Toussaint Louverture
François-Dominique Toussaint L'Ouverture (20 May 1743 – 7 April 1803) also known as Toussaint L'Ouverture or Toussaint Bréda, was the best-known leader of the Haitian Revolution.
Quotes
[edit]- For too long, gentlemen by way of abuses that one can never too strongly accuse of having taken place because of our lack of understanding and ignorance - for a very long time, I say - we have been victims of your greed and your avarice. Under the blows of your barbarous whip we have accumulated for you the treasures you this colony; the human race has suffered to see with what barbarity you have treated men like yourself...
- Letter to the General Assembly (1792)
- Let the sacred flame of liberty that we have won lead all our acts. Let us go forth to plant the tree of liberty, breaking the chains of those of our brothers still held captive under the shameful yoke of slavery. Let us bring them under the compass of our rights, the imperceptible and inalienable rights of free men. [Let us overcome] the barriers that separate nations, and unite the human species into a single brotherhood. We seek only to bring to men the liberty that [God] has given them, and that other men have taken from them only by transgressing His immutable will.
- Letter to the General Assembly (1792)
- We are black, it is true, but tell us, gentle men, you who are so judicious, what is the law that says that the black man must belong to and be the property of the white man?
- Letter to the General Assembly (1792)
- For too long we have borne your chains without thinking of shaking them off, but any authority which is not founded on virtue and humanity, and which only tends to subject one's fellow man to slavery, must come to an end, and that end is yours.
- Letter to the General Assembly (1792)
- "Address to Soldiers for the Universal Destruction of Slavery", Bulletin official de St-Domingue, 18 May 1797
- When the people of St-Domingue first tasted the fruit of liberty that they hold from the equity of France; when to the violent upheavals of the revolution that announced it succeeded the pleasures of tranquility; when finally the rule of law took the place of anarchy under which the unfortunate colony had too long suffered, what fatality can have led the greatest enemy of its prosperity and of our happiness still to dare to threaten us with the return of slavery?
- Letter to the French Directory, November 1792
- It is for you, Citizen Directors, to remove from over our heads the storm that the eternal enemies of our liberty are preparing in the shades of silence. It is for you to enlighten the Legislature, it is for you to prevent the enemies of the present system from spreading themselves on our unfortunate shores to sully them with new crimes. Do not allow our brothers, our friends, to be sacrificed to men who wish to reign over the ruins of the human species. But no, your wisdom will enable you to avoid the dangerous snares which our common enemies hold out for you.
- Letter to the French Directory, November 1792
- Since the revolution, I have done all that depended upon me to return happiness to my country and to ensure liberty for my fellow citizens. Forced to combat internal and external enemies of the French Republic, I made war with courage, honor and loyalty. I have never strayed from the rules of justice with my enemies as much as was in my power I sought to soften the horrors of war, to spare the blood of men.
- Idleness is the source of all disorders, and if it is at all tolerated, I shall hold the military commanders responsible, persuaded that those who tolerate idleness and vagabonds are secret enemies of the government.
- ...We have no other resource than destruction and flame. Bear in mind that the soil bathed with our sweat must not furnish our enemies with the smallest aliment. Tear up the roads with shot; throw corpses and horses into all the fountains; burn and annihilate everything, in order that those who have come to reduce us to slavery may have before their eyes the image of hell which they deserve.
