In the great book of history, as well as in the 1960 study that Aimé Césaire dedicated to him, Toussaint Louverture makes his first appearance two years after the storming of the Bastille, at the beginning of the French Revolution. He arrives on the stage of history in August 1791, aged almost fifty, as a leader of the slave insurrection in Saint-Domingue.

Himself born a slave on May 20, 1743, the anti-colonial leader was at first known as Toussaint Bréda, after the plantation near Haut de Cap where he was based. There, he became a detonator for the revolutionary ideas from Paris, which, making their way across the Atlantic, led to one of the most important political upheavals of recent centuries.

This Caribbean territory had been a linchpin of the eighteenth-century imperial order; it was also one of the richest colonies in the world at the time. But in a land where slaves constituted nearly 90 percent of the population, the oppressed revolted against the colonial monster — and defeated it.