 a gweithio i gael ei gweithio clywbeth cysylltu yn yr ysgol Llyfridd. Mae'r hyn yn gwneud i'r Jonor Albert a rwy'n gweithio cysylltu'n gwybodol ar gyfer hynny. Mae'r gweithio'n gweithio ar gyfer Rhaglen Rhywb yn cymhwylo sydd wedi'i gweithio ymddangos gyda Llyfridd. Felly mae'r gweithio'n gweithio, mae'n gweithio'n gweithio. You can post a question to Sudeb by using the question form just below this video above me you'll find a link to the shop where you can buy his book. There's also a link for you to provide us with feedback, online cultural events are new for the British Library and would really like to know what you think. You can also donate to the British Library, the British Library is a charity. ystod fel yr adref, rydyn nhw'n meddwl i'r Rabyn. Hello, and welcome to this discussion of Black Spartacus by Sudir Hazari Syn. Thank you to the British Library for organising this event and for inviting me to chair it. I want to just begin by briefly describing the structure of the event. I will introduce our author, Sudir Hazari Syn. He and I will then have a conversation about the book for about 40 minutes. And then there will be time for questions from the audience. I'd like to ask members of the audience to submit questions through the question form, which you can find below the video, and I will then read them out for the benefit of Sudir and everyone else. So I first have the very pleasurable task of introducing Sudir. Sudir Hazariseng was born in Mauritius. He is a fellow of the British Academy and has been a fellow and tutor in politics at Balliel College Oxford since 1990. He's written extensively about French intellectual and cultural history. Among his books are The Legend of Napoleon, In the Shadow of the General, and How the French Think, all of which have won multiple awards. In 2020, he became a Grand Commander of the Order of the Star and Key of the Indian Ocean, which is the highest honour of the Republic of Mauritius. And I understand that Black Spartacus has just been shortlisted for the Bailey Gifford Prize, which is the UK's premier prize for non-fiction books. So we're very lucky to have Sudir with us today. Welcome to the event, Sudir, and thank you for taking time to speak with us. I want to start by thanking you for writing this incredible book. Reading it has been one of the most pleasurable, informative and stimulating things I've had to do in the last few weeks. The book's subtitle promises to tell the story of, and I quote, the epic life of Toussaint Louverture, and it succeeds in telling not only the gripping story of the rise and tragic fall of this utterly remarkable figure, whom Sudir calls the first black superhero of the modern age, but also that of the revolution that he led, the country that he did so much to found, the world's first independent black state, and the birth is nothing less than a new world in which enslaved black people announced the beginning of the end of the institution of slavery. I won't say much more about the book upfront, but I hope that the conversation we're about to have will give our audience more of a sense of the book and its remarkable subject. So let me start by asking you, Sudir, to say Louverture is a very substantially written about and much mythologised figure. And early on in the book you described recent historiographical trends in Toussaint scholarship, in respect of which you say, the ambition behind this biography is to cut through these tickets and find our way back to Toussaint, to return as far as possible to the primary sources, to try to see the world through his eyes and to recapture the boldness of his thinking and the individuality of his voice. And so what I wanted to ask you was whether you were impatient with these tickets, with the manner in which perhaps other theorists have brought their own investments to their reconstruction of Toussaint. What did you hope to achieve by writing this book? Thank you very much, Rahul, and thank you for that very warm and generous introduction and for being available this evening to be in conversation with me about Toussaint. I was impatient, yes, because part of this story, and we are still in Black History Month, part of this story is a story of Eurasia, because we are talking about the Haitian Revolution, which I think is the most extraordinary revolution of the Age of Revolutions in the late 18th century, yet for a very long time when people talked about the Age of Revolutions, and you still see it in books and textbooks that are still read today, people talk almost exclusively about the French and American revolutions. So some of these tickets are perhaps the ticket is the wrong metaphor here because it's really about cutting things and removing them from sight, hence this idea of histories being erased. Eurasia seems to me to involve some combination of denial, eliminating the story altogether, and indeed in the context of Britain, eliminating the fact that Britain also tried to fight to restore slavery in the 1790s, and Pitt the Younger, who sometimes described as an abolitionist, was actually the Prime Minister who piloted and financed this counter-revolutionary war that lasted five years, and which ended in humiliating British defeat. So there's denial, there's denaturing, so for a long time the Haitian Revolution and Toussaint were described in opposite and very pejorative ways. This was seen as a violent, primitive event rather than an event which focused on the emancipation of the enslaved people. Eurasia is also about relativising things, hence when it is acknowledged often, and you see this very much in French writing, that the Eurasian Revolution is seen as a kind of poor distant relative to the main occurrence, which is what happens in France or happens in the United States. And underlying this, of course, is a very patronising, objectifying view of the event, which really denies agency to the revolutionaries in Saint-Domingue. And so all of this, and sometimes you see this even in biographies that are positive