Presidency for life returns after three years of crisis

Three years of crisis followed the liberal constitution, including a large scale revolt among rural inhabitants of the south. The outcome the editors describe is a partial entrenchment among the political elite, who produced a new constitution reinstituting the presidency for life. The text they reproduce comes from an official printing found in a New York library. It stripped out some of the articles of the 1843 document while keeping certain important changes won by the movement that had overthrown Boyer. The editors treat this constitution as unusually durable in the sequence, since Soulouque was elected president for life under it, insurgents decreed a return to it in December 1858 after forcing him toward exile, Geffrard officially confirmed that return, and it was then amended in 1859 and again in 1860.

Geggus ends with the only two cases where he thinks slave rebellion demonstrably changed the emancipation timetable. In May 1848 a mass entry into the town of Saint Pierre and the fighting that followed in northern Martinique led the governor to declare slavery abolished at once, roughly three months before the decree issued by the new revolutionary government in Paris would have taken effect. He is careful about causation, noting that the decision to abolish had already been taken and was itself what provoked the risings, so the rebellions fixed the date rather than the outcome. The Martinique declaration had immediate effects in the other French colonies and in the Danish islands, where a large rising on Saint Croix in July 1848 cut eleven years off a plan the Danish government had announced the previous year to end slavery in 1859.

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 1847 Thomas Madiou published the first part of his history of Haiti, followed in 1848 by the second and third volumes. Nicholls treats it as the provocation that generated everything else in his article. Madiou was himself of mixed race but never wholly committed to the mulatto cliques, and he did two things the elite found intolerable. Each volume carried an appendix giving the colour of the characters named in the text, and he described postcolonial Haiti as containing two castes. His assessment of Dessalines departed from the accepted view and his judgment of Christophe was thought excessively lenient. The mechanism Nicholls describes is reactive: Ardouin and Saint-Remy wrote largely against Madiou, and Saint-Remy said outright that the errors he found in the history had turned an intended biography of Petion into a general work.