Toussaint Louverture's constitution of 1801 is usually filed as an authoritarian embarrassment. Ardouin called it tyrannical, Madiou a lie, and Fischer does not deny that it hands one man enormous power. She argues it is nonetheless a document of real interest for the history of rights.

Her case rests on how the text words its prohibition. France in 1795 had recast the ban as a limit on contract, something nobody may do to himself. The colonial text names slaves directly, puts their protection ahead of any general principle, and recasts the opening of the 1789 Declaration as a sequence of verbs: to be born, to live, to die, all of it free, all of it French, all of it here. Entitlement comes unhooked from birthplace, turning the colony into a refuge.

Rights here belong to an inhabitant rather than an abstract citizen, and the shift registers a history of transportation and death that abstraction had smoothed away.

Kaisary takes up the 1801 Constitution of Saint-Domingue, promulgated by Toussaint Louverture, and treats it as a document both complex and contradictory.

The reading proposed runs it through the work of Peter Linebaugh and Marcus Rediker. The abstract available for this record breaks off there, so the argument's development cannot be reported further.

Toussaint Louverture wrote his constitution in 1801 as governor-general of Saint-Domingue, years before Haiti existed. Its third article declared that everyone there is born, lives, and dies free and French, a statement of loyalty to the French Republic that simultaneously advertised his own independent authority.

Semley examines the difficult kind of black citizenship the document tried to build, resting at once on the end of slavery and on continued membership in an empire. The constitution is read next to French constitutions of the 1790s and to Haiti's own early constitutions, with attention to how each speaks about marriage and family in gendered terms.

Louverture sought to convert racial slavery into black citizenship by enforcing standards of order, purity, and family life, and in doing so, Semley argues, arrived at troubling new accounts of blackness and Frenchness, and of a gendered self, that bear on present-day debates over human rights.