The most liberal charter Haiti had produced lasts about three years

The editors describe a period of relative constitutional stability ending in the 1840s, when a new generation of intellectuals and politicians demanded a more liberal regime. Several opposition members had been elected to the chamber of deputies but Boyer stifled their calls for change. In March 1843 a popular army marched from the south against the president, who resigned to the senate before the troops reached the capital. A provisional government convened primary assemblies to elect a constituent body charged with drafting a new constitution, and that body published its draft in October, followed shortly by the final version the editors located at a university law library. They call it the most liberal document produced in the country since the revolution for the place it gave individual liberties, and note that it was short-lived.

Enumerators began taking a new census of Dominica in the first days of June 1844. Field workers freed six years earlier believed that the writing down of names was preparation for putting them back into slavery. About fifteen hundred people in the countryside walked off, protested and threatened planters, officials and the enumerators themselves. Ten or twelve people were hurt and none of them seriously. The reaction was the event. Four protesters were killed, four were wounded and some three hundred cultivators were jailed. Ninety four were tried and ninety convicted, six of them sentenced to death. The trials showed the rising elite of free coloured men something it had not expected. Witnesses reported that the labourers drew little distinction between white owners and coloured ones, and one man was quoted saying that people of colour would weed the canes and the country would become like Saint-Domingue. The coloured members of the assembly, the grand jury and the bench sided with the prosecutions.

In 1841 Charles Baudelaire, newly twenty, was put aboard a ship for Calcutta by his stepfather. He got as far as Mauritius and Bourbon, then part of France's plantation empire, and the voyage fed poems that later appeared in Les Fleurs du Mal. Back in Paris he began a relationship with an actress known as Jeanne Duval, widely reported to be of Haitian descent, whom he called his Black Venus. It ran more than twenty years. She is the subject of many of his own drawings and of a canvas by Edouard Manet, and visitors described finding him reading unpublished work aloud to her. Emmanuel Richon showed in 1998 that scholars had never established her origins and had repeated without evidence that she infected the poet with syphilis, when the transmission more likely went the other way. Slavery was abolished in Bourbon and the other French possessions less than seven years after his visit, while Paris argued about the equality of the races.

Gerlus uses two rural movements to show that the line between peasantry and army was porous in a way that shaped Haitian politics. The Piquet movement began in the southern peninsula under Jean-Jacques Acaau, whom he describes as a peasant who had apparently become a soldier. The Caco movement started in the north a generation later and looked to him like an alliance between poor and landless peasants and senior army officers. Between those dates Faustin Soulouque, a peasant who had climbed to the top of the army, ruled from 1847 to 1859 first as president and then as emperor. Gerlus's point is structural. Because holding state power was the reliable route to land and income, insurgency and officeholding were parts of one system, and rural grievance was repeatedly harnessed to the ambitions of men who already held commissions.