Not unlike the peasant rebels in France during the Great Terror of 1789, the slave insurgents of Saint-Domingue invoked a powerful and distant figure—who they rightly understood might have the power to counteract the assemblies of the colony—against their all-too-local enemies. As Garran-Coulon noted in his report, the evocation of the king was a logical political strategy. Even if the royal government protected them very little against their masters, it was the only protection they could “invoke against the tyranny of their masters.”

Dubois, Laurent, Avengers of the New World_ …, loc. 157