The freedman buys a man named Jean-Baptiste and then frees him

Toussaint was a legally recognised freedman by the middle seventeen seventies, a fact he kept almost entirely out of his revolutionary self presentation. Shortly after that he bought a slave named Jean-Baptiste and granted him his freedom. The article stresses the cost, since a prime slave ran to about twenty five hundred livres and the manumission tax added half the value again, a levy introduced in 1764 precisely to slow the growth of the free population. Formal emancipations of adult black men were rare, and in 1788 only two hundred and ninety seven people were freed in a colony of half a million, of whom thirty two were black men. Three years later Toussaint leased thirteen slaves and a coffee plantation at Cormier from his son in law, cancelled the lease after two years and had to reimburse the owner for two who died in his care. Where this account departs from the standard one: The article rejects the traditional picture of a lifelong idealistic emancipator, while also resisting Pluchon's reading of a man of the old regime, arguing both purchases look more like altruism than exploitation.

Between 1775 and 1791 Guadeloupe received 2,271 people from Africa. Only 287 of them, thirteen per cent, came from West Central Africa, which left that region fourth behind the Bight of Biafra, the category the database calls Other Africa, and the Bight of Benin. A quarter century earlier West Central Africa had been the largest supplier to Guadeloupe. Martinique shows the same fall, from twenty eight per cent in the years to 1775 down to twenty per cent afterwards, on small numbers. French Guiana fell furthest, to 220 people out of 2,722. In the same sixteen years Saint Domingue took 143,181 from that one region. The contrast is the whole point of the comparison. Every French Caribbean colony had enslaved people and none of the others produced a revolution, and Saint Domingue was the only one whose arrivals were overwhelmingly and increasingly from a single African region.

When the French government drew its colonial slave law together in 1685, it also stated that Africans who reached France as slaves could become free under French law and custom and could not be forced back to the West Indies. Owners found ways around it. A decree of 1716 let planters register enslaved people as having been brought over for education, which blocked their freedom claims. Read alongside the remnants of serfdom, that reasoning allowed four thousand enslaved people to be kept in France in 1738. Later, labour shortage in the colonies moved the government to order them shipped back, even though they returned carrying a spirit of independence. In 1777 a royal decree closed France to black and mixed race people, free and enslaved alike, allowing a West Indian owner only one personal servant while travelling. The stated reason was the well-being of the colonies. The following year a decree forbade black and white marriages in France.

Jean Pierre Boyer was born in the colonial capital in the year the United States declared independence, a coincidence Baur uses to frame a life spent between the Atlantic revolutions. He was in France as a young man, returned home in time for the English invasion of 1793, and later fled again toward France, a voyage interrupted when his ship was taken by Americans during the undeclared naval war between the United States and the French Republic at the end of the decade. Released once the crisis passed, he lived in Paris until the autumn of 1801. The article treats this itinerary as the making of a politician who understood European powers from the inside, and who returned to a country where Dessalines proclaimed independence at the start of 1804 and was killed by an assassin's bullet two years later.