Written in Kreyòl and framed as a family gathering at which a long-absent traveller returns to report what he has found out, Trouillot's book asks where Haitian misery came from and answers with a class analysis of the colony and the revolution.

He reads the Code Noir not as protection for the enslaved but as legislation serving the planters who ran Saint-Domingue and the French merchants they in turn served, since law follows the interests of whoever controls the state. He explains why a slave system had to keep its workers alive in order to keep working them, and devotes a long stretch to the middle stratum — artisans, clerks, gendarmes, white and mulatto and black — whose position between the two fundamental classes made it both restless and the most prejudiced of all.

The rising of August 1791 is then set inside those contradictions, along with the diverging aims of the rebel commanders and of the enslaved mass.