Chapter 8

Creating ‘modern’ citizenships

out of slavery: Jean-Jacques
Rousseau and Toussaint
Louverture
Tendayi Bloom
 1 Introduction

1 Introduction

Figure 8.1a Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712–78) Figure 8.1b Toussaint

Louverture (1743–1803)

In the early eighteenth century, most of Europe was ruled by royal

families with various approximations to absolute power and land-
owning elites. New approaches to science and engineering facilitated
significant technological advances. New wealth came from overseas
colonies. All of this contributed to a period of extraordinary social
change and new ideas about how society should be organised. It is a
period often referred to as the ‘European Enlightenment’.
It is in this context that we find the thinkers Jean-Jacques Rousseau
and Toussaint Louverture, neither of whom began life in a particularly
remarkable way. They both imagined the societies in which they lived
differently. Their ‘modern’ ideas of a politically empowered, universal
citizenship sparked debates and drove radical changes that continue to
influence how we live today.
Rousseau’s ideas contributed to the French and American revolutions.
Louverture’s showed how the same logic required revolution in Saint-
Domingue as well, leading to the creation of the modern state of Haiti.
Through Rousseau and Louverture we can see the power of political

151
Chapter 8 Creating ‘modern’ citizenships out of slavery: Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Toussaint Louverture

ideas and how they can resonate in different places and different times.
They also help us to begin to think about why some thinkers are still
remembered centuries after their death.

152
 2 ‘Man was born free, and he is everywhere in chains’

2 ‘Man was born free, and he is

everywhere in chains’
The son of a Genevan watchmaker, Jean-Jacques Rousseau was still an
adolescent when he became an apprentice engraver. Badly treated by
his employer, he became increasingly frustrated until, still only 16, he
left his apprenticeship and did not return (Rousseau, 1953, p. 49). He
went on to have a range of jobs and became known as an intellectual
only in his late middle age, having benefited from varied life
experiences (Damrosch, 2007).
Rousseau arrived in Paris in 1742, aged 30, and quickly became friends
with Denis Diderot, a French philosopher who is a central figure in
the Enlightenment. They and their circle radically questioned the ideas
that underpinned the society in which they lived. As a result, in 1749
Diderot was arrested and incarcerated in the dungeons of the Château
de Varsenne. It was on his way to visit his friend there that Rousseau
was struck by the idea that no one living in civilisation is really free
(Rousseau, 1953, p. 328). Soon afterwards, he penned what has become
one of his most famous texts:

Man was born free, and he is everywhere in chains. Those who

think themselves the masters of others are indeed greater slaves
than they. How did this transformation come about? I do not
know. How can it be made legitimate? That question I believe I
can answer.
(Rousseau, 1968)

Rousseau set out to understand why people submit themselves to what

he believed to be the servitude of civilisation and whether any
government could be justified. He became one of a collection of
thinkers developing versions of the idea that government can be
justified only according to some sort of ‘social contract’. For Rousseau,
the consent to this contract did not need to be given by each
individual in turn but could be given by the ‘general will’ – that is,
each individual would become a citizen through participating freely in
the general will, for example through voting, or by being driven by a
feeling of justice and a love of the community.

153
Chapter 8 Creating ‘modern’ citizenships out of slavery: Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Toussaint Louverture

Rousseau’s ideas were radical for his time. Two books in particular,
both published in 1762, were worrisome to those in power. These were
The Social Contract, which concerned Geneva’s authorities, and Émile,
which caused reaction in Paris. In Geneva and Paris respectively, there
were orders for The Social Contract and Émile respectively to be
burned and for the author to be arrested. Rousseau, who was living in
Paris, fled. By 1763 he had renounced his Genevan citizenship for the
second time and lived in exile. He eventually returned to France as an
old man and continued to write.
The burning of his books did not stop the circulation of Rousseau’s
ideas, and before his death the American Revolution – which was
influenced by Rousseau’s work – had already begun. The French
Revolution would soon follow, intrinsically intertwined with another
revolution in the French colony of Saint-Domingue, to which we will
now turn.

