Empire: World History - 64. The Black Spartacus

Episode Date: July 11, 2023

'A courageous chief only is wanted. Where is he, that great man whom nature owes to her vexed, oppressed and tormented children? Where is he? He will appear, doubt it not; he will come forth and raise the sacred standard of liberty.' Saint-Domingue, the most lucrative colony in the world, is fuelled by the exploitation of 500,000 slaves. But the waves of the French Revolution are washing up on its shores: dreams of liberty, equality, fraternity are spreading on the plantations. Is Toussaint L'Ouverture, the Black Spartacus, the courageous chief who can help them achieve this? This episode is sponsored by BetterHelp. Give online therapy a try at betterhelp.com/empirepod. Twitter: @Empirepoduk Goalhangerpodcasts.com Producer: Callum Hill Exec Producer: Jack Davenport + Neil Fearn Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

If you want access to bonus episodes reading lists for every series of Empire, a chat community. Discounts for all the books mentioned in the week's podcast, add free listening and a weekly newsletter, sign up to Empire Club at www.mpowerpoduk.com. And welcome to Empire. I'm Anita Arnden. And I am William Turimple. Why leaning in a bit? I mean, we know. It's like a... You never know who might forget.

Are you on a boat? I'm sitting. I am sitting in the house I grew up in in Scotland, which I haven't been to for four years since my father died. And I'm looking out on the garden. I ran around as a child. It's very, very nice. And unusually for Scotland, it's a bright blue summer day and it's just gorgeous.

Yeah, Cal has just said, Willie, can you stop looking out the window and look at the night? That's the problem, the window. It's to my right and I can't start looking at. Listen, the thing with audio magic is that you can pretend you're looking out of the window so we can hear you. It's still a very foreign form to me.

No, I know, I know. We've only done about six million episodes. No, I understand. I understand the problems. I'm just trying to understand what Little William was like. I mean, we are going to get to this. It's a really good podcast, by the way. Just since you've opened the door or a window, a crack,

what were you like as a child? My housemaster at school said I was the boy who's changed least. Oh, no. I was exactly like this, I think. I was mad keen. I wrote age seven at my primary school. They had the little essay saying, what do you want to be when you grow up? And I was an author and an archaeologist.

And it's more or less. It's history rather than archaeology, but it's more or less. My first trip to London was to age seven was to go and see the Tutankhaman exhibition. Really? It's south of the border of the first time. I remember it was the time that they were burning crops and I'd been brought up with all these stories about how awful the English were.

And as we passed the border in the train, it was like Mordor because the whole place was on flames. And I literally thought we're going into the land of the orcs, Edward I'm the first and all this. I'm going to share a little story with you. I don't think I've told you this before, but you went to school with Patrick French, didn't you? I did.

So Patrick, dearly departed. Patrick French. Died this year. Died this year. An absolutely wonderful man. My friend from the age of 12. Yeah. And he, you know, an author of liberty or death and many other books.

Young husband. Young husband, which is an excellent book. The great Naipal biography. He told me a story about you. Do you want to know? I thought. Possibly not on that. You've been saving this one.

What was this expression? I know lots of stories about you from Patrick, but this is one you'll be fine with. But he said that you have actually always been the same. And at school, quite, I don't, you know, sort of off your own back, you started running a history society. Archaeology society. Okay, I've misremembered.

I'm sure he said it right. But you would put these little notes up on the notice board saying, archaeology this week, this Thursday, while everyone else is running around playing, you have the chance to listen to a really interesting talk by me on something. And sometimes hardly anyone turned up, sometimes people did turn up, but you have never been different, which is, yeah. And it wasn't me talking. We had some very interesting speakers.

And it actually was, I suppose, it meant in some ways a dry run for all this, because it was writing to people asking them to come on and speak on history. Did more people come when it was just you or when you had a speaker? I think I only ever spoke once. Okay. And that was a very boring lecture on Anglo-Saxon sculpture. Oh, was it? And that did get a pretty low turn. Actually, it's not true.

My friends loyly turned up. Anyway, if you want me to dish more dirt on William, on the things that I've heard about him, yes, you can just email this. I'll just see if there's a quantum of interest in... Luckily, Patrick is no longer around to dish any water, but he much missed it any other way. I know, such a nice man. Anyway, look, today we are discussing one of the most extraordinary characters in this story of slavery. This is a story of a man known as the Black Spartacus, Toussaint-Lu-Avature.

You're rather impressed by that French accent today. Thank you very much. Just sit together. Consenting. Just a little bit descending to my level. Thank you. Who led the only completely successful slave rebellion in the history of the transatlantic slave trade? It is the Haitian revolution, the only slave revolution in history to result in an independent state.

