The protest slogan that pits the children of Dessalines against the children of Pétion has organised Haitian street politics since the fall of Jean-Claude Duvalier, and Mocombe asks what it actually names. Reading the revolution through his own framework of phenomenological structuralism, he distinguishes three consciousnesses formed before 1804: the whites, the affranchis of free blacks and gens de couleur who shared European commercial and religious assumptions, and the field slaves and maroons of Bois Caïman, whose Vodou practice underwrote a communal rather than a market order. On that reading the slogan is a quarrel between two bourgeoisies, a landowning and professional black class against a mulatto and Arab commercial elite, both competing for the state and both committed to an export economy. The African majority in the provinces, whom he calls the children of Sans Souci, appear in the rhetoric and not in the programme, which is why the conflict keeps repeating.