Girard's article covers the 1802–4 period in Haiti, during which an expeditionary force sent by Napoleon Bonaparte on the one hand, and an army of Blacks and Mulattoes (most of them former slaves) on the other hand, openly considered genocide of the enemy population. Whites carried out massacres but fell short of genocide because of the French military defeat; Blacks won the war and eradicated Haiti's white population in 1804. The article offers five main explanations for this genocide. First, the Haitian slave revolt coincided with the French Revolution, and the slaves and soldiers borrowed from the metropolis the idea that the survival of a revolution justified murder, war and even large-scale massacres, that ideology was worth dying, and killing, for. Second, economic interest was at the heart of the planters’ desire to force black slaves to work, but it also influenced the rebellious slaves’ decision to kill all planters and their families: black generals, who replaced Whites as plantation owners, directly benefitted from the genocide. Third, the 1802–4 period marks the conclusion of a bloody, thirteen-year slave revolt that was itself a reaction to a century-old colonial rule characterized by the brutal exploitation of a large slave population. War, by creating a context in which violent death was the norm rather than the exception, made it easier to resort to mass murder. Fourth, with few exceptions, those who perpetrated the genocide were former slaves, while most victims were former slave owners and soldiers supporting slavery; the genocide was thus a form of class warfare in which an exploited lower class exacted revenge against the master class. Finally, in its last stages, the war turned into a racial conflict that pitted Whites against Blacks and Mulattoes. The usual characteristics of racism (hatred, oversimplification, conspiracy theories, dehumanization) all facilitated the genocide. Girard concludes that the 1804 genocide must be understood in a specific, Haitian context, but that it was also the product of ideas (racism and class warfare, notably) that were central to more modern genocides.