The Roots of Haitian Despotism 9781626371590

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The Roots of Haitian Despotism

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The Roots of Haitian Despotism Robert Fatton Jr.

b o u l d e r l o n d o n

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Published in the United States of America in 2007 by Lynne Rienner Publishers, Inc. 1800 30th Street, Boulder, Colorado 80301 www.rienner.com and in the United Kingdom by Lynne Rienner Publishers, Inc. 3 Henrietta Street, Covent Garden, London WC2E 8LU © 2007 by Lynne Rienner Publishers, Inc. All rights reserved Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Fatton, Robert, Jr. The roots of Haitian despotism / Robert Fatton Jr. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN-13: 978-1-58826-544-9 (hardcover : alk. paper) 1. Haiti—Politics and government. 2. Haiti—History. 3. Despotism—Haiti. I. Title. F1921.F38 2007 972.94—dc22 2007000767 British Cataloguing in Publication Data A Cataloguing in Publication record for this book is available from the British Library. Printed and bound in the United States of America The paper used in this publication meets the requirements of the American National Standard for Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials Z39.48-1992. 5 4 3 2 1

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Contents

Preface

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1 Introduction

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2 Habitus, Political Culture, and African Legacies

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3 Social Hierarchies and Authoritarian Legacies

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4 Presidential Monarchism

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5 The Empire Arrives: The Road to the US Occupation

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6 Imperialism and Authoritarianism

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7 From Duvalier to the Unending Democratic Transition

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8 Conclusion

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Bibliography Index About the Book

237 255 269

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Preface

THIS BOOK IS in some way the logical product of my previous work, Haiti’s Predatory Republic,1 which sought to explain the country’s unending democratic transition in the aftermath of the fall of the Duvalier dictatorship in 1986. Haiti’s Predatory Republic was to a large degree a conjunctural analysis—a study of the courte durée. It examined the unending transition to democracy, the short period of the ascendancy and crisis of Jean-Bertrand Aristide’s Lavalas movement in the aftermath of the fall of the Duvalier dictatorship in 1986. Haiti’s Predatory Republic did not dig deep into history to uncover the roots of Haiti’s political despotism. It was in this way incomplete and unsatisfying. This new work is more ambitious, a work of excavation; it seeks to understand the social origins of Haitian despotism and why, since its inception, the country has had a persistent history of dictatorial regimes lording it over an exploited majority. To decipher the fundamental causes of this persistent despotism, I have utilized the concept of the habitus. The habitus refers to a complicated repertoire of practices, attitudes, and behavior that are grounded in the material foundation of society. This repertoire can acquire a life of its own and in turn influence and shape material force. Habitus and political economy exist therefore in a dialectical relationship of continuous and mutually conditioning interaction. I contend that in the specific case of Haiti, the legacy of slavery and the plantation economy inherited from the predatory French colonial system engendered a powerful authoritarian habitus, which has in turn shaped decisively the country’s form of governance. vii

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The point is that the revolution of 1804, which marked the historic emancipation of enslaved people into citizens of the world’s first black independent republic, failed to eradicate tyrannical forms of bondage—nor did it do away with various types of monarchical presidentialism. The slaves’ quest for liberty and autonomy that fueled the fire of the revolution and brought about a fundamental democratic contribution to human affairs was incapable of sustaining the structures of an accountable and equitable political system. The year 1804 symbolized the most radical democratic moment that the world had hitherto known. It embodied a violent rupture with authoritarianism and hierarchy and the unambiguous and path-breaking embrace of citizenship for all human beings irrespective of race and color. It trespassed the “thinkable” and established the principle of equality that has become a universal leitmotiv of democratic theory. And yet, the revolution failed to fulfill its promise; emancipation did not translate into an accountable, let alone democratic, dispensation. Brutal reflexes of command and control, as well as paternalistic forms of domination inherited from the colonial period, nurtured the centralizing and militaristic exercise of power derived from the slaves’ insurrection to give rise to an enduring authoritarian habitus. Superimposed on profound divisions of class, race, and color, the habitus molded the behavior and social vision of rulers and dominant groups. Former slaves resisted encroachment upon their newly gained freedoms and fought to become independent peasant producers. Eventually, they won their struggle, but they remained a marginalized and exploited mass forming the large majority of the moun andeyo—the excluded outsiders. This pattern of exclusion, initially derived from the legacy of colonial slavery, has characterized Haiti’s history since its very beginning. It generated a predatory state bent on extracting resources from the peasant majority for the benefit of a small ruling class. In the process, the state became the prime arena for political struggles, because its capture was the principal means of acquiring wealth and power and of dispensing favors. Politics soon developed into a brutal zero-sum game; power conquered was not to be shared—it was power that had to be kept for the longue durée. The quest for monopolizing and retaining power and marginalizing the moun andeyo explains the persistence of the authoritarian habitus. With extremely rare exceptions, rulers never relinquished office voluntarily; they espoused a profound sense of messianism and believed in their own indispensability. The methods, style, and structures

