What language did the leaders of the Haitian Revolution actually speak? Girard tries to answer that for Toussaint Louverture in particular, using accounts left by people who knew him, letters written by other former slaves, and the memoir Louverture composed shortly before he died.

Reading these documents closely as a historian and a linguist, he concludes that Louverture wrote in French almost without exception, reserved Kreyòl for speech, above all when he addressed laborers, and hardly ever fell back on the Ewe-Fon of his Arada forebears.

The memoir also bears on a dispute among linguists. Against those who trace Haitian Kreyòl chiefly to African languages, Girard finds the stronger imprint to be that of older, regional and lower-class forms of French. Louverture's own attachment to French, he adds, supports readings of him as a moderate drawn to metropolitan models.