Episode 12: Toussaint Louverture and the Strategy of Dynamic Adaptation

Paul O’Neill CBE and Professor Beatrice Heuser

18 March 202533 Minute Listen

Professor Charles Forsdick tells the story of Toussaint Louverture, who led Haiti’s successful and highly adaptive slave revolt against the 18th century’s great powers.

Toussaint Loverture was a force of nature. A former slave, he led the revolt in Saint Domingue between 1791– 1802 that resulted in Haitian independence. As a self-taught military commander, he was ever present in the fight, adapting his tactics, employing psychological warfare techniques and harnessing the island’s tropical diseases to degrade the French occupying forces. A man of contradictions, he was variously a Spanish monarchist and a French republican who played the great powers of Britain, France, Spain and the United States to secure the space and resources for his revolution to succeed.

Despite leading one of the only successful slave revolts in history, he was less successful as a ruler, where the traits that made him such a great military leader, isolated him from his people. Internal divisions within the revolutionary army led to his capture by Napoleon’s forces and death in captivity in France a few months before Haiti achieved full independence in 1803. For this reason, the Haitian’s know him as ‘the Precursor’ and reserve the title, ‘Liberator’, for one of his lieutenants, Dessalines.

Professor Charles Forsdick is the Drapers Chair of French at the University of Cambridge. He writes extensively about post-colonial memory in Francophone countries, and is the co-author of Toussaint Louverture, A Black Jacobin in the Age of Revolution, with Christian Høgsbjerg published by Pluto Press in 2017.