Since the fall of the Duvalier dictatorship in 1986, Haitian street protest has rallied around the cry that the children of Dessalines stand against the children of Petion. Mocombe traces where that phrase came from, following the invocation of Dessalines through the American occupation, the invented story of Catherine Flon sewing the flag, the naming of the national anthem, and the rhetoric of today's educated black landowning professionals. He reads 1791 to 1804 as four separate revolutions, of grands blancs and petits blancs, of the gens de couleur, of creole blacks, and of the African born majority, and argues that the last of these has been written out of the record. What the slogan actually names, on his account, is a quarrel between two wings of one propertied class, both committed to capitalist development. The rural African majority holds a different practical consciousness, rooted in Vodou, the lakou and subsistence production, and he adds a third term, the children of Sans Souci, to make it visible.