Nicholls examines how a group of Haitian writers turned national history into a political weapon. After Thomas Madiou's Histoire d'Haiti appeared in 1847, with its frank talk of two castes and its appendices listing each figure's colour, Beaubrun Ardouin and Joseph St. Remy produced multivolume replies that Nicholls treats as legend rather than inquiry. In their telling the free coloureds of the colony were the true revolutionary vanguard, Toussaint served the whites and hated mulattoes, Dessalines and Christophe were despots, and Petion embodied liberal virtue, his land distribution proving his democratic spirit. Caste divisions were declared finished in 1793, which made elite dominance look like open competition. Vodou was assigned to barbarism and France to civilisation. Nicholls compares this handling of the past to whig history and to Soviet historiography, and shows the answering black legend built by Janvier, Firmin and eventually Duvalier working by exactly the same method.