A street guide to Port-au-Prince becomes a survey of class

Suzanne Comhaire-Sylvain kept printed and hand drawn maps of Haiti and used them as instruments. One was the 1947 Republique d'Haiti carte-guide et plan de Port-au-Prince, an ordinary street guide, which she used to chart how class, colour and political power were laid out across the capital in the 1940s. The classification she worked with put close to ten percent of the population in Class I. Only six percent of the population were the wealthy, educated, high earning households the category was meant to describe. The remaining 3.7 percent were servants and other members of Class IV living outside their own crowded wards, which meant inside the houses of the families they worked for. The map of the rich districts therefore contained the poor as residents. The city refused to sort itself into zones meeting at their edges. The classes overlapped inside the same buildings, and a street plan can be made to show that once somebody thinks to ask it the question.

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.

French rule in North Africa ended in two places within a single year. In Morocco the nationalist protest was led by Sultan Sidi Muhammad, and fighting in the Spanish-held part of the territory added pressure the French could not absorb. They withdrew in 1956. Tunisia arrived at the same point in the same year. Its Neo-Destour party had spent the early 1950s pulling itself apart in a quarrel between Bourguiba, who wanted terms, and Ben Yusuf, who wanted more than terms. The French tried force against the protest and inducements to the politicians. Bourguiba's side won the internal fight and took the country to full independence. Richard Reid argues that these movements had advantages their neighbours to the south lacked. Islam supplied a long tradition of political argument. The territories had borders and identities centuries deep. A rising pan-Arabism connected them to the Middle East and to a world larger than the continent. Nationalists below the Sahara had to assemble all three of those things while they organised.

Dumarsais Estime became president of Haiti in 1946 under the slogan of a black man in power. He had been a deputy under Sthenio Vincent and under Elie Lescot, he was the son of large landowners in the Artibonite, and he was married into an old mulatto family. The economy helped him. Postwar markets lifted coffee and sisal, exports doubled, tourism brought in foreign currency, and the budget rose from twelve to twenty one million dollars between 1946 and 1949. In that setting the noiriste argument appeared to be demonstrating its own usefulness. A substantial black section of the bureaucracy took shape and allied itself with the traditional fractions of the bourgeoisie of every shade, strengthening them. The black petty bourgeoisie expanded in the liberal professions, in small commerce and in the civil service. Reforms were announced for the peasantry and the working class and nothing changed for them. Repression of the unions and the left followed later.