The war makes the merchants rich and empties out the women

The Second World War was good business for a narrow layer of Haiti. Factory owners and the big import and export houses had guaranteed buyers in the United States, fixed contracts and rising prices. Very little of that money moved downward. The local markets went on extracting labour from a working class that was growing as people came off the land, and from the peasant majority that still fed the country. Haitian women carried the heaviest part of the arrangement. They walked the produce to market, they did the domestic work in other people's houses, they took the factory shifts, and they kept households running on whatever was left over. Sanders Johnson uses one word for what this did to them, which is depleted. It is the right word. A person can be impoverished and still recover. Depletion means the stock is drawn down faster than it is replaced, and nobody in the arrangement intended to replace it.

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.