Bellegarde sets out to raise the profile of a figure he considers overshadowed by Toussaint Louverture, Dessalines and Christophe. He traces Petion from an unrecognized childhood in Port-au-Prince and a silversmith's apprenticeship through the militia, the war between Rigaud and Toussaint, service in Leclerc's expeditionary force, and his October 1802 decision to turn his division against the French, a defection that drew mulatto officers and maroon bands behind Dessalines.

Three measures define the presidency. He broke up confiscated colonial estates and handed the parcels to soldiers of the independence army, creating a landowning peasantry; he founded a lycee and a girls' school, following Condorcet in making schooling the base of any democratic programme; and he supplied Bolivar with arms, ships and a printing press on the single condition that slavery end wherever the Liberator's forces prevailed.

Bellegarde closes on Petion's mildness, his popular nickname, and his death in 1818 at forty-eight.

Of the four men Bellegarde names as founders of Haitian independence, Petion is the least known abroad, and this short life sets out to change that.

Two claims carry it. Laws of 1809 and 1814 broke up the old colonial estates and distributed the parcels to soldiers and junior officers of the army of independence, creating a country of smallholders; Bellegarde treats this as the origin of Haiti's rural democracy and credits it with a social stability the political system never had. The constitution of 1816 made elementary schooling free, and Petion, following Condorcet, founded a lycee and a boarding school for girls at Port-au-Prince.

The second claim reaches beyond Haiti. When Bolivar took refuge there in 1815, Petion supplied money, arms and a printing press, declining public credit and asking only that slavery be abolished wherever the Liberator's arms prevailed, a promise made good at Ocumare in July 1816.