Setting the Haitian revolution beside the American and French declarations of rights, Fick argues that only the overthrow of slavery in Saint Domingue carried natural rights through to their full consequence, dismantling the ownership of people as property rather than a metaphorical political bondage. The second half of the essay follows what became of that freedom once it had to be defended. Reading Toussaint Louverture's labour code of 1800, his 1801 constitution and his own addresses to the workers, Fick describes a regime that bound cultivators to their estates under military supervision, blocked land sales below fifty carreaux so that no smallholding peasantry could form, and granted a quarter share of revenue while demanding harder work than slavery had. Emancipation was preserved by tying it to export earnings and a black army, so citizenship reached the rural majority in a heavily restricted form.