Dupuy treats the revolution of 1791 to 1804 as the most radical of the eighteenth century and the first to insist that Enlightenment claims about human equality applied to everyone rather than only to Europeans. But the colony that produced it was stratified by class as much as by color, and that is where his analysis settles.

Saint-Domingue's property-owning middle contained whites and affranchis alike; free people of color held perhaps a third of the productive estates and a quarter of the enslaved by 1791, while the petits blancs who despised them opposed the great planters. Out of the war came a fresh contest between an emerging black officer class and the older mulatto proprietors.

Louverture and Dessalines, Dupuy argues, defended the same underlying interest, a landed class built on the seized plantations and a bound workforce. Their quarrel was over France, and Louverture's non-racial settlement was ahead of what 1802 could accommodate.