French officers deliberately destroyed evidence of Louverture’s romantic liaisons

Evidence

Elsewhere in the colony French officers had already begun doing their best to erase what they saw as the perversions of this time of liberty. Soon after the French took Port-au-Prince, Lacroix and another general had found among Louverture’s papers a box with a “false bottom.” Underneath they found “locks of hair of all colors, rings, golden hearts punctured with arrows, little keys,” along with an “infinity of sweet notes,” all of which “left no doubt about the success the old Toussaint Louverture had achieved in love!” “He was black, and physically repulsive,” wrote Lacroix, “but he had made himself the dispenser of all fortunes, and his power could alter any condition when it wished.” Besides shocking the two generals, the discovery frightened them in its implications. For in Bonaparte’s instructions to Leclerc he had declared that “white women who have prostituted themselves to negroes, whatever their rank, will be sent back to France.” The archive they had found could have been turned into a list of the guilty. So the two men decided to do a noble thing: before looking too closely at what they had found, they decided to “lose every trace of these shameful memories,” and burned much of what could “remind us of our painful discovery,” throwing the rest into the ocean. — Dubois, Laurent, Avengers of the New World_ The Story of…, 987

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the reader’s stated interest in ‘is (Small acts of decorum toward corpses matter more than practical logic)’ — the destruction of an archive is a form of erasure, like the analogous destruction of evidence in other colonial archives.
• STORYSTEM: A portrait of power through intimacy — Louverture’s belongings archived sweet notes, then purged by frightened men. A fiction device: power measured by what subordinates dare collect.
• QUESTION: The letters and objects were burned and thrown into the ocean, so no one will ever know their content — an intentionally unanswerable historical question.