Haitian leaders burned Le Cap rather than surrender to Leclerc

Evidence

The gunners in the fort fired back, announcing to the troops in Le Cap that they were under attack. Christophe made good on his threat and ordered his soldiers to set the town alight. For the second time in a decade, it was devoured by flames. It was February 4—eight years to the day since the abolition of slavery had been decreed in Paris. Despite all the protestations made by Leclerc and Bonaparte, many in Saint-Domingue believed that liberty itself was at stake. Several months later one of Louverture’s colonels, the African-born Sans-Souci, would describe the officers serving with him as “defenders of liberty.” As it turned out, they had good reason. As Leclerc would later admit, a few “negroes” who were arrested soon after the arrival of the expedition were sold as slaves by French officials. — Dubois, Laurent, Avengers of the New World_ The Story of…, 940

Categorization

• XREF: Christophe’s self-immolation of Le Cap to deny it to the French parallels the sacrifice article’s theme of destruction-as-grief-strategy — burning one’s own city rather than surrender it.
• ADDENDUM: The deliberate burning of one’s own city to deny it to an enemy echoes the sacrifice article’s logic of destruction as an act of defiant love/loss, though the referents here are urban and strategic rather than ritual.