The promise to keep whites in the new nation ends in the 1804 killings

Girard closes on the gap between what Dessalines said at the founding and what he ordered a few months later. At the start of 1804 the new head of state gave assurances that white residents would have a place in the country. By the spring he had ordered the killing of most of the French whites remaining on the island. Girard presents this as the final step in a progression rather than as the expression of a fixed programme, describing a man who began the period as a general of the French republican army, spent 1802 insisting on his loyalty to France, and ended as emperor of an independent black state. The mechanism he emphasises is escalation driven by the conduct of the war under Rochambeau and by the impossibility of any settlement that left French power in place. He calls the journey a surprisingly gradual one.

In October 1803 Captain General Louis Thomas Villaret-Joyeuse set up a special tribunal in Martinique to try three offences together: poisoning, arson, and running away by stealing canoes. It sat between the first and second British occupations of the island, in the middle of the Napoleonic wars, and it built on the precedent of 1753, when the colony had first given poison cases their own rules. The tribunal travelled, its members were government officials and prominent local slaveholders, and the executions, usually burning at the stake, took place on the spot as soon as a trial ended. There was no appeal. Within two years Villaret-Joyeuse was reporting that the blight of poisonings was in retreat thanks to the court. The trials ran on until the British landed in February 1809, and the incoming British governor kept both the tribunal and the leading part local slaveholders played in it.

Toussaint Louverture was taken in Brunet's ambush on 7 June 1802. Brunet's aide de camp went straight to the general's house and emptied it of money, jewellery and papers. Of everything the family owned, Suzanne Louverture saved a single object, her husband's watch, engraved with the words that his virtue had opened every heart to him, his initials beneath, and a second line saying that he never knew the prejudice of colour. At the same hour a battalion commander named Pesquidon reached the property where she was living. She saw her son Isaac being brought in between two lines of soldiers, ran to him and asked where his father was. Pesquidon told her she would be given an escort so that she could join her husband. She agreed at once and left with her sons and with Louise Chancy, Toussaint's niece. The people of Ennery crowded the house begging the soldiers not to kill her or her children.

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.