Every 18 May Haiti marks the day Dessalines cut the white band out of the tricolor and Catherine Flon stitched what remained into a flag. Girard finds almost nothing in the archives to support the scene, and reason to doubt even its date and location.

Madiou, writing in 1847, gave the first detailed version and placed the design earlier, prompted by Petion after the French captured a rebel color and published a pamphlet claiming the insurgents had no thought of independence. Ardouin, more skeptical, kept the order and dropped the swordplay. Later writers preferred the theatrical telling and added to it, Flon included, in ways that track whether the author wished to credit Dessalines or Petion.

The archival record yields a less expected finding. Haiti's flag and its other emblems borrow heavily from French revolutionary iconography, and through most of 1803 the leadership presented itself as the defender of emancipation rather than as the enemy of white people.