Dupuy denies that Hegel took his master and slave from Saint-Domingue

Dupuy takes on the argument advanced by Tavares, Buck-Morss and Nesbitt that Hegel derived the master and slave struggle in the Phenomenology of Mind of 1807 from the Saint-Domingue revolution, noting that all three concede Hegel never mentions that revolution. He gives two reasons why the derivation is impossible. The first is Hegel's racism: like Voltaire, Montesquieu, Hume, Kant, Jefferson and Moreau de Saint-Mery, he held Africans to be savages inherently inferior to Europeans, and although he thought slavery unjust in general he justified African enslavement in the Americas as a means of raising them above savagery. The second is textual: the figures in the Phenomenology, and earlier in the System of Ethical Life and the First Philosophy of Spirit, are individuals emerging from a state of nature who seek mutual recognition and accept each other in advance as partners. Where this account departs from the standard one: Rejects the Tavares, Buck-Morss and Nesbitt thesis that Hegel's master and slave dialectic came from the Haitian Revolution, on grounds of his racism and of the mutual recognition the figures presuppose.

On 7 November 1808 General Jean Louis Ferrand marched about six hundred men toward Seybo, in eastern Santo Domingo, to put down a rising led by an officer he had once trusted with the district. He believed the sight of him would restore order and that any resistance would break easily. Waiting for him were 2,100 soldiers sent from Havana and Puerto Rico. The battle was one sided. Ferrand ordered the survivors to withdraw, said aloud that he was the victim of his own overconfidence, took a cartridge from an aide before anyone could stop him, primed his pistols and killed himself. He had soldiered for twenty five years, through the American and French revolutions, and had run the last French government in Hispaniola for almost five. His second in command, General Joseph Barquier, took over a position that was already lost. Six weeks later a junta named Juan Sanchez Ramirez governor in the name of Ferdinand VII.

Between May 1809 and the middle of the following January, the mayor of New Orleans, James Mather, tallied 9,059 arrivals and sent the number to the governor. Almost all had sailed from Santiago de Cuba or Baracoa, expelled from the island where they had taken shelter after fleeing Saint-Domingue. Only one vessel in the movement came from Havana. Further landings in the first months of 1810 carried the total past 10,000. The three castes of the old colonial order arrived in roughly equal numbers: white, free of colour, and enslaved. Children made up 42 percent of the free people of colour, 29 percent of the enslaved and 24 percent of the whites. Orleans Parish held 17,001 people in 1806 and 24,552 in 1810, and the refugees were 90 percent of the growth in the free coloured population. Measured against the town itself, between 10,000 and 12,000 residents in 1806 and 17,242 in 1810, the arrivals doubled New Orleans.

In October 1802 Petion had taken up arms at Haut du Cap and Dessalines was preparing to do the same at Petite-Riviere, after a secret understanding between them. The French had already tried to arrest him at Gonaives, and he had ridden straight at the officer sent to take him and demanded where the slanders about him came from, which was enough to unsettle the men. At Petite-Riviere he pulled down a gallows the French had put up and then went to the presbytery, where the priest Videau had invited him to lunch. Chief of brigade Andrieux was at the table waiting for the moment to have him seized. A woman of colour, Madame Pageot, who worked as Videau's servant, appeared in the doorway opposite Dessalines and made him understand with a movement of her hand that he was about to be bound. He said he saw smoke on the mountain, went out, mounted, and fired the alarm cannon. Three thousand peasants came.