Duval Duvalier prescribes sociology for the national crisis

On 25 May 1921 Duval Duvalier began publishing a series called Practical Sociology in Le Courrier du Soir. His argument was that Haiti would not get out of its crisis until Haitians examined their own social life objectively, and that this examination came before any programme of action. The country was six years into the American occupation. The explanations then in circulation ran to the moral failure of one class or another, the colour question, foreign conspiracy and providence. Duvalier proposed that the society be studied the way any other object is studied, by the people living in it. That instinct produced the indigenist current of the following decade, in which Haitian intellectuals turned to the peasantry, to Creole and to Vodou as subjects of research. Duval Duvalier is remembered now chiefly because his son Francois took the same method, the study of the Haitian people, and made it an instrument of rule for thirty years.

Amir Faysal, driven out of Syria by the French in the summer of 1920, was proclaimed king of Iraq on 23 August 1921. General Gouraud had already proclaimed the state of Greater Lebanon with Beirut as its capital on 1 September 1920, and on 24 July 1922 the League of Nations Council gave its approval to the mandates covering Syria, Lebanon, and Palestine together with Transjordan. In the British sphere Egypt was the first to be granted formal independence, by a declaration of 21 February 1922 that ended the protectorate while reserving a list of British rights, and a constitution of 19 April 1923 made it a hereditary monarchy under King Fuad. Zeine treats the years from 1918 to 1920 as the decisive ones. Arab nationalism took its modern shape in them, living on resentment of Anglo French domination and on opposition to the Jewish national home in Palestine.

Between the wars a class of educated Africans in the French territories began arguing about politics in print, and the administration worried that they would find a rural following. Tiemoko Garan Kouyate, an activist and for a time a communist, wrote about the emerging African proletariat and about nationalism. He belonged to a set of men across French western and equatorial Africa who ran newspapers, built the first trade unions and corresponded with Marcus Garvey and with George Padmore, the Trinidadian who took charge of the African section of the Comintern in 1927. Plenty of African politicians in these years worked with the colonial order. Blaise Diagne, elected to the French assembly from Senegal in 1914 on rural votes, made himself an ally of France and defended its policies in public, conscription included. Andre Matswa built a society in the French Congo in the late 1920s demanding French citizenship and the rights attached to it, and by the early 1930s the administration had broken both him and it. Dockers struck at Conakry in 1919 and railwaymen in 1925 and 1938.

Forty-five days after the ambush that killed Lieutenant Muth, a peasant told the marines where Batraville was sleeping. At daybreak on 19 May 1920 patrols closed on the rocks at the top of Morne Ti Bois Pin, five miles southeast of Lascahobas. The cacos fired first. An automatic rifle cut Batraville down, still carrying the binoculars taken from Muth, and a sergeant shot him with a pistol as he tried to rise and draw. Armed caco resistance ended there, and so did the presidential hopes of Dr Bobo, the mulatto physician for whose ambitions a great many peasants had paid. Marines and gendarmerie together lost 98 killed and wounded across the whole war. Caco dead are counted differently by everyone. A conservative figure for 1915 to 1920 is 2,250. Hans Schmidt put it at 3,250. Roger Gaillard asked whether the total, counting repression and the after effects of the fighting, might approach 15,000, and said the war often resembled a massacre. Not a shot was fired south of the Cul-de-Sac.