The army takes sixty five per cent of the Haitian budget

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.

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 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.

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.