COUSIN D’AVAL
Histoire de Toussaint-Louverture, chef des Noirs insurgés de Saint-Domingue; Précédée d’un coup d’oeil politique sur cette Colonie
Paris, Pillot, 1802.
12ve (145 x 85 mm) with one engraved portrait as frontispiece, 154 unn.ll. Pink boards, flat spine (Ateliers Laurenchet)
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Sabin, 42351

One of two editions published in the same year, this one remained anonymous.

The text was made after Toussaint Louverture’s surrender and internment in France. He died in prison in 1803, aged about 60.

Toussaint Louverture (born in the early 1740s) in the French colony of Saint Domingue, he was enslaved on the plantation of Bréda. Freed in 1776, he ran a coffee plantation and quickly climbed the social ladder. Quickly involved in the slave revolt in 1791, while remaining loyal to France, he was appointed brigadier general in 1795, lieutenant governor of Saint-Domingue in 1796 and then commander and chief of the army in 1797. Toussaint Louverture’s influence became too great in the eyes of the metropolis, and he was arrested in 1802, deported and imprisoned in France where he died in 1803.

Cousin d’Aval (1769-1839), born in Avallon, begins his work with a bitter description of the influence of the colonisers and the responsibility of the French state for the events of the revolt. He explains that “les agents envoyés par le directoire dans les colonies, au lieu d’y rétablir le calme et la tranquillité, y portèrent tous les fermens de la révolte. Tous les pouvoirs furent inconnus, et l’anarchie la plus complète dévorar une partie des habitans de ces contrées”.

A good copy, complete with the engraved portrait of Toussaint Louverture on the frontispiece.