General Touissant Louverture: Black Liberator Re-Enslaved in Paris
In 1802, General Touissant Louverture of Haiti became the last in a series of Revolutionary leaders from the Americas to visit France.
But unlike Franklin, Paine, Adams, and Jefferson, Toussaint arrived in shackles: betrayed, beaten, whipped, and legally re-enslaved by Napoléon.
Within less than a year, the heroic liberator of the tropics was found dead in a frigid French mountain prison. Born a slave in the tropics, he died in chains in the Alps. Yet he had become the leader of perhaps the most successful slave revolt in all human history. Sometimes known as Napoléon Noir (the Black Napoleon) he earned a permanent place of honor in our Americans in Paris pantheon.
Nor did Toussaint’s demise mark the end of the free Haitian Republic he founded (known at the time as Saint Domingue). As Toussaint himself famously declares,
“In overthrowing me you have cut down in Saint Domingue only the trunk of the tree of liberty; it will spring up again from the roots, for they are numerous and they are deep.”
For as fate would have it, a devastating epidemic of yellow fever soon wiped out 50,000 out of the 80,000 soldiers Napoloon had sent to re-enslave Haiti. Eighteen of Napoleon’s finest generals died with them. Humiliated by Haitian military victories and decimated by disease, the defeated French armada limped home in utter defeat.
Nor is Toussaint’s fate in any way unrelated to the fate of the new United States of America further north. Quite the opposite:
From Washington, Thomas Jefferson actively supported Napoléon’s military plans to re-enslave Haiti — beginning with his refusal to recognize the newly-independent Black government of Haiti during his eight years in office as President; and ending with the imposition of a U.S. naval blockade on Haiti using his military powers as U.S. Commander in Chief.
In so doing, Jefferson consciously and deliberately fanned widespread fears among southern American slave plantation owners that the so-called “contagion” of French slave rebellions in Haiti would soon spread north to the United States.
Don’t just take my word for it. Take Jefferson’s: As far back as July 14, 1793 — the same year France was voting to end slavery forever — an alarmed Jefferson wrote to his fellow Virginian slave-owner James Monroe, “I become daily more and more convinced that all the West India Islands will remain in the hands of the people of colour, and a total expulsion of the whites sooner or later take place. It is high time,” Jefferson continued ominously, that “we should foresee the bloody scenes which our children certainly, and possibly ourselves (south of the Patowmac) have to wade through, and try to avert them.”
To add insult to injury, the date Jefferson’s notorious letter to Monroe coincided exactly with the fourth anniversary of the fall of the Bastille: July 14, 1793.
So it wasn’t just Napoléon who betrayed the noblest ideals of the French Revolution — and who betrayed Toussiant. It was Thomas Jefferson himself. Indeed, through the Louisiana Purchase, Jefferson and Napoléon together re-enslaved millions (and vastly extended the territories open to slavery in the new United States).
The Black Codes
In both the U.S. and the U.K. today, the role of French colonial slavery in shaping the institution of slavery globally is often misunderstood — or ignored completely.
Most of the stunning wealth and beauty of Paris under Louis XIV was in fact built on the naked, bleeding backs of several hundred thousand French slaves, imported from Africa by force to work the French sugar plantations. As historian Tom Reis explains, “Saint-Domingue [now known as Haiti] was the most valuable colony in the world. And its staggering wealth was supported by staggering brutality.” 50% of new slaves died after less than a year in the islands. As Reis concludes bluntly, even “the brutality of the American Cotton Kingdom a century later could not compare to that of Saint-Domingue in the 1700s.”
Yet an equally powerful, equally long-lived anti-slavery tradition had taken root in France as well. As early as 1315, King Louis X of France had published a decree proclaiming that “France signifies freedom,” thereby implicitly freeing any slave who crossed into the borders into France forever. Admittedly this noble decree did absolutely nothing to end slavery in the French colonies abroad.
By 1685, Louis XIV’s notorious new Code Noir (“Black Laws”) institutionalized mass-slavery in all of France’s many far-flung overseas territories — while simultaneously expelling all Jews from France.
Much as in America, therefore, French political philosophy was rife (and rotten) with a whole series of irreconcilable contradictions concerning slavery. For example, Louis XIV once personally intervened to guarantee the freedom of a slave brought to Paris, based on that ancient royal decree that “there are no slaves in France” — and all this at a time when literally hundreds of thousands of Africans were enslaved under the power of the French Empire worldwide.
Yet the Sun King’s intervention, in turn, soon triggered waves of lawsuits by Frenchmen of mixed-race ancestry, suing (often successfully) for expanded rights and freedoms. Hence Paris soon became home for a class of free — often wealthy — mulatto landowners born in the French Caribbean colonies of the Americas, but claiming full citizenship in France itself. Indeed it is no exaggeration to say that these free black men (or gens de couleur as the French called them) were the first true Americans-in-Paris, decades before Ben Franklin, John Adams, Tom Paine, or Thomas Jefferson first set foot in France.