- Letter to Dessalines. (1802)
Quotes about Toussaint Louverture
[edit]- No person knew better than he the art of governing the people under his jurisdiction. The greater part of the population loved him to idolatry. Veneration for Toussaint was not confined to the boundaries of St. Domingo; it ran through Europe; and in France his name was frequently pronounced in the senate with the eulogy of polished eloquence. No one can look back upon his career without feeling that Toussaint was a remarkable man. Without being bred to the science of arms, he became a valiant soldier, and baffled the skill of the most experienced generals that had followed Napoleon. Without military knowledge he fought like one born in the camp. Without means he carried on the war. He beat his enemies in battle, and turned their own weapons against them. He laid the foundation for the emancipation of his race and the independence of the island. From ignorance he became educated by his own exertions. From a slave he rose to be a soldier, a general, and a governor, and might have been king of St. Domingo. He possessed splendid traits of genius, which was developed in the private circle, in the council chamber, and on the field of battle. His very name became a tower of strength to his friends and a terror to his foes. Toussaint's career as a Christian, a statesman, and a general, will lose nothing by a comparison with that of Washington. Each was the leader of an oppressed and outraged people, each had a powerful enemy to contend with, and each succeeded in founding a government in the new world. Toussaint's government made liberty its watchword, incorporated it in its constitution, abolished the slave trade, and made freedom universal amongst the people. Washington's government incorporated slavery and the slave trade, and enacted laws by which chains were fastened upon the limbs of millions of people. Toussaint liberated his countrymen; Washington enslaved a portion of his. When impartial history shall do justice to the St. Domingo revolution, the name of Toussaint L'Ouverture will be placed high upon the roll of fame.
- He was one of the leaders. There were others: Boukman, a Jamaican who in 1791 organized a Vodou ceremony where people pledged to fight for liberty or to die. There was Mackandal. And then L’Ouverture, who was on a plantation, who started organizing, and had military training. There were also leaders like Jean-Jacques Dessalines, whose motto was, “Cut their heads off, burn their houses.” L’Ouverture was taken from Haiti and imprisoned in France, where he died. Wordsworth wrote a poem about him. One of L’Ouverture’s most quoted sayings was, when he was about to be taken off by the French, “You can cut the branches of the tree of liberty, but you can’t destroy the roots because they are too strong and too many.” He was a phenomenal leader, but it’s important to acknowledge the others. Because it’s a problem we have thinking that one person can make a revolution, whether it’s now or in the past.
- Edwidge Danticat Interview (2003)
- Toussaint did not make the revolution. It was the revolution that made Toussaint. And even that is not the whole truth. ... Today by a natural reaction we tend to a personification of the social forces, great men being merely or nearly instruments in the hands of economic destiny. As so often the truth does not lie in between. Great men make history, but only such history as it is possible for them to make. Their freedom of achievement is limited by the necessities of their environment. ... In a revolution, when the ceaseless slow accumulation of centuries bursts into volcanic eruption, the meteoric flares and flights above are a meaningless chaos and lend themselves to infinite caprice and romanticism unless the observer sees them always as projections of the sub-soil from which they came.
- C. L. R. James, The Black Jacobins (1938)
- Toussaint made her [Haiti] what she is. In this work there was grouped around him a score of men, mostly of pure negro blood, who ably seconded his efforts. They were able in war and skillful in civil affairs, but not, like him, remarkable for that rare mingling of high qualities which alone makes true greatness, and insures a man leadership among those otherwise almost his equals. Toussaint was indisputably their chief. Courage, purpose, endurance—these are the tests. He did plant a state so deep that all the world has not been able to root it up. ...This man risked his empire rather than permit the slave trade in the humblest village of his dominions. You think me a fanatic tonight, for you read history, not with your eyes, but with your prejudices. But fifty years hence, when Truth gets a hearing, the Muse of History will put Phocion of the Greek, and Brutus for the Roman, Hampden for England, Fayette for France, choose Washington as the bright, consummate flower of our earlier civilization, and John Brown the ripe fruit of our noonday, then, dipping her pen in the sunlight, will write in the clear blue, above them all, the name of the soldier, the statesman, the martyr, Toussaint l’Ouverture.
- Wendell Phillips, from lecture (December 1861)
- Hopefully, these characters bring us closer to a sense of self: honest and honored. Icons: Toussaint Louverture to José Martí to lesser known heroes, Atahualpa and Denmark Vesey. We lace our visions with Celia Cruz and Aretha Franklin.
- Ntozake Shange, Wild Beauty: New and Selected Poems (2017)