about Toussaint, but they still somehow don't quite want to give him all the attributes of agency that I think is extraordinary life warrant. So that's really what I felt I was up against, and that's why I thought it was really important to try and bring back his voice. Thank you. I wonder if you want to say something about the sources that were most useful to you in writing this book, and perhaps even about sources that surprised you in the course of researching and writing the book. Yes, thank you, because this book would not have been possible without all the wonderful archival material that I found. Now, it's a characteristic tragedy, I think, of post-colonial society. Very often the colonial entity robbed them of their memory as well, and this happened to Haiti. Almost all the documents about the colonial history of Saint-Domingue in the 18th century are now in France. And so that's where you have to go to find out about Haitian history before 1804. But I was able to draw on all of those sources, and it's an incredibly rich series of documents which contain a lot of material by, written by Toussaint himself, because Toussaint was a French general, an administrator, and he ends his career as the governor of Saint-Domingue. So he leaves behind an absolutely massive paper trail. But the other exciting thing was finding material about Saint-Domingue in the United States, because America was very interested in the revolution and tried to develop close links with Toussaint-Domingue. So in various American archives I found wonderful documents, including documents from Toussaint himself, Spain as well, and Britain. By nature of the British involvement, the archives in Q have a lot of documentation, including documentation which highlights Toussaint's dealings with the British. And last but not least, I should mention the British Library, which has a wonderful collection of secondary sources from the period, and a unique document, which are the memoirs of a French administrator who settled in Saint-Domingue in the late 18th century. And he gives us an absolutely unique eye-witness account of how the revolution in Saint-Domingue appeared to essentially a counter-revolutionary Frenchman in the late 18th and early 19th centuries. This is an absolutely unique document, and I thank the British Library for keeping it for two centuries and making it available. That's extraordinary. One of the most intriguing aspects of Toussaint-Domingue for me as a political theorist was reading about the manner in which his worldview was shaped by a range of different influences from the culture of the Alada region in Benin, the indigenous Tino Indians of the Caribbean, the culture of Voodoo in Haiti, Catholicism, French Republicanism. And yet, despite the convergence of these many influences, there has been a kind of persistent tendency in the scholarship to view Toussaint and his milieu through European categories, as the Black Jacobin in the title of CLR James' famous book, as the Black Napoleon as an instance of black carbonarism. I think this is the term that's used to describe the milieu out of which the revolution emerges, and even as Black Spartacus in the title of your book. And I wondered if these sorts of European framings reduced the range of ideological and political currents through which we might see Toussaint. Why does this seem to be such an enduring tendency in the way we perhaps in the West view Toussaint? That's a fantastic question, and I start by pleading guilty because the title of the book is, in a sense, a comparison of Toussaint to a figure from antiquity but a European figure. I would say, I mean, the reason I chose that particular title is that it was one that Toussaint himself, it was given to Toussaint by perhaps his closest French Republican ally, a governor called Etienne Lavaux, who gave the speech in 1796 calling Toussaint, the Black Spartacus. And Toussaint himself was very happy for that title to be bestowed upon him, and he himself was very happy to use it. And rather like the French Revolutionaries, this is one area where there is quite a lot of overlap. Rather like the French Revolutionaries, analogies with Greece and Rome came quite readily to Toussaint. Whenever he was haranguing his soldiers, for example, he often used to say to them, come on, you've got to be virtuous, you've got to be manly like the Romans. This is how the Romans won their victories, particularly when he was talking about discipline. So the Roman comparisons were comparisons that Toussaint himself made, and I think if they were good enough for him, then they're good enough for me. However, those sorts of analogies often are used for slightly more pejorative purposes. And I think what it does, the kind of work that it does conceptually is just to both, you know, if you're looking at it in a slightly benign way, you can say that what it's doing is giving a sort of sense of familiarity to either an alien event or a milieu that is very hard to comprehend from a European perspective. But of course, the consequence of doing that is that it ends up denaturing the object, and particularly in the case of the Haitian Revolution and Toussaint himself, relativising or minimising completely those African and Caribbean characteristics. The L.R. James, I mean, it still is an absolutely magnificent book, but it's a book which doesn't really dwell at all, barely mentions the African and Caribbean aspect. And, you know, one of the key Caribbean aspects, of course, is Toussaint's religiosity. He's a devout Catholic. And because that doesn't really fit in with the sort of mid-20th century neo-Marxist conception of revolution, that gets swept under the carpet. So, there's a lot at stake culturally and in terms of interpretation in these framings. Thanks. But of course, I suppose Toussaint himself leads us to make these connections because he felt such a deep attachment to Frenchness in addition to everything else that he was. I wonder if I could ask you about that very complicated