Vastey redefines colonial as the massacre or enslavement of blacks

The essay shows Vastey taking a phrase Malouet had used to describe black liberty as domination and massacre, and turning it into a definition of the colonial system itself as the domination of whites and the massacre or enslavement of black people. The move parallels Dessalines renaming the country and redefining the word black to cover every Haitian citizen. Vastey addresses a double audience, his compatriots and the sovereigns and tribunals of Europe, and distinguishes his task from the novelist's, saying he is setting out misfortunes, long sufferings and unheard of tortures. The essay argues this text prefigures Cesaire's discourse on colonialism by asking what colonisation fundamentally is and answering that it is a system of domination which destroys itself because it cannot contain its own contradictions, and treats it as a founding document of postcolonial theory.

Mathieu Orfila published his Traite des poisons in Paris in 1814. It set out to catalogue every known poison and to serve courts as well as physicians, and it gave a name to a new field, toxicology, a word coined for the purpose. Translations into English, Italian, German and Hungarian followed almost at once, and three French editions appeared inside a decade. Orfila ran his own experiments on mercury sublimate, arsenic and antimony. For the arrow poisons of the Amazon and the Orinoco, and for plants used against snakebite in New Granada, he simply cited other people. What the book leaves out is the trials then filling colonial courtrooms. Enslaved and free people of African descent were being tried for poisoning in Suriname and Martinique while he wrote, and his illustrative cases are a toddler who ate rat poison, a young woman who put arsenic in her soup, and a man who took too much opium.

When the monarchy was restored in France in 1815, the gains made during the Revolution were reversed for almost everybody. The peasantry was the exception. What the countryside had seized or bought stayed in its hands, which is why some historians describe the French Revolution as the first successful peasant revolution of modern times. Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie pushes the reading further. Peasants in the last years of the old regime were attacking the enclosers, the drainers and the improvers, so their revolt was aimed at capitalism rather than at feudalism, and where no improving landlord had appeared, as in Brittany, the peasants stayed quiet. Volker Hunecke makes a parallel case for the towns, where the end of controlled bread prices produced a defensive fury against free trade. A revolution described for a century as the arrival of a new economic order had its most durable effect in slowing that order down.

Girard follows the losing side of independence. Thousands of angry cultivators refused incorporation into Dessalines's army and chose instead to ally with the French commander Rochambeau, and even after the evacuation he went on fighting renegade bands numbering between fifteen hundred and four thousand, one of which called itself the Rochambeau army. He captured and executed their most prominent leader, but lower class opposition to the new landowning elite did not disappear. It took state form in the independent territory that Jean-Baptiste Perrier, known as Goman, held in the south for fourteen years, and reappeared in the Piquet risings of the eighteen forties. The article treats this continuity as the real long term consequence of the labour policy Dessalines had enforced first for Louverture and then for France.