Jeanne Perez goes to Harlem and carries the lesson home to Haiti

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.

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.

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.

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.