Written first as a series of articles for the Port-au-Prince daily Le Matin marking the centenary of Peralte's birth in 1985, this short biography sets the caco leader's life against the United States occupation that began in 1915. Michel assembles the record from Roger Gaillard's research, parish and archival documents reproduced in an appendix, and the memories of contemporaries, then arranges it into eighteen chapters he calls cantos, borrowing the shape of an epic and naming the later ones for the passion, crucifixion and resurrection. Schooling in Hinche and Port-au-Prince, service as an arrondissement commander, imprisonment at Cap-Haitien and the escape of September 1918 lead into the rising on the Central Plateau, where an undisarmed peasantry and harsh forced labour made revolt possible. A chronology running to the final caco surrender in October 1921 closes the volume. Michel writes frankly as an advocate, dismissing readings of Peralte as a Marxist and defending his nationalism as a Christian one.