Toussaint Louverture and the Undermining of the Haitian Revolution

Abstract

This work using a structurationist, structural Marxist, phenomenological structuralism, understanding of practical consciousness constitution, explores the origins and basis for the Haitian Revolutionary leader, Toussaint Louverture’s (May 20, 1743-April 1, 1803), social, political, and economic policies. The eldest son of an Arada King, Toussaint Louverture, was a creole-slave born on the island of Saint-Domingue/Haiti. As the eventual leader of the Revolution from 1794-1801, Louverture attempted to have the island remain an independent French territory where slavery was outlawed, but the export-oriented plantation economy, with the slave trade, persisted. He, essentially, adopted the position of the French Royalists, the white plantation owners who wanted more autonomy from France and its “exclusif” mercantile economic system, which forced them to trade and do business exclusively with French merchants and bankers. Although, Louverture’s demeanor and position is typically juxtaposed against his successor, Jean-Jacques Dessalines, all subsequent leaders, I argue here, would go on to adopt Louverture’s policies, the export-oriented agricultural economy, with variations based on who (mulattoes or members of the black grandon class) should serve in the position of the white planters once independence was declared from France in 1804. This decision, to maintain Louverture’s political and economic policies as opposed to redistributing the land to the African masses so that they can pursue their subsistence agriculture and komes, I conclude, has undermined the Revolutionary impetus of the Haitian Revolution and converted Haiti into the so-called poorest (periphery) country in the Western Hemisphere.