In the opening pages of Le système colonial dévoilé, Baron de Vastey explains his motivations for publishing the first systematic critique of the ideology of French colonialism by an author of African descent. Heralding the convening of European sovereigns for the Congress of Vienna as a ‘momentous event’ in which, for the first time in history, the abolition of the slave trade was an explicit object of deliberation, Vastey situates his work as the complement to Henry Christophe's Manifeste du roi, published just one month prior, in September 1814. However, whereas Christophe sought to defend Haiti's revolutionary birth and its continued rights to sovereignty, Vastey announces the intention to ‘unveil the barbaric Colonial System’ for Europeans and Haitians alike (1814b, vii). The ‘truth’ to be unveiled, what Vastey equates with the colonial system as a whole, is slavery itself, described as ‘the most horrendous, the most terrible wound ever to afflict humanity’ (vi). Beginning with a chapter on the Spanish colonization and enslavement of indigenous populations and the advent of the slave trade, Vastey goes on in a second chapter to enumerate, in excruciatingly denuded prose, a litany of atrocities committed against slaves in Saint-Domingue on the part of their masters. In arguing so forcefully against the crime of slavery, his text therefore makes a direct intervention in the literature of abolitionism.

That Vastey would write an explicitly antislavery tract at this moment may, at first glance, seem fitting given the ideological climate of the post-Napoleonic European world and Christophe's specific political objectives in the wake of the 1814 Dauxion Lavaysse mission to Haiti. Although the Atlantic World powers remained generally hostile to the notion of an independent black state, the abolitionist movement had gained important victories in England, culminating in the abolition of the British slave trade in 1807. While Britain continued to pursue universal abolition of the trade to suit its own economic interests and the growing public demand, transnational activism on the issue spiked when the prospect of peace after the Napoleonic wars inspired hope for an international treaty. Especially encouraging to many observers were the favourable views of the Russian Emperor Alexander I toward abolition of the trade (Reich, 129–30), which probably inspired Vastey's praise of him as ‘distinguish[ed]… by dint of his humanity, his liberal outlook, his moderation, his generosity’ (v).