Janvier argues that Protestantism would make Haitians work

Louis Joseph Janvier published a treatise on Haiti's foreign affairs in 1883 arguing that conversion to Protestantism would supply the religious basis for capitalist development in a poor peasant country. The Protestant, he wrote, is thrifty and self reliant, does not spend his money on carnivals and other frivolities, permits free discussion, encourages private initiative, and is almost always a better worker and a better citizen than the Catholic. He held that the religion suited the African temperament better than Catholicism and had been useful across Africa for introducing populations to Western habits. Janvier is regarded by some as the founder of Haitian nationalism, and his target was the return of French clerical power after the concordat of 1860, which he read as colonial authority coming back through the church. What he wanted was a church whose clergy answered to the temporal government even on doctrine. He conceded it would never happen, writing that Protestantism would never be a danger to Haiti.

Baptist missionaries reached the lower Congo in 1878 and 1879 and were welcomed at Sao Salvador by Pedro V. They built their church beside the ruined cathedral and in the early 1890s took stones from it for the walls, which to Kongolese eyes implied a continuity the Europeans did not intend, since the ruins were still the burial ground of generations of rulers and the central shrine of the kingdom. In August 1885 Henry Richards wrote from the station at Mbanza Manteke that the people were coming up in such numbers that services had moved outdoors and that more than seven hundred had converted, with a mass burning of images. Something similar happened at Sao Salvador a year later. The men who carried the new preaching outward included a blacksmith called Dom Miguel Ndelengeni and a young man at Stanley Pool named Ntoni, which is the Kongolese form of Anthony.

Arnold Toynbee, lecturing in 1884, produced the analysis of the industrial revolution that later writers worked from. Its essence for him was the replacement of medieval regulation by competition, which made the revolution a social event before it was an economic one. Eighty years later Ronald Hartwell defined the essential character of the same thing quite differently, as a sustained rise in the rate of growth of total and per head output at a pace that broke with everything before it. The two definitions travel together in most accounts, since freedom from old constraints was supposed to produce the growth. In the twentieth century the growth half took over, because every new state in the world was being told that the road to wealth ran through an industrial revolution of its own. Haiti heard that advice as often as anyone, and the word revolution in it carries this nineteenth century English cargo.

Monseigneur Guilloux was archbishop of Port-au-Prince from 1870 to 1885, and he wrote that the numerous parishes deprived of priests were crying out for pastors, each competing to be first to have its own curate, and that satisfying them all proved impossible. He read the demand as evidence of Catholic hunger. By the time he arrived the Church had been present in the territory for the whole history of slavery, and the population already held its own reading of Christianity, in which the rites, the saints and the symbols had long been annexed to the purposes of Vodou. Masses and ceremonies for the dead sat inside the framework of Vodou religious life. Being Catholic and serving the spirits became a single reality that still marks the country. Only a thin layer of privileged families entered the assimilation the missionaries had in mind.