Writing from Christophe's kingdom against the French colonial party and its correspondents at home, Vastey explains both why Haitians freed themselves and why they afterward turned on one another. He begins with a complaint about the record: no general account of Haiti has been written by a Haitian, and the European fragments that exist were assembled from planters' testimony and carry its prejudice.

His central claim is that the internal wars were manufactured abroad. Hedouville, he argues, came with secret instructions to divide Toussaint Louverture from Rigaud, and having failed with the first flattered the second into accepting a command he had no right to hold; the later conflict under Petion was that war's aftershock. Both generals, on this account, were tools of a France unable to restore slavery by force.

The polemic is aimed as much at writers in the republic - Colombel and Milcent are named again and again - as at Paris.

Trouillot's account of how the Haitian Revolution was silenced has a second half that scholarship has largely passed over: the demand that history be told from the perspective of the colonized. Daut takes it up by reading two Haitian writers who were themselves participants — Boisrond-Tonnerre, whose Mémoire appeared in 1804, and the Baron de Vastey, whose Système colonial dévoilé followed a decade later.

Both wrote, she argues, to keep the former colonists from having the last word: to shape foreign opinion through the press, and to fix a national memory in which the revolution is an origin story rather than an atrocity. She also traces how they were dismissed. Nineteenth-century European and American commentators questioned whether Haitians had written their own books, or whether the books mattered; later historians who explained Haiti's troubles by color prejudice among Haitians extended the same logic, relocating blame onto the country itself.