154
 3 ‘I was born a slave, but nature gave me the soul of a free man’

3 ‘I was born a slave, but nature gave

me the soul of a free man’
Toussaint Louverture was born Toussaint Bréda in around 1743, a
slave on the Bréda sugar plantation in the French colony of Saint-
Domingue. He would change his name to Toussaint Louverture
(‘L’Ouverture’ is French for ‘The Opening’) in his first public
proclamation in his fifties, in 1793. When Louverture was born, Saint-
Domingue was a major producer of coffee and sugar and the most
economically important of the French colonies in the Americas. Its
economy was entirely dependent upon the labour of slaves brought
mostly from Africa.
Louverture’s parents had been brought to Saint-Domingue as slaves,
likely from the area that is now the country of Benin. Louverture likely
gained literacy in French and Latin thanks to Jesuits or an army officer
(Girard, 2014, pp. 3–4). He probably also spoke both Fon and Creyol
(Forsdick and Høgsbjerg, 2017, p. 21). Literacy gave him an advantage
not enjoyed by most slaves of Saint-Domingue and has been important
in the dissemination and preservation of his ideas.

Some illiterate officers like Louverture’s nephew Möise could be

deceived by secretaries who misrepresented their ideas, but
Louverture was educated enough to retain control over his prose
even when he did not personally pen a letter. … Louverture did
not employ secretaries because he could not write, but because he
could not write well: He wanted his letters to Parisian officials to
be couched in formal French, a language he never fully mastered
in writing.
(Girard, 2014, pp. 5–6

Like Rousseau, Louverture spent his first 30 years gaining the

experience that would drive his most productive and influential years.
It is believed that he obtained his freedom in 1776, though little is
known of the circumstances. He set up a smallholding with his wife,
his stepson and eventually two more sons. While there had been
rebellion before, in 1791 the slave revolt in Saint-Domingue had more
momentum, just as revolution was also gaining force in France.

155
Chapter 8 Creating ‘modern’ citizenships out of slavery: Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Toussaint Louverture

Toussaint Louverture was in his forties when he joined the uprising.

(Girard and Donnadieu 2013, p.42)

156
 4 ‘It is not for slaves to deliberate freedom’

4 ‘It is not for slaves to deliberate

freedom’
Before he left Paris, Rousseau had warned that civilisation can look like
freedom, even when the citizens are effectively enslaved by civilisation.
As such, he argued that it was crucial to try to understand those who
reject society’s slavery, including those rejecting colonisation, for
example. This was novel. Many thinkers before him had sought to
demonstrate superiority of European cultures over those conquered by
European powers. This included referring to conquered people as
‘savages’. Rousseau played on the use of this word. He argued that a
government cannot be justified unless it is forced to justify itself to the
people it governs and they are then able to accept or reject it. In this,
Rousseau was calling for a new sort of citizenship.

Just as an unbroken horse tosses its mane, stamps the ground

with its hoof, and rears up furiously at the mere approach of the
bit, while a broken-in horse patiently suffers even the whip and
spurs, savage man will not bend his neck to the yoke that civilized
man wears without a whimper; savage man prefers the most
tempestuous freedom to the most tranquil subservience. Hence it
is not to the degradation of enslaved peoples that we should look
in judging man’s natural disposition toward or against servitude,
but rather to the wonders worked by all free peoples in saving
themselves from oppression. I know that enslaved peoples do
nothing but boast of the peace and repose they enjoy in their
chains, and that miserrimam servitutem pacem appellant1. When,
however, I see free peoples sacrificing pleasure, repose, wealth,
power, and even life itself for the sake of preserving the lone
good that is so scorned by those who have lost it; when I see
animals, born free and abhorring captivity, smashing their heads
against the bars of their prison; when I see multitudes of naked
savages scorn European pleasures and brave hunger, fire, the
sword, and death just to safeguard their independence, I feel that
it is not for slaves to deliberate about freedom.
(Rousseau, 2009, pp. 72–3)