relationship between him and Saint-Domingue and France. You tell the story of his relationship with successive French agents in the colony, you know, with each of whom he masterfully succeeds in setting the terms of the relationship and gaining the upper hand. And yet through all of those encounters, he shows no desire to completely sever the connection with France. So, how should we understand his enduring attachment to France and his desire to preserve this connection between Saint-Domingue and the metropole? Great question. I mean, it's one that if we had the whole evening, we could perhaps start to arrive at some sort of comprehension of it because it is very complicated because it works at multiple levels. I think one has to start almost with a sort of emotional identification that Toussaint had with the French. And of course, when you fight on the battlefield with French soldiers in the name of the French Republic, that creates, because that's what Toussaint does from 1794 onwards. He's fighting for France and he's seeing comrades of his die on the battlefield in order to keep Saint-Domingue French. That does create a very powerful bond. And his relationship with the French Revolution is a complicated one, but I think he always remains right until the very end true to the original spirit of the French Revolution. And I would say that it's not he who moves away from the French Revolution. It's the French Revolution that moves away from him because what happens in France in the second half of the 1790s is that the French Revolution takes an increasingly conservative turn. And that leads to the advent of Napoleon Bonaparte in the 1799 coup. And Bonaparte, in a sense, is a counter-revolutionary, I would say, rather than a revolutionary. And you see that the first moment where you actually see that in full is when he restores slavery in 1802. So of course Toussaint doesn't want to have anything to do with that France, the France that is counter-revolutionary, and the France that is working to restore slavery. But he retains this personal, intellectual, ideological attachment to certain ideals of the revolution. And the one that I highlight most emphatically throughout the book is the idea of brotherhood, of fraternity, which he, I would say, borrows and then adapt to his own purposes, because that's the other really important thing about Toussaint. He's never purely imitative in anything he does. He's drawing from all these different cultures, whether they're Caribbean or African or European, but always for his own strategic and tactical purposes. And the same is true of fraternity, the way he understands it is actually quite different from the model that emerges with the Jacobins in the 1790s. I'm glad you brought up fraternity because I wanted to press you a little bit on the notion of republicanism, which seems to be an important thread that runs through the whole book. It does a lot of work in explaining his political commitments. It describes a utopian vision of political community, but also a style of war, a style of living. So I wondered if you could say a little bit about how Toussaint inhabits and maybe refashions this category, and particularly also about the gaps and tensions that there might have been between his republicanism and the French tradition of republicanism. I suppose what I'm getting at is I'm trying to understand whether he was trying to hold the French, the French in the metropole to the noblest of their own standards, or whether there was something lacking even in the most expansive conception of French republicanism that he was trying to show up. Fantastic. That's a fantastic question. And again, I think what it shows is just that even when the trajectories of Saint-Amang and Revolutionary France are moving in parallel, there are still very important differences between the two entities. I think one of the things that emerges very clearly when you look at Toussaint's dealings with all these different French administrators, except for Lavaux. He thinks he's an absolutely pure, sincere republican. He writes almost going to love letters to him. I mean, that's very much in that sort of sentimental style of the late 18th century. But he thinks that there are some French republicans who are absolutely pure and who are therefore completely committed and dedicated to defending the interest of Saint-Amang. And of course protecting the people of Saint-Amang from enslavement or reinslavement. But his dealings with other French administrators are much more problematic. And that's where you get into this rather interesting conflict where you can see that they are treating him not to use Kantian language, not as an end in himself, but as a means. And they're very patronising, very condescending and very unwilling to recognise the remarkable power and talent that he has. So that's what leads him to become increasingly suspicious of the French at one level, of the French Republic at one level, because this is a colonial republic. So we have to remember that the interactions between France and Saint-Amang are asymmetrical, because France is still regarding itself as a colonising power. So when a country behaves as a colonising power, the fact that it's a republic ultimately ends up not meaning very much, it's the colonising dynamic that ends up playing out. And that's what Tousain experiences. But in terms of his own beliefs and values, what I try to do is sketch out. I mean, he's not a theorist, but he's someone who is constantly driven by ideas and values. So you have to reconstitute his beliefs and values. But I think once you do that, you see that he's very clearly driven by certain absolutely fundamental republican objectives. One is to prevent his people from being re-enslaved. The other is to develop this notion of fraternity, which has two prongs. One is the unification of the black people of Saint-Amang, all the black people, whether they're Creole born, born in the Caribbean, or as they were called at the time, Bothal, born