So tell us about Louvre Chor. Give us a thumbnail sketch of who this man was. Well, he is a figure who is becoming quite famous in the francophone world. And there was a big French TV series, for example, about him. and Wycliffe Jean, Jean. You're trying to outfrench me. I wonder what he did. Do you mean, why Cliff Jean?

I mean, I don't overdo it now, Mr. Man of the People. Rapped about him. Carlos Santana has done songs about him. There's a plaque to him in the Pantheon, recently erected, incidentally in the Pantheon, along with the other greats of French history. He was a major influence. His revolutionary techniques were started. by Castro and Ho Chi Minh,

yet he's someone that's almost completely unknown in the Anglophone world until... Oh, any parts of the Anglophone, I have to correct you, because my American friends have been telling me that actually he's an enormous figure in the Black Lives Matter. Correct.

In the United States, he's massive, but not here. In Great Britain, no one really knows his name. And he is an extraordinary... He's an incredibly cool character. And he is someone you could easily imagine at the forefront of a whole line of movies or Netflix series. He's born enslaved on a sugar plantation in Sandamang,

which is what we today call Haiti, which is the, of course, half the island of Hispaniola. And today, of course, we think of it as a poor and rather chaotic country. There's always undergoing coups and there's some strange violence, and there's sort of voodoo, and it's often held up as a, you know, the kind of archetypal chaotic sort of third world country in summer camps. But in the 18th century, it is the richest place in the entire colonial world. It's the center of the slave trade, has more slaves than anywhere else.

It makes a vast profit for France and Spain, who both have bits of the island. And Louverture comes to adulthood at the time of the French Revolution, and he mixes ideas from the Caribbean, from France, from Africa, and produces a new. new form of politics that's part Jacobin, but very much focused on his, on the liberation of the slaves. Yeah. And we should say, I mean, Haiti at the time in the 1800s is the sugar and coffee capital of the world. I mean, it is pumping out the stuff. It has enormous importance when it comes to trade. So this is a, this is a jewel in anybody's crown. And again, this is something that we need to get our head around because, again, in our head, America is.

is the rich area, and the Caribbean is small and marginal. The 18th century is the other way around. It's the Caribbean that is hugely rich. And the three richest islands are, first of all, Santa Mao, secondly Jamaica, thirdly Cuba. And that is where the money is being minted. And huge fortunes are there to be made. And the American South, Virginia, all this sort of place, comes very much lower on the priority list if you're sitting in Europe wanting to make money out of colonies. Well, we're going to go into Leverture's life and deeds in a great deal of detail in these podcasts, but just if I was writing his CV, this is how I would write it. Outmaneuvers three successive French commissioners, defeats the British, overpowers the Spanish and in 1801,

despite having been wounded 17 times, 17 times in battle. And lost most of his front teeth when a cannonball goes off, poor guy. Yeah, I mean, but gone through all of that, nevertheless, authors, his, own new abolitionist constitution for Sanderbank, asserting, and I'll quote from it, here, all men are born, live and die, free and French. So to get to that point where he has that amount of muscularity and influence, he had to create a myriad of international alliances. He had to build an army. He had to build an army that could defeat eventually Bonaparte's forces. So you're going to have a lot of names in this that you're going to

recognize there are going to be some cameo roles going through this where you're going to go, what? And Bodeepard does not come out well out of this story. He is the demon in the pack, and he plays a very, very negative role in the story. But what I love about this whole story is the way that, I don't know, Dussart is so mysterious. He moves in such extraordinary ways that he comes to be regarded, not just by his own people, but by the French, the British and the Spanish, who he takes on. almost as a supernatural figure. He uses voodoo.

He's renowned for his almost magical capacity to appear in the most unexpected of settings and to vanish without a trace. I mean, I love this. There's one of his French enemies, you know, the French detested him, but this is what they said. I often think, you know,

the most powerful praise comes from the people who hate your guts the most, but this one is, he is, Toussaint is a man who managed to make himself, so to speak, invisible where he was, and visible where he was not. He seemed to have borrowed,

his spontaneity of movement from the tiger. It's such a good quote. It's not bad, is it? I love that quick. I mean, if you were him, you'd put it on a poster. It's not bad. But for all that sort of, you know, voodoo, mystical stuff, which is very important to his myth, both then and today in the Caribbean,

he left solid political achievements behind him. And he was described at the time as the father of blacks, the black son and the French Revolution, the black George Washington, the bono part of the Caribbean. the African hero, the Hannibal of Saint-Dermont, and so on. In all these different newspapers, all these different countries, he is. You missed my favourite. I don't know why you missed my favorite.

