Haiti asks Washington for relief and gets four million for the Artibonite

A generation earlier Haitian finance ministers had gone to Paris. France in 1946 was broke, so in December a Haitian financial mission put its case to the State Department instead. It asked for the 1938 Export-Import Bank loan to be forgiven or postponed, for credits toward assorted projects, and for a pause in bond repayments. American officials noted that Haitian finances were the strongest they had been in years, and refused. Ambassador Joseph D. Charles told an American reporter afterwards that every American attempt to help had increased Haiti's poverty and confusion. Lucien Hibbert, whom Estime had made rector of the university, tried again in September 1947, asking the Export-Import Bank for twenty million dollars and being told any loan required a justified project. He replied that this was impossible for his government, accused the bank of shutting the door on Haiti, and went home. Norman Armour, who had served in Haiti and now stood high in the department, set about repairing relations. On 29 December 1948 the bank lent Haiti four million dollars on easy terms to develop the Artibonite valley for power and agriculture.

Casimir argues that the two measures Bonaparte's government could not carry out have become operational again by other means. The first, destroying the working population's resource base, he traces through the twentieth century. The second, deporting the non-conforming French-oriented Haitians, has turned into an exodus. It began as voluntary exile with the 1946 Revolution, accelerated in the 1960s during Francois Duvalier's reign, and from the 1980s onward became an uncontrollable outflow of qualified and semi-qualified personnel. At the level of the masses, the departure of boat people looks to neighbouring territories, and even to the larger countries of North America, like a threat of significant proportions. His conclusion is that the state can no longer retain even its own oligarchy, and that the extinction Napoleon wanted by force is now burning on a low flame.

Allied flags flew between Cairo and Casablanca in 1945, and none of the powers holding them had a secure future in North Africa. Moroccans expected full sovereignty once the war was won, on a promise reported to have come from Roosevelt himself. France answered by suppressing the new nationalist party Istiqlal, and the sultan Sidi Mohammad became the central figure of the struggle over the rest of the decade. In Algeria the American landings gave nationalism a push. Ferhat Abbas and other men schooled in French put their names to a Manifesto of the Algerian People that demanded reform. Abbas then set up the AML to argue for a republic federated with France. He was attacked by the settlers on one flank and by Ahmed Messali's PPA on the other for asking too little. Protest turned violent in 1945 and was put down with great brutality, and the years that followed brought French backing for the settlers and rigged elections. Tunisia lost its reforming monarch Moncef Bey to exile while Bourguiba held to the Free French. In Egypt the Muslim Brotherhood turned nationalist while London thought about the canal.

On 1 January 1946 the student paper La Ruche, edited by Rene Depestre and Theodore Baker, greeted the new year as the year democracy would beat fascism, and printed four lines of verse: down with the Francos, long live democracy on the march, long live justice, long live the workers of the world. Within two days the editors were in the police station on the Champ de Mars and the paper was banned. Medical students walked out first, then the rest of the university, then the lycees, then children as young as ten, crossing the Champ de Mars shouting for liberty and democracy and against dictatorship. The Garde answered with clubs. On 7 January, Jacques Stephen Alexis, Depestre and Baker announced a new party demanding the release of political prisoners, immediate elections and a free press. On the 8th and 9th the government clerks struck, then the teachers, then the shopkeepers. Elie Lescot went on the radio promising drastic measures. On the afternoon of 11 January, Alexis and Georges Rigaud went to his residence and told him to go. He asked for time to arrange his affairs. Two hours later Fort National fired three times.