The president of France on Thursday stepped into the cold mountain prison where Toussaint Louverture, a famed leader of the Haitian Revolution, died 220 years ago after being tricked, kidnapped and secreted across an ocean and into the French hinterland, reports The New York Times.
Standing in the armory, not far from the cell where Louverture spent his last days, President Emmanuel Macron called the man who took on France after being freed from slavery a hero who embodied the true values of the Enlightenment and the French Revolution.
“Toussaint Louverture strove to give life to the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen,” Mr. Macron said in a speech delivered on the 175th anniversary of France’s abolition of slavery. “That which offered freedom, equality, fraternity to all.”
It was the first time a French leader paid official tribute to Louverture at the prison where he died, a powerful gesture from a president determined to reconcile the France of today with the shadows of its past.
But the effort comes at a time when the issues of race and colonial history remain extremely fraught, and what Mr. Macron did not say may have spoken louder than what he did.