Saint Domingue's final royal governor went to the guillotine in Paris on 15 April 1793. Blanchelande had been convicted of working against the Revolution: he was said to have denied the colony's white settlers their liberties and to have helped along the slave insurrection that began in 1791. Popkin reconstructs those two years from archives no one had used.

Blanchelande blundered often, and Popkin grants it. Yet the verdict registers more than one man's failures. It marks the collision between what the Revolution professed in its liberal opening years and what governing a slave colony actually required. His orders could not all be obeyed at once: leave the white settlers to govern themselves, make them equal with free people of color, and crush the revolt. One trial witness said the job exceeded any person's powers.

The article sets aside the durable charge of counterrevolutionary motive and reads the episode within a crisis running through every transatlantic empire of the period.