1
Latin translates to: ‘they call a state of wretched servitude a state of peace’

157
Chapter 8 Creating ‘modern’ citizenships out of slavery: Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Toussaint Louverture

This rejection of symbolic slavery and claiming of liberty was the

driving force behind the American Revolutionary War (1775–83) and
the French Revolution (1789–99) and the construction of republican
citizenship that underpinned them. They would eventually lead to
American independence from Great Britain and the abolition of the
French monarchy. Both revolutions were premised on the idea of
citizenship and by the demand – of the citizens – for the freedom
from slavery presented by Rousseau and others.
Rousseau not only condemned metaphorical slavery in society but also
the real slavery in the colonies (Cook, 1936, p. 301). He also observed
that, ‘however we look at the question, the “right” of slavery is seen to
be void; void, not only because it cannot be justified, but also because
it is nonsensical, because it has no meaning’ (Rousseau, 1968, p. 58).
Yet at the same time, both France and America remained heavily
reliant upon this more literal sort of slavery. The relationship of the
French revolutionaries to Saint-Domingue, the home of Toussaint
Louverture, was complex. For example, among their number were
plantation owners and an awareness of the importance of Saint-
Domingue for French prosperity. For many, the abolition of slavery
would have seemed like a disaster. This drove an argument among
some that the revolution’s ideals of freedom and citizenship rights
should be restricted. These people argued that those ideals should not
be extended to those who had been brought to the Caribbean from
African countries as slaves, for example. Other revolutionaries rejected
slavery of any sort, no matter who was enslaved, including that in
Saint-Domingue.
In the period just prior to the revolution, the French king Louis XIV
had attempted to implement decrees to improve the conditions for
slaves in the colonies. This had met with opposition from Saint-
Domingue slave owners who opposed French meddling in the colony’s
local affairs. The American Revolutionary War broke out in 1775, over
the imposition of colonial taxes alongside the imposition of rules from
England. Colonists in Saint-Domingue began to see their struggle in
the same context, as a rejection of imposed royal power upon colonial
institutions. As a result, slave leaders like Louverture initially supported
the king against the republican revolutionaries (Forsdick and
Høgsbjerg, 2017, p. 27), though this would change.

158
 5 ‘Those whom you call your slaves and who claim the rights to which all men may aspire’

5 ‘Those whom you call your slaves

and who claim the rights to which all
men may aspire’
The ideas that drove the revolution in Saint-Domingue have been
traced to African political thought and reactions to local conditions as
well as engagement with the ideas of the European Enlightenment
(Fischer, 2004). In the early letters of Toussaint Louverture and others
in Saint-Domingue, we can find the ideas of Rousseau and those of
revolutionary France. This can be seen in an early letter of the leaders
of the Saint-Domingue slave revolt to the National Assembly of
revolutionary France:

Gentlemen,
Those who have the honour to present you with these memoirs
are a class of men whom up to the present you have failed to
recognize as like yourselves, and whom you have covered in
opprobrium by heaping upon them the ignominy attached to their
unfortunate lot. These are men who don’t know how to choose
big words, but who are going to show you and all the world the
justice of their cause; finally, they are those whom you call your
slaves and who claim the rights to which all men may aspire.
For too long, gentlemen, by way of abuses that one can never too
strongly accuse of having taken place because of our lack of
understanding and our ignorance – for a very long time, I say –
we have been victims of your greed and your avarice. Under the
blows of your barbarous whip we have accumulated for you the
treasures you enjoy in this colony; the human race has suffered to
see with what barbarity you have treated men like yourself – yes,
men – over whom you have no other right except that you are
stronger and more barbaric than we; you have engaged in [slave]
traffic, you have sold men for horses, and even that is the least of
your shortcomings in the eyes of humanity; our lives depend on
your caprice, and when it’s a question of amusing yourselves, the
burden falls on men like us, who most often are guilty of no
other crime than to be under your orders.

