Walsh reads Toussaint Louverture and Aime Cesaire together, using their writings to ask how each understood and recounted a defining moment in the decolonizing of the French Caribbean. For Louverture that moment is the revolution that freed the colony of Saint-Domingue; for Cesaire it is the 1946 departmentalization that folded Martinique and other colonies into France itself.

Setting the two side by side lets Walsh trace what connects them. Emancipation left distinct legacies in each case, and those legacies were carried forward in narratives of revolution and nationhood that later generations inherited.

By revisiting both figures through the several layers of narrative they left behind, the book arrives at an account of what it has meant, historically and in the present, to be free and French in the Caribbean.