Madiou publishes a history listing the colour of every actor

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.

Until the Second Republic he had remained a technical expert, oddly isolated from both the radical republican and the abolitionist movements, writing for journals including La Reforme. The revolution brought the republicans to power and gave him the chance to apply what he had argued since 1840, that emancipation must be immediate and unqualified, that racial equality follows from it, and that emancipation without citizenship leaves freedom without substance. As undersecretary of state for the colonies he headed the commission that abolished slavery in the French colonies. He was then elected by the freed populations of Martinique and Guadeloupe to represent them. He returned to France after the fall of the Empire in August 1870, was elected again by Martinique in 1871, and spent the rest of his life as the recognised spokesman for antislavery and for the memory of Toussaint Louverture, dying in 1893.

In 1848 the budget of the Haitian army stood at 3,232,225 francs, which came to sixty five per cent of everything the national government spent. Faustin Soulouque was in his second year as president and would crown himself emperor the following year. The figure is worth setting beside what the state did not do. It ran almost no schools outside the towns, maintained few roads, and drew most of its revenue from a tax on coffee grown by farmers it otherwise left alone. No European power was preparing to land. France had recognised Haitian independence in 1825 and the threat that justified this spending had passed a generation earlier. The army existed at that size because control of it was the route to the presidency, and every president had to pay for the loyalty that had put him there and could remove him. Two thirds of public money went to the one institution that decided who governed.

The Sunday dances at Congo Square ended in the 1870s as the French speaking Africans of New Orleans were pushed into American life after the Civil War. The old order of the city had three tiers, white, free person of colour and slave, and the white American Protestant order that replaced it had one line with everybody on one side or the other. Creoles of colour lost standing and money quickly through the last quarter of the century. By its end all the famous Vodou doctors and queens were dead, and the religion went underground while federal, state and city authorities, joined by Black and white Protestant leaders, worked to destroy African folk religion in Louisiana. Black New Orleanians were still half the population. They kept the practice going in the downtown Creole neighbourhoods, in secret societies, and in the Mardi Gras Indian tribes, whose sequined suits and beaded pouches answer to the sequined flags and charged packets of Haiti.