Alice Garoute dies and Port-au-Prince marches for her unbidden

Garoute, second president of the League and the figure Sanders Johnson calls the mother of the Haitian feminist movement, died after months of illness in the countryside outside Port-au-Prince. Her influence registered within hours, when a feminist demonstration entered the streets of the capital without anyone organising it, and women of all classes, colours and cultures moved and mourned together. In the first days of October the League's leaders met at her grave in a Port-au-Prince cemetery, out of reach of a press that was asking whether the movement could survive her, and recommitted to fight until women held full rights as Haitian citizens. Garoute had said publicly that she hoped a delegation would lay flowers on her grave on the day women first voted. Sanders Johnson notes that seven more years passed before that delegation could come.

From the 1950s the classical account of the French Revolution as a bourgeois revolution came under attack from several directions at once. One of them was the Atlantic thesis of Jacques Godechot and Robert Palmer, which held that the French Revolution was a part of a single great revolutionary movement running through the whole western world. That movement included the American Revolution, the Latin American revolutions, revolts in almost every European country of the late eighteenth century, and the revolution in Haiti. France was the most intense case and not a different species. Wallerstein notes that the Atlanticists kept most of the assumptions they were attacking, describing the movement as liberal, bourgeois and democratic. Albert Soboul rejected the thesis furiously, because grouping France with the west of the eighteenth century pulled it away from Russia in the twentieth. Haiti enters that argument as evidence, and the argument was never really about Haiti.

In September 1939, when Britain and France declared war on Germany, no European government imagined leaving Africa. There had been trouble. Political movements were forming that pointed toward later nationalism, the countryside protested, workers in the towns organised, Islamic and Christian movements rejected the assumptions colonial rule rested on, and African voices were getting louder. None of it threatened the structure, and no colonial power had given serious thought to retreat. Twenty years later Britain and France had begun programmes of withdrawal that could not be reversed, Belgium was about to lose the Congo, and only Portugal and the settler regimes of Southern Rhodesia and South Africa were digging in, at a cost paid out over the following decades. Europe left Africa in roughly the span of time it had taken to seize it. The change came from two directions, from what European governments needed at home and abroad, and from African movements altering the facts on the ground. Grievances accumulated through the Depression and the war hardened after 1945 into parties.

The deposed president Dumarsais Estimé arrived by boat in Jamaica seeking temporary asylum. Haitian agents in Kingston, fearing he meant to use the island as a base to attack the newly installed government, created a row that prevented Estimé and his family from disembarking. Alexander Bustamante intervened, arguing that Jamaica must not allow the Haitian government to involve it in Haitian politics, that he himself was undesirable to some people at home, that nothing said by the Haitian government would be accepted without proof, and that a future ousted Haitian president would want the same courtesy. Smith calls the remark prescient, because Paul Magloire, who followed Estimé and had received the freedom of Kingston on a state visit two years before, landed at Palisadoes a day after being pushed out himself in 1956.