Casimir treats Haitian independence as two things happening at once, a secession from the colonial metropole and a fracture inside the population that the new state never closed. Saint Domingue produced two juxtaposed groups: colonists and their descendants who understood themselves as French and spent the nineteenth century trying to restore the tie, and the African-born captives and their descendants for whom entry into Frenchness was never available on tolerable terms. Reading the Code Noir, Toussaint Louverture's 1801 constitution and the successive rural codes of Christophe, Boyer and Duvalier, he argues that Haitian law kept reproducing an obligation to assimilate alongside the impossibility of doing so. The elite that emerged had no roots among the cultivators and became an oligarchy lacking the means for the civilising mission it claimed. The argument ends in the present, with assimilation now defined by wealthy countries under United States leadership and delivered by non-governmental organisations, and with the oligarchy itself among the losers.