A documentary reader built around primary sources from colonial Saint-Domingue and the revolution that destroyed it. Geggus supplies the editorial introductions and a compact narrative account of the revolt itself, so that the documents arrive with enough context to be read on their own terms.

Much of the material had not appeared in print before. Geggus gathered it from archives on both sides of the Atlantic and translated it for this edition, including sources on the conditions that pushed enslaved people and free people of color toward revolt in 1791.

The volume is pitched at readers meeting the subject for the first time as well as at those already working on it.

Walsh reads Toussaint Louverture and Aime Cesaire together, using their writings to ask how each understood and recounted a defining moment in the decolonizing of the French Caribbean. For Louverture that moment is the revolution that freed the colony of Saint-Domingue; for Cesaire it is the 1946 departmentalization that folded Martinique and other colonies into France itself.

Setting the two side by side lets Walsh trace what connects them. Emancipation left distinct legacies in each case, and those legacies were carried forward in narratives of revolution and nationhood that later generations inherited.

By revisiting both figures through the several layers of narrative they left behind, the book arrives at an account of what it has meant, historically and in the present, to be free and French in the Caribbean.