The League speaks for all classes and its officers come from one

Once the League had its mission the leaders set about recruiting and about placing themselves inside national political argument. The message was multiclass activism and a single Haitian womanhood. The roster complicated it. Madeleine Sylvain, the president, was an attorney. Alice Garoute, the vice president, was an intellectual married to a high court judge. Thérèse Hudicourt came from a prominent family and practised social work. The secretary general was Fernande Bellegarde, whose father Dantès Bellegarde had served as ambassador. Sylvain's sisters Yvonne, Jeanne and Suzanne were members too, and between them they were the country's first woman doctor, a certified social worker and an anthropologist. To many Haitians this looked like a club for rich women with charitable intentions and no knowledge of how the majority lived. Chantalle Verna reads the group as an ordinary professional class whose advantage lay in schooling, skills and contacts more than in accumulated wealth. The League set itself up as a research body on women's lives, seven years before the Institut d'Ethnologie was founded to study Haitian culture.

The occupation had begun in 1915, ostensibly to collect loans and restore civil order after five presidents in four years were assassinated or driven out, and had revealed its imperial character through control of the customs houses, institutional racism and the revival of the corvee. The caco guerrilla movement under Charlemagne Peralte was crushed in 1919 and its leaders executed. At Cap Haitien the American flag was lowered and the blue and red Haitian flag hoisted. Eleven months after his New Year message Vincent validated his nationalist credentials by holding a state funeral in the same city for Peralte. The book treats both ceremonies as political theatre that could not conceal the splits inside the nationalist movement, and dates the beginning of the postoccupation conflict to this moment. Nineteen thirty-four therefore closes one struggle and opens another that runs to 1957.

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.

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.