Bellhouse tracks a change in how race was made visible in French metropolitan culture across the long eighteenth century, working through two figures she takes to be symbolically central: the dismembered enslaved Black man, and the Black rapist or lover who is duly punished.

The evidence is two sets of illustrations for Voltaire's Candide, both designed by Moreau le Jeune, one from 1787 and one from 1803. The French and Haitian Revolutions fall between them, and reading the pair against each other registers what had shifted in the French cultural imaginary.

The asymmetry she identifies is telling. Images of the maimed enslaved man circulated openly in France across the whole period, while sex between the races stayed off limits to representation. In 1803, a year before Haitian independence was declared, Moreau breaks that prohibition by metaphor, substituting a monkey to render the Black man as a beast committing rape.