Black Spartacus: The Epic Life of Toussaint Louverture

"I think he brings to it a very accomplished sense of a transatlantic world in which you’ve really got to take seriously all the parts of that world. This is a biography that manages to span a world because its subject spanned a world. Toussaint has been dealt with at length before. But there is new material here. There’s a deep understanding of what late colonial Saint-Domingue was like, and how it became Haiti . Get the weekly Five Books newsletter There is a person in the middle of it who’s quite difficult to get hold of. And that’s partly the nature of the records, he’s someone who began life in an enslaved culture. But it’s partly that mythmaking happened during his lifetime. He made myths about himself. But also he has been the subject of myths because he is so deeply connected with the founding of a particular place. It’s fascinating that he is now honoured in the Panthéon in Paris, when the French actually destroyed him. One of the themes underlying the book is the way in which the French Revolution turned on itself. We’ve all known that since Charles Dickens , if not before. But here is a man who was given his opportunity by the collapse of the old regime in France, and yet, in the end, became the victim of the very revolution of which he was a part. It’s there throughout the book. The book’s divided into four parts. And the last part is called ‘The leader and his myths’, which leads you on to what happened next. And the story of Haiti, of course, is enormously mixed. It has needed heroes because it’s got plenty of villains. Yes, although this book is not hagiography at all. It’s very easy to look for a great liberation hero. But this book shows a deeply flawed man who clearly didn’t make the lives of those who became free, all that much freer. He wanted hard work. There’s a certain ‘ Animal Farm -ness’ about the story. And yet, what an achievement it was for this little island to stand up to one of the great powers of 18th century Europe and create the first predominantly Black-run republic in the world. It’s extraordinary."