159
Chapter 8 Creating ‘modern’ citizenships out of slavery: Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Toussaint Louverture

We are black, it is true, but tell us, gentlemen, you who are so
judicious, what is the law that says that the black man must
belong to and be the property of the white man? Certainly you
will not be able to make us see where that exists, if it is not in
your imaginations – always ready to form new [phantasms] so
long as they are to your advantage. Yes, gentlemen, we are free
like you, and it is only by your avarice and our ignorance that
anyone is still held in slavery up to this day, and we can neither
see nor find the right that you pretend to have over us, nor
anything that could prove it to us, set down on the earth like you,
all being children of the same father created in the same image.
We are your equals then, by natural right, and if nature pleases
itself to diversify colours within the human race, it is not a crime
to be born black nor an advantage to be white. If the abuses in
the Colony have gone on for several years, that was before the
fortunate revolution that has taken place in the motherland, which
has opened for us the road which our courage and labour will
enable us to ascend, to arrive at the temple of liberty, like those
brave Frenchmen who are our models and whom all the universe
is contemplating.
For too long we have borne your chains without thinking of
shaking them off, but any authority which is not founded on
virtue and humanity, and which only tends to subject one’s fellow
man to slavery, must come to an end, and that end is yours. You,
gentlemen, who pretend to subject us to slavery – have you not
sworn to uphold the French Constitution? What does it say, this
respectable constitution? What is the fundamental law? Have you
forgotten that you have formally vowed the Declaration of the
Rights of Man, which says that men are born free, equal in their
rights; that their natural rights include liberty, property, security
and resistance to oppression? So, then, as you cannot deny what
you have sworn, we are within our rights, and you ought to
recognize yourselves as perjurers; by your decrees you recognize
that all men are free, but you want to maintain servitude for
480,000 individuals who allow you to enjoy all that you possess.
Through your envoys you offer liberty only to our chiefs; it is still
one of your maxims of politics to say that those who have played
an equal part in our work should be delivered by us to be your
victims. No, we prefer a thousand deaths to acting that way

160
 5 ‘Those whom you call your slaves and who claim the rights to which all men may aspire’

towards our own kind. If you want to accord us the benefits that
are due to us, they must also shower onto all of our brothers.
(letter to the French General Assembly from Biassou, Jean-François and
Belair, July 1792 cited in Nesbitt, 2008, pp. 5–8)

According to Nesbitt, this letter was also signed by Toussaint

Louverture, who had a hand in writing it.
Rousseau’s ideas, and those of his contemporaries in France, were
distributed in pamphlets in Paris. Some such pamphlets travelled across
the Atlantic and influenced the debates that were developing in Saint-
Domingue. It is reported of one man who was later executed for
fighting against slavery in Saint-Domingue that ‘in one of his pockets
pamphlets printed in France, filled with commonplaces about the
Rights of Man and the Sacred Revolution’ (Dubois, 2005, p. 102).
Rousseau’s key contribution to the understanding of citizenship was to
reconfigure it as a political status to be held by all in society, one
which carried both duties and rights and which would be arrived at by
consent. Louverture and his contemporaries in Saint-Domingue built
on this, arguing that the equality of citizenship should be open also to
those whom the French empire had previously designated as slaves and
as racially inferior. While the French and American revolutions rejected
the ‘aristocracy of class’, Louverture and others argued that they still
relied on an ‘aristocracy of the skin’. (This term is used for example by
Deputy Camboulas to the French National Assembly in response to
the delegation mentioned below, cited in Forsdick and Høgsbjerg,
2017, p. 55; James 1938, p.98)
In 1794, a delegation of three representatives from Saint-Domingue
went to Paris to speak before the National Assembly. They represented
each of the three ‘racial’ groups in the colony: the ‘free whites’ (who
were plantation owners and workers), the ‘free non-whites’ and
‘enslaved blacks’. As the representatives finished speaking, Georges
Jacques Danton of the Committee of Public Safety declared the end of
slavery.

