Haiti declares war on Germany and its German merchants lose everything

In 1918 the government of Sudre Dartiguenave declared war on Germany. Haiti sent no troops anywhere. What the declaration did was allow the state to seize property belonging to Germans in Haiti and to intern German nationals. German houses had been the most aggressive foreign commercial presence in the country for forty years, lending to governments, financing revolutions, marrying into Haitian families and handling much of the import trade. They were also the main competitors of American business. Nicholls reads the declaration as the instrument that cleared them away. With the German firms broken up and their owners interned, the field was left to United States companies at the exact moment the new constitution opened Haitian land to foreign ownership and an American adviser controlled the treasury. The war in Europe supplied the legal occasion for all of it. The result on the ground was that one foreign power now held the customs, the finances, the army, the constitution and the trade of the Haitian republic.

The Caco rising began in earnest in 1918, and its cause was the corvée. Peasants were being taken by gendarmes and set to work without pay on roads the occupation wanted for moving troops. Charlemagne Péralte gave the resistance a command and a political programme. Nicholls calls it the most serious armed opposition the American occupation ever faced. Peasant irregulars turned out in thousands across the Central Plateau and the North, and the Gendarmerie, created two years earlier so that marine garrisons would be unnecessary, proved unable to hold the country without marine reinforcement. That failure is the point of the entry. The occupation had built a Haitian force to do its policing, and the first serious test showed the force could not police Haitians who had decided to fight. What followed was a campaign of nearly two years, fought by United States Marines with aircraft, machine guns and paid informers, against people armed mostly with what they could take from the posts they overran.

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.