The centaur of the savannah. He's the centaur. And this is because he's this great horseman. He has this white horse called Belangerin. He rides through the night. He appears the following morning on his white horse. He changes the course of battles when he appears. At the time, he's recognized as this extraordinary black hero.

figure not just in Haiti, not just in the Caribbean, but in America, in Philadelphia, in London. In one of the London papers describes him, the annual register describes him as the major public figure of the year, a great man. I mean, I love riffling through old newspapers. And, you know, they really, I mean, just it's worth mentioning. So Philadelphia newspapers usually refer to him as the celebrated African chief. The London Gazette in 1798 said he was a Negro king. a proud representative of the black race whom the Christian world to their infamy have been accustomed to degrade. So, you know, a figure that looms large for a long time. The timing is important.

And in a sense, he's partly, he provokes what happens at this time because this is just when the cries for emancipation are really beginning to get heard in Britain. There is a considerable lobby which is being resisted very strongly in London. And the same sort of thing is going on in France, too. The revolution initially comes out for slaves, Baudaparte rolls it back and sees it in the potential part of the French economy and then wants to re-enslave all these people. So all this is going on, and he appears just at the right moment, this incredibly charismatic figure who changes the story by leading a successful revolt

and leading his people to freedom. And the great tragedy is that he is captured through treachery just before he achieves this final independence. and he dies alone in a freezing prison. They deliberately put him when they capture him. They take him back to France and they put him in the coldest place they can find in the middle of the Jura Mountains. And he dies, huddled around a fire a year later without any covering. I mean, it's a tragic story. Can I just, no, just listen to this.

That's me slapping my head because you just gave away an ending again. I mean, and that, ladies and gentlemen, is all we have to. No, we've got loads to say. And a different thing. It's always good if you know the idea, and then you see how it works towards it. Just doing it again. That is the sound of despair.

Right. Well, let us, I mean, we've given you sort of a rollicking ride through an exceptional life, but there is so much to tell you and so much to learn from this story. I've still got half the ending left to tell them. I haven't told yet. No, we don't tell it.

This is me giving you the Paddington stare. Do not. I'm seeing the stair. I will keep one. I know when I'm being told what to see. Yeah. I mean, were that were true, Lord, were that were true. Okay.

So first of all, we should talk about Sanderbanc a little bit. So, as you say, a Caribbean island. But the terrain is really interesting, dominated by mountain ranges. There are massive plains in between them. I mean, it's fecund. It is fertile because there are waters coming down from rivers, coming down from the hills. It is a place that stuff grows. Well, what's important, I think, is that it's both fecund and fertile, but also

incredibly mountainous. So it's both a place you can make a lot of money for, but it's also a place where if you're a guerrilla leader, you can fend off organized armed forces. It's like, you know, it's the Afghanistan or the Caribbean, if you like. It's a place that's given naturally for resistance movements. Yeah. So again, this is a very thumbnail sketch of the history. So because so many European adventurers had their eyes on it. So the Spaniards colonized it first when they went to the New World, but but not for that long, because in the mid-17th, century, it was taken over by French pirates. Our friends, the pirates, who sort of sail the seven seas and do whatever the hell they weren't. I've just realized we haven't actually done

pirates. We should definitely do a series on pirates. Why have we not thought of that before? Well, I don't know, but it's such a brilliant idea. I'm quite a cross that you thought of it and I didn't. So caters empires. Pirate empires. Yes. So over time, these French pirates, you know, they turn from swashbuckling and a pillaging and a lulligan and a lubey. And they decide to set up shop. I know that, but they decide that they're going to put down their roots in this very fertile, fertile land. And they begin to create plantations. They start with coffee.

And of course, you know, this is labour intensive. We're talking about the mid-17th century. They need hands to be working in these plantations. And where do they look? Well, where everybody else is looking at this time, they look to Africa. And it has, by the mid-18th century, half a million slaves, most of whom have come, from Africa who are being worked to their death every year. There's a rapid turnover because of the way that they're treated. Yet it's incredibly profitable. And so vast is the slave population here

that it probably has, and this is again important for the future history of rebellion, it has the highest ratio of black to whites. There's about 10 to one blacks to everyone white. In other words, it's ripe for a rebellion. And by sheer weight of numbers, the slaves, have a greater chance of success here than they do elsewhere. Yeah, I mean, we've mentioned sugar and coffee, but they also grow significant amounts of cotton, indigo, cacao for chocolate. And it becomes such a vast part of trade. I think it supplies two-thirds of France's overseas trade at the time, is that right?

