On second thought, however, page 99 does say a lot about Toussaint Louverture, a man who often hid his agenda and preferred to act behind the scenes.

None of the leading white colonists of Haiti mentioned him in the debates raging in 1789, and so he is barely mentioned in the chapter. Louverture was still unknown at the time: he had obtained his freedom but he remained on the plantation of his former master, where he worked as a muleteer and a coachman. When opening the book at page 99, I was taken aback at first: this happens to be one of a handful of pages in the book that doesn’t mention Toussaint Louverture by name! The chapter covers the early months of the French Revolution in 1789, when some white planters toyed with the idea of declaring Haiti’s independence from France. The reason is simple: he was an incredibly complicated figure who obscured his innermost thoughts. He was possibly the most significant person of African descent ever, yet there has been no modern scholarly biography of him in English until now. Toussaint Louverture: A Revolutionary Life retraces the life of the leader of the Haitian Revolution, the only successful slave revolt in world history. Girard applied the “ Test” to his new book, Toussaint Louverture: A Revolutionary Life, and reported the following: In 2014, he was a research fellow at the DuBois Institute at Harvard University. A native of the Caribbean, he studied in France and the United States. Philippe Girard is a professor of history at McNeese State in Louisiana and the author of four books on Haitian history.

Philippe girard toussaint louverture