Garrigus reconstructs the career of Julien Raimond, an indigo planter, one-quarter African by descent, from Saint-Domingue's southern coast who became the foremost campaigner for racial reform in revolutionary Paris -- and who is remembered chiefly as a hypocrite, having told free men of colour and later rebel slaves that they owed France a debt while himself sinking under debts to French creditors.

Against that reputation four claims are advanced. Raimond's early life shows colonial racism hardening in the 1760s, when men of mixed ancestry who had been treated as social equals were barred from office and made to document their status. His success in persuading Parisian abolitionists to attack prejudice rather than bondage cleared the ground for the uprising of August 1791. His argument for keeping freedpeople at work was taken up by revolutionary governments across the Antilles. And his turn towards Toussaint Louverture in 1800 marked an early reading of what Bonaparte intended.