The ordinance Charles X signed in 1825 is remembered for its second article, the 150-million-franc indemnity. Kwass turns to the first: the demi droit, a halving of duties on French goods intended to restore the commerce France had enjoyed when the colony was the richest in the Atlantic world.

Where the indemnity succeeded in extracting money, this commercial privilege failed. Haitian customs officers obstructed it from the outset through a series of deliberate tactics, and the government eventually abolished it; a French consul, casting Haiti as a duplicitous woman, compared the resistance to Penelope weaving by day and unpicking her work by night. Kwass reads this as statecraft rather than mere evasion, driven by fiscal need, revolutionary principle, and a rural population unwilling to purchase an independence already won by arms.

Set against French mercantilism and recent work on sovereignty, the affair shows a young Black republic acting effectively against an informal empire that nonetheless did it lasting harm.