Abstract
Delafosse de Rouville was a young officer when he arrived in Port-au-Prince. In the 1780s, the city was an important hub of military and commercial activity in Saint-Domingue, France’s ‘pearl of the Antilles’, a profitable and brutal slave colony whose residents would successfully revolt against the French to become the independent nation of Haiti in 1804. Years later, after the fall of Napoleon and riding the Bourbon restoration’s wave of aristocratic energy, the anti-Republican de Rouville published his memoirs in the form of an Éloge to his former commander in Saint-Domingue, Colonel Mauduit-Duplessis, followed by an Essai sur la situation