Anna

“Yet Toussaint did not make the revolution. It was the revolution that made Toussaint. And even that is not the whole truth. ... Today by a natural reaction we tend to a personification of the social forces, great men being merely or nearly instruments in the hands of economic destiny. As so often the truth does not lie in between. Great men make history, but only such history as it is possible for them to make. Their freedom of achievement is limited by the necessities of their environment. ... In a revolution, when the ceaseless slow accumulation of centuries bursts into volcanic eruption, the meteoric flares and flights above are a meaningless chaos and lend themselves to infinite caprice and romanticism unless the observer sees them always as projections of the sub-soil from which they came.”
― C.L.R. James, The Black Jacobins: Toussaint L'Ouverture and the San Domingo Revolution