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Public Culture 118 Césaire’s confrontation with the “colonial problem” as revealed through and in Haiti thus began in the 1940s. But he did not begin writing directly about these events until the late 1950s, precisely when he reoriented his own political project away from assimilation and toward federal autonomy. This work, including an extended historical essay on Louverture and a play about the tragic reign of King Christophe, linked reflections on revolutionary politics, postcolonial liberation, and historical temporality.46 It is important to note that at the end of his life, when the actual abolition of slavery had foreclosed the emancipatory possibilities of his 1848 program for abolition, Schoelcher had also turned to the legacy of Louverture. The specter of the revolution in Saint-Domingue had figured prominently in Schoelcher’s politi- cal imagination, especially after his visit to independent Haiti in 1841.47 Fear of another catastrophic eruption in the Antilles informed his interest in establishing an enduring association between France and its population of former slaves. This pragmatic concern was paired with a principled commitment to radical republi- can ideals, which he saw embodied in Louverture’s freedom struggle. On July 27, 1879, Schoelcher was invited to give a talk in Paris on Louverture as part of an effort by Thomas-Prosper Gragnon-Lacoste to raise funds to construct a memo- rial tomb for Louverture in Bordeaux, where his ashes remained.48 This talk laid the foundation for the carefully documented historical monograph on Louverture that Schoelcher then published in 1889.49 46. Aimé Césaire, Toussaint Louverture: La Révolution française et le problème colonial (Tous- saint Louverture: The French Revolution and the Colonial Problem) (Paris: Présence Africaine, 1962); Césaire, La tragédie du roi Christophe (The Tragedy of King Christophe) (Paris: Présence Africaine, 1970). The latter may be read as a parable of decolonization that, like Césaire’s 1966 play about Patrice Lumumba, Une saison au Congo (A Season in Congo) (Paris: Seuil, 2001), enacts and meditates on the very interpenetration of historical epochs that I explore. These plays illuminate the underlying continuities among Césaire’s politics, criticism, and aesthetics. They also resonate with Edouard Glissant’s later call for a “prophetic vision of the past” in his 1961 play organized around “the simultaneity of the two time frames in which Toussaint lives” and marked by “the equivalence of past and present” (preface to the 1st ed. of Monsieur Toussaint: A Play, trans. J. Michael Dash and Edouard Glissant [Boulder, Colo.: Reinner, 2005], 15, 16). 47. See Victor Schoelcher, Colonies étrangères et Haiti (Foreign Colonies and Haiti) (Pointe-à- Pitre: Désormeaux, 1973), vol. 2. 48. Victor Schoelcher, Conférence sur Toussaint Louverture, général en chef de l’armée de Saint- Domingue (Conference on Toussaint Louverture, General in Chief of the Army of Saint-Domingue) (Port-au-Prince: Panorama, 1966). Following the talk, Ernest Legouvé, one of the organizers, pre- sented a celebratory summary of Schoelcher’s role in the 1848 abolition of slavery, concluding with the proposal that he now be called “Schoelcher Louverture” (51). 49. Victor Schoelcher, Vie de Toussaint Louverture (Life of Toussaint Louverture) (Paris: Karthala, 1982).