This is a new critical edition of an unjustly forgotten drama by Alphonse de Lamartine, written in the early 1840s but only given its first, and last, performance in Paris in 1850. It draws a compelling image of Toussaint Louverture, the father of Haitian Independence. Lamartine proved something of a visionary by stressing his hero's search for a coherent racial and national ideology, a theme which has become fundamental in Negritude and post-colonial literatures. This edition is the first to provide a critical apparatus covering the history of the text, the political and social background...