Napoleon wished to reconquer the emancipated colony, and sent a strong army against it. The negroes rallied round their chief, and offered a heroic resistance; finally the French withdrew, and abandoned the island to the ex-slaves. In 1825 the metropolis recognised the independence of Hayti. The Constitution of the new republic was promulgated in 1801. Without disdaining the suzerainty of France, which had prematurely abolished slavery, the negroes made laws intended to establish a democracy; they organised municipalities, and recognised Catholicism as the State religion. They recognised that labour, painful as it is to an indolent nation, is yet obligatory. From this time forward the history of Hayti is a perpetual succession of civil wars and dictatorships. Liberal laws were given to a caste habituated to slavery. Pétion, who was honoured by the friendship of Bolivar, was President in 1807; he applied himself more especially to the education of his people, and was called the father of his country; his government was a period of peace between two crises of vandalism. Before him the successor of Toussaint Louverture, Dessalines, had ordered the killing of all the whites, and had commenced a disastrous racial war. Nothing could be more hateful to the ex-slaves than the aristocracy of the skin; neither whites nor mulattos escaped the fury of the rulers. The integrity of the negro race was the ideal of these ferocious dictators. {229} No South American republic had to suffer such ill-augured tyrannies as those of Hayti; no autocracy was so formidable as that of these ex-slaves, whose leaders were notable amateurs of pageantry and bloodshed. Soulouque, the sworn enemy of the mulattos, proclaimed himself Emperor in 1849, taking the name of Faustinus I., and surrounding himself with a grotesquely ambitious court: he was the most execrable of despots. The Republic was re-established in 1859, and the monotonous sequence of servile coxcombs who made use of their power to gratify their passion for extermination recommenced: civil wars, international wars, assassinations, and massacres filled the bloodstained chronicles of the isle. The Haytian rulers exercised a harsh domination over San Domingo, where mulattos abounded and the Spanish tradition was not extinct; the negro invasion exiled the Dominican writers, destroyed the culture of the university, and swept like a wave of barbarism into the brilliant colony.