A paralysed king shoots himself and the two Haitis become one

Girard closes the division of the country with two deaths. Petion died in 1818, mourned as the only man whose rule had caused Haitians no tears, and was succeeded by Boyer, who continued his policies while the south slid further into poverty and northerners crossed the internal border to escape forced labour. In 1820 a stroke left Christophe almost paralysed, his troops found the courage to conspire against him, and he shot himself rather than let anyone else end his life, according to legend with a silver bullet. Haiti was reunited under Boyer. Christophe's palaces were looted, his plantations were broken up, and the network of public schools he had built with British tutors, the first in the country's history, was abandoned. Girard notes that the schools Petion founded served only the children of the elite and that public education has improved little since.

In 1818 two French medical writers, Fournier and Begim, published an attack on Felix Pascalis of New York. They called him a man who had never really been a doctor at all. Then they went further and named his connection in Saint-Domingue with the insurgent leader they called the pious Romain and with the camp at Trou Coffy, accusing him of presiding over the killing of white civilians and the mutilation of their bodies. Pascalis demanded two thousand dollars in damages. He also wrote to Jean Deveze in Paris, who had run the fever hospital at Bush Hill in Philadelphia in 1793, and obtained from him a signed declaration in February 1820 that his conduct during the Trou Coffy affair had deserved glory. To make his case he set down in 1821 a long memoir of what he had seen, the Anecdote historique. That document, written to save a medical reputation in Manhattan, is one of the fullest eyewitness accounts of any 1791 insurgency in the colony.

France abolished slavery in its colonies in February 1794 without ever stating plainly that the slave trade was over. Napoleon Bonaparte restored both in 1802 and 1803. The traffic then became a theoretical question, because once war with Britain resumed the French lost Martinique and Santo Domingo in 1809 and Guadeloupe in 1810, and the Royal Navy blockaded the French coast. At the Congress of Vienna in 1814 and 1815 the European powers declared their opposition to the trade while stopping short of prohibiting it. Bonaparte, briefly back in power during the Hundred Days, issued a decree of abolition in 1815 that had no effect on anything. The prohibition that finally held was a law of 15 April 1818, passed under the restored Bourbon monarchy. Even then several more years went by before agreements with Britain on searching suspect ships at sea gave that law any force in French waters.

Dupuy offers two arguments against the view that the indemnity was the main reason Haiti could not develop its economy. The first is that the dominant classes were unable to turn the peasantry into a proletariat and so revive the sugar plantations that had produced the colony's wealth. Failing that, they had to accommodate a class structure made up mostly of landowning peasants, tenant farmers and sharecroppers producing the coffee, cotton, indigo, cacao and lumber Haiti exported. The landed bourgeoisie therefore drew its wealth from rents extracted from tenants and sharecroppers, from buying and selling the farmers' cash crops on the world market, and from importing and reselling goods at home. Haiti stayed fully integrated into the capitalist world economy all the same, because the surplus value contained in what it produced entered the circuits of industrial and financial capital abroad. Where this account departs from the standard one: Denies that the indemnity was a major cause of nineteenth-century Haitian underdevelopment, pointing instead to the ruling class's failure to proletarianise the peasantry.