The plot of the book moves somewhat like that of a detective, armed with multi-archival documents, on the trail of a slippery suspect. But it is difficult not to see that Girard in this book is consistently suspicious and unduly unsympathetic of Toussaint from his unknown days as a slave, through the warrior years, on to the apogee of his governorship of the country, and his capture and imprisonment by the French authorities. Girard presents himself as a champion of the supremacy documentary evidence and unsentimental historiographical reconstruction of the Haitian Revolution. To Girard, Toussaint apparently had the mature mind-set of a creole white planter more than a black revolutionary freedom fighter. In his previous publications, Girard sounded a warning that he was not one of those historians (presumably not all Haitian nationalists) who adores Toussaint uncritically as a patriot who fought unrelentingly to bring about the freedom of the enslaved masses of Saint Domingue. Toussaint’s desire to promote the material interest of his family and himself is crucial to Girard’s representation of him as an overambitious, corrupt civil war fighter/politician only ambiguously responsible for the freedom of the enslaved. He was a family man in a slave society at war in which it was difficult to protect relatives and by the time he died in prison in France in 1803, only a handful of these beloved persons survived to fight over his legacy.

On Girard’s account, Toussaint drew his family heritage not so much from his African father or from his African culture (which he rejected conveniently), as from the interdependence and culture of his creole relatives and French models. Girard provides in surprising details stories of the large family networks of Toussaint, more toward into his own creole wives and children than backward into his African slave-traded relatives.

Girard can justifiably claim to have contributed greatly to the unearthing of new documentary sources and it is this material which emboldens him to put forward a revisionist portrait of Toussaint as a many-sided character of intriguing complexity. Looking at Girard’s endnotes, one sees only one other recent biography, the book by Maddison Smartt Bell ( Toussaint Louverture: A Biography, 2007) which Girard dismisses as an inadequate study based on insufficient documentary sources. Of course, the broader field of the controversial Haitian revolution is passionately attractive to intellectuals all over the world. In this book, Philippe Girard puts the icing on the cake of this remarkable twenty-first-century series of re-appraisals of a subject, the biography of Toussaint Louverture, which seems not to have attracted recent English-language historians.

Toussaint Louverture by Philippe Girard