Predictably the vast Code Noir itself was filled with internal contradictions. For example, under Article 9 of the Code Noir, white men could be severely fined for producing children with slave concubines who were owned by another man — along with the slave concubine’s negligent master.
Alas most provisions of the Code Noir were even more barbaric than American laws governing slavery: for instance, under the Code Noir slaves could legally be chained or beaten — and even tortured or executed if they struck their masters or attempted repeatedly to escape. Under French law, torture was systematic and state-regulated: The penalty for a first escape attempt was to cut off an ear. The penalty for a second attempt was to cut a hamstring. The penalty for a third escape attempt was death.
French philosophers were well aware that French wealth was built on French slavery. As Voltaire himself once complained, through the voice of his famous fictional character Candide, slavery was “the price we pay for the sugar…in Europe” — a sarcasm uttered when Candide confronts a starving slave whose leg and arm have both been hacked off for stealing food. Parisian pastries, Voltaire concludes bitterly, were sweetened with sugar but leavened with blood.
No one in America understood all this better than Thomas Jefferson — the third founding father to earn a place in our Americans-in-Paris Pantheon.
Ruined Revolutions
To their eternal credit (and Jefferson’s shame) these same French philosophers, from Montesquieu to Voltaire, all stood firm in fervent opposition to the notorious Code Noir. Some even dedicated their lives to its destruction — including the Christian theologian Abbé Raynal, who in 1770 published a scathing multi-volume exposé of the entire French slave empire. Banned and burned, the book nonetheless became an underground bestseller, ran to 70 editions, and influenced both British and American abolitionists on both sides of the Atlantic when it was translated into English.
Not surprisingly, given such splendid ideals and advocates, the collapse of French slavery came only shortly after the fall of the Bastille. By 1790, publication of the Rights of Man granted full citizenship to the so-called gens de couleur (in other words, free men-of-color from the Caribbean who were already living as free men in Paris). Then in 1791, the French slave colony of Saint Domingue — where 40,000 white French colonists lived surrounded by 400,000 African slaves — rose up under the charismatic leadership of the formerly-enslaved black General Toussaint L’Ouverture. Breaking with France, the newly-independent nation of Saint Domingue (which renamed itself Haiti) became the first nation ever to shatter the hated chains of slavery completely.
Terrified of losing Haiti’s vast wealth in coffee, indigo, and sugar, the French Revolutionary Government under Robespierre soon granted full freedom to all slaves in all French colonies in 1794 — and even seated Black representatives in the French National Assembly.
Decades ahead of the U.S. And U.K., it truly seemed as if the noblest ideals of the French Revolution had already come to full fruition.
Napoléon’s Treason
It was, alas, the former hero of the Revolution himself, Napoleon Bonaparte, who brutally betrayed the Revolution he had once defended — not just by declaring himself Emperor, but also by reinstating the old Code Noir (and thereby re-enslaving several million recently-freed French citizens around the world).
The historical timeline here is important enough to comb through in some detail: By 1802, the self-declared Imperial Consul, Napoléon Bonaparte, suddenly and unilaterally re-authorized slavery in all of France’s remaining foreign colonies — meanwhile expelling all free black soldiers from his armies. With a single stroke of Napoléon’s pen, hundreds of thousands of human beings were instantly re-enslaved worldwide. Ironically, 1802 was the same year that the newly formed state of Ohio banned slavery within its borders — directly adjacent to the suddenly re-enslaved French territories of Louisiana. It was also the year the United States banned further importation of black slaves from Africa, with Thomas Jefferson’s full support and signature.
Next Napoléon set his sights on reconquering the wealthy former French slave colony of Haiti. Dispatching a huge armada to deliver a knockout blow, Napoleon hoped to trick or trap or simply frighten the famous Haitian commander, Toussaint L’Ouverture, into immediate surrender or submission.
At first, Toussaint and his followers declared themselves ready to die rather than return to slavery. In so doing, they seemed to understand the original French motto of “Liberty, equality, fraternity, or death” far better than the French themselves. Perhaps that was why the phrase “or death” was eventually removed from the official French state version.
Retreating into the mountains, Toussaint’s forces practiced the same kind of scorched-earth strategy that would later defeat Napoleon in Russia.
Yet when Toussaint finally dared to negotiate a cease-fire with the frustrated French, he tragically let himself be lured into attending fake “peace talks” on board a French ship. Instantly the heroic Haitian General found himself chained, stripped, tortured, and shipped back to France as a humiliated prisoner of war. “They have sent me to France naked as a worm,” he wrote in despair.
But his legacy and legend lived on, perhaps most notably in the stage portrayal of Toussaint by yet another famous Black American in Paris, Paul Robeson. In 1936 Robeson had headlined a celebrated British stage play about the Haitian hero.
Ironically, Robeson’s courageous but controversial speech to the 1949 Paris Peace Conress immediately resulted in a ban on all further performances in the U.S.
Black-listed by Senator McCarthy’s Un-American Activities Committee, Robeson’s efforts to perform in Peekskill, New York even sparked a notorious anti-Black, anti-Semitic riot.
