The Declaration capitalises Indigène and demotes France

Perry reads the Declaration for its typography. Members of the new state appear as the people of Hayti, and as citizens, both terms recognisable from French revolutionary politics. Most often, though, the text names them Indigène, a word that slides between noun and adjective and never loses its capital. She finds this striking in a text whose non-standard French three times removes the capital from France itself and never capitalises the adjective français, as though exercising a demotion at the level of type. Capitalising indigène positions it as a concept to be claimed rather than a natural category, and she notes it has no counterpart on the other side of the Atlantic. Following Rancière, she treats the appropriation as a productive misuse capable of designating an entire category of political subjectivity, built here out of inclusion and exclusion.

Jean-Francois and Georges Biassou led the enslaved insurgents of northern Saint-Domingue in the early 1790s and granted liberty to people who served under them. On 8 November 1804 General Louis Ferrand wrote to his subordinate Peralta and cancelled all of it. He insisted that neither man had ever held the right to liberate anybody, so every French black or coloured person freed by either of them held no valid claim to freedom and was to be treated as a slave. In the same letter he made one exception. Former Spanish slaves who had received their liberty from the King of Spain for service in colonial armies would keep it. The distinction turns on whose signature counts. A monarch could make a free person out of an enslaved one. A black general at the head of an army could not, whatever paper he issued and whatever the person had done to earn it. Many people in Santo Domingo held their freedom on exactly that kind of paper.

The Louverture family reached Brest after twenty five days at sea and was then broken up on Napoleon's orders. Toussaint went to the Fort de Joux in the Jura. His son Placide was taken to Belle-Ile. His nephew and aide de camp Chancy was interned at Toulon. Suzanne Louverture, her son Isaac, her youngest son Saint-Jean and Louise Chancy were sent to Bayonne and from there to Agen, with nothing, since they had been allowed to carry nothing away. On 8 January 1804 Saint-Jean died there of a wasting illness at the age of thirteen, having said that he could not survive his father. Toussaint had already been dead nine months. One week earlier, at Gonaives, Dessalines had declared the independence of Haiti. A letter of 6 October from the French general Vincent, a friend of the family, records that Suzanne Louverture's reason had begun to give way.

Louverture reached Brest in July 1802 and was not moved to the fortress of Joux on the Swiss frontier until early August, while his wife and sons were sent to Bayonne. Woodward gives April 1803 for his death in the text and dates it precisely under an accompanying illustration. He names tuberculosis as what killed him and adds that the body was never returned to the country he had fought to liberate. The separation of the family was itself part of the mechanism, since the two sons had been educated in Paris and had earlier been used as leverage on their father. Woodward pairs the death with what was happening in the colony at the same moment, where decrees from Bonaparte's government stripped free men of colour of their rights and restored slavery, driving black and mulatto commanders into a single alliance against the French. Where this account departs from the standard one: Woodward attributes the death to tuberculosis, where most accounts of the Fort de Joux imprisonment describe pneumonia, cold and deliberate neglect.