The Power of the Personality - The influence of Leon Trotsky´s History of the Russian Revolution (1930) on C.L.R. James´ The Black Jacobins (1938)

Abstract

In 1932 C.L.R. James sailed from his native Trinidad to London determined to make a life for himself in the metropole as a writer. With him on his journey he had an idea for a book. He was going to write a biography about the Haitian revolutionary leader, Toussaint Louverture. However, when James arrives, a radical transformation occurs. Quite by chance he reads Leon Trotsky ́s History of the Russian Revolution (1930) and joins the Trotskyist movement a little over a year later. The consequence of this is that James ́s conception of the world system has changed, and this has a fundamental effect on how he decides to tell the story about Toussaint Louverture. This thesis argues that Trotsky ́s History had a fundamental influence on James ́s re-imagining of Toussaint Louverture, in what would become James ́s most famous work, The Black Jacobins: Toussaint Louverture and the San Domingo Revolution (1938). I argue that in The Black Jacobins, Toussaint Louverture has the same historical role as Lenin has in Trotsky ́s History. Toussaint, like Lenin, appear as the last and decisive element that had to come into place for the revolution to succeed.