Blanchelande, the last royal governor of Saint Domingue, was guillotined in April 1793 on charges that he had instigated the slave insurrection. Popkin works through the governor's correspondence and the trial records to show the accusations were baseless, then asks the more useful question of why the governorship failed anyway. Blanchelande arrived committed to the liberal principles of 1789 and deferred repeatedly to the colonists' elected assemblies, at the very moment those assemblies were refusing every concession to free men of colour and to the insurgents. With seven navy ministers in Paris during his two years in post, he had no reliable instructions to follow. The civil commissioner Roume eventually pushed him into the alliance with free men of colour that Sonthonax and Polverel would extend. By then Blanchelande had lost an army at Platons and his standing everywhere, and he ended by recommending the dictatorial powers he had declined to use.