![]() ![]() ![]() Since the discovery in the 1970s that Toussaint was a propertied freedman before the Revolution, some writers have taken off on a tangent, turning him into a wealthy planter. Whereas most Louverture biographers have adopted extreme interpretations that depict the black leader as either an idealist or an opportunist, Girard provides a balanced portrait, sympathetic but unsentimental. The space Girard devotes to these topics-some two-fifths of the text-reduces the room available for exploring the revolutionary process, so that this study is somewhat less of a history of the Haitian Revolution than many similar biographies. Also unusual is an interesting final chapter devoted to Louverture’s descendants and his evolving postmortem reputation. The work’s most original feature is the attention given to Toussaint’s life before the Revolution, which historians long thought irrecoverable but in the last forty years has been pieced together by various scholars. ![]() Straddling the divide between popular history and a scholarly study, the book astutely exploits much of the wealth of recent Haitian Revolution research and weaves it into a tightly written, highly accessible narrative. (Cloth US$ 29.99)Ĭo-author of an article on Toussaint Louverture’s early life and author of two books on his final years, Philippe Girard here joins up these two extremes with a full-length biography of the Haitian Revolution’s main protagonist. Philippe Girard, Toussaint Louverture: A Revolutionary Life. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |