French becomes the official language 114 years after independence

Haiti conducted its government in French from independence in 1804 onward, and no law said so until 1918, when French was legally recognised as the official language of the nation for the first time. Nearly everyone in the country spoke Creole and only Creole. The bilingual minority who could work in French were the people who held office, drafted laws, taught school and heard court cases, so the rule put on the books in 1918 confirmed an arrangement that had already settled who could take part in public life. Creole waited another forty six years for its first appearance in a Haitian constitution. That came in 1964, and the clause permitted Creole only where the use of French would place a monolingual speaker at a disadvantage, in a courtroom for instance. Creole was recognised as a national language alongside French in 1983, and in 1987 Haiti became officially bilingual, at a point when about seven percent of Haitians actually were.

When the occupation began planning roads into Caco country in 1916, a Haitian cabinet minister showed the Americans the Code Rural. Geffrard's corvée had been sitting in it since 1863: the people of each section were to maintain the highways running through their land, and the police were to enforce it. Smedley Butler was happy to enforce it. From July 1916 gendarmes notified peasants named by the magistrats communaux and the chef seksyon that they could pay a tax or work three days. Nobody had money, so they worked. They were supposed to be fed, housed and entertained with bamboches, which the Americans described as Voodoo dances. Butler drove Dartiguenave out to the work sites in the presidential Ford most weeks so the president could share the rice and peas and explain that this was for Haiti. In 1915 there were three miles of road outside the towns fit for a car. By March 1918 the corvée had built or rebuilt 470 miles at 205 dollars a mile. The route from Port-au-Prince to the Cap opened on 1 January 1918 and took the presidential Ford fourteen hours.

The Prix Goncourt is the most prominent literary award in France. In 1921 it went to Batouala, a novel by Rene Maran set among Africans in French Equatorial Africa. The decision mattered a long way from Paris. Black writers and artists in Haiti and elsewhere read it as evidence that African life could be the subject of serious literature in the language of the colonisers, and interest in Africa among them sharpened afterwards. Haiti at the time was six years into an American military occupation, and its intellectuals were in the middle of a long argument about where the country's culture had come from. The generation that produced Jean Price-Mars and the indigenist movement was reaching for African descent as an answer. A prize handed out in a Paris dining room supplied a piece of that case. Nicholls puts it in a Haitian political history for that reason, since the arguments Haitians were having about Africa were arguments about themselves.

Guillaume Sam took office with money, some from Simon Sam and some a shipload of Theodore's New York banknotes, worthless in substance and convincing enough to spend. Caperton called him a strong man feared by the better class of Haitians for his methods. The French minister Pierre Girard described a manner of marked sweetness laid over a nature that was authoritarian, vindictive and pitiless. In March 1915, when word came that Rosalvo Bobo was mounting an invasion with the usual help from Desiderio Arias, Sam began seizing hostages. At least two hundred men were shut in the old jail as sureties for the quiet of the capital, most of them mulatres and all of them from the leading families: Oreste Zamor, three sons of Edmond Polynice, General Jules Preval, General Gaspard Peralte of Hinche, three Chatelains, and men named Nau, Lafontant, Alexis, Vincent and Douyon. He was right that a plot existed. By the end of April Bobo held Fort Liberte, and by the middle of May his Cacos held a perimeter around the Cap.