As modern historiography has only begun to appreciate, the Haitian Revolution – an act of self-liberation originating from the revolutionary Atlantic that brought about the overthrow of slavery in the richest European colony in the Caribbean – was ‘an event in the history of ideas, and of the moral imagination, as well as a dramatic political episode with a wide impact’. The recognition of its relevance, as Robin Blackburn has recently observed, is an inescapable key to our understanding of the global scope of the coterminous revolutionary processes on the two sides of the Atlantic, which should be read in their interconnectedness. In David Brion Davis's potent imagery, ‘Like the Hiroshima bomb, its meaning could be rationalized or repressed but never really forgotten since it demonstrated the possible fate of every slaveholding society in the New World’. It comes then as a historical paradox that, as Michel-Rolph Trouillot influentially argued in his study Silencing the Past, the Haitian Revolution ‘entered history with the peculiar characteristic of being unthinkable even as it happened’ – an inconceivable event that openly defied European clichés as to the assumed incapability of organized mass resistance on the part of the enslaved; those clichés would be perpetuated by a prevailing Euro-centric historiography, and, since ‘worldview wins over the facts’, the Haitian Revolution would undergo a process of ‘erasure’ and/or ‘trivialization’ in subsequent historical narratives, which has proved durable and lasted until recently.