That's an extraordinary figure. And it's known as the Pearl of the Antilles. Yeah, it's the world's largest producer of sugar and coffee. and even Jamaica, which is the most profitable British colony, pales in significance next to it. So, in short, pre the Haitian Revolution, this was the most valuable colony in the world. And it's not a taller backward place either at a time when, you know, a lot of the North American world is very rural and fairly basic. The capital cap is a bustling cosmopolitan centre with a population of nearly 20,000. there are libraries, there are philosophical societies, there's a publishing world, private libraries,

reading clubs. So it's not a provincial place at all again, you know, what has to completely rejig one's one of those preconceptions. And I think someone coming from, you know, Virginia would regard this as a major metropolitan centre. It was somewhere you'd go for a bit of culture. Yeah, and I think one of the things, you know, sort of that underlines this and just how well the pirates had done for themselves. These former pirates and our settlers had done for themselves. You know, they built bakeries and theatres. They had disposable income. Bakers. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, you know, petisseries. 25 bakeries. And this is important because you understand that the hierarchy, the division between races, is so stark here on this island.

And people see it every single day. And the scientific organization, again, San Damiq had the Circle de Philadelph... I can't do that. Philadelphia. Circle of Philadelphia. Circle of Philadelphia. Which published five volumes of scientific memoirs on things as diverse as medicine,

agriculture, botany, ethnographical studies. And it had, you know, this scientific center had an international membership. So, you know, there were people who were traveling from Europe and the United States to come and give lectures and likewise and papers going,

it's an important place. And this is again, this thing that we have to struggle with when we're studying this world is that the same people who are studying philosophy and reading Enlightenment thought and going to these reading rooms and using these libraries are also the same people who are controlling a black African slave population with barbaric cruelty. And differently, I mean, the difference is, you know, we talked about in Britain, you know, the reason why for so many years nobody said anything is because they couldn't see it. Here they see it every time they go into a letter.

lecture. Every time they go and buy a Claire, every time they go and deliver a lecture, they see it. But I guess, either don't care or are blind to it anyway, willfully blind to it. And so side by side with this world of philosophical societies

and learned journals, you have the world of the slaves, 500,000 black African slaves with no political or civil rights, treated extremely badly, very very high mortality, rates, people die in their 30s or 40s, very few live longer. But there's also a big world,

because of the semenian, because of the sheer density of the slave world, there's a very sophisticated slave culture with brotherhoods in the plantation. They practice voodoo in this strange mixture of indigenous Indian and black African mythologies and spirit rituals and things involving bodies and resurrection, dance, song, possession, divination, all this sort of thing, is far more developed in Haiti than it is in smaller islands. Now, I want to give you a little bit of casting here because there are different types of people, and I'm very interested in this division among the white community. So you have Les Grand Blanc, the big whites, these are the wealthy merchants, the bourgeoisie,

the people who own stuff, the people who are going to the patisseries, if you like. And then you have the small whites. And these are the people, you know, I suppose you'd call them, the bureaucrats, the middle classes, the clerks, the artisans, the grocers, the lawyers, and they have less. One little detail there, which I love, according to, so we should quickly say very, very much up front that there are two fantastic books that we are drawing on today from this. The first is C. L.R. James, and it's called the Black Jacobins, Tucson Louverture and the San Domingo Revolution. And that is written in the 30s when fascism is beginning to rise.

Gosh, as early is that? Yeah, no, no, I always thought of him as a sort of 50s or 60s figure, but no, he's way before that. Well, that makes the writing even more interesting because he's kind of slightly prescient about the arrival of fascism on his doorstep. That's very interesting. Yeah, no, C.L.J. is born in 1901, it says, yeah. Gosh, okay. And the other? And the other is a book which won the Wilson History Prize, Britain's Premier History Prize, two years ago by Sudhir Hazari Singh. A fantastic book called Black Spartacus.

And it's amazing. And it challenges some of the CLR James. conclusions. C. L.R. James, I think it's been absolutely a fixture for anyone studying this stuff for 40 years. And Soudreisian has found an amazing amount of new stuff, not least in the National Archives in Q, which bizarrely had even letters from Lvartou, and the whole range of stuff,

which changes the picture. But one detail in the CLR James, which I love, is that some of the Pitti Blanc, the small whites, are escaped galley slaves. Yeah. So you've got, I don't know, I don't know whether they're galley slaves from the Ottoman world or what the fact they're doing in, excuse me, my language. I don't know. Oh, I've got a fit of the vapors.

