The Dominican independence day marks separation from Haiti and not from Spain

Haiti occupied the eastern side of Hispaniola from 1822 to 1844, and Dominican writing came to call those twenty two years the black years. The Dominican Republic keeps 27 February as its independence day, and what the date marks is separation from Haiti. Spain governed the same territory for three centuries and the end of that rule carries no comparable holiday, which is the point: the celebration expresses a wish to claim a European legacy and to be free of an African past. Before the French Revolution the French held western third of the island had a much larger black population than the Spanish held east, and the Spanish speaking inhabitants of Santo Domingo had long feared a more numerous and militarily stronger French speaking black society on their border. Haiti invaded three times. In the early 1900s Haitian labourers, many of them undocumented, crossed the other way to cut cane and to live in the bateyes, and scholars date the sharpest growth of anti Haitian feeling to that migration.

In March 1841 Gregory XVI told Bishop Rosati, sent to Haiti on a mission that nearly worked, that he could not die easy without seeing this poor abandoned country become Christian again. He died in 1846 without it. The obstruction was not theological. Haiti had a functioning religious life and did not need Rome's permission to have one. The blockage was that recognizing Haiti ecclesiastically meant recognizing Haiti, and the Vatican was not going to move ahead of the Catholic monarchies. The Concordat finally signed in 1860 mattered for a reason that is usually skipped: it handed the entire education system to French religious orders. So the schooling of the Haitian elite for the next century was designed abroad, taught in French, and structurally hostile to the language and religion of the majority. The 1860 signature is why the 1980 language debate was still being fought.

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.

In the first volume of his Histoire d'Haïti, Thomas Madiou argues for the disappearance of the Taino on grounds of absorption rather than complete extermination: until the middle of the eighteenth century certain families kept unmixed descent and used the title of cacique, but by his own day no Haitian belonged directly to that race. Perry notes that Madiou's narration collapses racial purity into the survival of social structures, leaving the reader to assume Taino social practice ended with intermarriage, which was convenient for the new state since he had described Taino families as exercising a limited legal autonomy. His contemporary Émile Nau made a stronger case for continuity, stressing partial descent and the survival of Taino words and songs, but still denied that nineteenth-century Haitians were direct heirs. Where this account departs from the standard one: Perry argues that if one drops the requirement that aboriginal people be racially pure to count as such, the habitual claim that the Taino were eliminated on Hispaniola becomes an overstatement, and she notes that Moreau de Saint-Méry's own account, which records people with special legal status, unduly minimises their presence.