Donatien-Marie-Joseph de Rochambeau

Fick's Making Haiti documents Rochambeau's campaign through the testimonies and records of those who experienced it — the enslaved and formerly enslaved population whose resistance his violence was designed to break and whose memories of his atrocities were preserved in the court records, plantation registers, and survivor testimonies that Fick mines. Where Dubois reads Rochambeau from the perspective of the French imperial project, Fick's subaltern methodology allows the violence to be read from below: the escalating terror that proved to the formerly enslaved that surrender meant reenslavement and that death in battle was preferable to the fate Rochambeau offered. Her account makes the revolution's final phase legible as a response to Rochambeau's exterminatory campaign rather than simply as the uprising's triumphant conclusion.

Rochambeau's exterminatory campaign, read from below through Fick's subaltern methodology, proves that the formerly enslaved fought to the death because surrender meant reenslavement — the revolution's final phase was a direct response to what he offered.

Dubois's Avengers of the New World reads Rochambeau as the French commander who personified the expedition's descent into exterminatory violence — a general whose use of dogs trained to kill Black people, mass drowning of prisoners, and systematic terror marked a crossing of a line that even by 18th-century military standards was recognizable as atrocity. Dubois situates Rochambeau's brutality within the broader logic of a colonial restoration project that required the extermination or reenslavement of a population that had demonstrated military capacity and political will over a decade of revolutionary warfare. His tactics, which shocked some French officers and horrified observers, appear in Dubois's account not as exceptional barbarity but as the logical endpoint of Napoleon's colonial project: a regime that could only be maintained through total violence.

Rochambeau's exterminatory tactics — dogs trained to kill Black people, mass drowning — were not exceptional barbarity but the logical endpoint of Napoleon's colonial project, which could only be maintained through total violence.

Bell's Toussaint Louverture: A Biography reads Rochambeau as the figure whose escalating violence after Leclerc's death made negotiated settlement permanently impossible — the general whose atrocities (the attack dogs, the mass drownings, the execution of priests) convinced the Black generals who had submitted to Leclerc that there was no future available to them in a French Saint-Domingue. Bell's biographical focus on the Black leadership perspective makes Rochambeau's role legible differently than Dubois's imperial history: where Dubois reads Rochambeau as the logical endpoint of Napoleon's project, Bell reads him as the figure who unified Dessalines's coalition by making the alternative to independence literally unsurvivable. The formerly loyal commanders who had hoped to negotiate autonomy under French sovereignty found in Rochambeau's campaign the proof that no such accommodation existed.

Rochambeau's atrocities unified Dessalines's coalition by making any negotiated accommodation with France literally unsurvivable — the Black generals who had submitted to Leclerc found in Rochambeau's campaign the proof that independence was the only alternative to extermination.