Sylvain-Bouchereau says the occupation made Haitian feminism

Madeleine Sylvain-Bouchereau was born in Port-au-Prince on 5 July 1905 into a family already at the centre of national politics. Her parents, Eugenie and Georges Sylvain, led the Union Patriotique, the organisation that fought the American occupation. She was ten years old when the marines landed. She trained at the Bryn Mawr school of social work outside Philadelphia and became the first president of the Ligue Feminine d'Action Sociale, and in 1941, seven years after the last Americans left, she set down what the occupation had done to women. Her book Haiti et ses femmes appeared in 1951, two hundred and fifty pages running from the Ayiti of before Columbus to her own decade, built out of surveys, ethnography and the research of her colleagues, whom she cited more often than anyone else. Her claim was that Haitian women had never organised for their own rights before the invasion and that the invasion produced the movement. Maud Desvarieux of the same league recorded the other half. The occupation demoralised people, and plenty of women got no renaissance out of it.

Japan defeated Russia in 1905. It was the first time in the modern era that a non European power had beaten a European empire in a full scale war, and the news travelled fast through every territory then under European rule. The practical consequences were in Asia. The consequences that mattered elsewhere were about what people believed was possible. Colonial administration rested on the claim that European supremacy was a fact of nature and not an outcome of gunnery, industry and organisation, and Tsushima made that claim harder to state with a straight face. Nicholls places the Japanese victory among the events that fed the growth of black consciousness in the years before the First World War, in Haiti and in the wider black world. Haiti had made the same argument in 1804 by destroying Napoleon's army, and had been punished for a century for making it. In 1905 the argument was made again by somebody else, and this time Europe had to concede the point in public.

Long before he took office, Stenio Vincent served as a Haitian delegate to the international exposition at Brussels and published a survey of the republic with a Belgian publisher, covering its history, resources, climate, agriculture, customs, ethnography, religion and current politics. St. Hubert treats the book and the posting as the origin of a strategy. Born at Gonaives in 1874, with a law degree in 1892 and a post at the Haitian legation in Paris under Hyppolite by 1896, Vincent came to see international expositions as instruments of national argument, taking the example of Brazil as a model. Elected two decades later, he would send more delegations to world's fairs than any Haitian head of state since Salomon, participating in three during the nineteen thirties. St. Hubert reads that early posting as the seed of a lifelong strategy.

Antoine Simon crammed soldiers onto a German merchant ship and onto the warship Nord Alexis, whose name nobody had thought to change, and steamed for Gonaives to put down Leconte's rising. He led the march north himself while Joseph Jeremie crossed the mountains to Hinche and pushed into Caco country through Cerca-la-Source, Mont Organise and Valliere. Leconte took shelter in the German consulate at Cap-Haitien. The government suddenly recovered its memory of the Consolidation fraud of 1904 and issued a warrant for him as a fugitive, and the Germans refused to give him up. Simon took Fort Liberte on 7 February and let his troops loot and kill across the north, in the same week that fire swept his own Les Cayes. Jeremie burned nothing, which earned him standing with the Zamors and with the Peralte family of Hinche. One of the young Peraltes, Charlemagne, marched in his column. Eight years later Charlemagne Peralte was leading the armed resistance to the American occupation, and the Marines shot him and photographed the body.