The protest cry setting the children of Petion against the children of Dessalines still circulates in Haitian political life. Mocombe asks where it came from, using the structurationist and structural Marxist account of consciousness he calls phenomenological structuralism.

The slogan is usually heard in racial terms, with Petion standing for the neoliberal outlook of the mulatto elite and Dessalines for the economic reform and social justice voiced by the African masses. Mocombe's suggestion is that the two figures now function as categories of class struggle within a capitalist world-system under American hegemony, and that the African majority, the children of Sans Souci, bears the cost.

Haitians honour Jean-Jacques Dessalines as a founder devoted to his countrymen's freedom; white contemporaries called him a butcher. Girard sets both aside for a ruler who took much of his outlook and policy from the Atlantic plantation system he grew up inside.

Archival work in France, Britain and the United States yields an uncomfortable record. Dessalines urged France to arrest fellow black revolutionaries, hesitated for years over breaking with France, and kept close relations with some white Frenchmen even after the massacres of 1804. He negotiated widely with neighbouring states to hold on to colonial trade links, worked to keep the sugar plantations whole though he had himself been enslaved — probably by Toussaint Louverture's son-in-law — imposed a strict feudal order on former slaves, tried to import African labourers, and drew on American and European as well as African sources.

Interest, in Girard's reading, drove Dessalines as much as the race and ideology that dominate the historiography.

Haitian and foreign accounts alike have credited Boisrond-Tonnerre with writing the 1804 act of independence, drafting it through a single night at Dessalines's order. Jenson doubts the story on textual and practical grounds and restores Dessalines to the center of it.

No signed original survives, and the machinery Madiou describes, simultaneous publication across the new state on New Year's Day, did not exist; no Haitian newspaper is confirmed to have been printing in early 1804. What is now read as one document was more likely several texts composed over the first weeks of the year, later gathered and backdated to give independence a founding moment.

The earlier proclamation Dessalines issued in November 1803 with Christophe and Clervaux circulated widely in the United States, where it was taken for a declaration. Across these texts Jenson finds a consistent ferocity of image and address that she identifies as his own.

Nineteenth-century historians handed down a damning sequence: Dessalines betrayed Charles Belair, Toussaint Louverture's nephew, to the French, and was rewarded six weeks later with command of the revolutionary army. De Young finds this implausible. Officers such as Petion, Christophe and Clervaux, and thousands of guerrilla fighters, would hardly have submitted to a man who had just delivered Belair to Leclerc.

Working from the Rochambeau papers, he prints the report of Commandant Repussard, who actually made the capture. It shows Belair taken by a National Guard detachment sent from the far bank on Jablonowski's orders, found with surprising ease, and it shows Repussard forbidden to fire and frightened enough of his own superiors to ask for protection.

On this reading, the letter Leclerc published over Dessalines's name recorded a fait accompli, and was circulated to embarrass him and cut him off from the insurgents rather than to expose treachery.

Mocombe reads Dessalines through phenomenological structuralism, a structurationist framework, and argues that he differs from Haiti's traditional leaderships in a specific way.

Having avenged the island's Taino and African populations against France, Spain, and Britain, Dessalines attempted to mediate between two incompatible modes of social and system integration. On one side stood the Catholic and Protestant ethic and the spirit of capitalism carried by mulatto elites and creole petit-bourgeois blacks who had taken on their former masters' worldview. On the other stood the African majority's Vodou ethic and its spirit of communism, an ethos they had merged with that of the Taino.

Where the first two classes wanted Haiti absorbed into the capitalist world-system of nineteenth-century Europe, Dessalines tried to constitute the nation within both frameworks at once. Working from a structural Marxist account of practical consciousness, the book examines the roots of his policies and concludes that his death drained the revolution of its momentum.