in Africa. And one should remember that 60% of the adults in the late 18th century, Saint-Amang, were born in Africa. So Saint-Amang was not their place of birth. So Tousain is trying to bring them together and tell them that they form a community, as it were. But fraternity for him is also about creating harmony or re-establishing harmony between the black people, the white settlers, and the people of mixed race. And that's a key ingredient in what he's trying to achieve. So fraternity is the second pillar of his republicanism. And then the third, and you see it as driving all his policies, is I think this notion of the common good. What he's trying to build is a kind of fraternal community in which everyone is working for the best interests of Saint-Amang. And that is what eventually leads him into a kind of collision course with the French. Because of course the colonial dynamic doesn't really allow for a prioritisation of the interests of the colony against those of the metropole. So that's what eventually becomes the major conflict between Saint-Amang and the French. Because the French can't even countenance the possibility that a colonial entity is going to be able to behave in an autonomous way. Because that's what Tousain wants. He doesn't want to break from France, but he wants to be able to, when it's necessary and when it's in the interests of Saint-Amang, follow policies that are in Saint-Amang's interests rather than in the interests of the metropole. And of course this vision of fraternity also leads to a particular conceptualisation of race. And I wonder if we could talk about that. In particular, I'm curious about whether the opportunity to have warm relationships with people like Lavaux account for his ability to envision a multi-racial community, a kind of proto-civic nationalism, if you like. I'm not sure if that's perhaps too presentist a term to foist on to him in that time. But this is an interesting contrast to the views of some of his contemporaries who would have taken a much more, you know, the McCandallus line that you write about crudly in all the whites. Can you perhaps tell us something about these contrasting views of race and the possibility of racial coexistence that obtained in that time and place? Yes, absolutely. And in that dialogue and conversation that Toussaint is having and which I try to reconstitute because many of the, particularly his early speeches, are speeches that he is giving to his fellow, to his brothers, his black brothers, saying to them, And there for reasons that you can understand are just incredibly suspicious of white people in general, right? These are people who have enslaved them for several generations, right? And suddenly from 1793 onwards, Toussaint or other 1794 in Toussaint's case, Black leaders are telling their brothers and sisters that you can trust these whites because they are people who are bound by honorable objectives. And it's incredibly hard for a lot of black people to accept that and Toussaint talks to them and tries to persuade them that this is necessary. And this is where you see the kind of didacticism of his approach and you see him spelling out this kind of vision of what a multiracial future community should look like. And I think this is where also his religiosity comes in because some of these values that he's preaching, for example, the emphasis on forgiveness and reconciliation, is getting from his Catholicism or his particular brand of Catholicism. And he's also drawing there on other forms of spirituality too. So it's a very diverse, almost kind of eclectic range of arguments that he draws upon when he's talking about race. The other thing about his language when he talks about race, which is very striking, is that perhaps the single term that comes up most often is the word honour. In other words, he's not only interested in thinking about race in terms of rights. Of course, rights really matter. And the fight, particularly in the first half of the 1790s, is a fight to emancipate and therefore to establish concretely in law on a kind of juridical basis that black people are equal to all the other communities. Once that's achieved, to say, is interested in something much bigger, much grander, which is actually to prove that black people are not just as competent as other groups to carry out a wide range of tasks, but better. And so that's where this concept of black honour comes in. And it has very strikingly modern echoes too. And in that sense, it's very instructive to read in because he's really, and there's such a long and distinguished tradition of this across the black communities across the world of emphasizing this notion of honour. I was really struck by what you said about such a high proportion of the population of the colony being African born. And I was wondering if we could talk a little bit about the cultures that they came from, and in particular the cosmologies that might have animated their political worldviews. The voodoo makes a frequent appearance in the book as a site for political thinking and resistance. It seems to supply the ideas and the networks out of which some of the precipitating events of the revolution emerge. I'm thinking of the famous Boa Kaiman ceremony, for example. And Tusa is seen by his followers through the lens of the Haitian laws, the deities such as Papa Legba and Ogun Fer, you tell us. Yet later in life, in 1800, he bans voodoo in a decree that prohibits nocturnal assemblies and dances, presumably of precisely the kind that produced the revolution. So how do we make sense of the place of voodoo in this revolutionary and post-revolutionary milieu? It's a fantastic question and I think again one needs to almost distinguish different levels. I mean, one preliminary remark here is that as with, you know, I suppose I said the word Christianity, you know, it's a term which would cover so much and so much variation. I think when we're talking about voodoo in late 18th century Saint-Amang, it's a sort of umbrella term