Issued at Cap Francais in November 1801 and labelled dictatorial by his biographer Schoelcher, this proclamation gathers most of Toussaint Louverture's domestic programme into a single document.

It opens as self-justification. War was waged with restraint, defeated enemies received as brothers, rank held as a trust rather than a reward. It then turns into a long complaint about morals. Parents in the towns are accused of raising children in idleness and in contempt for farming; unemployed women, foreigners spreading rumours, officers keeping concubines and idle domestics are all named as threats to public order. Labour becomes an obligation on everyone capable of it, marriage the institution the state must defend, religion the ground of civic virtue.

The decrees that follow put teeth in the sermon, making commanders criminally answerable for revolts they failed to foresee or suppress. Liberty here means disciplined cultivation, not release from work.