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of governance that were derived from the authoritarian habitus acquired a life of their own in spite of relative changes in Haiti’s material foundation. These changes, however, never altered the basic premise of the predatory state: the ruling classes’ use of their monopoly of political power to extract a comparatively limited economic surplus from the moun andeyo. After more than 200 years of existence, Haiti’s predatory system and authoritarian habitus have reached a point of exhaustion. The patterns of extraction have drained the lifeblood from the moun andeyo and left the nation in ruin. While the habitus continues to inform political practices, it can no longer organize or legitimate state governance. Since the collapse of the Duvalier dictatorship in 1986, the authoritarian habitus has fallen in utter disrepair, but it has not been replaced by a coherent emancipatory project. In fact, the debris of the habitus has contributed to block the never-ending democratic transition. With few exceptions, the literature on Haiti has tended to emphasize the role of individual leaders in the making of the country’s politics. This tendency has also led many to assume that the crisis confronting Haiti is nothing but the consequence of “bad” leaders and thus the solution to the crisis is the coming to power of “good” rulers. This book rejects these assumptions; they tend to be simplistic and tautological. There is no doubt that, everything being equal, a “good” ruler is better than a “bad” one; but this does little to define what makes for a “good” leader and whose interests such a leader should serve. Moreover, and more importantly, the elevation of leadership to the determining factor in Haiti’s history fails to take into account the simple reality that the predatory structures of the country leave very little room for individual choice. I do not mean to imply that individual rulers play no role in the making of history, but rather that they find themselves in particular situations that are not of their choosing. They are not free to do as they wish; they confront a historical legacy that hampers greatly their capacity to act. In short, powerful structures and historical legacies constrain severely any ruler’s margin of maneuver. In Haiti, this has meant that rulers, irrespective of their political affiliation or ideologies, have been “caged” by the authoritarian habitus and unable to free themselves from its pervasive influence. In spite of the passage of time, the basic substance of predatory politics remained much the same. Moreover, Haiti’s location in the world system limits further what can be changed or partially modified. Rulers’ choices are thoroughly

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circumscribed by the country’s utter dependence on external financial sources and on foreign security forces. Since the 1990s, this dependence has increased to the point where Haiti’s sovereignty has become a legal fiction. This period, marked by constant crises, was punctuated by major intrusions from “across the water.” These intrusions were not new; the United States had occupied the country from 1915 to 1934, and earlier France and Germany used their own gunboat diplomacy to compel Haiti to accept their demands. Direct foreign interventions in the country not only failed to set in motion anything resembling a self-sustaining democracy and economy, but they exacerbated social conflicts and predatory forms of governance. They symbolized the triumph of violent seizures of power and reinforced the Haitian authoritarian habitus. In fact, since independence, the intersection of domestic and international political economies has always had deleterious effects on the development of Haiti. There is little in the recent past to suggest that this bleak reality will change drastically. However, the newly elected president, René Préval, may have the opportunity to negotiate for better terms of dependence. Paradoxically, he may benefit from the collapse of all state institutions to gain greater sympathy and flexibility from international donors. In fact, the systematic crisis besieging the country and the fear of a complete descent into hell represent Préval’s opportunity to change the course of Haitian history. The current situation benefits few and thus opens the possibility for the emergence of a new coalition of forces that may finally advance more democratic and equitable policies. This possibility, however, faces serious obstacles. The dominant classes always fear that any program of reforms may get out of control and undermine their position of power. Thus, in spite of real fears that the existing climate of chaos and indiscriminate criminal violence may threaten their personal security, these classes may be reluctant to risk their current advantages for the uncertainties and unexpected outcomes of political change. In some fundamental ways, the well-off are more likely to prefer the realities of a status quo they know than the promises of an unknown future. Thus, the authoritarian habitus will not be easily displaced even if it falls into desuetude. * * * I would never have written this work without the privilege of enjoying a full year of research. I want to thank the University of Virginia

