ) was a leader of the Haitian Revolution .

He held a key leadership position during the Haitian Revolution that led to the country's independence on January 1, 1804 - nine months after his death . He is considered a national hero in Haiti .

Live and act

Toussaint was born into a family of slaves around 1743 on the Count de Breda's plantation near Cap-Haïtien . From the priest Simon Baptiste he learned to read and write as well as some Latin. In 1777 he was released, married Suzanne Simon and had two sons, Isaac and Saint-Jean. He was a staunch supporter of voodoo , which he viewed as a peaceful union of Catholicism with the traditional religions of Africa .

At the end of the 18th century, a few Haitian slaves, who accompanied their masters on trips abroad, also came to France , and there came into contact with the “rebellious” ideas of this country and spread them among the slaves on their return to Haiti.

When the news of the French Revolution reached Haiti in 1789 , regional uprisings only broke out, but they quickly developed into a bloody civil war that culminated in the Haitian Revolution . The chaos left thousands of deaths, most of them mulatto and black.

In 1791, when the civil war was at its height, Toussaint joined the movement for the liberation of slaves in the French part of the island of Hispaniola ( Saint-Domingue ) and, thanks to his military expertise, quickly became the leader of this liberation movement. This ended victoriously in 1793 and resulted in the abolition of slavery in 1794. It was the most successful slave revolt in a European colony to date . Because of his military successes, Toussaint was soon called the "black Napoleon".

A group of former slaves under Toussaint's leadership entered the French / Spanish War on the Spanish side in 1793 . In 1794, however, he moved to the French side with 4,000 soldiers and received the rank of Général de brigade from them .

In 1799 a civil war broke out between the former allies of the Liberation Army. Toussaint also proved to be a good strategist in this conflict and crushed the army of the rival mulatto leader André Rigaud . From then on he was the undisputed ruler of the colony. Toussaint sent the governor Étienne Maynaud de Bizefranc de Laveaux as envoy to Paris , he had the government commissioner Léger-Félicité Sonthonax deported from the country in 1797, and Saint-Laurent de Roume was arrested in 1800.

On February 4, 1798, Sonthonax gave a speech in the Council of Five Hundred in which he described Toussaint's behavior towards him. From that moment on, France was suspicious of Toussaint. Hedouvilles should stop him.

In 1801 he also occupied the Spanish-influenced eastern part of the island of Hispaniola (now the Dominican Republic ), where he also abolished slavery and carried out a major land reform .

In 1802, Toussaint came into conflict with France, which failed to meet its demands for black rights. Toussaint again proved to be a skilled military leader: he drove the French from the island and also triumphed over English privateers and the last Spanish garrisons.

To counter the influence of Toussaint, Napoléon Bonaparte finally sent an expeditionary army under General Charles Victoire Emmanuel Leclerc to the renegade colony. Napoleon stopped an unrealized resolution to repeal the Code Noir, which had been in force since 1685 and repealed by Toussaint, on May 20, 1802, also in Haiti. The Code Noir itself continued to apply elsewhere after 1805 until the final abolition of slavery in France on April 27, 1848.

Captivity and death

Toussaint was captured on June 7, 1802 and deported to France.

On April 7, 1803, François-Dominique Toussaint Louverture died in Fort de Joux near Pontarlier ( Doubs department ) as a result of the harsh prison conditions .

After his death

Haiti was the first country in Latin America to liberate itself from the status of a colony through the declaration of independence by Jean-Jacques Dessalines and to gain state independence on January 1, 1804 . After the USA, Haiti was the second state on the American continent to do this on its own - through the Haitian Revolution .

The West Indian author and Marxist theorist CLR James wrote The Black Jacobins: Toussaint L'Ouverture and the San Domingo Revolution, a standard work on the Haitian revolutionary , published in 1938 .

His life found further literary expression in The Wedding of Haiti and The Key , two stories by Anna Seghers , and also in Isabel Allende's novel The Island under the Sea . The airport of the Haitian capital Port-au-Prince bears his name; it is called Aéroport international Toussaint Louverture .

As early as around August 1802, the English romantic poet William Wordsworth dedicated the poem To Toussaint L'Ouverture to him, which was published on February 2, 1803 in the Morning Post newspaper .

In France, too, the Haitian revolutionary leader was the subject of literary myths. During his lifetime, many French eyewitnesses and eyewitnesses wrote about Haiti's national hero today. A large number of works have been written about him to this day.

Trivia

The jazz trumpeter Donald Byrd got him in honor of his father, a Methodist minister , the Christian name Donaldson Toussaint L'Ouverture Byrd II .

The Latin rock band Santana released an instrumental piece entitled Toussaint L'Overture on the album Santana III (1971) in their psychedelic phase . An early live recording of it can be found on a special edition of the second album Abraxas (1970) as a bonus track. The live version was made on April 18, 1970 in the Royal Albert Hall . Further live versions can be found on the albums Lotus (1974), Moonflower (1977), Sacred Fire (1993), Dance Of The Rainbow Serpent (1995) and Santana IV - Live At The House Of Blues, Las Vegas (2016). Only on the 2016 album is the title corrected to Toussaint L'Ouverture .

