In 1953 a newspaper accuses two historians of laundering colours

The founding story went unchallenged until Timoleon Brutus published in the Port-au-Prince daily Le Nouvelliste in 1953. Brutus pointed out that the French admiral's report on the Arcahaie engagement described the banner on the sunken barge as black and red, while both Madiou and Ardouin had let readers assume it was blue and red. Girard explains the stakes in terms of internal Haitian politics rather than antiquarianism. Black nationalist writers read the omission as deliberate, arguing that two authors of mixed race background had quietly manufactured archival backing for the blue and red banner that Petion adopted after independence, at the expense of the black and red imperial standard associated with Dessalines. The revelation opened a scholarly and political fight over the colours that ran for decades and fed directly into the flag policy of the Duvalier state.

France ran its African policy after 1954 in the shadow of Algeria, and the fear of a second Algerian war shaped everything decided in Paris. The plan had been a Greater France in which the colonies stayed inside the republic, an idea that assimilated West African elites supported until it became clear that full citizenship was never on offer. Reforms in 1956 gave internal self government while Paris kept the army, foreign policy and economic planning. As Algeria worsened, de Gaulle put a straight question to the colonies in 1958. Keep the link to France and keep the money, or take complete independence and lose all of it. Almost every African leader chose the link. Guinea under Ahmed Sekou Toure chose sovereignty. De Gaulle cancelled all assistance, withdrew French staff and had the equipment carried out. Guinea survived on Soviet and Ghanaian support. Within two years the rest of Francophone Africa had followed it, and in 1960 the French colonies of west and equatorial Africa became independent states.

The second half of the 1940s was a good stretch for Haitian exports, with coffee and sisal prices rising, and the boom around the Korean war in 1950 and 1951 kept coffee high and demand for sisal strong. From late 1951 to the summer of 1952 sisal prices halved. The coffee harvest of 1953 was very small, and the following year coffee prices fell sharply. In the same year, 1954, Hurricane Hazel struck Haiti and destroyed forty percent of the coffee harvest and fifty percent of the cocoa harvest. By 1955 coffee still accounted for over sixty five percent of total export value, followed by sisal at almost sixteen percent, sugar at more than three and a half, cocoa at about the same, and essential oils at three percent. Plantation Dauphin, once the largest sisal producer in the world, gave up the crop in 1971 after synthetic fibres undercut it.

Several film crews recorded the re-enactment, and in the autumn of 2012 Le Glaunec found an excerpt in the archives of a Haitian and Caribbean documentation centre in Montreal. It runs a little over three minutes, is narrated in English and appears to have been made for American audiences. The narrator calls the soldiers of the indigenous army a band of patriots fighting for freedom and frames the battle as a continuation of the American war of independence and its language of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. The author reads this as an act of translation that makes the Haitian war intelligible to a foreign public by subordinating it to an earlier one. The footage shows a handful of French figures overwhelmed by hundreds of half naked fighters, a soldier of Rochambeau waving a white flag, and the horse of the actor playing Capois lying dead. It has apparently not been shown since 1954.