Up to this point in our exploration of the transatlantic print culture of the Haitian Revolution, we have focused our attention primarily on texts designed by their authors to be scientific, historical, or biographical. However, the late eighteenth to mid-nineteenth centuries also saw what can only be described as a deluge of representations of the Haitian Revolution that were meant to be fictional. Before 1865, more than 100 novels and plays of the Revolution had been published or staged in the Atlantic World, written by the well known and the obscure alike. In these fictions, the trope of “monstrous hybridity” continued to loom large, as people of “mixed race” were more often than not portrayed as either desiring of vengeance against the “whites” to whom they were related by birth or by whom they had been enslaved, and as hateful of other people of color and, especially, “negroes,” who supposedly reminded them of their degradation.

The French novelist J.-B.C. Berthier published an inflammatory romance of the Haitian Revolution in 1801 entitled Félix et Léonore; ou les colons malheureux, in which “racial mixing” was described as not only completely unnatural—‘there has never been an error more fatal in its consequences than that which has assimilated two species [celle qui a assimilé deux espèces] that are distinguished by the most essential of differences’ (2:77)—but as the impetus for revolutionary parricide. Berthier consequently characterizes the free people of color in Saint-Domingue as both the unnatural children of their ostensibly “white” colonist-fathers and as the principle perpetrators of the violence of the Revolution: ‘the men of color plunged their daggers into [their father's] breasts.