The widow Dessalines shuts her door to the emperor Faustin

After the failure of the second campaign in the East, Faustin Soulouque had General Jean-Jacques Cesar Dessalines, the son of the first emperor, arrested along with Colonel Beliard, said to be a grandson of King Christophe, and several other senior officers. A court martial condemned them on a false charge on 2 June 1856 and they were shot the following morning. Cesar Dessalines was the last direct descendant of the founder. When Soulouque came back from the campaign and let it be known that he wished to pay his respects to Claire Heureuse, she refused to receive him and kept the doors of her house closed all day so that the refusal would be public. He understood and went back to the palace. On 22 June 1857 he had a law voted raising her pension from one hundred to three hundred gourdes a month. She refused to draw any of it, and went back into poverty.

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is the subject of many of his own drawings and of a canvas by Edouard Manet, and visitors described finding him reading unpublished work aloud to her.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.

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.

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.