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ePaper created 2014-06-21, 10:32:49 | version 1.31.00
Untimely Vision 119 For Schoelcher, the revolution in Saint-Domingue had demonstrated that the course of history could be redirected and a new society created when a population of enslaved blacks transformed themselves into a self-determining political force. Schoelcher also mourned Louverture’s descent into despotism as a tragic betrayal of republican principles. In contrast, Césaire understood this dictatorship circum- stantially, as compelled by a revolutionary crisis, and argued that Louverture had chosen to sacrifice himself as a political act addressed to a future generation. Each writer treated Louverture critically and empathetically, identified with him in complex ways, and sought to work out his own emancipatory project by work- ing through Louverture’s confrontation with the problem of freedom. In different ways, Schoelcher and Césaire attended equally to the immensity of Louverture’s achievements, the impossibility of his enterprise, his manifold failures, and the ever-unrealized possibilities for black liberty and human emancipation that his interventions opened. Additionally, Schoelcher and Césaire both turned to Lou- verture precisely when the radical possibilities of their own utopian visions had been foreclosed and their strategies needed to be revised. In his 1962 study Césaire refers to Louverture as “the Precursor.”50 In doing so, I would suggest, he is not only identifying his predecessor as the avatar of modern anticolonial revolution. Césaire’s Louverture is also, and perhaps most importantly, a patient and visionary political strategist, a skilled reader of historical conditions who grasped the importance of negotiation, compromise, and timing. Ever mind- ful of long-term strategy, he repeatedly made sacrifices in the present, includ- ing that of his own life, to ensure the future freedom of his people. For Césaire, Louverture demonstrated a self-reflexive and self-surpassing ability to “reconvert his politics” by abandoning previous positions for new ones that corresponded more adequately to rapidly changing historical conditions.51 Throughout the long revolutionary struggle Louverture remained concerned with identifying the set of arrangements that would ensure the greatest liberty for his people given the existing order. Such concerns led him successively to fight against French revo- lutionaries, to fight alongside them against enemies of republicanism, to propose a novel form of colonial autonomy within an imperial federation, and finally to confront France directly in an epic revolutionary battle with Napoléon.52 50. Césaire, Toussaint Louverture, 345. 51. Césaire, Toussaint Louverture, 250. 52. This reading of Louverture’s politics is based in part on his own writings, which are gener- ously excerpted in Schoelcher, Vie de Toussaint Louverture; Césaire, Toussaint Louverture; and Toussaint L’Ouverture, ed. George F. Tyson Jr. (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice Hall, 1973). It is also indebted to the important and insightful accounts provided in C. L. R. James, The Black