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for this benefit, which was partially funded by my endowed professorship, the Julia Allen Cooper chair of Government and Foreign Affairs. The staff of the Centre des Archives d’Outre-Mer, located in beautiful Aix-en-Provence, also facilitated my research. I have tried out various sections of this work at many lectures and conferences, and I thank the audiences for asking questions that helped me clarify my own thinking. The argument developed here was suggested earlier in the Journal of Haitian Studies in 2004.2 I owe a very special debt to my friend and intellectual marassa Alex Dupuy for reading carefully every page of an early version of this manuscript. The imperfections of this book would have been glaring had it not been for his incisive and constructive criticisms. His insights were simply invaluable. In addition, I was extremely lucky to benefit from the advice of another dear friend, Jerry Handler, whose profound knowledge of the Caribbean gave pause to my wild generalizations on matters I was little acquainted with! I owe Jerry very particular thanks for passing on multiple references that contributed to making this book more informed. I also wish to acknowledge Natasha Copeland for translating skillfully many French passages into English. In addition, I benefited from the comments and suggestions of two anonymous scholars who read the manuscript for Lynne Rienner Publishers. Finally, my deepest debt of gratitude is to my family for putting up with my selfish determination to complete the first draft of this book before June 9, 2006, and to follow unencumbered by any unfinished business my real obsession, the World Cup—a sacred quadrennial month-long ritual for any self-respecting Haitian. To my wife and coworker, Cindy, to my son Luc, and to my daughter Vanessa, thank you for your loving patience. Last, but not least, I dedicate this book to my brother, Bernard, who knowingly or unknowingly set me on the academic path. Growing up surrounded by his library was an invitation to read and discover the joys and pains of making sense of our very imperfect world. While he has always been an inspiration, I will not blame him, however, for this book’s shortcomings.

NOTES 1. Robert Fatton Jr., Haiti’s Predatory Republic (Boulder: Lynne Rienner Publishers, 2002). 2. Robert Fatton Jr., “The Haitian Authoritarian Habitus and the Contradictory Legacy of 1804,” Journal of Haitian Studies 10, no. 1 (2004): 22–43.

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The King is the slave of history. In the events of history, so-called great men are merely tags that supply a name to the event, and have quite as little connection with the event itself as the tag. Every one of their actions, though apparently performed by their own free will, is, in its historical significance, out of the scope of volition, and is correlated with the whole trend of history, and is completely, preordained from all eternity. —LEO TOLSTOI, War and Peace

Great Men make history, but only such history as it is possible for them to make. Their freedom of achievement is limited by the necessities of their environment. To portray the limits of those necessities and the realization, complete or partial, of all possibilities, that is the true business of the historian. —C. L. R. JAMES, The Black Jacobins

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Introduction

MY GENERAL GOAL in this book is to explain the social origins and development of the Haitian authoritarian habitus. I will do so by examining how material structures have produced critical junctures1 directing to particular historical trajectories that in turn have narrowed further future choices and outcomes. In this constrained environment, actors are simply not free to do as they please; their decisions are to a large extent predetermined by the legacy of original conditions. Thus, alternatives are extremely limited, and from the path to which they lead, “one damn thing follows another.”2 In the particular case of Haiti, this implies that the colonial plantation regime based on slavery and white supremacist values had a determinant role in shaping the country’s critical junctures. These junctures engendered a cascade of policies and choices contributing to despotic rule and economic underdevelopment. At the dawn of the twenty-first century, however, the Haitian crisis has become so fundamental and generalized that it invites utter political unpredictability and chaotic social turbulences. Paradoxically, this type of acute systemic decay opens up historical horizons and announces that “everything is possible.” In this sense, whether continued stagnation and stasis—or a full descent into a hellish Hobbesian world of daily violence—is more likely than a progressive transition to a more egalitarian and democratic order will depend on which forces are capable of organizing and which agenda is ultimately victorious. In such conditions, political outcomes are “intrinsically uncertain, and . . . open to human intervention and creativity.”3 Thus, the heavy weight of Haiti’s historical legacy has confined the country to 1

