Trouillot's argument that the revolution in Haiti was, in its own moment, unthinkable — that European thought had no categories for enslaved people conceiving of freedom and founding a state — is Tomich's starting point and also his target. He accepts the account of silencing but presses on its looseness. It supplies no procedure for relating the long structures of Western ontology to a particular event, and it risks reading the revolution backwards from its outcome, treating the enslaved as fully formed revolutionary subjects from the beginning.

His test case is Victor Schoelcher, whose book on Haiti appeared in 1843 after the first visit there by a European abolitionist. Schoelcher arrived a republican heir of the Enlightenment, anxious about what he would find, and found stagnation. He blamed not race but Boyer's autocracy and a mulatto elite immobilised by fear of the black majority, and made Toussaint the figure who turned revolt into a movement for liberty.