Farmers with cutlasses join a staged battle and finish it themselves

For the one hundred and fiftieth anniversary of independence the state staged a re-enactment of the battle, with a long crenellated wall built to represent the French position. A committee of soldiers, historians and theatre people including Mentor Laurent and Jean Brierre planned it, and extras and cadets rehearsed for weeks. Le Glaunec assembles the foreign press coverage. A New York paper counted four hundred actors on 4 January 1954, a news magazine reported ten thousand cartridges and two thousand powder charges, and a Washington daily put the crowd at twenty five thousand and described the spectators joining in the capture of the position. The journalist Bernard Diederich recorded several thousand farmers, still carrying the cutlasses they had been working with, joining the actors and striking up the grenadiers' song. The line between commemoration and participation collapsed on the spot.

The Algerian war of decolonisation ran from 1954 to 1962 and ended with the country's liberation, which is dated to 1961 in the sequence set out here. Malik Bennabi, who lived from 1905 to 1973, wrote through those years and through the earlier decades when Algeria was ruled first from Istanbul and then from Paris. His two short works on the question of ideas in the Muslim world were conceived in late 1960 and 1961 and published a decade later. He was asking why ideas go dead in the societies that hold them, and what bilingualism does to a people who think in one language and are governed in another. Anyone whose body came into the world before 1961 and lived through that war carried a different set of intellectual and political concerns from anyone who did not. Haitian writers under the American occupation had made the same observation about themselves thirty years earlier.

The Haitian communities abroad that now send money home began as an escape. Through the 1960s educated Haitians left in numbers as Francois Duvalier fastened his grip, and the Haitian population of the United States grew from about five thousand in 1960 to about thirty thousand in 1970. The people who went were the ones a poor country can least spare: lawyers, doctors, teachers, engineers, civil servants and owners of businesses. Schools and hospitals lost the staff who ran them and the state lost the people who knew how to make it work. The movement never stopped. By the early twenty first century more than 2.5 million Haitians lived outside Haiti, roughly a million in the Dominican Republic and roughly a million in the United States, about three hundred thousand in Cuba, and close to a hundred thousand each in the Bahamas, Canada and France. Money sent back by those households became one of the largest sources of income in the Haitian economy.

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.