Haitians turn up at Versailles as Wilson defends small nations

Renda notes that representatives of the organised opposition to the occupation appeared at Versailles in 1919 to press their case with Wilson at the moment he was championing the rights of small nations, which she calls the most troubling development for the international reputation of the United States. She sets the year in perspective to show how easily the occupation vanished from American memory. In the same twelve months in which a few marines turned the tide against the Cacos by capturing and killing their leader, the League of Nations was being forged at Versailles, more than four million American workers went on strike, race riots ran through the country and the Senate finally approved woman suffrage. Bad press had begun when African American missionaries returned with accounts of atrocities, but Haiti only really caught public attention when it became an issue in the 1920 presidential campaign.

The assembly elected in 1923 opened on 11 August, ratified the Lausanne treaty, and in October made Ankara the capital. On 29 October it amended the constitutional act passed two years earlier, and the country became a republic. The presidency went to Mustafa Kemal. Ismet Pasha took office as the first prime minister under the new arrangement. The change followed from the principle of national sovereignty that the assembly had claimed since 1920, and it began a new ideological direction. The nationalism of the war of liberation had grown out of populist ideas and religious loyalty and had served to fix the territory. The nationalism that came after the republic aimed to rebuild the state on a secular western model. From this point the words Turk and Turkey appear in the leaders' speeches in a national sense where they had previously carried a religious one, and pan Islamism and pan Turanism were both discarded.

The corvée failed where it touched Haitian officials. Magistrats and gendarmes worked out that they could exempt anyone who paid and impress anyone who could not. A peasant who finished his annual stint was given a card by the Americans; the chef seksyon would tear the card up in front of him and send him back to work with a blow from the kokomakak. By late 1918, after Butler had gone, men were being roped together and marched to distant work sites like conscripts for the old army. Educated townsmen were caught in it too. Dantès Bellegarde was still angry twenty three years later about the gendarme who knocked on Jean Price-Mars's door in Pétionville and took him away for three days. Out of this came the teledjòl that ran through the mountains of the North and the Artibonite: the blan have come to bring slavery back, and the corvée is only the beginning. Major A. S. Williams wrote that the labour system had taught peasants to hate the occupation and taught gendarmes to treat civilians as material. He abolished it on 1 October 1918. It was already too late.

Charlemagne Masséna Péralte of Hinche was a graduate of Saint Louis de Gonzague, a former commandant de la place at Port-de-Paix and at Léogâne, and a brother in law of Oreste Zamor, which made him an enemy of Dartiguenave. In early 1918 he was convicted of taking part in a night raid on Gendarmerie headquarters at Hinche, where a payroll of twelve thousand dollars had just arrived. Caught at Ouanaminthe before he could reach the border, he was sentenced to five years of hard labour in the civil prison at the Cap and set to sweeping the gutters under guard. On 3 September 1918 he persuaded his guard to run with him into the mountains behind the Plaine du Nord. He gathered Bobo's old Cacos and Zamorist bands from Hinche and declared war to drive the invaders into the sea. On the night of 17 October a hundred Cacos wearing the scarlet badge of Ogoun attacked Hinche and lost thirty five dead to a garrison that had been warned. On 10 November sixty of them took Maïssade.