Péralte declares a provisional government and claims the North

In 1919 Charlemagne Péralte set up a provisional government in the North and announced that he would drive the American invaders into the sea. His movement demanded the restoration of Haiti's national institutions and the return of the country's resources to its own people. The claim mattered more than the ground he actually held. A rebellion that calls itself a government is making a legal argument: that the administration in Port-au-Prince, with its dissolved legislature and its foreign advisers, has stopped being the government of Haiti, and that sovereignty has passed to the people still fighting for it. Haitian rebels had been making that argument since 1791. The occupation could not answer it, because answering required saying in public that a treaty signed while a landing party held the capital bound the Haitian nation for twenty years. Péralte styled himself General in Chief of the Revolution and corresponded with foreign legations as a head of state. The Americans called him a bandit and put a price on him.

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.

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.

Malbranche-Sylvain and Alice Garoute catalogued what the collectors brought back. The Senate hearings in Washington had concluded that no Haitian girl or woman was touched, harmed or killed by the occupation. The list of grievances the women assembled recorded girls and women burned alive, buried alive, hanged and shot. Some appear by name: Mme. Rosier, Hergenee, Madame Garnier, Athelia and Cloraine Etienne, Madame Eucharice Cadichon, Dorlean Joseph, Madam Prevoit, Mme. Bregarde, Madame Lumenesse. Others enter the record through a relationship, as somebody's mother or sister or daughter, or as the woman who had been caring for a pregnant neighbour. Much of the harm was done at the line between the street and the house, in doorways and yards, where occupied public space pushed into private life. A committee in Washington had declared this category of victim empty. Haitian women filled it in longhand, name after name and wound after wound, and produced a record the occupation could neither correct nor destroy.