Gerard Mentor Laurent, historian of Sonthonax and Dessalines, dies

Gerard Mentor Laurent died on 9 April 2001, aged 82, after going blind. He was born on 14 December 1919 and spent his life in the archives. He published Coup d’oeil sur la politique de Toussaint Louverture in 1945, Six etudes sur J. J. Dessalines in 1951, Pages d’histoire d’Haiti in 1960, and Haiti et l’independance americaine in 1976. His four-volume Le commissaire Sonthonax a Saint-Domingue, issued between 1965 and 1974, is still the fullest Haitian account of the man who abolished slavery in the North.