Saint-Domingue makes the inhabitant the bearer of rights

The 1801 text bans slaves before it states any principle, reversing the usual order in which a general rule precedes its application, and it centres a human subject rather than an institution. Under the heading concerning inhabitants it rewrites the famous first article so that men are born, live and die free and French in this territory. Three moves follow from that. Liberty is unlinked from birthplace, which turns the colony into a refuge for anyone whose freedom has been violated. The list of birth, life and death forecloses gradual emancipation schemes, apprenticeships and short indentures. And the subject of rights becomes the habitant, a term rooted in the slave economy that meant a landholder and slaveowner, and therefore meant a person who is not enslaved. The article argues this sidesteps the split between man and citizen that European rights language could not close. Where this account departs from the standard one: Against Ardouin, Madiou and much recent scholarship, which read the 1801 constitution as tyrannical, a strategic blunder or an expression of white planter interest, the article argues its language registers the experience of the enslaved and constitutes an original contribution to universal rights thought.

Girard traces the genesis of the expedition to an order to prepare a force of three thousand six hundred troops at Brest. Coming shortly after Bonaparte had turned against Louverture, the squadron was most likely intended as the first instalment of a force that would grow once peace with England was secured. He is explicit that earlier orders do not count as the beginning. A first instruction to ship out had come as early as December 1799, countermanded within days; new orders followed in January 1800; the fleet was repeatedly delayed, rerouted to Egypt when Bonaparte chose alliance instead, and then held up at Toulon. Once the peace preliminaries were signed, six thousand men were ordered ready to sail from Brest by 20 October with five thousand six hundred to follow from four other ports. Where this account departs from the standard one: Girard dates the decision to invade six months before the meeting at Malmaison that other histories treat as the turning point.

Governor Nugent sent Corbet, who had negotiated with black leaders for a decade, to Haiti aboard the Tartare in early January. His report to Kingston states that he is laying before the governor a declaration of independence he says was composed while he was there, or shortly before his arrival at Port-au-Prince, and which he could not present earlier. The article treats this as decisive against the received chronology. It does not settle which part of the Acte Corbet carried, but it contradicts the claim that the full text was drafted overnight on New Year's Eve and published throughout Haiti on 1 January, while confirming that something was in print by the second half of January. The article connects a Charleston news item of 23 February about a proclamation received at Kingston to the same report. Where this account departs from the standard one: Directly contradicts Madiou's account of a single night of composition by Boisrond-Tonnerre followed by nationwide proclamation on 1 January 1804.

Wood opens with Napoleon sending Leclerc to restore French rule in Saint Domingue after Toussaint had made himself master of the island, and dates the dispatch to 1801. With the initial French successes, many black and mixed-race troops and their officers entered French service, and in suppressing the sporadic risings that followed the restoration of French rule Dessalines earned from Leclerc the title of butcher of the Negroes. The mechanism of the reversal was news from elsewhere. Word that Napoleon had ordered slavery restored in Guadeloupe and Martinique was the signal for defection throughout the ranks of the colonial troops. Readers should note the fleet did not arrive until early 1802, so Wood's date refers to the decision rather than the landing, and she gives the meeting between Dessalines and Petion as the point at which the insurrection was agreed.