The Dokos maroons attack free coloureds and sell black captives

Geggus follows the Dokos of the south-east, apparently a branch of the Maniel, through the Revolution to show how little marronage and rebellion overlapped. They generally remained aloof, but in 1793 they sacked the plantations of free people of colour when invited to do so by their white enemies. They then fought on the side of the Spanish invaders of Saint-Domingue, keeping or selling their black captives as slaves, and in 1802 briefly joined the Napoleonic invasion forces before turning against them. He notes that no maroon band is known to have joined the 1791 revolt, and that the only documented link between a rebel leader and marronage is a letter of November 1793 in which Biassou described Jean-François to his Spanish patrons as a poor fugitive at the time of the revolt. Where this account departs from the standard one: Geggus argues that marronage functioned primarily as an alternative to rebellion, a safety valve explaining the remarkable absence of slave revolts in eighteenth-century Saint-Domingue, and that the closing of that option by coffee expansion into the mountains and the 1777 extradition treaty with Santo Domingo might be counted a cause of the 1791 revolt.

Francois Furet and Denis Richet refused the description of 1789 as a bourgeois revolution and called it a liberal one instead. Their reading needed a date on which the liberal revolution left its course, and they chose 10 August 1792, the day the Paris sections and the federes stormed the Tuileries and brought down the monarchy. From that morning, in their account, the revolution swerved towards the Terror, which they treat as a brief parenthesis running against a much longer liberal current that spans 1750 to 1850. What pushed it off course, they say, was the patriotic fervour of the crowd. Albert Soboul answered that the crowd drove the revolution and supplied whatever force it had. The argument matters beyond France. Historians read the French Revolution as a commentary on the Russian one, and the dates they pick are chosen with the twentieth century in view.

The clearest demonstration of Girard's thesis is the Saint Lucia expedition of June 1795. Victor Hugues sent about three hundred men from Guadeloupe against twenty four hundred well equipped British soldiers. They carried the promise of freedom, drew heavy support from the enslaved population, fought as guerillas and took the island. The naming of the resulting force is itself part of the history. British reports called the men who joined brigands, the word normally used for maroons, while French accounts called them the French army of the woods. Hugues ran the same play elsewhere, using the black Caribs of Saint Vincent, sponsoring a large rising in Grenada across 1795 and 1796, and drawing up smaller schemes against Saint Christopher and Curacao. Girard notes that several of these islands had been French within living memory and still held French speaking populations, so the campaign for black freedom doubled as a bid to recover lost territory.

In the middle of June 1798 four vessels from Saint Domingue reached Philadelphia. Governor Thomas Mifflin forbade the landing of any of the black passengers aboard them and asked President John Adams for authority to stop such landings in neighbouring states and to keep their owners out of Pennsylvania altogether. The fear behind the order had been building for years. Enslaved people had set a series of fires in Albany in November 1793, the practice was said to have spread, night patrols in Philadelphia were increased, and a fire broke out in the city on 4 January 1797. White Philadelphians had come to speak of black insurrection as an infection that ships could carry. The standoff ended when letters from the white colonists on board assured the city that only fifty five enslaved people were with them and that none had ever carried arms.