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The dishonest political position of the French Army was now taking its toll. The soldiers still thought of themselves as a revolutionary army. Yet at nights they heard the blacks in the fortress singing the Marseillaise, the Ça Ira, and the other revolutionary songs. Lacroix records how these misgu…

But Toussaint’s soldiers and generals, illiterates and ex-slaves, had been moulded by the same revolution. An army is a miniature of the society which produces it. If the black army had wobbled before the French, it was because San Domingo society as a whole did not know what to think of Leclerc’s …

The hamartia, the tragic flaw, which we have constructed from Aristotle, was in Toussaint not a moral weakness. It was a specific error, a total miscalculation of the constituent events. Yet what is lost by the imaginative freedom and creative logic of great dramatists is to some degree atoned for …

It was in method, and not in principle, that Toussaint failed. The race question is subsidiary to the class question in politics, and to think of imperialism in terms of race is disastrous. But to neglect the racial factor as merely incidental is an error only less grave than to make it fundamental…

That was the style, the accent of Toussaint and his men. The British and the Spaniards could not defeat it. All they could offer was money, and there are periods in human history when money is not enough.