French writing about slavery revived in the 1820s after two decades of censorship, and Charles X's recognition of Haitian independence in 1825 gave it a subject. Kadish notes what recognition cost, an indemnity that drained the Haitian treasury for most of a century, but her interest is in how French readers were taught to feel about it.

Her example is Sophie Doin, a Protestant writer with no personal tie to the Caribbean who set out to do in France what abolitionists had managed in England, namely reach past an elite readership. Doin drew on Thomas Clarkson and on Mungo Park's travels, and Kadish tracks how the French translations she worked from sharpened those originals into something more accusatory.

What Doin added was voice. Figures who appear in her sources only as victims become characters with wills of their own, and women turn up as agents of the cause rather than its emblems.