MacLeod sets out to unsettle the received portrait of Faustin Soulouque as a dull-witted tyrant whose twelve years in power were an embarrassing interruption in Haitian life. That portrait comes largely from French and American writers, and it leaves obvious puzzles unanswered: how a supposed nonentity outmanoeuvred the senators who elected him in 1847 expecting a figurehead, and why he lasted so long when abler presidents fell within months.

Reading consular dispatches, the government press and nineteenth-century Haitian historians, MacLeod finds a shrewd politician rather than a caricature. Soulouque struck at black extremists as readily as at the Port-au-Prince elite, promoted mulatto talent, and treated his imperial nobility as a cheap way of binding generals, merchants, piquet chiefs and Vodoun leaders to the regime. His campaigns against the Dominican Republic followed convictions his predecessors had shared.

The essay is offered as a prompt to rethink Haiti's recurring strongmen, not as a settled account of them.

Faustin Soulouque had been enslaved until 1793, could write little beyond his name, and commanded the presidential guard when deadlocked ministers settled on him as a compromise in March 1847. They expected a figurehead. Brandon's sketch follows what they got instead.

The country he inherited was unrecognized abroad, pressed for payment of foreign claims, divided north from south and black from mulatto, and had run through three presidents in three years. Soulouque outlasted his ministers, put down the killings of April 1848, and turned to bringing the eastern part of the island back under Haitian authority, winning at Azua before his troops were routed at Ocoa. To dispel the gloom after that defeat he was proclaimed emperor in 1849 and crowned in 1852 with regalia bought abroad.

The invasions failed, and in January 1859, his soldiers deserting to Geffrard, he sailed into exile.

Faustin Soulouque was an undistinguished career soldier when the Haitian Senate made him president in 1847, apparently expecting a man they could manage; he crowned himself emperor and held power for a dozen years. Baur's portrait, published in 1949, treats the reign as a mixture of farce and slaughter and is unsparing about its subject's illiteracy, superstition and fear.

The judgments extend well beyond the man. Baur reads Boyer's fall in 1843 as the removal of a capable mulatto elite and the start of a racial conflict he considers unresolved, and he ranks the imperial years as the turning point after which Haitian politics settled into despotism and corruption. He allows Soulouque two achievements: territory in the interior retained after the failed invasions of the Dominican Republic, and the preservation of Haitian sovereignty through a diplomatic crisis in which foreign powers pressed hard.