Anyway, I don't know what they're doing in. No, you really, I think you've made that quite clear. That is now abundantly clear. Anyway, so there's ex-galley slaves among the, the poor ones. And, of course, this leads to edgy relations with the black slaves, because they're, very key not to be put on the same level as them. And so there's huge tensions running through this rich but very hierarchical colony. Yeah. I mean, the thing about the bitumen, the small whites, is that they hate the big whites and they hate the black slaves. So they are caught in a maelstrom

of resentment and hatred. And then in the non-white world, you also have the whole mulatto and marron population of mixed blood. Remind us who they are, remind us because we have referred to them before. They're both escaped slaves who've made their own lives up in the mountains and they're mixed blood. This group sits between the different kinds of whites and the blacks. And as we'll see as this story develops, not necessarily good relations with the slaves at all. And Louvartour has a rival in the Marant community. And so we saw earlier when Vincent was talking about Tacky's revolt, how it was the Marant's and the free blacks that were used against the slaves.

And there's a similar thing going on here. There's a lot of tension, despite Lovatour's best attempts to try and sort it out, between the mixed blood community and the black Africans. So, yeah, we're going to give you one more cast member. It's going to sound weird to you, but it's a very important cast member. And then we're going to take a break, and we're going to come back with Lovatur himself. But this is a very major character in this story,

and that is the French Revolution. It is crucial in this story. So the French Revolution, you know this, but is a movement by the French to overthrow the absolute monarchy of Louis XVI, who'd ruled France the years at the time. The French Revolution begins

with the fall of the Bastille. You know, it's all of those men at the barricade, Les Mies, all of that kind of thing, and the Declaration of the Rights of Man, which, let me remind you... Fertility, equality, liberty. You just took the best line. I always say it in French.

Liberté, fraternity, equality. But this is going to be very, very important, because the reverberations, just as everybody in Britain fears, the reverberations from that French Revolution spread. Like a boulder in the water, the ripples from the French Revolution sweep across Europe, all across Asia, and they reach the Americas. and they lap up on Sandemak as well.

Join us after the break. We've given you sort of a backdrop of Lovetur and where he comes from, meet the man properly himself. Welcome back. So we've given you the extraordinary cast list of this story. Just before we shake hands with Lovatio, let's talk about the Milato Revolt

because October 1790 is a very pivotal date in this story, isn't it? And this is presumably when news is just arriving from France of what's going on and the storming of the barricades and all that. And it is the first to rise up are not the black African slaves, but the mulattoes. And they rise up killing both the Pitti Blanc and the Granblanc. All the whites are being cut. There's a major revolt. And they have a leader called Vincent Oge. And he's tortured and executed in a horrific manner. News of this torture and death erupts across the island. And very soon after this, you have a slave revolt, which follows, which is separate from it, but in a sense, inspired by it.

I'm really fascinated with how actually the news of the French Revolution spreads around the plantations themselves among the slaves, because they had heard of it. Of course, everybody's talking about the French Revolution, but they frame it in their own terms. Yeah. And these are interesting. They talk about the white slaves of France, rising up and killing their masters and now enjoying life on their own terms.

And that is a very powerful thing, even though, you know, they don't share the color. they share the slavery in their minds with the French who rise up and get rid of their monarchy and their nobility. And in July 1791, a gigantic man called Bukman, who's the head of a plantation and has been following the situation, organizes a revolt among the slaves. And its aim is to exterminate the whites. It's a very, very serious uprising. The plan was to set farth plantations, and this would signal to the slaves in La Cap, the capital, that it's time. to rise up. I mean, and Bookman is, his is a violent plan because he, his basic messages kill all the whites. Yeah. Massacre the whites. It is, it is going to be different to what you meet with

Leverture, but his is, his bloodlust is now sweeping through. How successful is Bookman's uprising? So on the night of the 22nd of August 1791 in the middle of a fierce tropical storm, it's all very filving there. Sondon, and CLR. James gives a wonderful. wonderful version of it in his books. Bookman gives his final instructions to the slaves. They perform voodoo incantation and they suck the blood of a stuck pig. This is all, I mean, this is all kind of fantastically, you can just imagine all this. And that night, the slaves do rise up, they murder their masters and they burn the plantations to the ground. And the cap is not, however taken, because there are precautions there. And it is, you know,

