And its major protagonists were not slave owners but slaves themselves.57 The creoles of Saint-Domingue, after all, were a tiny minority surrounded by a vast population with their own interests and interpretations of the world. The enslaved were "omnipresent and attentive observers" who had an astute sense of the divisions among their oppressors and developed a rich vocabulary to describe it. They referred to the newly arrived whites who often served as their overseers as moutons France—French sheep. (The term would be used later to refer to the French troops that arrived, and were decimated, in 1802.) They coined the term petit blancs—little whites—to refer to those who did not own land, contrasting them to the grand blancs (big whites), also called Blancs blancs, or "White whites," whose ownership of property made them true whites.

Dubois, Laurent, Avengers of the New World_ …, loc. 68