Haiti/The Start of It

Chateau de Joux in the Jura Mountains on the border
between France and Switzerland.

Part two of my grand adventure in the Alsace, Lorraine, and Franche Comté region of France in 2004: How I learned about the fate of Toussaint L'Ouverture, liberator of Haiti.

I am standing with several fellow journalists in the courtyard of a nearly 1,000-year-old fortress called Chateau de Joux and looking at two tiny windows in it. The chateau is more than 3,000 feet above sea level near the French town of Pontarlier in the Jura Mountains, a range that forms a 125-mile natural border between France and Switzerland. Built in the eleventh century as a Burgundian fortification, the original wooden structure was replaced with one of stone two centuries later.
     A true castle fortress, with its massive medieval towers, dry moats (there wasn't enough water for a wet moat up on the mountain), and drawbridge, the chateau was reinforced and expanded several times. Sometime in the eighteenth century it was converted into a state prison. A guide on the tour I'm taking, called the Abolition of Slavery Route, points to one of the windows and says (in English: There are two guides, one speaking French, the other English), "In there Toussaint L'Ouverture, the greatest leader of the Haitian Revolution, spent his final days."
     The Haitian Revolution, the only successful wide-scale revolt of black slaves anywhere in the world, began with the killing of whites by blacks in the late summer of 1791, in areas surrounding the main port town of Cap François (now Cap Haitien) in Saint-Domingue. Occupying the western third of the Spanish island of Hispaniola, an area that had been ceded to the French in 1697, Saint Domingue (it would become Haiti in 1804) was the gem of the Caribbean, the envy of the British, yielding more sugar, indigo, coffee, and cotton on its plantations than any other European colony. It was also, by many accounts, a place of horrifying cruelty. The rebellion—which had been in the hearts of the Haitians, and only needed a catalyst—was led by a charismatic Jamaican named Boukman. He was a houngan, or Vodou high priest, and with several thousand slaves (there were some 500,000 of them on that part of the island, many fresh off-the-boat African warriors), burned the northern plain to the ground.
     François Dominique Toussaint Breda (his original surname being the name of the area in Saint-Domingue from which he came) took care to get the family of his white owner, who had been good to him, on a ship to America, and then joined the revolution. He was 48, not a young man acting rashly but middle-aged and educated, with a family of his own and much to lose. But he was still a slave.

An illustration of Toussaint L'Ouverture at battle.

      Toussaint was bolstered by, among other things, the work of the French writer Guillaume Thomas François Raynal, a radical Jesuit priest whose attacks on slavery caused his 1772 book A Philosophical and Political History of the Establishments and Commerce of the Europeans in the Two Indies to be banned in France. In it he wrote of the slave's plight: "A courageous chief only is wanted. Where is he, that great man whom Nature owes to her vexed, oppressed and tormented children? Where is he? He will appear, doubt it not; he will come forth and raise the sacred standard of liberty." It is said Toussaint read this passage many times.
     Toussaint, whose last name became L’Ouverture—the one who finds an opening—because of his ability to always find a gap in the enemy's defenses, rose to become that courageous chief. He drove the British from Saint-Domingue when, beginning in 1793, they spent five years trying to snatch the West Indian jewel from France. By 1801 he had persuaded some former plantation owners who had fled to return and help try to set the province on a new path to prosperity. He also formed an assembly of six men, one from each province of Saint-Domingue, and created a new constitution, which named him governor for life with the right to pick his successor.
     That Toussaint had the audacity, as a black man, to aspire to such greatness stuck deeply in the craw of Napoleon Bonaparte, First Consul of France and the most powerful man in that nation. But more to the point, Napoleon wanted Saint-Domingue restored to France and he wanted to re-establish slavery and its riches. So Toussaint, the one man who truly stood in his way (or so Napoleon thought), was tricked into capture and carried across the Atlantic in June 1802 to be imprisoned in a castle on a mountain.
     Our guide tells us that it is very cold in the Jura Mountains in winter, one of the coldest places in France. I can attest that the damp air was bone chilling as we stood there on a rainy day last September. The cruelty of the entire situation crystallized for me as I drew an invisible line with my eyes from his window to the outside world and realized that this man was not even given a glimpse of the fairy-tale landscape that surrounded the fortress.
     The evening before, I had seen similar scenery from the bus window as we traveled south from Besançon, the heart and official capital of the Franche-Comté (which means "free county") region of northeastern France. We were on our way to a welcome dinner with our hosts, representatives from the United Nations, UNESCO, and various French tourist offices. They had worked together for the past two years to perfect the Abolition Route. The route was created in 2002 under the direction of Philippe Pichot, as part of a larger Slave Route project initiated by UNESCO in 1993. The goal of the bigger project was to acknowledge the impact of slavery on a global level UNESCO's member countries in Africa, the Caribbean, the Americas, and Europe were called on to research their own roles in the slave trade, and to find ways to use what they learned in their cultural tourism efforts. This tour we were taking was France's contribution.

