Estimé is ousted weeks after promising Haitian women the vote

Coming out of their congress the Haitian women's movement had the president's support and fully expected to win the vote within months. Weeks later Estimé was removed from the presidency. Sanders Johnson argues the movement absorbed the setback rather than being derailed by it, because the convention had generated momentum that carried through the volatility. In August, Sylvain-Bouchereau wrote a public letter to the leader of the new junta, Paul Eugène Magloire, rebuking the military for not granting suffrage in 1946 after Lescot's failed presidency, and urging the administration to abolish the discrimination that had weighed on Haitian women since independence. She asked how anyone could speak of a free people, a fully democratic state and universal suffrage while more than half the population was left out, and warned against listening to those who said Haitian women were unprepared.

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.

Britain, France and Belgium handed over power in their African colonies between the late 1940s and the 1960s, and even the transfers that went smoothly left the new states badly equipped. Schooling under colonial rule was open to a minority until the final years, so most citizens could not read, could not follow what their government was doing, and had no practical way to hold anyone to account. The men who took office had been pushed through training programmes assembled at speed once independence was agreed. Civil society, the associations and newspapers and courts that make a government answerable, had never been allowed to grow. Reid warns against reading the instability that followed as nothing more than colonial failure. The conflicts over who controlled land, revenue and office ran back into the nineteenth century, before any European flag went up, and they resumed once it came down. Colonial neglect made those older quarrels worse. I keep these decades on a Haitian timeline because Haiti reached the same position in 1804 and met the same problem: a sovereign state, a population kept illiterate on purpose, and a ruling class assembled overnight.

Alejo Carpentier published El reino de este mundo in 1949. The novel follows Mackandal, Boukman, Henri Christophe and Pauline Bonaparte through the revolution and its aftermath, and it holds Vodou, revolutionary violence and European reason in one frame. In the prologue Carpentier set out what he called lo real maravilloso, the marvellous real, arguing that the ordinary substance of Caribbean life already contains what the European surrealists had to manufacture in a studio. He had visited Haiti in 1943 and seen Sans Souci and the Citadelle, and the trip gave him both the setting and the argument. That prologue became the founding statement of magical realism, the mode that Gabriel Garcia Marquez and a generation after him carried to the rest of the world. The line runs from a ruined palace in the Haitian north to a Colombian village to the international bestseller list. Haiti sent out a revolution in 1804. In 1949 it sent out a way of seeing.