Fick sets out to show how the outlook and the collective action of ordinary people shaped the revolution in eighteenth-century Saint Domingue and what followed it. The book moves from slavery and the forms of resistance that preceded 1791, through the risings in the north and the separate struggles of free people of colour, into a long treatment of the south, tracing the path from local revolt to civil war and independence.

Writing in the late 1980s, Fick connects that history to the mass mobilisations then spreading from Gonaives, Saint Marc and other provincial towns to the capital, and argues that leaderless popular organisation, not politicians or foreign patrons, brought down the dictatorship. Reconstruction, on this view, will come from rural knowledge and local forms of association or it will not come at all.