Any life of Toussaint Louverture has to work around two obstacles: the archive is thin before 1791, and the gaps have been filled for two centuries with legend. Louverture supplied some of it himself, cultivating the international press and shaping his memoir with posterity in view, telling conservative planters one story and the black rank and file another.

This introduction surveys how he has been refigured since, from bloodthirsty savage at one extreme to greatest of black men at the other, and treats the mythmaking as a subject worth studying in itself. C. L. R. James is read closely on the tension between impersonal historical forces and individual leadership, including his own later turn toward a history written from below.

Much of the argument is aimed at recent conservative revisionism, particularly Philippe Girard's portrait of a pragmatic social climber, which the editors regard as reducing a revolutionary to one fragment of himself.