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a disastrous trajectory that has reached a ruinous impasse, which ironically offers to political actors the opportunity to fight for a significantly better society than the current one. Human agency has the potential to be unleashed to transform the very structures that had hitherto crippled it. Obviously, this moment of freedom is neither infinite nor absolute; it occurs not in a vacuum, but under conditions of uncertainty, scarcity, and insecurity. Political actors benefiting from and bent on keeping the status quo as well as those seeking an alternative are all the product of past and existing realities; they have been permeated by the authoritarian habitus and constrained by its contradictions and institutional manifestations. Choices are, however, possible, and the past need not be repeated. The Haitian crisis is not only full of great dangers; it is also replete with opportunities, even if the immense debris of despotism weighs like a nightmare on the country’s future. From its very inception as an independent republic in 1804, Haiti has been characterized by powerful patterns of authoritarianism. Epitomizing what might be called an archetype of messianic rule, these patterns, I contend, are rooted in the legacy of colonialism, the forms of the emancipatory struggle against slavery, and the material matrix of the domestic and world economy. Haiti’s authoritarian tradition has generated long periods of repressive order punctuated by moments of anarchy as well as heroic but fleeting quests for democracy. In fact, dictatorial rule has coexisted with and unleashed a constant search for liberty. If the former has always overwhelmed the latter, the struggle between the two indicates that Haitian culture has no predetermined authoritarian essence. The quest for freedom has tended, however, to embody an individualized strategy of marronnage, a form of escape from the abuses of power, rather than a collective confrontation against despotism. Of course, there are exceptions, as the war of independence clearly demonstrates, but they are uncommonly rare. Thus, both authoritarianism and marronnage are embedded into the longue durée of Haiti’s history; their contradictory amalgam forms the Haitian political habitus—what Pierre Bourdieu defines as the system of “dispositions acquired through experience” that shapes particular types of behavior at particular historical moments.4 Haiti’s political “dispositions” have bred a corrupt and militaristic presidential monarchism of self-proclaimed messiahs and paterfamilias lording it over their “sons and daughters.”5 With rare exceptions, the country’s numerous constitutions have all ratified the providential

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authoritarianism of a single all-powerful man. Toussaint Louverture’s charter of 1801, which foreshadowed the island’s break from imperial France and abolished slavery, announced at the same time the impending dictatorial systems that have marked Haiti’s history. In spite of emancipating slaves, the charter curtailed their freedom and created a quasi-totalitarian state that demanded their disciplined loyalty and absolute submission.6 Louverture’s whims and desires became the law; unopposed and surrounded by sycophants, the brilliant Machiavellian architect of the first successful challenge to white supremacy became a tyrant. As Laurent Dubois points out, This state was literally embodied in one person, Toussaint Louverture, who was declared governor of Saint-Domingue for “the rest of his glorious life.” Louverture was even given the right to choose his successor, but the latter’s term of office was limited to five years. . . . Governor Louverture would sign and promulgate all laws, control all administrative and military appointments, and oversee enforcement of labor policies and trade. He had the right to censure any publications and to suppress any writings arriving from outside that might bring “disorder” or “corrupt” its residents. Residents were granted few political rights beyond the ability to present petitions to the administration, particularly to the governor, and were warned that “seditious gatherings” would be dispersed, by force if necessary. Louverture’s power was based . . . on the military.7

Thus, Toussaint’s 1801 charter set the tone for future generations of monarchical despots bent on ruling “for life.” While life mandates have not been a universal feature of all Haitian constitutions, they shaped political customs and expectations and legitimated the dictatorship of personal rule.8 The paradox of the Haitian Revolution is that it was fought in the name of liberty and equality and yet left a legacy of authoritarian politics. This legacy, however, has little to do with ingrained cultural tradition or ethnic essence. It is not some sort of Africa’s revenge against the New World. While it is clear that slaves brought with them their own habitus and that it shaped their adaptation to and behavior in their new Caribbean environment, they did not create “une Guinée américaine”9 when they founded Haiti. They were neither the embodiment of “l’homme de la nature” confronting l’homme “civilisé,”10 nor the irrational believers in the supernatural battling “la causalité européenne.”11 In fact, Haitians were and are still the product of historical forces rooted in both the global and domestic material structures within which they gained and preserved

