Written in the months after Jean-Claude Duvalier's flight, when new parties and newspapers were appearing daily, Nicholls's account explains the dynasty's collapse as the result of its support shifting from one class to another.

Francois Duvalier won in 1957 as the candidate of the black middle class against a bourgeois rival favoured by the church and the American embassy, then held power by terror, populist rhetoric and the careful distribution of thin patronage, cultivating houngans and militia chiefs while dismantling every rival centre of authority. His son inherited the machine without the father's knowledge of the country. Encouraged by Washington, Jean-Claude staked the regime on modernization and assembly plants, leaned steadily on the business community, and lost the black Duvalierists; the Bennett family's plundering then alienated the bourgeoisie too.

That left him exposed to mass protest, to the church, and finally to the embassy and the army. Nicholls closes by surveying the parties, unions and clergy contending in the interim.