Toussaint Louverture
François-Dominique Toussaint Louverture
Revolutionary Leader and General · 1743–1803
Who is Toussaint Louverture?
Toussaint Louverture was born into slavery on the Bréda plantation in Saint-Domingue (present-day Haiti) around 1743. Freed some years before the revolution, he joined the massive slave uprising that began in August 1791 and rose rapidly through its ranks by combining military skill with shrewd political maneuvering among the French, Spanish, and British powers contesting the colony. By the late 1790s he had become the colony's de facto ruler, abolishing slavery in practice, restoring the plantation economy under free labor, and promulgating an autonomous 1801 constitution that named him governor for life while nominally keeping Saint-Domingue within the French empire. This alarmed Napoleon Bonaparte, who dispatched an expedition to restore French control and slavery. In 1802, Louverture was lured into a parley by General Jean-Baptiste Brunet, arrested, and deported to France, where he was imprisoned at Fort de Joux in the Jura mountains and died of cold and neglect on 7 April 1803, less than a year before the colony he had led achieved full independence as Haiti.
Sources: C.L.R. James, The Black Jacobins (1938) · Encyclopaedia Britannica: Toussaint Louverture · Wikipedia: Toussaint Louverture