A judge lasts fifty five days and resigns into a general strike

Joseph Nemours Pierre-Louis took the provisional presidency on 12 December 1956 and gave it up on 4 February 1957. He was fifty six, a bachelor judge from Cap-Haitien who sat on the court at The Hague, and his cabinet was assembled from cronies and stand-ins for Dejoie and Duvalier. Leaving out Jumelle and Fignole guaranteed that both men would fight him. The Parti du Peuple Haitien demanded an immediate return to the principles of Dumarsais Estime and wanted Jumelle barred over the empty treasury he had left behind as finance minister. Through January its squads, which called themselves commandos, hunted down Magloire's appointees, beat them and drove them out of their offices. A bomb went off at a margarine plant on 10 January and a larger one blew in the north door of the legislature two weeks later, breaking windows across downtown. On 1 February the Dejoie ministers resigned together and a second general strike closed the fuel pumps, the agricultural school, the general hospital and the business district. Pierre-Louis resigned three days after that.

Portugal did not negotiate. In Angola, Mozambique and Guinea-Bissau the administration hardened its racial policy through the 1950s and left nationalists no route except force. The MPLA was founded in Angola in 1956 and rode a peasant rising of the early 1960s against forced labour and compulsory cotton growing, practices the British and French colonies had given up years before. FRELIMO formed in Mozambique in 1962 and began a long war of its own. The worst of these wars was in Algeria, which French opinion counted as a province of the mother country. Reform schemes were half hearted and colonial officials sabotaged them. Younger nationalists set up the Organisation Secrete in 1948 to prepare armed struggle, and when it collapsed a handful of its members founded the Front de Liberation Nationale. The FLN went to war in November 1954 and fought on two fronts, guerrilla operations inside Algeria and diplomacy outside it at the United Nations and among the non aligned and pan Arab states.

Arriving at Palisadoes airport in Jamaica one day after his ouster, the Haitian military president Paul Magloire remarked that when he left Haiti it was on fire and that it was now going to explode. Smith builds his conclusion on that line, arguing that in Haiti the removal of a hated ruler has usually opened a long and halting march toward change rather than concluding one, and that Magloire's comment applies as well to 2004 and 1986 as to 1956. What distinguishes the most recent instance in his account is the continuing support for Lavalas, obscured by heavily armed gangs in the capital with unreliable political allegiances, a long list of contentious presidential candidates, the drug trade, and the ambiguous role of the bourgeoisie and the army.

Destin records that Magloire reached celebrity status in the United States when Eisenhower invited him for a state visit, having made the cover of a national magazine the year before. The tour was received with publicity, especially over his views on race in America. As a guest in the wake of the Supreme Court's school desegregation decision, the leader of the first black republic was interviewed about the case and predicted that discrimination in the United States would soon be a bad dream. He received an honorary doctorate of law from a black sociologist serving as a university president, and further honours in New York. Destin sets the visit inside the period called the golden age, when coffee prices were high and the country was the only one in the Caribbean where the tourist industry was controlled by nationals.