Juste Chanlatte mattered to the political and literary life of the newly independent Haiti, yet his standing has never matched that role: his writing has long been disparaged, Haitian critics included. The record of the man is thin in the same way. Even the date of his birth is uncertain, and what he did during the Revolution is largely a matter of guesswork.

The gap is widest across the ten years that begin with the British landing of 1793 and close with the rout of Leclerc's expedition in 1803, a stretch his biographers have filled in by conjecture. Pierrot shows where the conjecture came from: accounts composed after Chanlatte's death, seldom supported by references, and frequently written by people with no sympathy for him.

Against that inherited picture Pierrot sets French colonial paperwork and other archival material, building the fullest life of Chanlatte yet written.