A French naturalist is pulled out from under a bed and spared

A few days before the battle of Crete-a-Pierrot, Dessalines was at Petite-Riviere de l'Artibonite where French residents were being killed in reprisal. Two young Frenchmen ran to Claire Heureuse and begged for their lives. She told them to hide under a bed and went to receive her husband, who came in from the field with Bazelais, Laurette, Lamartiniere and Lafortune. A sneeze from the next room gave the men away. One was cut down at once. Claire Heureuse went on her knees, called on the other officers to help her, and told her husband that the survivor was a doctor who might be useful to him one day. She held on to his tunic and let herself be dragged the length of the room until he gave way. The man was Michel Etienne Descourtilz, who later published his Voyage d'un naturaliste and an eight volume flora of the Antilles, and who admitted in print that he owed his life to her.

Haitian historians have often argued that Louverture aimed all along at an independent state. Geggus reports that most scholars disagree and sets out the reasoning. He already had independence in fact, and a formal break would have brought a French attack and probably a naval blockade by the slaveholding British and Americans as well. In a hostile world, as long as the French Republic stood against slavery and racial discrimination, people of colour in its colonies were better off remaining colonial subjects. On this reading independence was adopted in the Haitian Revolution as a last resort and only to protect what the revolution had already won. It was Bonaparte's aggression that precipitated the separation. Geggus also notes that the citizenship promised in 1794 proved illusory, since the constitutional provision making the colonies part of France was never enforced before Bonaparte annulled it in 1799. Where this account departs from the standard one: Against a long tradition in Haitian historiography, Geggus holds that Louverture did not seek independence and that secession was forced on the revolution from outside.

Bonaparte persuaded Spain to return Louisiana under the secret treaty of San Ildefonso in October 1800, with the transfer taking effect in 1802. Girard insists the purpose was economic rather than strategic. French colonies produced coffee, sugar, cotton and indigo but no wheat, so they bought flour, timber and dried cod from American merchants on terms French officials considered extortionate. General Claude Victor, who was to command the garrison for Louisiana, argued that supplying the colonies without foreign help would be an immense advantage. The result would have been a self sufficient empire running from Louisiana to Guyane. Three expeditions were fitted out in 1802, Leclerc with twenty thousand men for Saint-Domingue and Santo Domingo, Richepance with thirty five hundred for Guadeloupe, and Victor with three thousand for Louisiana, though the last sat in Flushing and Dunkirk for want of troops and transports. Where this account departs from the standard one: Girard reads the Louisiana retrocession as a food supply scheme for the sugar colonies, against readings that make it a strategic threat to the United States.

Maurepas was one of Toussaint Louverture's officers and commanded the department of the Northwest. In 1802 his wife shared his end. In the channel between Tortuga and the mainland the whole family was hoisted and hung from the great yards of a ship and flogged until they died, and the bodies were then thrown into the sea. The account records that Madame Maurepas spent the time urging her husband and her children to die like heroes rather than complaining. The same pages list Madame Chevalier, who put the noose around her own neck on the deck of the Duquesne, Madame Paul Louverture, taken by night with her children and drowned in the roadstead of Cap, and Louise Rateau, who kept a house in Port-au-Prince where men plotting against Rochambeau could meet. General Leclerc wrote to Napoleon that it had to be seen with what spirit both men and women went to meet death.