An illiterate peasant woman appoints and dismisses Haitian ministers

Victoire Jean-Baptiste came from the Campeche holding at Milot and could not read. In October 1889, after beating Legitime, Florvil Hyppolite filled his household with people from his own region before going to Port-au-Prince in triumph, and the running of his kitchen and cellar fell to her. She moved to the capital, took a house at Morne-a-Tuf and then a place in the national palace itself, where she acted as something close to a first lady, to the fury of respectable opinion and the alarm of the French minister, who reported it to Paris. Refused payment by the public works minister Brenor Prophete for work claimed at the president's second residence, she had him dismissed, and on 31 December 1894 she obtained the appointment of Tiresias Simon Sam as minister of war. Money was drawn from the treasury for her while the country's finances were critical, and Hyppolite gave her estates in the North.

Dahomey had been the dominant power on its stretch of the West African coast since the 1720s. French forces conquered it between 1892 and 1894, and the kingdom stopped existing as a political entity in 1900, when the French removed its last king. A degree of institutional continuity survived through rituals performed at the royal palace in the capital city of Abomey, which became a museum. The defeat also loosened the rules about what could be spoken. The origins of the royal clan had been guarded as a secret held inside the dynasty, and no account of them appears in any European source written before the monarchy was destroyed. Within about a decade of the conquest a French colonial official named Le Herisse published what became the classic version of Dahomian traditional history, taken from a single informant, Agbidinukun, a brother of the last independent king Behanzin who served the French as a district chief. What the palace had kept turned into a printed book.

On 18 May 1896 the United States Supreme Court decided Plessy against Ferguson and made segregation lawful for the next fifty eight years. The case had been organised by the Comite des Citoyens of New Orleans, a body drawn mostly from families descended from Saint Domingue, whose president that year had himself been born in Haiti. Louisiana had passed a Separate Car Act in 1890 to divide passengers on the railways. Rodolphe Desdunes and his son Daniel first tested it on a journey between states and won. The committee then sent Homere Plessy to test it on a journey inside Louisiana, and that case went up to the Supreme Court and was lost. The date chosen for the announcement was 18 May, which is Haitian flag day.

Cultivators rioted at the village of La Plaine in Dominica in 1893. Coloured politicians were at the same time protesting about abuses of executive power, and the Crown appointed Sir Robert G. C. Hamilton to inquire into the island's affairs. His report appeared in 1894 and treated the peasantry as an established class of owner occupiers, produced by the demands of the labourers and by the planters' own inability to keep their estates in order after slavery ended. Hamilton wrote that this class had turned its attention mainly to growing what Dominicans called provisions. His favourite phrase was peasant proprietor. The cultivators did not use it. In the list of grievances the La Plaine district sent him they called themselves the small landowners, and elsewhere they said small owner, small proprietor or simply small man. One planter told the inquiry that a labourer stops developing the moment he becomes a peasant proprietor. Three years later the commissioner C. O. Naftel adopted Hamilton's vocabulary and applied it backwards, writing that the class had arisen within a few years of abolition.