Girard argues non-whites were most of the French forces after 1802

Reviewing Philippe Girard's account of the war of independence, Geggus notes that all historians of Haiti know the Napoleonic army of conquest included a large contingent of soldiers of mixed racial descent driven from Saint-Domingue by Louverture, and that far less well known is the number of prominent free blacks such as Jean-Baptiste Belley and Étienne Mentor who also lobbied the French for his overthrow. Girard is the first to claim that for most of the war non-whites made up the majority of the French forces. Geggus finds the general thesis, that the revolution was not a simple struggle about slavery, race or colonialism, a mixture of the obvious and the tendentious, and thinks the implication that Bonaparte never decided to restore slavery is contradicted by the evidence. Where this account departs from the standard one: Geggus accepts Girard's finding that non-whites formed the majority of French forces for most of the war of independence but rejects his implication that Bonaparte never decided to restore slavery, and disputes Dubois's description of the Haitian Revolution as profoundly democratic.

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.

On 27 April 1800 Toussaint got the French commissioner Roume to sign an order authorising him to take possession of Spanish Santo Domingo. Bell stresses the verb. The order was extracted rather than received, part of a pattern in which Toussaint obtained French legal cover for decisions he had already made. The mechanism was the dormant Treaty of Basel, which had transferred the eastern colony to France in 1795 and had never been executed for want of troops. Acting on it gave Toussaint the whole island, closed the land route by which enslaved people were still being trafficked from the Spanish side, and removed the last territory where a rival authority could shelter. It also alarmed Paris, since a governor who could annex a neighbouring colony on his own initiative was plainly beyond correction by decree.

Citing the nineteenth century historian Thomas Madiou, Le Glaunec fixes the opening of hostilities against the French expedition to the evening of 4 February 1802, when Fort Picolet fired a cannonball at the arriving squadron and by doing so gave the signal that fighting had begun. The same fort closes the story. From its walls the last surviving French soldiers and the fighters of the indigenous army exchanged their final words and looks during the evacuation of the city, which the author dates to eleven days after the Battle of Vertieres. Picolet therefore brackets the whole war of independence in the north, opening it in February 1802 and witnessing its end in late November 1803. The author notes that the Atlantic below the fort is the same water that carried enslaved Africans to the colony in the eighteenth century and then carried Bonaparte's troops.