Of the four founders Haitians honour, Pétion is the one foreign readers know least, and Bellegarde sets out to correct that with a short life built around three decisions. The land laws of 1809 and 1814 broke up confiscated colonial estates and handed plots to the rank and file of the independence army, creating a nation of peasant proprietors. The Constitution of 1816 made elementary schooling free, and Pétion founded a lycée for boys and a boarding school for girls in Port-au-Prince. In 1816 he armed and supplied Bolívar on the single condition that the liberator abolish slavery wherever he prevailed, which Bolívar duly proclaimed that July. Bellegarde presses the first of these into contemporary service, arguing that smallholding gave Haiti social stability through the world depression and immunity to communism. The claim is asserted rather than demonstrated.