cover image Toussaint Louverture: A Revolutionary Life

Toussaint Louverture: A Revolutionary Life

Philippe Girard. Basic, $29.99 (352p) ISBN 978-0-465-09413-4

Girard, professor of history at McNeese State University, lucidly reveals how Toussaint Louverture led a remarkable life even in comparison with the other leaders of the Age of Revolutions. Born into slavery in the French colony of Saint-Domingue, Louverture grew up speaking the Fon language of Benin and, most likely, practicing his parents’ Vodou traditions. Louverture was enslaved until he was almost 50, but in the final decade of his life he became a guerrilla fighter, general, diplomat, planter, and head of state before dying as Napoleon’s prisoner in France. As Saint-Domingue became the black republic of Haiti, Louverture presided over a revolution that was significantly more radical—in both ideals and practice—than the American and French uprisings that helped inspire it. Girard’s study, based on extensive research in European archives, succeeds in relating Louverture’s extraordinary life in its many and often contradictory aspects. It also conveys how he became an inspiration to abolitionists, civil rights activists, and anticolonial rebels worldwide without obscuring “the complexities of the Revolution he had to navigate and the skill he displayed in doing so.” Girard’s intelligent and graceful work offers a detailed account of Louverture’s experiences and achievements, as well as a laudable overview of the revolution he helped create and sustain. Agent: Paul Lucas, Janklow & Nesbit. (Dec.)