The writings published by Baron de Vastey between 1814 and 1820, the year of his death, are ‘manifestly the work of a sophisticated and perceptive defender of his nation's independence’ (Nicholls, 1991, 121). All of these publications, which only a few years ago could legitimately be described as ‘practically unavailable in the original French’ (Jonaissant, 2009, 202), can now be consulted on the Internet by anyone interested in pursuing a first-hand encounter with Vastey's work. His manifestly ‘sophisticated and perceptive’ ideas aside, however, what do we know of the actual life of this ardent defender of Haitian independence? Surprisingly (and disappointingly) little, it must be said, although ongoing archival research being conducted on both sides of the Atlantic is now beginning to lay the foundations for a decidedly more positive response to that biographical question.

The little information that was previously available concerning Vastey's life derived from four main print sources, the first of these being the rare moments of autobiographical disclosure in his published writings, which are notoriously chary in this regard. Second, there is a brief but information-packed paragraph concerning his life in a letter dated 29 November 1819, one of two surviving letters Vastey wrote to the English abolitionist Thomas Clarkson that were published (in translation) in 1952 as part of the Clarkson–Christophe correspondence (Griggs and Prator, 178–82). Third, we have a number of first-hand accounts produced by foreign visitors to the kingdom of Hayti who happened to have met Vastey in the last years of Christophe's reign and made passing comments about him, in letters (some of which were also included as part of the Clarkson– Christophe correspondence) and books published mostly in the decade following upon his death. Finally, we have a variety of rumours and innuendoes circulated in the late 1810s and early 1820s by rival publicists for the Pétion-Boyer regime such as Noël Colombel and Hérard Dumesle, bitter enemies of Christophe who had a stake in maligning Vastey, and whose unflattering accounts of him greatly impacted how he would be represented in the work of subsequent Haitian historians, starting with the ‘three monumental histories’ (Geggus, 2002, 31) produced in the 1840s and 1850s by Thomas Madiou, Beaubrun Ardouin, and Joseph Saint-Rémy.