Working from press reports, diplomatic dispatches, newsreel film and visits to the sites themselves, Le Glaunec traces how the battle fought outside Cap-Haïtien on 18 November 1803 became Haiti's founding memory. Before the 1890s it barely figured in national commemoration. Recognition grew from the 1920s and was secured by the 1954 sesquicentennial, when four hundred actors and cadets restaged the assault before twenty-five thousand spectators, and farmers back from the fields joined in with their cutlasses. François Duvalier then annexed the memory, making 18 November a public holiday for the army in his 1957 constitution and having schoolchildren swear a daily pledge that names Vertières; his newspaper repeated for a decade that the battle continues. Set against that rhetoric are the ruins the author walks through, Fort Picolet abandoned and littered, its walls now serving Vodou practitioners, evidence that the physical traces of the war of independence are far more fragile than the official memory of it.