Manigat charges Petion with the first coup and the first rigged vote

Manigat sets the polemical field before entering it. Christophe's detractors, Milscent and Colombel among them, used everything against the bloodthirsty tyrant they held responsible for disunion, dissidence and civil war, in order to lower him and raise their idol Petion. Manigat interrupts the contrast by listing what Petion is charged with: being the author of the first bloody coup d'etat in Haitian history and of the first electoral fraud in the country's political annals, and being an agent of France, a traitor with pro-French sentiments, from at least 1809 until 1816. On the other side the Christophian writers, led by Vastey and Prevost, exalted their hero until he became immaculate and untouchable. Manigat argues the scientific historian must get out of this quarrel, which clutters traditional Haitian history, and try to establish what was actually lived. Where this account departs from the standard one: Attributes to Petion the first bloody coup and the first electoral fraud in Haitian history and calls him pro-French from 1809 to 1816, against the liberal portrait of him.

Napoleon Bonaparte had removed Ferdinand VII from the Spanish throne and put his own brother Joseph in his place. Spanish subjects in Cuba refused to accept the substitution, and their anger fell on the French planters and craftsmen who had settled among them after fleeing Saint-Domingue. On 12 March 1809 the Marques de Someruelos, captain general of Cuba, issued a proclamation ordering a vigilance committee in every town and every parish to look into the conduct and the opinions of the French living there and to expel anyone whose presence seemed dangerous. The committees worked fast. News of the expulsion orders reached Louisiana in April, probably carried on the same vessels as the first people driven out. Many of those expelled had already rebuilt their lives once after leaving Saint-Domingue, and among them they had established five hundred estates in eastern Cuba. They now lost a second set of properties and went looking for a third country.

On 7 November 1808 General Jean Louis Ferrand marched about six hundred men toward Seybo, in eastern Santo Domingo, to put down a rising led by an officer he had once trusted with the district. He believed the sight of him would restore order and that any resistance would break easily. Waiting for him were 2,100 soldiers sent from Havana and Puerto Rico. The battle was one sided. Ferrand ordered the survivors to withdraw, said aloud that he was the victim of his own overconfidence, took a cartridge from an aide before anyone could stop him, primed his pistols and killed himself. He had soldiered for twenty five years, through the American and French revolutions, and had run the last French government in Hispaniola for almost five. His second in command, General Joseph Barquier, took over a position that was already lost. Six weeks later a junta named Juan Sanchez Ramirez governor in the name of Ferdinand VII.

Having imposed a military dictatorship on the pattern of Louverture and Dessalines, Christophe went further and declared the State of Haiti a kingdom with himself as King Henry the First. He created a hereditary nobility of four princes, eight dukes, twenty-two counts, thirty-seven barons and fourteen knights, along with a Grand Almoner, an archbishop and suffragan bishops. To supply an educated elite he founded schools reserved for the children of the nobility and of military officers and brought in Anglican pastors to run the Academie Royale and the secondary schools. The book argues the machinery served a class rather than a colour, benefiting mainly the newly freed black elite while including several mixed race men in the top council of ministers, just as Petion placed black generals in his own power structure, so neither government followed a policy based on colour alone.