TOUSSAINT L’OUVERTURE: Napoleon’s ‘Gilded African’ or Wordsworth’s Tragic ‘Chieftain’ with Deirdre Coleman

In the mid-19th century the American abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison denounced the way in which slavery treated black people ‘as if they were not men, but automata or chattels’.

In The Johnston Collection there is a French automaton clock [apparently] representing Toussaint L’Ouverture, the hero of the Haitian revolution in the late 18th century. This lecture looks at a range of visual and textual representations of L’Ouverture, from the sympathetic British view of him as a hero, to the hostile French view of him as a traitor and buffoon.

Deirdre Coleman is the Robert Wallace Chair of English and Deputy Dean of the Faculty of Arts at the University of Melbourne. She is a specialist in the Romantic period and has published extensively on the abolitionist movement in the 18th century. She is also interested in early automata.