Race, Law, and Contested Heritage: Toussaint Louverture’s Family in France

The Haitian revolutionary Toussaint Louverture died in a French prison in 1803; his family was also brought to the metropole, where they would spend the rest of their days in the rural southwest of the country. Their lives in France are usually recounted only as biographical curiosity, but they illuminate complicated interactions of race, law, and political legacy. This article relates their experiences both to those of other free people of color in the metropole and to Napoleonic policing. Doing so reveals how much the reinstitutionalization of slavery in the Caribbean affected even elite free people of color in France. It also shows the Louvertures’ relative success in challenging repressive legislation, and the unusual social and cultural capital they wielded in negotiating with the French state. Because the Louvertures’ lives are unusually well documented and spanned many political regimes, their stories also allow us to investigate why and how much racial policing changed with the end of the Napoleonic government. The chronological and geographic range of their lives illuminates a further issue: how men and women reimagined and retold their stories. While historians are aware of silences and revisions in historical records, we have rarely examined how these revisions encompassed both metropolitan France and the larger Atlantic world, or the choices they involved as individuals confronted different regimes. The Louvertures would repeatedly reframe their histories to appeal to authorities—and seek to use French law to defend their rival claims as Toussaint’s heirs.