Sepinwall reviews Philippe Girard's The Slaves Who Defeated Napoleon and reaches a split verdict. She credits the archival reach, the chapter by chapter reconstruction of the war's final seasons, the separation of Leclerc from the still harsher Rochambeau, and the demonstration that Bonaparte's commitment to restoring slavery was less fixed than usually assumed. Against that she sets a series of objections. Girard calls Louverture duplicitous for warning his followers that France meant to re-enslave them, which she notes was a reasonable fear given Napoleon's conduct in the other colonies. His attribution of Haitian poverty to the plantation burning and the expulsion of white managers sidelines the diplomatic isolation and the indemnity of 1825. His proposal to replace racial categories with hundreds of thousands of individual histories reads as an overcorrection. The book, she concludes, illuminates the French officers who lost far better than the former slaves who won.