In 1934 a young Duvalier writes what Duvalierism would later enact

In 1934 a young Haitian doctor writing under the name Abderrahman published a page of complaint and defiance. He described what it was to come from the class of youth the elite dismissed as misbegotten, rejected with mistrust and contempt for having emerged out of the lower depths of the real Haiti, pushed back among the homeless and the hungry, worn down daily by poverty and by the arrogance of people newly arrived at money. The writer was François Duvalier. Heinl treats the passage as the key to everything that came after, and it is hard to argue with him. Twenty three years separate it from Duvalier's presidency. The doctrine that grew out of it holds that the light skinned elite had forfeited the right to govern by existing, its offence being its presence ahead of any particular act of misrule. Private humiliation had been converted into political theology. A reader in 1934 would have called it the cry of an angry young man.

The American withdrawal in 1934 opened room for a wave of new associations, and on 3 March that year the Ligue feminine d'action sociale was founded in Port-au-Prince, the first feminist organisation in Haiti. Within days a nervous government forbade it to operate, judging its programme subversive and overambitious. Ten women sat on the steering committee. Madeleine Sylvain and Alice Garoute were the best known. Beside them were Fernande Bellegarde and Olga Gordon, Therese Hudicourt and Marie Corvington, Alice Teligny-Mathon and Esther Dartigue, Georgette Justin and Maud Turian. They redrafted the programme until it reduced to a single mild point, the physical, economic and social improvement of the Haitian woman, and got their permission. Branches followed at Port-de-Paix in February 1935, Saint-Marc in September 1935, Les Cayes in October 1936, Jacmel in 1937, then Petionville, Leogane, Gonaives and Cap-Haitien. The League ran evening classes for women workers in poor districts, a cooperative savings fund, libraries and a workers' centre, and petitioned for equal pay for equal work.

Two Haitians living in Paris founded La Revue du Monde Noir in 1930 to argue for solidarity and self-respect among black people across the world. The setting matters. Paris in 1930 held students and writers from the French Caribbean, from West Africa, from Madagascar and from the United States, all of them educated in the same language and all of them discovering that the education had not made them French. A magazine in that city could reach the whole empire at once, which no journal published in Port-au-Prince or Dakar could do. The review is a direct ancestor of negritude, the movement that Aime Cesaire, Leopold Sedar Senghor and Leon Damas would build over the following decade and that shaped black writing in French for fifty years. Haitians reached the argument early because they had been having a version of it at home since 1927. A country independent since 1804 had a longer run of experience with the gap between formal freedom and European contempt.

The book opens on the contradiction. New Year's Day carries great weight in a country born from a slave revolt, yet on this one the American flag flew over the central square in the capital, a visual reminder that the first sovereign nation in the Caribbean was still occupied. Vincent called the coming year the year of Haiti's second independence in his state of the nation address. The argument the book builds on this scene is that the end of the struggle for desoccupation was the beginning of a longer ideological and political conflict, one that ran through the revolution of 1946 and ended in 1957 with the Duvalier dictatorship. The same day is recorded in a photograph of Vincent, foreign minister Elie Lescot and the Garde d'Haiti high command celebrating together.