The peasants rise against the corvée and the Gendarmerie cannot hold

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.

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.

The Héraux constitution took a year of paperwork between Port-au-Prince and Washington. Franklin Roosevelt later claimed to have written it. It was mostly the work of Ferdinand L. Mayer, the American chargé, and officials of the State Department. With no National Assembly left to ratify anything, the occupation used a device Haiti had never seen, a national plebiscite, held on 12 June 1918. Colonel John Russell, commanding the brigade, admitted that his forces were openly in favour and that any Haitian who knew enough to vote knew how the soldiers had voted. The elite stayed home. The count came back 98,225 in favour and 768 against. Russell thought every government employee had voted at least once, and noted that some voters believed they were choosing a president while one believed he was voting for a Pope. The trap sat in Title VIII, the transitory provisions, which let the president govern through his Council of State until he chose to call elections, in whatever even numbered year he liked. Dartiguenave never chose one.