Three categories of absentee planter, and no list ever drawn up

Sonthonax and Polverel distinguished refugees who had fled the turmoil and could freely return, deportees who needed authorisation from Paris, and emigres who had gone to enemy colonies or joined the invading armies and whose property the colonial state confiscated. The first two categories were supposed to keep their property rights while absent. Since no list of the three categories was ever drawn up, the distinction became unworkable and everyone who had left found their estates confiscated. By 1796 two thirds of planter property had been taken. Sequestered estates were leased to the highest bidder for five years and could not be sold until peace returned, which let whites who had never owned land acquire it. The book treats this administrative failure as the origin of the black propertied class, since Louverture's officers later leased the same estates.

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.