Marriage would have made her wages stop being hers

Jeanne Sylvain treated her own marriage as a subject for sarcasm. The wave of weddings around her was a pattern she studied, in the way she had been trained to study populations. Her plainest reason for staying out of it was financial. She had just taken her first paid job, and earning her own money was a step up in her life. Under the law then in force a married woman's wages legally stopped being her own. Marriage therefore meant handing back the single thing the job had given her. Seen from her desk it looked like a loss of freedom and of movement, something hanging over her like a sickness she was watching spread through her friends. A woman who had spent that winter cataloguing an influenza outbreak found the same shape in the marriage contract, and she gave it the same name.

French territories south of the Sahara had been decisive for Charles de Gaulle during the war. They supplied soldiers, and they supplied the land and air routes across the continent that made a Free French war effort possible at all. African nationalists knew what that was worth. At Brazzaville in 1944 de Gaulle was obliged to promise political reform once the fighting ended, a package of concessions that African military and economic contributions had forced and that also acknowledged how much France would need its colonies to rebuild. The promise was aimed at keeping the empire steady and intact. Meanwhile inflation, broken trade routes and low export prices piled onto hardship left over from the 1930s. African workers had discovered their own leverage and were using strikes and new trade unions to real effect, above all in the mining zones. The British answered with film, radio, newspapers and pamphlets, which required presenting the colonial state as good and its enemies as evil. An empire that had demanded obedience now had to ask, and a request can be refused.

C. L. R. James published the first edition of The Black Jacobins in 1938, writing in London for the Trotskyist press and organising for African independence. The book takes the revolt that began in Saint-Domingue in 1791 and treats it as a revolution of the first rank, with Toussaint Louverture as a political thinker and the enslaved of the northern plain as the people who decided the outcome. Before it, the standard European account handled Haiti as a colonial disaster with a body count attached. After it, the years from 1791 to 1804 could be set beside 1789 and 1917 and discussed in the same terms. The timing was deliberate. James was writing for readers who would soon be demanding an end to empire in Africa and the Caribbean, and he handed them a case in which enslaved people had beaten France, Spain and Britain in turn and founded a state. The argument outlived its first edition by decades.

The Comite Executif Militaire that replaced Lescot had three members: Colonel Franck Lavaud of Jeremie, Major Antoine Levelt of the Artibonite, and Major Paul Magloire, who commanded the presidential guard. Lavaud and Levelt were mulatres, Magloire was noir. They dissolved the legislature Lescot had assembled and made Sylvio Cator, the Olympic long jumper and owner of the Cafe Savoy, mayor of Port-au-Prince. Crowds attacked elite shops, including the Bata store, and the committee offered power to the supreme court, which declined it. Parties appeared by the dozen. Strikes hit SHADA, Plantation Dauphin, the wharf and the HASCO sugar mill, where a former mathematics teacher named Daniel Fignole could move the working districts of the capital with a sentence. Fignole's party was the Mouvement Ouvriers Paysans, and its secretary general was a silent country doctor, Francois Duvalier, who had published political tracts a decade earlier under the name Abderrahman. Legislative elections on 12 May put communists into the Senate and defeated Fignole. The liberal constitution of 1932 was revived on 12 August and the presidential vote set for the 16th.