which actually covers and I hasten to it I'm not a specialist, but it stretches across actually quite a wide range of spiritual systems of belief. But it is a recognisable way of life and you see it from the third quarter of the 18th century and you see the increasing role that it's occupying, particularly in the plantations. I mean, we have documents that kind of underscore the extent to which voodoo is part of the daily life of the men and women who are still enslaved at this time, but who are working on the plantations. And I think, to Sarah's attitude to it, I would say, first of all, if you think of it as a personal ethic, this is something that I find a lot of direct evidence of. So he wears a red handkerchief on his head. And that's the classic symbol of Ogunfair, the spirit of war. And that's also a way of communicating with his own troops, as it were, many of whom he knows are adepts of the voodoo religion and the voodoo way of life. In fact, the very name Louverture, and this is what I describe in the book, faces two ways, faces three ways, actually, because it is a nod to the enlightenment and the idea of intellectual and personal emancipation. But one of the voodoo loas or spirits is Papa Legba, who is the guardian of the crossroads, and is the figure who allows you to make the transition from something to one form of life to another. So when he chooses that word, when he chooses that name, Louverture, in 1793, he's actually also speaking to his own primary constituency, and that's very characteristic of Toussaint. At the same moment, he's very often using language that can speak to multiple audiences. Of course, voodoo has African roots, and since the majority of the adults were African born, he's very keen to retain that capacity to communicate with them. Now, all of this is personal, right, individual, however, Toussaint is also someone who has responsibilities, and particularly in the later 1790s, he's trying to hit one of his primary objectives economically is to kickstart the economy and particularly the plantation economy. I mean, we might get to talk about it a little later. But one of the fundamental problems he starts to face in restoring, to put it very quickly, in restoring some kind of discipline in the labor force is that many of them are practicing voodoo, and voodoo, as people will know, is something that happens at night and in the early hours of the morning. And so if you're trying to instill and maintain a kind of system of discipline among the workforce, it's very hard to allow voodoo to continue. And I think the 1800 decree has to be seen exactly in that context. It's not that he's necessarily against voodoo per se, of course he isn't, but his primary objective in 1800 and in 1801 is to restart the economy and viewed from that perspective voodoo is actually an impediment. That's really interesting. So this is also a moment of a shift from slavery to perhaps a kind of state capitalism, if you like, or a state plantation system. And it's a shift in Tusa perhaps also from revolutionary to, as you said, the man with responsibilities, the governor. And I wonder if these shifts change the meaning or the possibility of freedom as he begins to take on these new responsibilities. I'm thinking particularly about the more uncomfortable aspects of the 1801 constitution, which of course many of his critics pointed out at the time. The centralisation of power, but also the measures that tied the cultivators to the plantation system. And I was thinking here of Marx's category of wage slavery, which of course he comes up with 50 years after these events, which invites us to think about the resemblances as much as the differences between forced and badly remunerated labour. So the question is, does Tusa, as governor, roll back from his lofty conceptions of freedom, should that trouble us? Or should we read this as necessary accommodations that he had to make, he had no choice but to make? I mean, I would say more the latter simply because if you're looking at the context in the late 18th, early 19th century, he's already starting to sense that not only is the revolution being threatened, but that the principal shield that he had hoped would deflect some of these predatory moves that people wanted to make against Saint-Domingue, his principal shield, which was France, was moving towards some sort of restoration of slavery. And this isn't just about Saint-Domingue, you know, because in fact when the French restore slavery, they don't do it first in Saint-Domingue, they do it in Guadeloupe and they do it in some other Caribbean colonies. So this is a kind of general policy rather than something that is Saint-Domingue specific. And given that that was his primary objective, well, I'd say his two primary objectives by the late 1790s are to protect his people from re-enslavement and maintain the regime that he has created and the social order that he has created. Now the only way that that can happen is if Saint-Domingue is able to continue to export. And by then he's already established quite an intricate network of trading relations with the Americans and even the British. The British are very keen to trade with Saint-Domingue because Saint-Domingue produces things that the British need in the Caribbean. And that is his lifeline. And therefore, once you think of it in those terms, it becomes really, and I put it very simply, a question of the survival of the revolution. If there were many other revolutionary states at the time, I think might have been able to think about this differently. But it is the only state of its kind and therefore he puts the survival of the revolution as his highest priority. And his economic policy, I think, ends up reflecting that. That's extraordinary also because it almost prefigures the dilemmas that so many subsequent revolutions have, whether it's the Bolsheviks or Cuba or any of a number of examples that we can think of. So in a sense, the Haitian revolution seems to prefigure or offer the prototype