Faustin Soulouque was an undistinguished career soldier when the Haitian Senate made him president in 1847, apparently expecting a man they could manage; he crowned himself emperor and held power for a dozen years. Baur's portrait, published in 1949, treats the reign as a mixture of farce and slaughter and is unsparing about its subject's illiteracy, superstition and fear.

The judgments extend well beyond the man. Baur reads Boyer's fall in 1843 as the removal of a capable mulatto elite and the start of a racial conflict he considers unresolved, and he ranks the imperial years as the turning point after which Haitian politics settled into despotism and corruption. He allows Soulouque two achievements: territory in the interior retained after the failed invasions of the Dominican Republic, and the preservation of Haitian sovereignty through a diplomatic crisis in which foreign powers pressed hard.