Guadeloupe is retaken at the cost of a tenth of its people

The Guadeloupe expedition succeeded where the Saint-Domingue one failed, and Girard counts the price. Richepance arrested the black soldiers at Pointe-a-Pitre soon after landing and held them on ships, then defeated the army led by Louis Delgres, who destroyed himself with his followers rather than surrender. Richepance died of yellow fever as Leclerc did, and his successors crushed what remained through a policy so harsh that it cost the island roughly a tenth of its population before slavery was formally restored. The wider instructions behind this were deliberately kept secret because of their reactionary content. Martinique and Saint Lucia, recovered at the peace of Amiens, were excluded from the emancipation law, black officers in Saint-Domingue were to be deported and their men disarmed, and Bonaparte publicly professed attachment to freedom while privately backing a half servile labour regime pending full re-enslavement. Corroborated by 2 works in the library.

When the Indigenous army was close to breaking under Bonaparte's expedition, Fouchard says it was the maroons who were still in the field and who pushed the generals out of their inertia. During the truce that followed the deportation of Louverture they carried on alone, raiding, burning, sabotaging and sniping, and he cites Christophe's own admission of this to General Pamphile de Lacroix. He names Sylla, Sans Souci and Boukman as the maroon leaders who showed the way. His account of the method is specific: with fewer men than the enemy, victory came from poisoning the rivers, destroying roads and bridges, and burning everything until the last invader had gone. Two centuries of guerrilla practice were what allowed the regular troops to finish the job, and the army that had won in Italy and Egypt left fifty thousand dead behind. Fouchard credits Louverture, Dessalines, Petion and Christophe, and above all the maroons. Where this account departs from the standard one: Fouchard makes the maroons rather than the regular Indigenous army the decisive force in the war of independence.

Meeting the French general Brunet, Dessalines complained that Toussaint had only ever used him as a beast of burden, had never summoned him when an assembly met, and feared him more than he loved him. Two days afterwards, learning that Louverture had failed to order a local rebel commander to lay down arms under the recent ceasefire, he wrote at once to Leclerc denouncing that conduct as extraordinary. He was then invited to meet Leclerc at Cap-Francais, where the alleged disloyalty was certainly discussed, since Leclerc later cited the accusations of Dessalines as one of his main reasons for deciding to arrest Louverture. Louverture agreed to meet Brunet without a large escort on the evening of 7 June and was taken and deported to France in violation of the amnesty agreed only weeks before. Where this account departs from the standard one: Against the tradition that makes Dessalines the loyal lieutenant of Louverture, Girard argues he actively encouraged the French to remove him.

Geggus argues that the blacksmith Gabriel's conspiracy in Richmond, Virginia looks very much like a response to the abolitionism of the French Republic rather than to the Haitian Revolution. At that moment an undeclared war ran between France and the United States, and Frenchmen living locally were said to have had a hand in it. Historians routinely link the conspiracy to Saint-Domingue, but contemporary sources show no trace of the conspirators discussing it, and the evidence of the black revolution's impact on Virginian slaves is in his judgement remarkably slight. He makes the same move about the attempt launched from Saint-Domingue in 1799 to raise a slave insurrection in Jamaica: the initiative came from Paris and was organised by the French official Philippe Roume, while Toussaint Louverture secretly revealed the plan to the British because a maritime blockade would have ruined him. Corroborated by 2 works in the library. Where this account departs from the standard one: Geggus denies the standard link between Gabriel's conspiracy and the Haitian Revolution, finding no contemporary evidence for it.