In conversation, Fouchard lays out the version of Haitian history he spent a career defending. He starts before Columbus, with Ciboney and Arawak settlement, and refuses the word discovery: an island of a million people was already inhabited, and what followed was extermination in the search for gold.

Marronnage is his organizing idea. Flight began with the first African arrivals in 1503 and never stopped, carrying with it poisoning, sabotage, arson and abortion, and keeping a habit of resistance alive two centuries before the Encyclopedists wrote a line. When the indigenous army was close to collapse before Leclerc, he argues, it was maroon commanders who kept fighting and showed the regular officers how the war could be won.

He also claims Toussaint for American history, on the grounds that his refusal to serve Napoleon's designs forced the sale of Louisiana, and ends on colonial theater and the singer Minette.