of all modern revolutions that come after it. Yes, absolutely. But there I would add one other thing, which I think is something distinctive of Toussaint. Because among revolutionaries, and we've seen this throughout the 19th and the 20th centuries, there's often the debate about whether you consolidate or whether you internationalize. Toussaint, I think even if he had the means to internationalize with someone who did not believe in internationalization he didn't believe in it for, I think, a very interesting reason, which is that he thought that if a revolution was to succeed, its sources and its roots had to come from within that society itself. In other words, he did not believe that you could promote revolution by force of arms. And that's a big debate among revolutionaries. But Toussaint had a very clear view and a very clear understanding that the only reason a revolution works is if it's completely embedded in the spirit and the values and the practices of a particular people. Yeah. Just a quick reminder to the audience that you can send in questions using the question form. We're going to move into the last section of our structured conversation. So this is your opportunity to get those questions in. Toussaint comes across as a truly remarkable man in everything you write about him, you know, fiercely intelligent, a creative thinker, a brilliant military commander, master tactician, diplomat, practitioner of the medical arts, skilled horseman, indie fatigable. Sometimes he sounds too good to be true. And this made me think or wonder how you distinguish myth and legend from fact, particularly when you're dealing with oral history sources. But also is it even important for you to do this? Because I sense that you're as interested in the legend and in the way the legend travels. And your penultimate chapter is a really fantastic study of the way in which the legend, the myth of Toussaint travels and the work that it does. So but my question is, is there a tension between reconstructing the life of Toussaint in a way that has justice to the sources, but also tracing and taking pleasure in the many appropriations of his name and legacy that try to do radical work? Yes, thank you. Yeah, no, that's a great question. And I mean, part of the answer is that I'm interested and I've done this before when writing about Napoleon and de Gaulle, for example. I'm interested in myth as, you know, as social constructions, if you like. In other words, these are things that people put together for particular purposes. And sometimes the leaders themselves do this. Toussaint, I should say, is not that interested in promoting himself. There is a sort of cult of the personality by the late 1790s in Saint-Domingue. But as far as I can make out, it's a spontaneous one. And it's one that is based on the sort of general recognition that this person is exceptional. You often hear the language of exceptionality, particularly among the white settlers who use it as a kind of resource almost to entrust themselves to him. They say, oh, he may be black. And we may not trust black people in general, but he's an exceptional black. He has qualities that, you know, in their own kind of racist view of the world, they just couldn't believe that all black people could be like Toussaint. But they were prepared to believe that there were a few who could be like him. But in terms of the myth and the way it develops after Toussaint's death, I think this is just a remarkable testimony really to the almost a sort of spiritual power of the Haitian Revolution. Because there's this quite remarkable dichotomy between the erasure of the Haitian Revolution in, if you like, white Western historiography, because it does disappear for a long time, you know, almost two centuries. It's sort of wiped out. The phenomenon that I trace in the final chapters of the book, which is, you know, it doesn't disappear completely because it survives in people's imaginations. It survives in oral traditions. It survives in stories that people tell to each other and tell to their children. I mean, that's how the Toussaint legend develops in the United States among African Americans. The stories of Toussaint and his heroic military achievements are told to children. And you can almost trace that continuity all the way from the early 19th century to the mid 20th. So that's how political legends are transmitted. And I think what is really interesting about Toussaint is that you can find, if you look closely enough, you don't need to rely on written sources. A lot of this is happening through oral sources or through songs, through portraiture. One of the most remarkable works of art that I came across about Toussaint was the collection on the Haitian Revolution by the African American artist Jacob Lawrence, who produces these wonderful panels in 1939. And the reason I love them is because there are short descriptions beneath each of them, but the power is in the image. And when you look at these images of Toussaint, what you can then imagine is how people who were not literate saw him, because that's what Jacob Lawrence is doing. He's sort of projecting that absolutely marvellous reconstitution of the Louverturian epic by black communities across the Atlantic. So this is a story that runs right across the 19th and the 20th centuries. Okay, I think this might be a good opportunity to take some audience questions. So the first question is from Rachel Douglas. Even for so well documented a historical figure as Toussaint Louvertur, there are many things we don't know about him, or have learned relatively recently, such as his ownership, his own ownership of slaves himself. Which sources did you find the most useful? Were there archive sources in Haiti that you found useful? And where was most of your source material located? Thank you, Rachel. Unfortunately, there weren't that many sources that I found in Haiti itself. I mean, it's wonderful to talk to Haitians, of course, because you get a sense of where Toussaint lives