The base of a mountain rose to the bus's left side, and a dark, placid river flanked our right. Trees grew thick on the hillsides. A gentle mist came and went, half-revealing lakes, yellow stone cottages with peaked roofs and red shutters, gardens with giant cabbages, and grazing red-and-white cows called Montbeliardes.

Toussaint L'Ouverture spent his final days
in this cell at the Chateau de Joux
in the Jura Mountains of France.

     Toussaint L'Ouverture was given no view of the natural beauty of the Franche-Comté not only because, as I can see, part of a tower completely blocked the view, but because boards were put-up over his windows to keep out all but a scant bit of light. The effect of this is plain once we crowd inside the cell. The interior is 20 feet long and 12 feet wide, with a simple barrel vault ceiling, and when the guide turns off the light, it is nearly pitch-dark. There is a large fireplace, but judging from the few existing accounts, it was rarely lit. Some sticks of furniture, representing what might have been made available to him, nearly complete the pitiful picture. The rest I fill in myself a graying black man, nearing 60, dressed in the "old half-worn dress of a soldier, and shoes in the same condition," as he described in his final memoirs, sits shivering and hungry in the dark. He was given no news of his family and even though Napoleon had called him a traitor, no trial, something Toussaint requested in letter after letter to the First Consul.
     The former general begged for fair treatment, but no answer ever came, and on April 7, 1803, Toussaint L'Ouverture was found dead. The coroner called it apoplexy; I think the man's heart just broke. The French writer Chateaubriand said it was a case of "the Black Napoleon" being "imitated and killed by the White Napoleon."
     A bronze bust of Toussaint that stands just outside his cell moves me. Although it is thought that no true likenesses were made of him from life, several drawings and paintings do exist, all different. The artist who cast this work captured a fierce pride and determination in his eyes that reminds me of later black visionaries—Congo's Patrice Lumumba, or America's Malcolm X, among many others.
      There is the question asked ad nauseum as to whether that rebellion did any good. I borrow from Audre Lorde: "the master's tools will never dismantle the master's house." Take from it what you will; I'm saving the aftermath of the revolution for another post.
     Do I co-sponsor violence? What rational human wants to participate in violence? Do I think that rampaging through the countryside killing every white man, woman, and child was a good thing? Of course not. I will not be painted with a brush called "militant" for reporting the news. And that news, borne out throughout the history of mankind is that in the wake of centuries of enslavement and brutality by one race over another, sometimes rebellion is the only answer.

American Revolution: The Battle of Cowpens, 1781, by William Ranney,
1845. The battle marked a decisive victory against the British in the South.

The French Revolution: Storming of the Tuileries, August 10, 1792, painted a year later by Jean-Duplessis-Bertaux. King Louis XVI
and Marie-Antoinette fled with their children in the advance
of an army 30,000 armed French citizens.

Haitian rebels and French expeditionary forces clash on
November 18, 1803, at Vertières, Saint Domingue.