it's everything that the slave drivers and the plantation owners have feared. It's barbaric. It's violent. Women and children are targeted in this as well, aren't they? And this is the point that we first start hearing about Toussaint-Luvatieu. This is when he rides into the rescue with a very different way of managing affairs. Yes. I mean, I wonder if this is, you know, just that he is appalled by what he sees with children being sort of bayoneted and dismembered. But let's talk about him. Let's talk about his origin story a little more. So he's the son of a petty chieftain. He is unusual from the start. You know, like with so many of these characters with Barber, with Olada Equiano. He's bright, and people around him recognize that

there is a bright mind in here. I mean, goodness knows how many bright minds they've ignored, but certain people are recognized. In his own words, what does he think of himself, William? You've got a great quote there. There's a lovely quote, which is one of his first declarations. He says, I was born a slave, but nature gave me the soul of a free man. And we do know a little bit about his background. He's the second son of someone called Guy. Gino, the king of the warrior nation of the Alas, the West African people, they've been on the Gold Coast and in Benin. And so his father is a very high status in this society. And he's born in the Caribbean on the Breda Sugar Estate, where his parents worked at slaves. And he is, initially,

Toussaint-Livertou is a spindly little boy, sickly, but he could swim well and was very quick at running and what he's famous for throughout his life is his exceptional abilities as a rider. Oh yes, the centaur of the Caribbean. The centaur of the Caribbean. And so he says he, one of the source says he habitually rode 125 miles a day, which presumably can't be literally true. Well, no, and also, they also say he survived on two hours sleep a night, which also, I mean, literally, I cannot believe that could be true.

That sounds crackers to me. What's very clear is that he has this presence. he is quiet, steely-eyed, serious, has immense gravitas. He spends a lot of time in his own as a kid. He's a shepherd on the estate. And he's sitting with his sheep on his own brooding. And he's literate and he's reading. Well, the reason he's reading, I mean, we should say, you know, this kind of, you know,

the difference in him is recognized by, and I love this. Again, if we're pitching this for a movie, Pierre Baptiste, you know, your archetypal, wise old man, you know, as a silvery head, who beckons him over with wizened hands saying, too sorry, see something in you. Who's going to play him in the movie? Who's a guy that plays Morgan Freeman? It's Morgan Freeman. Of course it's Morgan Freeman. Morgan. So he'll say, you know, he beckons him over and he said, look, you know, you've got a good mind, but let me mold it, let me help. And he teaches him things that are out of reach for most of the people working there. Even rudimentary French is out of their reach, but he teaches him French. He teaches him Latin. He

teaches him a bit of drawing as well. And from his father, he takes away that sort of native knowledge of plants, medicine, things that can heal. So, you know, as much as it's possible to be on a plantation, this is an educated, yes, sickly, but educated young man. And the Jesuits play a role here, too. The Jesuits get onto him. They're later expelled from Sandemang because they're encouraging the slave. and educating them and the plantation owners don't like this. But they're an important part. And he remains, despite taking on very much the spirit world and voodoo as well, he remains a Catholic throughout his life.

So Catholicism is important and important in his education. He's a product of the life on Santa Mag. I mean, all of these different cultures, all of these different learnings coming together in one human being, which will be incredibly important. He's also a man for the ladies. He is a man for ladies like him. And there's evidence that he has quite a few mistresses in his life

and only one apparently of his love letters survive. But we've got the replies from other ladies. He's a naughty man because he has got a wife while he has all these mistresses. He has two wives. He has one wife in his life and one later on. But he otherwise, he's not a libertine. He's actually quite a severe character. He doesn't eat much.

His daily diet is said to. of a modest plate of vegetables served with a few pieces of chicken. That sounds all right. That's not a chicken salad. I mean, I'm surprised you say, though. I thought you would have gone, that's horrible.

I don't like that. I like chicken snack. Next time we go to lunch, I know what I'm ordering for you. We'll see how that works, shall we? Mr. I think I'll have a steak. Shall we do that much with me? Okay. Says Mr. Nito who has the steak with me.

Anyway, at a large part. Anyway, unlike either of us, he doesn't drink alcohol. And he has an extraordinary capacity for physical endurance. And he's incredibly hard. He's shining up mountains faster than anyone else, disappearing into the jungle. And he, one of the features of his life that you see throughout accounts of his movements is that he's always on the move. And he rides so fast that he leaves his own guards trailing way behind him.

And even the best riders from France can't match him for speed or endurance, mention bravado. I mean, it is sort of Scarlet Pimperneli. You know, they seek him here, they seek him there. Those French who seek him everywhere. I mean, it could fit him very well. There's a lovely story at one point when he's being chased by one of his adversaries, and he crosses a river by standing fully upright on his horse and guiding the steed to the opposite. I love that detail. Yeah. I mean, we haven't really said how he has made the transition from being a learned slave. Lernet shepherd, sitting sitting with a. But then turning into somebody who is playing Catch Me If You Can with the French.

