The second invasion east ends with two grandsons of kings shot

Soulouque launched his second invasion in December 1855 and occupied the abandoned town of Las Matas by the 17th, then lost at St Thome shortly afterwards. In a fit of anger he ordered the immediate execution of Generals Dessalines and Christophe, grandsons of Haiti's two earlier crowned heads. Baur reports the American press ridiculing the campaign, with a main body of eighteen thousand put to flight by four hundred Dominicans and a field piece, and the emperor nearly taken before staff officers saved him at the cost of several of their own lives. The mechanism of the collapse was that Soulouque escaped with roughly three million dollars in currency and eighty thousand in Spanish paper while abandoning most of his men. He blamed treason. After that the empire was on the defensive.

Through the 1850s Haiti made repeated attempts to bring the eastern part of Hispaniola under its control. The defeat of its forces at the battle of Sabana Larga in 1856 ended those attempts. Haitian leaders had held since independence that the island had to be indivisible, on the reasoning that a slaveholding power installed in the east would eventually come west. The fear was not abstract. A ring of slaveholding territories ran from the southern United States through Cuba and Puerto Rico, and Haiti was treated by all of them as an anomaly that ought not to exist. What made the 1850s worse was that Haitian leaders could see the leading politicians of the young Dominican Republic looking for a foreign protector. After Sabana Larga the Haitian aim of political union was abandoned, and the Dominican search for annexation to a larger state went on.

In 1854 Emile Nau published his history of the caciques of Haiti, drawing attention to the near total extermination of a whole people by the Spanish invaders. Nicholls quotes his demand that Haitians should not ignore the origins and past of their country, and the claim that the last of that people were companions in servitude of the first African ancestors on the same soil, so that the African and the Indian were enchained together. The mechanism is genealogical. By writing the indigenous population into the national story, the historians of the elite could ground Haitian nationhood in the land rather than only in the plantation, while keeping the argument about racial equality that the whole school shared. Nicholls places the book alongside Ardouin and Saint-Remy as part of a single ideological project rather than as an independent antiquarian work.

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.