Pierre Dominique Toussaint L-Overature was a gifted military leader and law giver who transformed a slave revolt in the French sugar colony of San Domingo into a revolutionary movement resulting in the creation of the Republic of Haiti in 1803. The slave revolt in France’s most lucrative colony began in 1791 when news of the French Revolution and the Declaration of the Rights of Man began to reach the Caribbean Islands. The Black slaves of African ancestry at San Domingo believed that the ideals of liberty, equality and fraternity applied to them as much as to any White European. Toussaint L-Overature was drawn to this liberation stuggle giving it military discipline and constitutional articulation. Eventually the Black leader was captured by the forces of Napoleon Bonaparte, the General who sought to reinstitute Black slavery in France’s sugar islands. Toussaint L’Overature died of exposure in a jail in the French Alps in 1802. Nevertheless the movement he led was sufficiently effective to create Haiti, the second republic of the Americas. The leadership of Toussaint L’Overature in guiding his people away from slavery helped inspire many engaged in the struggle to oppose imperialism and oppression of all kinds. In 1938 the Trinidadian activist C.L. R. James helped explain Toussaint L’Overature’s accomplishments in his classic text, The Black Jacobins: Toussaint L’Overature and the San Domingo Revolution.
Of historical interest — You can see a clip of Toussaint’s last moments in prison from the award-winning new short film “The Last Days of Toussaint L’Ouverture” at http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1478449/ This film is the basis for a new feature (not with Danny Glover) that is in development.
Thanks for your comment twf. About time someone used his life as the basis of a full length film. We look forward to it’s release.