Tell us more about that. Well, when the expression comes in 1791, Toussando Vitu joins the ranks of the rebels. And like thousands of his black comrades, he rises up. And he actually becomes the secretary to one of the rebel leaders, Biasu. And in time, because of his learning and because of his charisma, he emerges as a key figure in the rebel leadership. And he protects white prisoners who are being massacred at the early stages.

of the uprising. And he advocates compromise with the local colonial assembly. This is a completely new approach because up to now the slave revolt has been all about anarchy and murder and rape.

But Lvitoo is more intelligent than that. And he's very well read. His key book that he's reading at this time is by somebody called Abbe Reinal, who writes something called the philosophical and political history of the establishments

and commerce of the Europeans in the two Indies, which actually calls for a slave revolution. And it says, a courageous chief is all that is wanted. Where is he, that great man whom nature owes to her vexed, depressed and tormented children? And Levertoe seems to think that this is him. And you can see this ambition to become a leader. And he cultivates this sort of mystical personality from the beginning. He has this sort of quasi-mystical aura. He has a red handkerchief that he wears around his head with the corners tied in delicate knots. And

he's seen as a symbol of Ojufeer, the voodoo spirit of war and anger and is believed to be able to the spirit is able to protect Toussaint and his men and keep them safe in war. Okay, so he's entered the fray. So the revolution has happened. It's lit a spark in him.

He believes the Abbe's prophecy is about him. He is now, you know, he is becoming, and we should say he's not, if you've got in your mind, so this young, spindly teen, He's not. At this time, we're talking about a man, aren't we? William, how old do we think he is at this time? Yes, I mean, he's surprisingly old for someone who is going to emerge as a kind of great military leader. And this is, you know, he's already 43 to 53 at this point, which isn't the usual age that you begin a military career.

He's also, as we said, you know, he's skinny and short because he had a sickly childhood. And the one thing that really makes him stand out, and this is in all the different accounts, is that he's one of the best. horsemen on the island. Great horsemen, but also, you know, a fairly effective orator. So there is this a proclamation that he makes, the Camp Turel proclamation. He announces, yeah. He announces this to his, you know, would-be followers. I am Toussaint-Louvittur. You have perhaps heard my name. You always have to say this with a French accent. It sounds like to speak to Cluze. I am Tussal Louvarture. You have perhaps heard my name. Okay. I am Toussaint-Louvittur. You have perhaps heard my name. You perhaps heard my name. You are aware brothers that I have undertaken vengeance and that I want freedom

and equality to reign in Sandamank. And it's those kind of stirring words that draw people to him. You know, this sort of stern, brilliant horseman who has physical prowess, has more learning than most of them, and who can talk like that. But also he has this sort of air of mystery about him, this air of elusiveness. He's a very private man. He confides to no one. He goes out of his way to conceal important information about himself, and he spreads misinformation and rumors. He puts false locations in his letters and his most confidential messages. And he once told a British diplomat that his preferred way of operating was to say little,

but do as much as possible. Yeah, I mean, it's pretty much the direct opposite of us. Actually. I just, you could talk a lot, do very little. Do nothing very much. Anyway, so Toussart is on the move. His reputation is growing. He's still, you know, at this point, even when he's making these rather grand proclamations,

still in the lower ranks of the Santa Mank rebellion, but he's impressive. And so he rises through those ranks. And by this stage, the slaves are sufficiently organized to actually have ranks and uniforms and have organized themselves in an impressively coherent and disciplined manner. And this is something that everyone remarks upon because, you know, this revolt started off as an anarchic uprising of people with machetes. But by now we've got sort of drilled regiments with weapons and uniforms. So it's taken on a completely different form now. I mean, you may not know the answer to this.

But do you have an idea of what the actual uniforms look like? Because I think I do. Got a rather grand picture of Tucson Lividure. You want to know? Tell me. Well, this, I mean, when you say uniform, you really aren't. joking. I mean, this is sort of like, you know, sort of stitch for stitch as grand. Yes. I mean, you're talking brocaded epaulettes, high-necked black jackets on Lovetur, at least, big, brassy, shiny

buttons going all the way down. Tight white riding, riding jumpers. Indeed. And those hats, you know, that normally you would associate with Bonaparte himself. There's wide sort of, yeah. Yeah, I don't know if it is a trick-on. I think it's like, you know, the two-sided. I'm not sure about that. I don't know. I think it might be sort of one of the, in the French style. I had never put you down as an expert in a hattery. I mean, more mad hattery. I might be wrong. I mean, it's what it looks like. But also, you know, sort of the feathered plumage coming out. So there was, there was this notion that actually you had to look the part as well. And the picture you're describing is in fact modelled on