Representatives of the French people, until now we have decreed

liberty as egoists for ourselves. But today we proclaim universal
liberty. […] France, until now cheated of her glory, repossesses it
before the eyes of an astonished Europe and assumes the
preponderance which must be assured her by her principles, her

161
Chapter 8 Creating ‘modern’ citizenships out of slavery: Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Toussaint Louverture

energy, her land and her population! Activity, energy, generosity,

but generosity guided by the flame of reason, and regulated by the
compass of principles, and thus assured forever of the recognition
of posterity.
(Georges Jacques Danton, speech at the National Assembly of the French
Republic, 1794, cited in Blackburn, 1988, p. 225)

Almost as soon as the end of slavery was announced, there were

already regrets and efforts to retract. However, once the news reached
the now-freed slaves of Saint-Domingue, there was celebration and
widening belief that the slaves could ally themselves with the French
Republic after all.

162
 6 ‘Could men who have once enjoyed the benefits of liberty look on calmly while it is taken from them!’

6 ‘Could men who have once enjoyed

the benefits of liberty look on calmly
while it is taken from them!’
While he did not join the revolution immediately, when he did,
Louverture quickly became a key leader. Initially, the focus among the
leadership was on emancipation under the French crown. It then
became a struggle for emancipation within the French Republic.
Eventually, it was also a struggle for independence (though
Louverture’s own stance on independence is debated). In response to
the attempts by France to reinstate slavery, Louverture wielded the
language and ideas of the French Revolution, echoing Rousseau in
Discourse on the Origin of Inequality (2009).

Could men who have once enjoyed the benefits of liberty look on
calmly while it is taken from them! They bore their chains when
they knew no condition of life better than that of slavery. But
today when they have left it, if they had a thousand lives, they
would sacrifice them all rather than be subjected again to slavery.
But no, the hand that has broken our chains will not subject us to
them again.
(letter to the French Directory, cited in Nesbitt, 2008, p. 34

In the same year, Louverture reframed the ideas behind the struggle
for freedom in Saint-Domingue as part of the idea of a much larger
struggle for liberty. Again, he made strategic use of the same wording
as the speakers in the National Assembly and the ideas of the
philosophers of the French Revolution. This was in turn heard by
would-be revolutionaries across both the French and the British
Caribbean.

Let the sacred flame of liberty that we have won lead all our acts
… Let us go forth to plant the tree of liberty, breaking the chains
of our brothers still held captive under the shameful yoke of
slavery. Let us bring them under the compass of our rights, the
imprescriptible and inalienable rights of free men. [Let us
overcome] the barriers that separate nations, and unite the human
species into a single brotherhood. We seek only to bring to men

163
Chapter 8 Creating ‘modern’ citizenships out of slavery: Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Toussaint Louverture

the liberty that [God] has given them, and that other men have
taken from them only be transgressing His immutable will.

Address to soldiers for the universal destruction of slavery, Bulletin Official

de St-Domingue, Toussaint Louverture, 18 May 1797 cited in Nesbitt, 2008,
p. 28

Louverture’s own position is complex. For a start, the position of

women in the revolution is not clear. In addition, he himself had likely
been a free man for some decades by the time of the revolution. Once
slavery was abolished, he ordered former slaves to return to their
plantations to work for a wage and to keep the colony economically
viable. This generated anger and may have undermined his position
among many. In his memoirs, Louverture reflects on this decision:

If I made my fellows work, it was to make them appreciate the

price of liberty without license, it was to prevent the corruption
of morals; it was for the general happiness of the island, and in
the interest of the republic, and I had indeed succeeded because
you could not see in the entire colony a single man without
occupation and the number of beggars diminished; aside from a
few in the towns there was not a single one in the countryside.
(Louverture, 1802, p. 97)

In 1787 the United States Constitution was signed. In 1789 the

National Constituent Assembly of France adopted the Declaration of
the Rights of Man and of the Citizen. In 1801 Toussaint Louverture
published the first Constitution of Saint-Domingue. Each of these
documents contains local differences, but central among them are the
core rights foreseen by Rousseau and his fellow thinkers: core human
rights intertwined with citizenship. It is important to note, though, that
the meaning of this citizenship varied.

