How the intellectual and cultural forces of the Enlightenment found a potent expression in cults of personality
In 1791, hundreds of thousands of enslaved people in Saint-Domingue, France’s most valuable Caribbean colony, rose in rebellion. During the war that followed, which ended with the independence of the Republic of Haiti in 1804, François-Dominique Toussaint Louverture emerged from obscurity and led an army of self-emancipated rebels against a shifting assemblage of British, French and Spanish forces. Toussaint overawed his rivals, wrote one biographer, “as a tall stately tree puts down the weeds and brushwood in its growth”.
He was among the heroes of an age of global rupture. In 1776, the US declared its independence from Britain. In 1789, the French Revolution shattered the European political settlement. In 1804, Haitian independence repudiated colonial slavery and shook the foundations of the Atlantic plantation economy. In 1808, Napoleon’s conquest of Bourbon Spain set in motion national independence movements across the Spanish empire in the Americas.