David's famous picture of Bonaparte Crossing the Alps. And he's this figure on this white horse with this sword raised. The only thing that sort of distinguishes him is the fact that he's black and you have a palm tree in the background rather than the elves. Yeah, they also make him taller than he is. I mean, I think you mentioned this before, that he's not big. He's not a tall of stature. And this, I think part is, you know, the secret of his ability is this great rider, the centaur, because jockeys, as we know, are small men. And this is a compact figure on the back of Belanger, his white horse. They look taller on a horse. That is true. Okay. So, there he is and he's trying to get some kind of discipline in the ranks make them a fighting force

and it's interesting that actually he's very successful in doing that but the owners don't take this lightly because they're still there I mean you know those who survive you know bookwin's first massacre attempts they are there and they are angrier then and quite you know quite understandably they're not going to just sit on their hands and let this happen what do they do and also So to complicate everything, you've got a mulatto revolt at the same time. So you've got this guy, Rigo, who's the great rival and will appear in the future as even more of a rival to Tucson. And so it's a big island, and there's a lot going on. So the slave revolt is only one thing in one corner.

And just saying with the masters for one moment more, but, you know, there are slaves who sort of join the rebellion. And then they think, oh, no, I've made a mistake. You know, they get frightened and they go back to their white masters and they are killed. So that, you know, that's kind of a strategic mistake on the part of the plant is, is that they treat those returning slaves so harshly that even more start leaving. You know, this is leaving and we're not coming back. So the numbers of this, if you like, slave army. Greater 100,000.

100,000 people. It's a big army. By the standards of the time, that is a very, very big army. And what happens to the Milato uprising? I mean, who are they rising up against and what happens to them? Similar sort of story, there is a mulatto who's hung in the streets of Port-au-Prince, and this causes an uprising in that part of the island. So you've got two different revolts happening on the same island at the same time, and you've got the whites joining together to resist in the middle. And there's nearly a moment when it all collapses, because the whites offer peace, and they reach out to the leaders.

and there's nearly this moment when the slave revolt sells out. Only because they say that we'll give some of... It's that old divide and rule thing, isn't it? We will give 400 of you freedom and you can live in peace, which is for most people, people just want to live in peace. So, you know, those leaders start fumbling around, going, well, actually, you know,

I don't want to die at the end of a sword. This might be better for me. But Louvitu has none of it. And in 1792, he trains up his own army. He becomes a brigadier general. And he makes sure that these slaves are properly drilled, capable of fighting proper European troops. And he has the tactics that he gets them to split up to multiple groups to try and develop the enemy.

But he also begins to develop. And this is something that develops later in these guerrilla tactics, these classic guerrilla tactics. He hangs around in ambushes. he will disappear into the jungle after striking baggage trains and ammunition parties. And he becomes this very, he's never had a military training. This is the extraordinary thing. He has just been a shepherd. But he knows the terrain very well.

And he has apparently this disinherent sense of strategy. Yeah, of how to fight a guerrilla war. And this is, and what's fascinating is that in years to come, we'll see pick figures like Ho Chi Min and Castro copying his tactics and reading his. of Louvatures' uprising to study how you do this thing, this whole idea of, and kind of Maoist tactics of a fish in the water and so on. This is stuff that is developed by a black slave who had been a shepherd on the island of Haiti. You know, one last thing, and we're going to end it here,

but he also understands the small circle of trust as well. So he sets up his own elite set of revolutionary troops, largely made up of Maril, and these are runaway slaves, remember. and he trains them better and he trusts them more he needs this inner circle and this is a big deal the fact that he's reached out to the Maros

who in so many other Caribbean slave rebellions have been the enemies have put down slave revolts yeah and we've seen this in Jamaica we see this also in Sierra Leone and what's so clever about Lovato is he's not just a fantastic

guerrilla leader who works out how to fight at this period in this form, in this amazing landscape. He's also someone that is conciliatory. He's also ruthless. He's a brilliant strategist. And he's someone that isn't just a, you know, a macho general in the battlefield. He's someone who realizes you need a whole variety of tactics if you're going to gain your freedom.

So, you know, from Shepard to rising through the ranks, we leave you in 1792 for this particular episode, where Tucson, is promoted to the rank of general in the rebel army. So join us on Thursday when we find out what General Loveture has up his sleeve.