164
 7 The power of ideas and the cults of Rousseau and Louverture

7 The power of ideas and the cults of

Rousseau and Louverture
When Louverture was at the height of his influence, Napoleon
Bonaparte believed that the ideas of Louverture and his presence in
Saint-Domingue were too incendiary. So, like Rousseau two decades
earlier, Louverture became an exile – though the circumstances
differed. In his memoirs Louverture describes how he was lured to a
meeting and arrested. In his absence, his home was pillaged, his wife
and sons taken. With only the clothes they wore, the Louverture family
were put on a ship to France. After 99 days on board, the family was
separated (Louverture, 2014, pp. 134–7). Louverture was taken to Fort
de Joux (near the French/Swiss border), the most secure prison in
France (Girard, 2014, p. 1).
In the final months of his life, incarcerated, Louverture wrote a
memoir, which he sent to Bonaparte as a plea for freedom. He
received no reply. Louverture died in prison in France in 1803. The
next year, Saint-Domingue, renamed Haiti, declared its independence.
Louverture was buried in the crypt below the chapel of the fort where
he was held. In the late 1870s, the site was expanded and his remains
became mixed into the dirt of its foundations so that there is no exact
spot which can be described as his final resting place. In 1983 a crate
of soil taken from the general area was given formally to Haiti, though
travellers still go to Fort de Joux in France to pay their respects.
Rousseau also wrote a book of reflections in his final months, Reveries
of a Solitary Walker. He died in 1778 of a stroke and was buried on
the Île des Peupliers in Paris. So many visitors went to see his burial
site that in 1794 his remains were moved to the Panthéon, among
those of Voltaire and the other ‘great citizens of France’. Today, both
Rousseau and Louverture have cult-like status. Images of Louverture
are still found across the Caribbean and in communities affected by
slavery. In 1893, Frederick Douglass, who himself had escaped slavery
at age 20 and was United States Minister Resident to Haiti, reflected
on this:

[Haiti] has grandly served the cause of universal human liberty.

We should not forget that the freedom you and I enjoy to-day;
that the freedom that eight hundred thousand colored people

165
Chapter 8 Creating ‘modern’ citizenships out of slavery: Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Toussaint Louverture

enjoy in the British West Indies; the freedom that has come to
the colored race the world over, is largely due to the brave stand
taken by the black sons of Haiti ninety years ago. When they
struck for freedom … they struck for the freedom of every black
man in the world.
(Frederick Douglass, 1893, lecture on Haiti, ‘The Haitian Pavilion
Dedication Ceremonies’, cited in Carrillo, 2012, p. 4)

Jean-Jacques Rousseau and his contemporaries in Europe questioned

the institutional structures they saw around them in European cities.
They argued for a new understanding of political freedom and for a
new form of citizenship. Toussaint Louverture and his contemporaries
in the Caribbean showed how the ideas of writers like Rousseau
required a discussion of both the slavery and the racism inherent in the
European colonial projects and their incompatibility with the ideas of
the European Enlightenment – including those of universal citizenship
and rights.
Both Rousseau and Louverture have also been associated with the
violence and excesses of revolution. Rousseau has been blamed for the
Great Terror, when thousands of Parisians lost their lives to the
guillotine. Similarly, Louverture has been blamed for the atrocities
meted out against slave owners in Saint-Domingue.
In exploring the lives and ideas of Jean-Jacques Rousseau and of
Toussaint Louverture, we also come across a key difference between
their legacies as thinkers. While Rousseau’s thinking is widely published
and circulated in his own words, and Rousseau himself has been the
subject of extensive scholarship, Louverture’s work remains harder to
find and his life more difficult to assemble. The lives of slaves are less
well recorded than those of citizens, and the documentation of slave
revolts is largely done by their masters. While the French Republic has
become a major world power, Haiti has been subject to subsequent
colonisations and economic sanctions and remains one of the world’s
poorest countries. Inequality among thinkers affects which thoughts are
contained in the traditional canon of political thought.

