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‘If the basis of popular government in peacetime is virtue, its basis in revolution is both virtue and terror,’ declared Robespierre on 5 February 1794: ‘virtue, without which terror is disastrous; terror, without which virtue has no power.’ His whirlpool of virtue would be the template for all similar self-righteous, secular witch-hunts; the Committee was the first modern war cabinet, the first government designed to purify and reshape society.

In March, the return of Danton – demanding an end to the Terror, warning of dictatorship and proposing peace negotiations – threatened Robespierre’s rule and vision. The Sea-Green Incorruptible – the epithet applied to him by the historian Thomas Carlyle – denounced him and his supporters for defeatism, stealing funds from the Compagnie des Indes Orientales and interceding for Marie Antoinette. On 5 April, Danton and the others went to the guillotine. ‘What annoys me most’, Danton supposedly reflected in Sanson’s carriage, ‘is I’m going to die six weeks before Robespierre.’

Robespierre had won, but now no one was safe. He and the Committee accelerated the executions by the ‘national razor’. The war speeded the rise of a generation of young officers. In the south, where British and royalist forces had seized Toulon, Robespierre sent two legates to retake the port, his brother Augustin and an ex-vicomte, Paul Barras, who were impressed by a young Corsican captain called Napoleon Bonaparte, energetic, thin and sallow, who in December 1793 commanded the artillery during its successful recapture. At the age of twenty-four, Bonaparte was promoted to general. In Saint-Domingue, another brilliant young general was taking command of a revolutionary army.

Three years into the revolution, the Convention outlawed racial discrimination but refused to abolish slavery, sending out 6,000 French troops to retake the Jewel of the Caribbean.

BLACK SPARTACUS AND THE TYRANT OF VIRTUE

As the French tried to crush the ex-slaves, Toussaint travelled to the Santo Domingo half of Hispaniola to negotiate an alliance with the Spanish, who duly made him a general. Meanwhile Biassou and several leaders were themselves trading in slaves, whom they sold to the Spanish. Biassou ordered Toussaint’s murder; he then stayed with the Spanish, and Toussaint emerged as paramount leader.

Wiry, tall, tireless, sporting ‘a blue jacket, large red cape, red cuffs with eight rows of lace on the arms, large gold epaulettes, scarlet waistcoat, pantaloons, half-boots, round hat with a red feather’, he ‘managed to make himself invisible where he was and visible where he was not’, an enemy recalled. ‘He borrowed his spontaneity of movement from the tiger.’ Infused with his African culture and slave traditions of voodoo occultism along with Catholicism, the French language and the Parisian Enlightenment, witty, playful and always surprising, Toussaint was a master of military tactics, manoeuvring between France, Spain and Britain. ‘Say little,’ he said, ‘but do as much as possible.’ Presenting himself as a cross between a god of war, Ogoun Fer, and a shapeshifting voodoo spirit of the crossroads, Papa Legba, he adopted a new name, Louverture – the Opening.

After two years ‘behind the curtain’, Toussaint proclaimed, ‘I am Toussaint Louverture: you have perhaps heard my name. You are aware, brothers, that I have undertaken vengeance and I want freedom and equality to reign in Saint-Domingue … to establish the happiness of us all.’

As commander he gathered around him the henchmen who would dominate Haiti. Jean-Jacques Dessalines, future emperor, was one of the slaves Louverture had managed after his own manumission, while Henry Christophe, future king, had worked as slave, stableboy and waiter, and as a drummer boy had fought at Savannah with the black French regiment Chasseurs-Volontaires de Saint-Domingue and with the Americans against the British. Most of Toussaint’s men were African-born slaves, particularly Kongos from Angola, but his chief of staff, General Agé, was white. Louverture boasted that he ‘put ninety Spaniards to the sword’ after one battle and sent heads to the French, yet he disliked ‘warriors with a fondness for spilling blood’, often protecting the colons.