In 2014, the US experimental rock band Swans released a 34-minute rock epic entitled "Bring the Sun / Toussaint L'Ouverture" on their album "To Be Kind".

Jacobin magazine uses a stylized image of Louverture as its logo.

See also

Movies

  • Égalité for All: Toussaint Louverture and the Haitian Revolution. Koval Films LLC London 2009 (approx. 60 min) - German premiere: ARTE , January 8, 2011
  • “Toussaint Louverture”: 2-part television film produced in 2012 for French television, directed by Philippe Niang , with Jimmy Jean-Louis and Hubert Koundé .

literature

Scientific representations:

  • Wenda Parkinson: This gilded African. Toussaint L'Ouverture. Quartet Books, London 1978, ISBN 0-7043-2187-4 .
  • CLR James : The black Jacobins. 1938.
    • The black Jacobins. Toussaint L'Ouverture and the San Domingo Revolution. Pahl-Rugenstein, Cologne 1984, ISBN 3-7609-0911-6 . (excellent and exciting analysis by the Caribbean author)
  • Franz Sundstral: From the black republic. The Negro uprising in Santo Domingo or the history of the origins of the state of Haiti. Haessel , Leipzig 1903.
  • Thomas Schmid : Break the yoke . In: The time . No. 5, January 25, 2001.
  • Hans Dollinger : Black Book of World History. 5000 years man is the enemy of man. Südwest-Verlag, Munich 1973, ISBN 3-517-00430-8 .
  • Isabell Lammel: The Toussaint Louverture Myth. Transformations in French Literature, 1791–2012. transcript Verlag, Bielefeld 2015, ISBN 978-3-8376-3170-8 .
  • Isabell Lammel: Toussaint Louverture in French Romanticism: The Transformation of the Haitian Revolutionary Leader into the Adversary of Napoleon Bonaparte. In: Sonja Georgi, Julia Ilgner, Isabell Lammel, Cathleen Sarti, Christine Waldschmidt (eds.): Geschichtstransformationen. Media, processes and functionalizations of historical reception. transcript Verlag, Bielefeld 2015, ISBN 978-3-8376-2815-9 , pp. 481-500.
  • Isabell Lammel: The functionalization of the Haitian revolutionary leader Toussaint Louverture as the perfecter of the French Revolution. In: Jasmin Marjam Rezai Dubiel (Ed.): "Indignez Vous!" - Making history in the 21st century. Neofelis, Berlin 2014, ISBN 978-3-943414-48-6 , pp. 97-118.

Fiction depictions:

Web links

Commons : Toussaint Louverture  - collection of images, videos and audio files

Footnotes

  1. ^ Helen Weston: The many faces of Toussaint Louverture . In: Agnes Lugo-Ortiz, Angela Rosenthal (eds.): Slave Portraiture in the Atlantic World . Cambridge University Press, New York 2013, pp. 345 .
  2. ^ Ian Thomson: The black Spartacus . In: The Guardian . January 30, 2004.
  3. ^ Hans Dollinger : Black Book of World History. 5000 years man is the enemy of man. Südwest-Verlag, Munich 1973, ISBN 3-517-00430-8 , p. 367.
  4. ↑ a b Louis Sala-Molins : Le Code Noir ou le calvaire de Canaan. Paris 2007, p. 17.
  5. ↑ Product of slavery. ( Memento from April 15, 2013 in the web archive archive.today ) In: Südwind-Magazin. Number 1–2 / 2004.
  6. ^ A b Hans Dollinger: Black Book of World History. 5000 years man is the enemy of man. Südwest-Verlag, Munich 1973, ISBN 3-517-00430-8 , p. 368.
  7. ↑ Three Women from Haiti, second story
  8. ^ William Wordsworth: The Collected Poems of William Wordsworth. Wordsworth Poetry Library, 1995, pp. 363f.
  9. ↑ Isabell Lammel: The Toussaint Louverture Myth. Transformations in French Literature, 1791–2012. transcript Verlag, Bielefeld 2015, ISBN 978-3-8376-3170-8 , pp. 359–365.
  10. ↑ Donald Byrd: Trumpeter and bandleader who offended critics with his mixture of jazz and soul , obituary in The Independent of February 13, 2013 (English).
  11. ↑ Remeike Forbes: The Black Jacobin. In: Jacobin . March 2012, accessed on March 15, 2020 .
  12. ↑ Remeike Forbes: The black Jacobin. In: Jacobin (German language edition). Retrieved March 15, 2020 .
personal data
SURNAME Toussaint Louverture
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Toussaint Louverture, François-Dominique (full name); Toussaint Bréda (maiden name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Haitian national hero
DATE OF BIRTH around 1743
PLACE OF BIRTH Cap-Haïtien
DATE OF DEATH April 7, 1803
Place of death Château de Joux