166
 8 Conclusion

8 Conclusion
In this chapter, we have looked at how both Jean-Jacques Rousseau
and Toussaint Louverture developed modern ideas of citizenship out of
their understandings of slavery. Rousseau worried that, although people
are born free, they submit themselves to the slavery of civilisation. He
wanted to understand what it would take for a government to be
justified. Rousseau also challenged the justification of colonial projects
bringing ‘civilisation’ overseas. The slavery that worried Louverture was
that which he saw in the French colony of Saint-Domingue, where
some people were understood to be ‘owned’ by other people. He
argued that this could not be justified.
Rousseau’s ideas contributed to the French and American revolutions.
Louverture’s ideas contributed to the revolution in Saint-Domingue,
known as the Haitian Revolution. Louverture used language like that of
Rousseau to show how the French revolutionary commitment to
citizenship and liberty in France must also drive a commitment to
ending slavery in its colony of Saint-Domingue.
In this chapter, we have seen how an understanding of one helps us to
understand the other. We have also seen how the different subsequent
histories of France, the United States and Haiti may have contributed
to the ways in which the ideas of Rousseau and of Louverture are
understood today.

167
Chapter 8 Creating ‘modern’ citizenships out of slavery: Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Toussaint Louverture

References and Bibliography

Blackburn, R. (1988) The Overthrow of Colonial Slavery 1776–1848, New
York, Verso (this edition 2000).
Carrillo, K. J. (2012) African American History Day by Day, Santa Barbara,
CA, Greenwood.
Cook, M. (1936) ‘Jean-Jacques Rousseau and the Negro’, The Journal of Negro
History, vol. 21, no. 3, pp. 294–303.
Damrosch, L. (2007) Jean-Jacques Rousseau: Restless Genius, Boston, MA,
Mariner Books.
Davis, D. B. (2014) The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Emancipation, New
York, NY, Knopf.
P. Girard and J-L Donnadieu (2013) ‘Toussaint before Louverture: New
Archival Findings on the Early Life of Toussaint Louverture’, The William
and Mary Quarterly vol. 70, no. 1, pp.41-78
Dubois, L. (2005) Avengers of the New World: The Story of the Haitian,
Cambridge, MA, Harvard University Press.
Fischer, S. (2004) Modernity Disavowed, Durham, Duke University Press.
Forsdick, C. and Høgsbjerg, C. (2017) Toussaint Louverture: A Black Jacobin in
the Age of Revolutions, London, Pluto Books.
Girard, P. (2014) ‘Introduction’, in Girard, P. (ed) The Memoir of General
Toussaint Louverture, Oxford, Oxford University Press, pp. 1–46.
Hobsbawm, E. (1962) The Age of Revolution 1789–1848, London, Orion (this
edition 1962).
James, C. L. R. (1938) The Black Jacobins, London, Penguin (this
edition 2001).
Louverture, T. (1802) ‘Memoir of General Toussaint Louverture’, pp. 52–169
in Girard, P. (ed) The Memoir of General Toussaint Louverture, Oxford, Oxford
University Press (this edition 2014).
Nesbitt, N. (ed) (2008) Toussaint L’Ouverture: The Haitian Revolution,
London, Verso.
Rousseau, J.-J. (2009 [1755]) Discourse on the Origin of Inequality, (trans. F.
Philip), Oxford, Oxford University Press.
Rousseau, J.-J. (1968 [1762]) The Social Contract (trans. M. Cranston), London,
Penguin Books.
Rousseau, J.-J. (1953 [1782–9]) The Confessions, (trans. J. M. Cohen), London,
Penguin Classics.
Rousseau, J.-J. (1762) Émile, Oxford, Oxford University Press (this
edition 1989).

168