in the Haitian imagination, and he occupies a very special place. But in terms of sources, the bulk of the material is actually in France in the Archive Colonial, and in the Archive Nationale. And also, because France was low colonial power, and many of the, particularly the coastal towns and cities were centres of shipping. So places like Bordeaux and Nantes also have not insignificant holdings. So that was my main source as far as the bulk of the documents were concerned. As far as Toussaint's pre-revolutionary life, pre-1791, the sad thing is we have very few documents, in fact, just a handful. So we still don't know for sure when exactly he was born, which year he was emancipated. We think it's sometime around the mid-1770s, but the manumission document hasn't appeared. I mean, I think it probably may well emerge at some point, because there's a lot of this material that hasn't been completely searched, particularly in French departmental archives. So I haven't given up hope that that will be emerged. But sadly, the pre-revolutionary life of Toussaint is one where documents are relatively few and far between. One more question from Rachel, who herself worked on Toussaint. So did your take on Toussaint Loubert, your change over the time you were working on this book? I've worked on CLR James and the different play and history versions of the Black Jacobins. I think the book is called The Making of the Black Jacobins. Overtime James's portrayal of Toussaint Loubert, you changed quite considerably. So did your own take change over time as you were working on the book? I mean, not as much as I think. I mean, the time difference between the two editions of the Black Jacobins is quite considerable. The first edition I think dates from the late 1930s. The later edition is in the early 1960s, I think. So that's a lot of time. And of course, you're always slightly shaped by the wider political and geopolitical context. So what's happening in the 50s and 60s is anti-colonial revolutions are on the march in a way that could only be, it was only a sort of glimmer in the 1930s. And I think that does shape, to some extent, CLR James' take. My intuition, let me put it that way, and that's what I hope to have eventually confirmed in the writing of the book, is that one needed to take Toussaint's republicanism seriously. In other words, the interpretative key to understanding, and indeed the Haitian revolution, was to think about this republicanism, but to think about it as a creole republicanism, a republicanism that rested on local Antillian Caribbean considerations and that was mediated through the political and ideological preferences of someone like Toussaint. And that's what I tried to do in the book, and that's what fortunately the archival sources allowed me to do. So in that sense, I didn't really change very much. I found my initial intuitions, thankfully, confirmed. Thanks. A question from Autumn. To what extent did Louverture or key figureheads contribute to the original outbreak of the Haitian revolution? That's a great question, Autumn, and although the documentation is scant there too, I think there's a fair amount of circumstantial evidence that shows that Toussaint played actually quite a major role in planning the outbreak. What happens from the late 1780s is that the sort of plantation elite among the enslaved start to meet regularly in the northern part of the territory. And they meet on Sundays, and the planters thought that this was basically a social event, so they were very happy to allow it. But what they were doing was in fact beginning to exchange information and prepare the ground for an insurrection. And that is what is planned in the middle of 1791. And the reason why I think Toussaint is very centrally involved is, first of all, his name doesn't appear anywhere, and that's absolutely classic to Toussaint because he had an absolute gift for looking absent in places that he were and appearing present in places that he wasn't. He was one of his almost kind of magical qualities. But when you look at the names of the people who were actually, you know, who have been documented as being the ring leaders in that early 1791 insurrection, they are all people who are very closely connected in one way or another to Toussaint. So he's very much there right from the outset. A question from Tajila Olayar. How did Islam influence the Haitian Revolution and Toussaint Louverture? That's a very interesting question, Tajila. I think what you see in, I mean, I think the most interesting connection may be through Macondale. We don't know much about Macondale, but some people believe that he was someone who practiced the Islamic faith. And Macondalism has some elements that may tie it to the Islamic faith. But beyond that, I must say, my own research didn't really find a huge amount of information when it came to the revolutionary period itself. Because of course, by the time you've reached the early 1790s, Macondale has been gone for nearly 30 years. And Toussaint is in many respects the person who picks up the torch as it were after him. But he is really someone who is trying to take the revolution in a rather different direction. So another question is, did you find yourself focusing on particular dimensions of Toussaint's life and less interested in others? There's little in the book, for example, about his personal life. Yeah, well that's less by choice than simply I wanted to stay as faithful as possible to the available records and documents. And although Toussaint was an absolutely voracious letter writer, you know, at the height of his power, he was dictating several hundred letters a day. He had five secretaries and he would be talking to each of them and dictating different bits of the letter to them and kind of wearing them down. But all of these are, as it were, public political administrative letters. Every now and then you get a sort of little hint of some of his private life. But you know, I think he's a revolutionary and very often