What stands here is the general introduction Manigat wrote for the last two volumes of his series, given over to Haitian diplomacy and international relations from Toussaint Louverture to the present. He calls it an examination of conscience of a history and of a historian, and it doubles as a critical autobiography written in the spirit of the Annales and of a history meant to be living rather than antiquarian.

The life carries the argument. A schooling in Haitian and Catholic tradition, study in Paris, a quarter-century of political exile and finally the constitutional presidency of 1988, ended after five months by the army, are set against the country's own sequence: the Caribbean as inseparable from Haitian identity, independence as the ground of haitianite, several distinct revolutions in 1946, an intellectual spring frozen by Duvalier, and two populisms that each failed.

Manigat offers the pages as material for younger readers to argue with.