Toussaint Louverture's constitution of 1801 is usually filed as an authoritarian embarrassment. Ardouin called it tyrannical, Madiou a lie, and Fischer does not deny that it hands one man enormous power. She argues it is nonetheless a document of real interest for the history of rights.

Her case rests on how the text words its prohibition. France in 1795 had recast the ban as a limit on contract, something nobody may do to himself. The colonial text names slaves directly, puts their protection ahead of any general principle, and recasts the opening of the 1789 Declaration as a sequence of verbs: to be born, to live, to die, all of it free, all of it French, all of it here. Entitlement comes unhooked from birthplace, turning the colony into a refuge.

Rights here belong to an inhabitant rather than an abstract citizen, and the shift registers a history of transportation and death that abstraction had smoothed away.