Toussaint Louverture: A Black Jacobin in the Age of Revolutions, by Charles Forsdick & Christian Høgsbjerg
Year: 2018
Type: article
Abstract: To the question "Will there ever be a truly authoritative biography of Toussaint Louverture?" Charles Forsdick (a professor of French) and Christian Høgsbjerg (whose writings focus on black Marxist thinkers) reply that "the answer is probably no" (p. 6).It is an odd way to start a biography of Louverture, but the statement surely applies to this book, which is undermined by its ideological bias and its overreliance on other authors.(Both the question and the answer are borrowed from an article by David A. Bell in The Nation, November 2, 2016.)Historians normally comb archives and then follow the sources wherever they may take them.Forsdick and Høgsbjerg proceed the other way around, beginning with a wish "to reassert the incendiary political implication of [Louverture's] life, actions, and revolutionary political thought" (p.10).Their model is The Black Jacobins (1938), the classic biography of Louverture by C.L.R. James.They lament what Chris Bayly has called the "conservative turn" in the scholarship on Louverture that has taken place in the past several decades as historians have uncovered less heroic aspects of his career (p. 7).And they cite Friedrich Engels: "Have these gentlemen ever seen a revolution?" (p.143).Key archival discoveries explain this shift in the historiography, which may shift again as new documents emerge and force us to reevaluate Louverture's life once more.Alas, Forsdick and Høgsbjerg introduce no new material; almost all the footnotes point to English-language secondary sources.Even when they mention foundational accounts of the Haitian Revolution that are accessible in print, such as Gros's Historick Recital, Louverture's Mémoire, and Beaubrun Ardouin's Études, they rely on secondary sources for their citations (see, for example, p. 38 note 26, p. 119 note 30, p. 133 note 16).According to classic communist dogma, revolutions are the product of a society's inner contradictions, so Marxist historians writing biographies of "Great Men" risk succumbing to what Thomas Carlyle has dubbed "Hero-Worship."Louverture's contradictory record further complicates the task of Forsdick and Høgsbjerg, who solve this conundrum by describing him alternatively as a "Precursor" who achieved all that could be achieved within the context of his time (p.148) or as a flawed figure who never embraced the radical agenda of his successor Jean-Jacques Dessalines-this "one-sided genius" (p.125), as James put it.Louverture's prerevolutionary life, which lasted almost 50 years, is covered in 17 pages in the first chapter.It was a particularly puzzling period during which he endured racism as a slave but also purchased and rented slaves as a freed-
Author: Philippe Girard
Institution: McNeese State University
Language: English
Subfield: Cultural Studies
Field: Social Sciences
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: diamond
OpenAlex ID: W2969287310