The Union Patriotique reaches sixteen thousand members

Nicholls records L'Union Patriotique as founded in 1921 by a group of Haitian intellectuals with two demands: an immediate end to martial law and the withdrawal of American troops. Haiti had been under American military occupation since July 1915. The armed resistance in the hills had been finished off the previous May with the death of Benoit Batraville, which left the argument to people who could write. The organisation grew quickly to sixteen thousand members drawn from every level of Haitian society and became the leading political voice of the nationalist movement. That combination is worth holding onto. A body founded by lawyers, teachers and newspapermen in Port-au-Prince ended with a membership larger than any caco band had ever put in the field, and it outlasted them by a decade. The occupation had thirteen years left to run. When it ended, it ended under the kind of pressure the Union Patriotique spent those years assembling.

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.

Justin Chrysostome Dorsainvil published a study of vodou in the journal Haiti Medicale in 1912 and 1913, the first attempt to treat the possession crisis as a clinical question rather than a moral one. He defined it as a religious and racial psycho neurosis marked by a doubling of the self, with functional alteration of sensibility and of movement, and a predominance of symptoms curable by persuasion. In 1924 he brought out at Port au Prince a philological explanation of vodou which took a different road. There he showed that vodoun is a Dahomean word meaning spirit, that the whole religion of the Fon flows from the cult of the vodoun, and that this cult stands as high as the most spiritualist. He asked at the end whether it was too much to say that such a people had arrived at a clear and precise monotheist conception. The two positions sit badly together, and the twelve years between them measure how fast the ground was moving.

These identifications were collected in the north of Haiti and hold for that region, since the pairings shift from one part of the country to another. Legba, the great master, the father, the familiar god of the Dahomeans, became Saint Anthony, probably Anthony the hermit, since the saint is shown with a black cock in place of a pig. Ougou Balindjo became Saint James the Greater. Agomme Tonnerre became John the Baptist. Daguy Bologuay became Saint Joseph, prayed to in words asking him to lead the petitioner as he led Mary into Egypt. The King of Aoueseau became Saint Louis, king of France. Grande Mambo Batala became Saint Anne. Maitresse Erzulie became the Virgin, and specifically the Virgin of the Nativity. La Sirene became the Assumption. Pierre d'Ambala became Saint Peter. Lesser deities found their own counterparts among the blessed, and a whole literature of written prayers followed the same road.