No teapot ever celebrated the slaves who freed themselves

White begins from an absence. The American and French revolutions generated floods of celebratory goods, printed ceramics and textiles, inlaid furniture, cockades and engravings, while almost nothing of the kind was made for the revolution in Saint-Domingue. The abolition decree of 1794 did prompt some French potters and printmakers to mark the end of slavery in the colony, with stylised former slaves in neoclassical dress announcing their freedom, and portraits of figures like Louverture appeared in books about the colony's military and legislative record. These objects advertise what the French revolutionary regime believed it had achieved. There is no Haitian equivalent of the objects that congratulated ordinary people for taking revolutionary action themselves. Part of the reason is structural, since a colony organised around plantation labour lacked both the market and the manufacturing base, and part is that Haitian actors did not make the images of their own revolution that circulated in the Atlantic.

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.

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.

Pierrot cites a London Gazette article of December 1798 celebrating Toussaint as a man born to vindicate the claims of his species and to show that character is independent of exterior colour, and telling every liberal Briton to feel proud that this country had brought about the happy revolution. The same article called him a negro chief or king. The mechanism the article identifies is threefold. Praising the individual detached him from his troops, his struggle and his country; describing him as a chief or king moved him out of politics and into a literary register British readers already knew; and crediting Britain with the outcome erased four years of British warfare against the very revolution being celebrated. Claims that Toussaint was of royal African extraction, true or not, served the same displacement.