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their independence. These structures rather than “l’Africanité” explain past and current predicaments. The roots of authoritarianism were more the product of choices resulting from structural constraints than the voluntary and free decisions of innately despotic leaders. To a large extent, the outcomes would have differed little had leaders other than Toussaint or Dessalines led the revolutionary struggle for Haiti’s independence. The structures within which Haitian rulers found themselves left few options; their choices were thoroughly constrained by the dominant white supremacist order and world capitalist economy. Such structures and constraints have always hampered Haiti’s choices. This is not to say that the island’s political class had no freedom whatsoever, but rather to point out the obdurate limits it faced. These limits have had similar deleterious effects on the governance of virtually all rulers irrespective of their race, class, or ideological persuasion. In reality, despotic regimes, racial hierarchies, and class divisions have been the hallmark of Haiti’s history whether power has been in the hands of Haitians themselves or in the hands of foreign imperial authorities. Embedded in profoundly racist values and the cruelty of slavery, French colonialism in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries was everything but democratic; 12 similarly, the US occupation of Haiti from 1915 to 1934 implanted into the island the United States’ own segregationist norms while imposing the repressive order of its Manifest Destiny.13 More recently, the US military intervention of 1994 restoring President Jean-Bertrand Aristide to power failed to generate any meaningful or long-sustained democratic transformation. Thus, while it would be wrong to ignore the significant role played by the Haitian authoritarian habitus in the making of Haitian despotism, this habitus has little to do with some Haitian predilection for dictatorship; in fact, it is the product of structural forces. This book is a study of how these forces contributed to the development and indeed consolidation of the habitus. I seek here to demonstrate that the authoritarian habitus, which gave birth to an archetype of messianic rule, was ingrained initially in the heritage of white colonial absolutism and the coercive forms of slave labor that the plantation economy entailed. While launched and won in the name of liberty, the long and violent war for independence generated militaristic patterns of command and a cult of the “chef,” which had antecedents in Africa itself. African slaves brought with them certain skills, traditions, and norms that were bound to

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affect patterns of resistance and accommodation to colonial rule. These skills, traditions, and norms did not remain intact once they reached the New World; in fact, they were drastically changed and “creolized.” They contributed to the development of a “hierarchical ethic”14 that provided additional raw material for the Haitian authoritarian habitus. At the same time, however, they furnished to slave insurgents military skills and means of organization that played a key role in the success of the Haitian Revolution. So emancipation came to embody a contradictory regime of individual marronnage and draconian command. Slavery was no more, but the preservation of freedom required armed discipline and the revival of a devastated economy. Confronting these two imperatives, Haiti’s founding fathers militarized society and turned into generalissimos bent on reestablishing the plantation economy. While the choice of the generalissimos was self-serving because it engendered a dominant landowning class of highly ranked officers, it responded to their justified fears that imperial and white supremacist powers would seek to conquer Haiti again. In addition, the call for reviving the plantation regime was an acknowledgment that the production of sugar was the only means of creating wealth in the constraining conditions of the world capitalist system. Thus, few viable policy alternatives existed. However, the road taken was full of detours and ended in a serious impasse. Former slaves resisted and ultimately undermined plans for the restoration of the plantation economy; they were not prepared to being again the victims of repressive labor discipline. They simply wanted to keep their autonomy and own their own plot of land to engage in subsistence agriculture. While they were ultimately successful, their victory had unintended and negative consequences for the future development of the country. The subsistence economy and its gradual degradation due to population pressures and utter governmental neglect contributed to growing poverty and the further marginalization of the peasantry. Taxed but otherwise ignored by the state, peasants eventually descended into a state of absolute pauperization. Underdevelopment and acute scarcity have in turn generated a politique du ventre—politics of the belly—that has made control of the government apparatus a violent and deadly business. Politics, in other words, has always been nothing but the prebendary acquisition of public resources for individual gain. For those not born into privilege, it has been the principal vehicle for the private accumulation of wealth; politics, since independence, has been synonymous with rampant

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corruption. Not surprisingly, those holding state power have used fraud and violence to keep it from potential challengers.15 Thus, the politique du ventre is not new; it is the basis of predatory rule, which has characterized Haiti’s two centuries of history. This is not to say that the country’s political system has remained static and that transformations in the economy have not occurred, but rather that such transformations have not been so dramatic as to alter the fundamental nature of the predatory system. New class alliances at the top have changed the form but not the substance of Haiti’s politics. The authoritarian habitus has remained a constant in the ways rulers have ruled in spite of outward ideological differences; the habitus, however, does vary in intensity depending on the degree of social polarization and the balance of forces between dominant and subordinate classes. So, for instance, the authoritarian habitus characterized regimes as distinct as François Duvalier’s and Jean Bertrand Aristide’s, or Dessalines’ and Pétion’s; the level, scope, and potency of repression as well as the main targets of that repression varied. Simply put, the degree of “predatoriness” differed. Rulers had to engage in a political calculus to determine very imperfectly and often mistakenly how to keep power and how to deal with adversaries. This in turn depended on whether challenges came from below and represented a vision of a world turned upside down, or whether they came from excluded groups that otherwise had no intention of truly changing the rules of the game. In the latter case, a mixture of cooptation and violence sufficed; in the former, repression tended to be harsh and specifically targeted against the popular sectors. Errors and miscalculations abounded and led to unintended consequences; instead of prolonging the ruler’s reign, they ignited popular resistance or provoked coups and countercoups. Paradoxically, then, predatory rule does not necessarily ensure stability; while it can generate relatively long periods of repressive order, it can also be a source of chaos and political fighting. Haiti’s constant unsteadiness reflects the incapacity of the ruling class to organize its own cohesion to govern effectively. In short, the ruling class has never been able to impose its hegemony; it has consistently failed in its attempt at building an integral state.16 The construction of an integral state is not a process springing from midair, nor is it the triumph of some political or administrative will. In fact, it mirrors the configuration of class power and the time horizon of rulers—that is, it reflects how such rulers value the future given their present strategic

