Nationals and Liberals, 1904/1906
This chapter traces the continued civil war in Haiti that manifested itself along these newly formed post-1869 divides: between Liberals and Nationals in politics, divergent approaches to education and cultural policy, and new approaches to commemorating Haiti’s foundational 1804/1806 division at the turn of the new century. Yet these new divides are not invented out of whole cloth: they draw heavily upon Haitian history while responding to ever-changing Atlantic currents of thought. That is, the post-1869 divides are marked by both the divides that shaped Haiti’s first fifty years of civil war and the ideological debates that marked the nineteenth-century Atlantic world—specifically, France’s Third Republican debates on nationhood and imperial republicanism and the rise of a new US hemispheric imperialism at the turn of the century. Thus, the divides between government forms that had driven the first fifty years of Haitian civil war gave way to a new set of factions that reactivated and adapted these earlier divisions.