Fox studies a mid-twentieth-century turn among Caribbean writers toward Tragedy as a way of thinking about revolution and independence, following Derek Walcott, Alejo Carpentier and Aimé Césaire as they enlist Henry Christophe (1767-1820) into a usable past. Where the inherited habit was to narrate the Haitian Revolution as Romance, these writers experimented with tragic form to imagine new philosophies of resistance.

The argument extends David Scott's reading of C.L.R. James's 1963 revision of The Black Jacobins, where James trades his epic register for meditation on Tragedy. Fox holds that the revolution's emplotment is tragic regardless, but that Tragedy works as analysis rather than surrender: it can lay bare the colonial subject's dilemma and prompt theories of radical action.

Archival work unsettles the received Christophe, whose reputation as a black tyrant became a racialist palimpsest serving neocolonial ends, though a tragic version surfaces as early as 1823. Walcott and Césaire, Fox argues, saw in him a visionary asserting black humanity.

In 1802 Napoleon sent a large expeditionary force under Leclerc to Saint-Domingue with orders to restore French authority over the colony. Girard follows that campaign through to its failure the following year.

He reads it against the pattern of France's other revolutionary wars, in which conviction and capable command compensated for scarce equipment and untrained troops, while a great European power fought to put the order of the Ancien Régime back in place. The uncomfortable question is which side of that arrangement France now occupied.