Laguerre follows Vodou across three centuries of Haitian social organisation and argues that its form has tracked whatever social unit carried it. Under slavery the Catholic mission failed: priests were few, often disreputable, and preached to people the colonists treated as tools, so baptism became a marker of rank among the enslaved rather than a conversion. African priests on the plantations filled the gap, and the religion took organised shape in maroon settlements, where it acquired a messianic and political charge that fed the Bois-Caiman gathering and the revolt of 1791. After independence, with the Church in schism until the Concordat of 1860, worship settled into the Lakou, the patriarchal extended-family compound, and became a family cult. As landholdings fragmented and the Lakou dissolved, the houngan lost his kinship tie to worshippers, and Vodou became a village religion, publicly tolerated and repeatedly turned to political use.