Anföraren för de upproriska negrerna på Domingo, Toussaint-Louvertures Lefverne, af Dubroca. Öfversättning af D. Krutmejer.
Stockholm: tryckt hos Carl Delén, 1802. First Swedish edition. 87, [1] p. Papered spine. Occasional brown spots. In very good condition.
First edition of the Swedish translation of the first biography of the “Black Napoleon” Toussaint-Louverture.
François-Dominique Toussaint Louverture (1743–1803) was an ex-slave, the best-known and the most successful black commanders of the Haitian Revolution, the only successful slave rebellion in history. The insurrection culminated in the elimination of slavery and the founding of the Republic of Haiti, in 1804, the first independent black republic and the second independent nation in the Western Hemisphere.
Approaching the last phase of the Revolution, after Toussaint Louverture defeated the British expeditionary force in 1798, and led a successful invasion of the neighboring Santo Domingo, freeing the slaves there in late 1800 and early 1801, he issued a constitution for Saint-Domingue that decreed he would be governor-for-life and called for black autonomy and a sovereign black state. In response, Napoleon Bonaparte dispatched a large expeditionary force of French soldiers and warships to the island, to restore French rule. At the same time, the ongoing campaign to vilify Louverture has been increased and Bonaparte’s regime hired Jean-Louis Dubroca (1757–1835) to lead the propaganda war against Louverture. Dubroca wrote and published a biography La vie de Toussaint-Louverture, chef des noirs insurgés de Saint-Domingue, in 1802, accusing him of treason and murder, and attacking for his hypocrisy and desperate ambitions (Ghachem; Danforth, 2014). Besides Swedish, the book was translated into English and Dutch in the same year, later into German and Spanish (published in Mexico, in 1806).
In her dissertation, Helen Matthews claims that Dubroca’s book appeared several months before Charles-Yves Cousin D’Avallon’s Histoire de Toussaint-Louverture (Paris, 1802), thus it is the first biography of Louverture published in France (Matthews, 2012).
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Price: €4,000.00