Laënnec Hurbon asks how a dictatorship takes hold of the imagination. Working from Gramsci's distinction between political and civil society, he locates the durability of Duvalier rule in the consent manufactured through school, church, language and the media. Haitian schooling, he shows, turns instruction into the acquisition of French, so that literacy becomes the badge of the civilised and the Creole-speaking majority is taught to hold itself responsible for its own exclusion. He then traces the vocabulary of Duvalierism back to eighteenth-century colonial anthropology and its talk of races in need of civilising, arguing that the regime's racism, elitism and scientism are borrowed from the imperial centre and turned on the population it claims to embody. Interviews with Haitian migrant workers supply his material on vodou, sorcery and oral storytelling, where he finds a popular speech that ideological control has failed to exhaust and a resistance still audible in everyday life.