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situation and calculations. The more secure their political positions, the more likely they will invest in long-term projects. In short, the creation of an integral state is dependent on the capacity of rulers to go beyond their immediate, narrow, corporate interests.17 Only then can the rationalization of politics occur, and only then can stability be “routinized.” I argue here that the historical inability of Haitian rulers to take the long-term view because of material constraints, international pressures, and domestic zero-sum game circumstances explains past crises and current predicaments. Indeed, the building of Haiti’s integral state has remained a project in the making—an unending and ever more difficult task. Indeed, for the past thirty years, the country’s problems have been compounded; the economy is in a permanent state of degradation, the political system is marked by the absence of any functioning institutions, the already weak sense of the public good is vanishing, class divisions have become obscenely inordinate, and poverty has deepened to an alarming degree. In addition, the country faces an ecological catastrophe brought about by massive deforestation and soil erosion. Finally, the absence of legitimate central authority has contributed to the parceling of violence and the proliferation of armed gangs with ever shifting allegiances. The fragility and instability of Haitian politics have invited foreign intrusions and military occupation and contributed to a virtual loss of national sovereignty. These bleak realities have prompted some to advocate for an international protectorate or a “cooperative sovereignty” that would take temporary control of Haiti.18 The suggestion is that for a prolonged period of time, the country should surrender its sovereignty to a well-meaning foreign occupation force that would set the country on the path of economic reconstruction and political reconciliation. As the influential US journalist, Don Bohning, put it in an editorial in the Miami Herald, “If Haiti is to continue as a functioning independent state, alternative options—including a period of international governance—need to be seriously contemplated to stem nearly two decades of unremitting political, economic and social deterioration. As unpalatable as it may be for the vast majority of Haitians . . . ceding temporary sovereignty to an international body is one option slowly gathering momentum.”19 While the idea that Haiti should come under the governance of an international trusteeship is not completely far-fetched given its thorough dependence on outside forces, it is unlikely to materialize;

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and if it did, there is no reason to believe that it would succeed in improving the lot of the destitute majority. The US occupation of the country from 1915 to 1934 may have created a semblance of an infrastructure and a form of centralized government, but it contributed neither to long-term self-sustaining economic development nor to lasting democratic forms of accountability. In fact, while in some quarters there is a growing nostalgia for the good old days of colonialism, there is little to suggest that foreign dominance can end vicious historical cycles or unleash virtuous ones.20 Paradoxically, this historical lesson seems to be accepted by strong advocates of the US empire. For instance, as Francis Fukuyama argues: Neither the United States nor the international community has made much headway in creating self-sustaining states in any of the countries it has set out to rebuild. . . . [The] rhetoric of the international community stresses “capacity-building” while the reality has been rather a kind of “capacity sucking out.” . . . This means that while governance functions are performed, indigenous capacity does not increase, and the countries in question are likely to revert to their former situations once the international community loses interest or moves on to the next crisis area.21

Moreover, the powers that be have no appetite for long-term building ventures; the costs are simply too high, especially for a country—like Haiti—that has no strategic value and no significant natural resources. The vicissitudes of the last US occupation of the island in the mid-1990s and the persisting quagmire in Iraq should disabuse those promoting a trusteeship for Haiti. In fact, the patterns of foreign intrusion into Haiti have been marked by the creation of a reckless international regime that fails to take responsibility for its own takeover while further dislocating domestic politics. With neither foreign nor national accountability, Haiti becomes an ungoverned system left to Hobbesian struggles and violence. In truth, the notion of a trusteeship is hallow and indeed cynical. Moreover, it would quickly unleash a wave of nationalistic opposition to what Haitians would perceive as a new imperial occupation by the blancs.22 But it is not just a matter of nationalism; it is also the fact that the obscene inequalities of the global system are a constant reminder that the so-called international community has neither the will nor the interest in effecting the transformations required for a sane and decent world order. This is not to absolve the local Haitian