revolutionary is particularly in revolutionary times and we must never forget that these are revolutionary times. Revolutionaries don't really have much of a private life and he is someone who devotes himself, you know, 150% to the cause. Some of his private letters were found by the French when they landed in Saint-Domingue in 1802, you know, the Napoleonic invasion, as it were. And some of those letters we know were destroyed. So there might have been more, as it were. I think, you know, I don't think they would add anything fundamentally to our picture of him because, as I say, he's someone who's going to primarily driven by this sense of, you know, belonging to and operating in the public sphere. That's a great question from Artica. How did Prusar reconcile his Catholic faith with the Lodw traditions he embraced? I could be mistaken, but they seem sort of Antoninous. That's a great question, Artica. And I think part of the answer is that one has to always remember with identities in a place like this. In a place like Saint-Domingue in the late 18th century is that people are constantly negotiating them and these different social and cultural forms are always in interaction with each other. And the relationship is never one that's completely static. So I think Toussaint is the sort of person who doesn't think to himself that he has to choose between his Catholicism and his embrace of certain aspects of the voodoo way of life. Rather, and this was very characteristic of the way he operated. He picked from, you know, ideologies or belief systems or ways of thinking. He picked elements that he felt could be useful to him or fitted with his own ethics and adapted them to his own purposes. I mean, he was very, I think one of the reasons why voodoo really mattered to him was because he could already see that it was a source of unity among the black communities of Saint-Domingue. And unity was something that was really important to him, right? And he wants to be close to the people. Therefore, this is not something that he can afford to ignore. On the other hand, that doesn't stop him from retaining and celebrating his own Catholic beliefs. But I think when you start looking more closely at these places or if you look at the way Catholicism is adapted in communities of enslaved and even in communities after they've been emancipated, you see it in Haiti today that voodoo and Catholicism sometimes are antagonistic, but sometimes they can't have it very easily. We're running out of time, so I think maybe there's time for one last question from me. Reading that penultimate chapter, it seems quite clear that there has never been a moment in the last two centuries when Toussaint has not been important in the black radical tradition. And yet in the white dominated academy of which both you and I are a part, it feels as if there has been a recent resurgence of interest in the Haitian Revolution added in Toussaint Louverture. Would you agree with that? And if so, why do you think that might be the case? It's a great question. I mean, I think part of it is to do with the more general resurgence of interest in the Haitian Revolution. And that is something which I think is to be welcomed and it's taken people to find different kinds of sources, particularly social historians, social and cultural historians have found very interesting things about the Haitian Revolution. Which have really changed our perspective on what revolutionary activity, how we should think about revolutionary activity almost. But I think there is also a slightly less welcome side perhaps in the West, which is to identify with particular individuals because they are reassuring and they are comforting. And I'm very struck that in interpretations of revolutionary moments, Western historiographies sometimes need to have a sort of quote unquote good guy that they can lead off against the bad guy. And so Malcolm X and Martin Luther King would be another one of these false oppositions. The good turned the other cheek, Martin Luther King versus the sort of violent and destructive Malcolm X. There's a great biography that's just come out by Danielle Joseph called The Sword in the Shield, which really fundamentally demolishes that kind of schematic opposition. Or if you think of the way people in the West talk about Mandela, you know, are saintly, you know, great believer in reconciliation, forgetting that Mandela was someone who always talked about the need to retain the arm struggle until such a moment as the White Order was prepared to negotiate seriously. You know, they kept telling Mandela, you know, we'll let you out of jail, but provided you renounced violence and he said no. So these false oppositions are always there. And in the way that the historiography has thought of the Haitian Revolution, the false opposition is between Toussaint, Toussaint being the nice conciliatory believer in a multiracial republic. And Dessaline, the sort of bloodthirsty, violent black nationalist, as it were. But actually, you know, when you look at the way the War of National Liberation was conducted in in Sandamang, as it prepares to become Haiti, you see that Toussaint and Dessaline were absolutely in agreement about the strategy that should have been pursued in order to do that. And defeat the French. So these figures sometimes serve these instrumental purposes, but actually they take us away from the fundamental elements of unity that we find in these great revolutionary moments. Thank you, Sudir. You've given us a tremendous amount to think about, both about the Haitian Revolution, but also its afterlives and the ways in which it continues to matter in the world today. That's all we have time for tonight. Thank you to our audience. And remember to buy the book from the link that you can also find on your screen. Thanks and good night. A big thank you to Ravel Rowe and Sudir Hazari Singh for the event, and also a big thank you to you, our lovely audience. 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