When the life of an ordinary man intersects with important events or, more typically, goes its own way in its own time, it leaves documents that open new ways of reading the past. It also provides new understandings that differ from those opened up by political archives or statistical analysis. Michel Vincent, who migrated to Saint-Domingue at the end of the eighteenth-century and lived through the Haitian Revolution, provides such an opportunity. The few archives that include his name reflect the social and racial structures of a colonial society before and during its destruction by free men of color and slaves.

Jean Hebrard is professeur associé at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales, Paris and a former Norman Freehling Visiting Professor at the Institute for the Humanities.