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ruling class from its utter failure, but to indicate that it is not alone in its resistance to social change and equity. Not surprisingly, the vast majority of Haitians eking out a miserable living in a bankrupt economy are exhausted and disenchanted. The year 2004, which marked Haiti’s bicentennial, became a nightmarish sequence of civil violence and foreign intrusion, culminating in another occupation that has failed to stem the country’s continuing and deepening crisis. There is little to indicate any systematic and progressive transformation of Haitian society; the abiding chasm between rulers and ruled, wealthy and poor—and the persistent pattern of destructive foreign interference—augur poorly for the immediate future. Haiti’s crisis is thus profound and systemic, and there are few signs that it will be resolved in the foreseeable future. The dominant forces at both the domestic and international levels are unwilling or incapable of extricating the country from its severe underdevelopment and its authoritarian predicament. The question then is whether there is an alternative to this bleak reality; is a rupture with despotism, ungovernability, and material degradation feasible? To paraphrase Antonio Gramsci, while an analysis of past and present invites a strong pessimism of the intellect, there is also the historical reality that no condition is permanent. Indeed, Haitians have always struggled against all odds. As slaves in the age of unfettered white supremacy, they fought for their freedom and defeated the all-powerful French Empire and established an independent nation. It is true, as this book intends to show, that the making of Haiti failed to fulfill its promise, but it did indicate that at particular junctures political actors matter and can generate unexpected historical outcomes. At the moment, the source of some hope resides in the growing but fragile networks of community organizations that are inventing means of survival for the poor; these networks defy the ugly realities of squalor and violence. They offer an alternative to the existing predicament and are the embryonic forms of responsive, accountable power. Whether they can go beyond their local reach remains questionable, but they show that the possibility of hope is never completely foreclosed.23 On their own, these organizations comprising civil society cannot, however, be the solution to Haiti’s utter decay; only a legitimate, democratic, and effective state can offer a comprehensive way out of the current predicament. Only the state can redress fundamental inequalities, establish a national infrastructure, and provide the systematic planning required

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for economic development. The fundamental question then is whether Haitians have the capacity, the means, and the will to build such a state. The absence of class hegemony, the persisting gulf between rulers and ruled, and the massive disparities of power dividing the few from the many bode poorly for such a massive undertaking. Failing to engage in this undertaking leads, however, to certain catastrophe. Paradoxically, Haiti’s best hope is that the threat and fear of an impending disaster will invite a drastic transformation of past and current behavior. Following this overview, in Chapter 2, I state how I interpret the concept of the habitus. I differentiate it from the conventional political science’s notion of “political culture.”24 The latter refers to the patterns of people’s psychological “orientation toward political objects” that express their “cognitions, feelings, and evaluations.” It is not clear, however, why and how this political culture lying within one of three categories—“parochial,” “subject,” and “participant”— morphs into one or the other to eventually culminate in the “civic culture.”25 In fact, “political culture” seems to be a frozen and almost unchangeable attribute of the psychological makeup of a nation. Moreover, the concept easily collapses into tautology. For instance, a society is modern and scientific because individuals have modern and scientific values. There is also the strategic reality that the theory of “political culture” is deeply embedded in what Immanuel Wallerstein has called “European universalism.”26 It portrays the “civic culture” as the unique product of Western liberal capitalism, which is the only civilization capable of ushering in “modernity” and progress. In this sense, the spread of “Western values” and indeed Western imperialism and interventionism become legitimate tools in the fight against backwardness and underdevelopment. “Political culture” represents therefore a form of Orientalism, “a mode of reifying and essentializing the other” that seeks to “demonstrate the inherent superiority of the Western world.” 27 It depicts non-Western civilizations as lacking the attributes necessary for the journey to modernity and as “suffering a sort of cultural lockjaw, which could be considered a cultural malady.”28 It is easy to understand how curing this “malady” has legitimated past and present forms of Western domination and expansionism. As Wallerstein puts it, The powerful were justified in having their privileged position because it made it possible for them to assist the escape of those

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who were locked into a sort of cul-de-sac. With the aid of the Western world, [non-Western] civilizations might break through the limits that their own civilizations had placed on their cultural . . . possibilities. This Western dominance was consequently no doubt a temporary and transitional phenomenon, but one that was essential to the progress of the world, and in the direct interest of those over whom domination was now being imposed.29

