A small revolt by free men of color in the Grande Anse in 1791 gives Geggus the material for a microhistory, built on archival sources barely used before and set within a wider argument about class relations during the revolution.

The rising itself is obscure, though an atrocity story attached to it has echoed through discussion of the revolution ever since. Working outward from it, Geggus reaches the questions it touches: how rumor moved, how slaves came to be armed, how the races dealt with one another, and where the free colored population's wealth and origins lay. That group, long the least understood part of Caribbean society, is on his account central, since its position in Saint-Domingue was anomalous and its activism began the colony's unraveling.

The Grande Anse held to slavery and white supremacy longer than anywhere else in the colony. Geggus takes the case as evidence that a regional approach is the most promising way forward.