Napoleon's second recommendation returns as emigration

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.

The National Assembly met in the Palais Legislatif on 16 August 1946 to choose a president. Garde officers sat in the galleries and in the chamber with submachine guns across their laps, the palace band played, and all five of the Garde's armoured half tracks stood across the street. Senators and deputies wrote names on paper slips. Dumarsais Estime, a lower middle class noir from the Artibonite backed by Major Magloire and financed by the distiller Alfred Vieux, led the first round with 25 votes against 8 for Bignon Pierre-Louis, 7 for Edgar Nere Numa and 6 for Colonel Calixte, the rest scattered among the many parties founded that year. After a recess the second ballot gave Estime 32, Numa 14 and Pierre-Louis 10, and he was declared elected. The half tracks led his car to the cathedral for a Te Deum past silent crowds. Lavaud then returned executive power to an elected president, seven months after taking it. Estime told him the army had been at once the head that commanded and the arm that carried out, and had kept its word.

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.

Jeanne Perez travelled to New York in 1947, and an account of the trip records that she formed a great liking for Harlem, a place she had heard a great deal about. Harlem in 1947 held the largest concentration of black political and artistic life in the United States, with its own newspapers, theatres, churches and organisations. Perez had spent years teaching Haitian girls, her niece among them, that their country's revolution and its monuments belonged to them, and she had written the girl a tour of the fortress Henry Christophe built in the northern mountains. The Harlem visit extended that education outward. What she wanted to leave behind was a habit of recognition, so that a Haitian girl reading about black life in another country would take it as connected to her own and not as foreign business. The geography of the lesson grew from the mountains above Cap-Haitien to the avenues north of Central Park.