The first is an anecdotal account of events, most of which Isaac personally witnessed, during the invasion of Toussaint's Saint Domingue by Napoleon Bonaparte's army. The second, though less complete and more fragmentary than the other, is almost the only source available on Toussaint's ancestry and his childhood. The memoir which Toussaint himself wrote during his final imprisonment is wonderfully vague on these matters. Though it is a sort of autobiography, Toussaint's memoir was meant as a legal brief for a military trial which never took place, and so cannot safely be taken at its full and apparent face value. What becomes obvious from his memoir, his correspondence, his proclamations and public addresses, his more casual statements that have survived in memory, and even from the way he told a tale of himself through his actions, is that Toussaint Louverture always shaped and controlled his own story—the narrative which presented him as a character—with great deliberation, care, and ingenuity.
What do You think about Toussaint Louverture (2007)?
