One school staged Vodou on the Rex and taught Catholic marriage in class

The Foyer was a stop on a longer political road for Haitian women, and it carried its own contradictions. Madeleine and Jeanne, who taught there, took a serious interest in Haitian folklore and its history. They visited the Institut d'Ethnologie in Port-au-Prince, where Lorimer Denis, a member of the Griot circle around Haitian ethnology and black nationalism, gave them guided tours and explained the meaning of the objects with evident enthusiasm. The same organisation that ran the Foyer, the Ligue Feminine d'Action Sociale, put Vodou performance on the stage of the Rex Theatre for a paying public. Inside the Foyer classroom the teaching leaned Catholic and socially conservative, aimed at girls' piety and at ending in a legal Christian wedding. Vodou was heritage worth exhibiting on one side of the street and something to be grown out of on the other. Sanders Johnson leaves the contradiction standing, because the League never resolved it either.

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.

On 11 January 1946 Elie Lescot was forced out of the presidency by a military coup in which Paul Magloire took the leading part. His removal closed the period, running from the start of the United States occupation in 1915, in which the light skinned elite governed Haiti without serious challenge. Several grievances arrived at once. Peasants had lost land to wartime agricultural schemes. Black intellectuals had not forgiven the campaign against Vodou carried out with the Catholic church. The dealings of the Lescot family were widely known. And a war fought against fascism made a president who ruled by decree hard to defend. Dumarsais Estime, a black politician associated with noirisme, was elected to a six year term and took office in August, the first black head of state since Vilbrun Guillaume Sam in 1915. A new constitution was promulgated. The argument Jean Price-Mars had put in a book in 1928, that Haiti should recognise itself as an African country, now held the government.