Machiavelli in the pocket, Bawon Samdi in the wardrobe

Dumarsais Estime taught Duvalier mathematics at the Lycee Petion. Duvalier married Simone Ovide Faine, a nurse, and they had three daughters and a son, Jean-Claude. He worked with American public health missions in the 1940s, went to the University of Michigan in 1944 for public health training and failed it, then followed Estime into government as director general of public health and rose to minister. When Estime fell he went into opposition and then underground, from 1954 to 1956, which he afterwards called his years in the maquis. Clement Barbot said he carried a worn copy of The Prince in his pocket through that period. To Washington he looked ideal: a civilian, a doctor, modest in his habits, no richer for having held office. He wore a black suit, white shirt, dark tie and black homburg behind heavy round spectacles, which foreigners read as the uniform of a careful family physician. Haitians read it differently. That is the dress of Bawon Samdi, the lwa who keeps the gate of the cemetery.

On 1 November 1919 United States Marines killed Charlemagne Péralte. His body was stripped, lashed to a door and photographed in a posture that read as a crucifixion, and the picture was circulated around Haiti so that anyone thinking of joining the rebellion would see it. The French had done the same thing in 1791 with Boukman's head on a pike outside Cap Francais. The result was the same both times. Péralte became a permanent figure in Haitian memory and his image the standard picture of resistance to foreign occupation, reproduced by Haitian painters for the rest of the century. More than two thousand Haitians died in the Caco rebellion. Fewer than a hundred Americans and gendarmes were killed. The disparity brought the campaign to the attention of the United States Senate, which held an inquiry in 1921 and concluded that the marines should stay. They stayed another fifteen years.

In December 1921 a United States Senate commission was in Haiti investigating reports of atrocities committed during the occupation. Senator Medill McCormick questioned Jean Marie Jan, the French Catholic bishop of Cap Haitien. Jan called the occupation an act of kindness, then explained the war against the Americans by saying the people had been driven to desperation by arbitrariness, injustice and mistreatment and had proclaimed their right to defend themselves. Asked whether Vodou had diminished since the landing, he answered that it had increased, and that the greatest cause was that the boko had been the soul of the insurrection. He also asked whether Washington intended to impose Protestantism by force. He had grounds. Edwin Denby, the American under secretary of the navy, was writing to E. O. Watson of the Council of Churches that Haiti lay within the sphere of the United States and that the Navy Department would be happy to facilitate the work of the missionary societies.

Louis Borno was elected president of Haiti in 1922 and became the chief Haitian instrument of the American administration. He did not treat the role as a humiliation. He described the occupation as paternalism in the honourable sense, a beneficent application of the duty a Christian people owed the weak, and he governed on that understanding for eight years. The practical content of the theory was plain. Borno prosecuted and jailed his political opponents, harried the press when it suited him, and stayed in office on American arms before a public that had no way of removing him, since no legislative elections were held. Nicholls records that the regime was unpopular at the start and unpopular at the end. Borno matters because he supplies the model of the collaborating executive that Haitian politics returned to repeatedly: a cultivated man of the capital, fluent in the language of duty and improvement, whose authority came from a foreign garrison and evaporated the moment that garrison lost interest.