Garrigus rebuilds thirty years of resistance in northern Saint-Domingue from trial testimony, court complaints and medical reports, much of it surviving only because colonists sent copies to France while the local courts burned their own records of slave trials. At the centre stands the poisoning panic of the 1750s and the man convicted of directing it. Reading the interrogations of Médor, the plantation nurse Assam and others against the grain, Garrigus presents Makandal as a Kongo diviner whose rituals bound people together for healing and self-defence, and points to colonial doctors who, two decades after the execution, described an animal-borne disease that fits the unexplained deaths. Around this he assembles other forms of refusal: a free mother suing to keep her son out of bondage, plantation strikes led by enslaved foremen, a delegation walking to Cap Français to lodge a torture complaint. Ten maps set these events on the ground where the 1791 revolt began.