Nine essays written in the year after Jean-Claude Duvalier fled, held together by the claim that the Duvalier state reproduced inside itself the relations of the slave plantation, so that removing a family could not end it. Hurbon reads the toppling of statues and the hunt for macoutes on 7 February 1986 as an attempt by a population to repossess national space. He then works outward: to the peasant flight produced by macoute rule in the countryside, to the way colour has served Haitian intellectuals as a claim on power, to seventeenth century European thought that made a slave colony compatible with Christianity, and to the rising of 1791, whose originality he says disappears when it is read as a by-product of events in Paris. Negritude, he argues, was left available for Duvalier to capture. The last essay asks why vodou priests were lynched alongside the torturers.