The papers tell Haitians to go back to the land

On 15 March 1910 L'Impartial reprinted a series called Ideas and Opinions on the agricultural and financial crisis, concluding that a return to the land was the only path to national recovery. This was the standing prescription of the Haitian press, and it was aimed at readers who had already left farming for the towns. Haiti earned its foreign currency from coffee grown by smallholders in the hills, along with cacao, cotton and logwood. Prices were set in Le Havre and Hamburg. Yields were falling as the hillsides eroded and holdings were divided among heirs. The treasury lived on export duties, so a poor crop meant unpaid soldiers, and unpaid soldiers meant a new revolution. The writers who called for a return to the land rarely proposed the things that would have made it possible, which were roads, credit, schools and secure title to the ground. Within the year Antoine Simon's government signed away the railway and half the national bank to foreigners instead.

Between 1913 and 1931 hundreds of thousands of Haitians crossed to Cuba to cut sugar cane. The wars fought in Cuba from 1895 onward had held the island's own supply of labour low, so when the sugar industry began expanding the planters imported workers, most of them from Haiti. Haiti had people and was running short of ground. Arable land per head was falling by the end of the nineteenth century, and Haitians moved readily when offered higher wages. Living conditions in the Cuban cane districts were hard, and the movement continued anyway. The depression stopped it. Prices for primary products fell, and Cuban population growth had by then rebuilt the domestic labour force to a level at which the Haitians were judged unnecessary. Repatriation began soon after. Those who stayed grew old in Cuba, and by the early 1980s the survivors were elderly men who had arrived as young cutters.

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.

Refusal took many shapes. In the French territories young men crossed borders and waited in hiding until the recruiting sergeants had moved on, the same evasion they used against tax collectors and labour levies. Revolts that looked like protests against conscription carried grievances that had been building since the 1890s. Armed resistance broke out against the British in Nigeria and against the French in Dahomey. In Mozambique the Barwe rose in 1917 against Portuguese rule. The Ottoman empire joined Germany late in 1914 and called for a jihad across the colonial world, which never came. The Sanusiyya, supplied with German and Ottoman money and weapons, beat the Italians in Libya early in 1915 and attacked the British in Egypt. Britain answered by declaring a protectorate over Egypt, crushing nationalist activity there, and taking the sultanate of Darfur in 1916. In Nyasaland in 1915 the preacher John Chilembwe led a short and fierce insurrection, driven in part by the scale of conscription and the number of local men killed fighting the Germans.