Santo Domingo is the first country of modern times to have posed in reality and to have proposed to the reflection of men, and that in all its complexity; social, economic, racial, the great problem that the twentieth century is running out of steam to solve: the colonial problem. The first country where this problem arose. The first country where it broke loose. When Toussaint Louverture for the first time burst onto the historical scene, many movements were underway: the white movement towards autonomy and commercial freedom, the Mulatto movement towards social equality; the Negro movement towards freedom. The bourgeois power resulting from the French Revolution experienced that freedom is indivisible, that one could not grant political or economic freedom to the white planters and maintain the mulattoes under the rule; that one could not recognize the civil equality to free men of color and at the same time maintain the negroes in the ergastule; in short, that in order to liberate one of the classes of colonial society, it was necessary to liberate them all, and that in order to liberate them all, it was necessary to liberate Saint-Domingue itself, to put the very existence of colonial society at stake: what appeared to power contrary to the interests of France. When Toussaint Louverture came, it was to take the Declaration of the Rights of Man literally, it was to show that there is no pariah race; that there is no marginal country; that there are no exceptional people ... He had been bequeathed bands. He has assembled a fleet. He had been left with a jacquerie. He had made a Revolution out of it; a population, he had made a people of it. A colony, he had made a state of it; better, a nation. The reissue of the work which renewed the historical analysis of colonial societies, based on a political and cultural project which retains all its force for the Third World today.