Andre Breton lectures in Port-au-Prince and the students catch fire

In December 1945 Andre Breton, the French poet who had founded surrealism two decades earlier, arrived in Haiti and gave a series of public lectures in Port-au-Prince. His audience included young men from elite families, schooled in French letters and increasingly hostile to the government of Elie Lescot. Breton spoke about liberty, revolt and the authority of the imagination, and the effect on those listeners was immediate. His visit coincided with the founding of La Ruche, a journal run by students that attacked the Lescot administration in blunt language. Nicholls treats the coincidence as consequential. A visiting European supplied vocabulary and permission to a group that already had grievances of its own and no settled way of stating them. Weeks later the government seized an issue of the journal, the students went on strike, and Lescot was gone by the middle of January 1946. A lecture tour is not a cause. This one arrived at exactly the right moment.

The Arab League was founded on 22 March 1945, less than two months before the war in Europe ended. It confirmed the independence and sovereignty of its member states while laying the basis for a federation in which they could strengthen political, economic and cultural ties without interfering in one another's form of government. Its immediate precursor was Anthony Eden's statement at the Mansion House on 29 May 1941 promising British support for any scheme of Arab unity that won general approval. Independence came in a rush around the same date. French and British troops left Syria on 17 April 1946 and Lebanon on 31 December of that year, and Transjordan became independent on 22 March 1946, with Abd Allah proclaimed king two months later. Two world wars and a quarter century of dealings with Europe had made one thing plain, which was that Arab nationalism could no longer be ignored.

African soldiers fought a long way from home. Troops raised in the French and British territories were in Italy from 1943 to 1945, and British commanders used African regiments heavily in Burma, the campaign that got called the forgotten war. By 1945 more than three hundred and seventy thousand Africans were serving in British forces alone. Many came out of it with a sharper sense of how the colonial system worked and where it sat in the world. Some professional soldiers were demobilised and settled quietly back into their villages. Others became organisers, agitators and party men in the years that followed. What the veterans brought back was firsthand. They had lived alongside Europeans of every class, had killed Europeans, and had watched European officers panic and retreat and fail. The claim that Europeans were a superior order of men did not survive that. Men who had been sent to defend empires that refused them citizenship came home knowing the thing could be broken, and knowing from four years of drill how to organise the men who would break it.

Dupuy closes his defence of Louverture's project with a comparison across a century and a half. France incorporated Martinique and Guadeloupe as overseas departments with full citizenship and elected legislative assemblies, ninety-eight years after abolishing slavery in those colonies. That is approximately the arrangement Louverture had sought in 1801, a self-governing territory inside the French polity whose inhabitants were citizens, with slavery and racial ranking dismantled but the economic link to France retained. Dupuy's point is that the proposal failed for reasons of its moment rather than of its logic. In 1802 slavery and white supremacy were indispensable to France, to its merchants and to its colonial planters, and were beyond Bonaparte's capacity to give up. Combined with mulatto hostility and with the Black nationalist demand for outright separation, that made Louverture's vision unworkable from the start.