Forced choice between French reprisals and insurgent death drove colonial troops to defect

Evidence

Leclerc believed that Dessalines and Maurepas were behind the defections, and issued orders for the arrest of the two officers. … For colonial soldiers throughout the colony, time was running out. They knew they might fall prey at any moment to the increasingly indiscriminate violence exercised by the French against colonial troops whose loyalty they suspected. Even if they survived these reprisals, they might end up dead at the hands of the victorious insurgents. Rumors were spread among the colonial troops that the French troops were preparing to leave the colony. It was time, such rumors suggested, to make a choice between joining the insurgents or dying at their hands. — Dubois, Laurent, Avengers of the New World_ The Story of…, 1019

Categorization

• XREF: Dessalines’ impending arrest directly seeds his dramatic defection later — central to the narrative arc the reader is tracking.