Duvalier writes himself into the presidency for the rest of his life

Francois Duvalier had been president of Haiti since 1957. In 1964 he had the constitution rewritten so that the office was his for as long as he lived, with the right to name the man who would follow him. The republic took the shape of a dynasty and acquired the documents to match. Haiti had known the title before. The revolution of 1843 threw it out, and one strongman after another brought it back whenever accountability became inconvenient. What the new text removed was the last pretence that any part of the state stood outside one person. Michel-Rolph Trouillot makes the point that winning the legal argument settled very little. The regime held the palace, the army, the militia and now the constitution, and it still had to keep explaining itself to a population that had never accepted its account of things. A government arguing that hard at the height of its power is showing you where it feels weak.

In the general election of 1964 Peter Griffiths won the seat of Smethwick in the English Midlands with a campaign built on black immigration, defeating a Labour minister to do it. It was the first occasion on which racism was taken up into the declared policy and programme of a major British party and used openly as an appeal to white voters. The result showed how far the argument had already travelled inside the organised working class and its own institutions. Two years earlier Parliament had passed the first Commonwealth Immigrants Act, in 1962, imposing controls on the movement of black people into the country. A White Paper on immigration from the Commonwealth followed in 1965, establishing that the number of arrivals was itself the problem and setting the terms of policy for years afterwards. Further acts came in 1968, using explicit racial categories, and in 1971, bearing down on the dependants and families of black and Asian workers already there.

The Algerian war entered its worst phase in 1956 with bombings in Algiers and a French army doubled to around half a million men. Ahmed Ben Bella, who had escaped from prison, organised the FLN abroad and kept the weapons moving, with Nasser's Egypt as the important ally. The fighting in Algiers through 1956 and 1957 was savage on both sides. Negotiations failed, and French settlers made their own attempts to seize the colonial administration. De Gaulle's offensives at the end of the decade destroyed a great deal and settled nothing, while opposition to the war grew inside France. In 1960 the United Nations recognised Algeria's right to self determination. After more failed talks and more atrocities the French withdrew in July 1962 and independence was recognised. Up to a million European settlers left with the administration, having lost about ten thousand dead. Algerian dead numbered a million or more. Frantz Fanon wrote Les Damnes de la Terre out of this war.

Early on 26 April 1963 an attempt was made on Jean-Claude Duvalier and his sister Simone as they were being driven to school. It failed. Radio announced the attack and called on all duvalierists to take up arms. Macoutes and members of the presidential guard made Thursday 26 April the bloodiest day of the Duvalier years. A manhunt ran through the streets at random. Anyone with the face of an opponent could lose his life for being in the wrong place, or, like the Benoits, for carrying a compromising name. Duvalier had named as authors of the attack a list of potential enemies headed by Lieutenant Francois Benoit, who had recently distinguished himself in the marksmanship competition of the Americas. Every member of the Benoit family was struck. Days earlier Jacques Fourcand, the president's adviser and new head of the Red Cross, had publicly promised a Himalaya of corpses. A year later the allied Duchatelier family disappeared.