In short, the drastic paradigmatic insufficiencies and the strategic dangers of “political culture” are thus an invitation to abandon altogether this explanatory framework. Using Haiti as a case study, I attempt in the next chapter to offer an alternative theory based on the concept of the habitus. NOTES 1. Ruth Berins Collier and David Collier, Shaping the Political Arena (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991), pp. 27–39. 2. Paul David, “Clio and the Economics of QWERTY,” American Economic Review 76, no. 2 (May 1985): 332. 3. Immanuel Wallerstein, The Decline of American Power (New York: The New Press, 2003), p. 68. 4. Pierre Bourdieu, In Other Words: Essays Towards a Reflexive Sociology (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1990), pp. 9, 61, 77. 5. Franklin Midy, “Le Pouvoir: Volonté de Puissance et d’Humiliation,” Chemins Critiques 5, no. 1 (January 2001): 75–104. 6. Louis-Joseph Janvier, Les Constitutions d’Haïti (1801–1885) (Paris: C. Marpon and E. Flammarion, 1886), pp. 1–25; see also Claude Moïse, Le Projet National de Toussaint Louverture (Port-au-Prince: Éditions Mémoire, 2001), pp. 29–34. 7. Laurent Dubois, Avengers of the New World (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2004), pp. 245–246. 8. Claude Moïse, Constitutions et Luttes de Pouvoir en Haïti, vol. 1: La Faillite des Classes Dirigeantes (1804–1915) (Montreal: CIDIHCA, 1988); Moïse, Constitutions et Luttes de Pouvoir en Haïti, vol. 2: De l’Occupation Etrangère à la Dictature Macoute (1915–1987) (Montreal: CIDIHCA, 1990); Moïse, Une Constitution dans la Tourmente (Montreal: Éditions Images, 1994). 9. Pierre Pluchon, “Introduction: Haïti la Veille de la Révolution,” in Alexandre-Stanislas de Wimpffen, Haïti au XVIII Siècle, edition introduced and annotated by Pierre Pluchon (Paris: Karthala, 1993), p. 34. 10. Pierre Pluchon, Toussaint Louverture (Paris: Fayard, 1989), p. 552. 11. Pluchon, “Introduction: Haïti la Veille de la Révolution,” p. 30. 12. See, for instance, the racist account of colonial life in Haiti in de Wimpffen, Haïti au XVIII Siècle.

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13. Mary A. Renda, Taking Haiti (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2001); Hans Schmidt, The United States Occupation of Haiti, 1915–1934 (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1995). 14. Igor Kopytoff, ed., The African Frontier (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987). 15. Robert Fatton Jr., Haiti’s Predatory Republic (Boulder: Lynne Rienner Publishers, 2002). 16. Antonio Gramsci, Selections from Prison Notebooks (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1971), p. 52. 17. Ibid.; see also Joseph Femia, Gramsci’s Political Thought (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987), p. 25. 18. Gabriel Marcella, “The International Community and Haiti: A Proposal for Cooperative Sovereignty,” presented at the National/International Symposium “The Future of Democracy and Development in Haiti,” Washington, DC, March 17–18, 2005. 19. “An International Protectorate Could Bring Stability to Haiti,” Miami Herald, November 23, 2004. 20. As Francis Fukuyama, State-Building (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2004), p. 38, points out, “If nation-building means the creation of self-sustaining state capacity that can survive once foreign advice and support are withdrawn, then the number of historical cases where this has happened successfully drops to a depressingly small handful.” 21. Ibid., p. 103. 22. The Creole word blanc does not merely imply “white,” but also encompasses the idea of the foreigner, the non-Haitian. 23. Jennie M. Smith, When the Hands Are Many (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2001). 24. Gabriel A. Almond and Sidney Verba, The Civic Culture (Boston: Little Brown, 1965); a recent revision and revival of the “political culture” paradigm is offered by Lawrence E. Harrison, The Central Liberal Truth (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006). As we shall see in forthcoming chapters, Harrison argues that Haiti’s underdevelopment and despotic tradition both are the result of the country’s African culture. More specifically, Harrison contends that the Vodou religion is responsible for Haiti’s ills. This perspective, I will suggest, is mistaken and ultimately racist. 25. Ibid., pp. 17–26. 26. Immanuel Wallerstein, European Universalism: The Rhetoric of Power (New York: The New Press, 2006). 27. Ibid., p. 75. See also Edward Said, Orientalism (New York: Vintage, 2003). 28. Ibid. 29. Ibid.

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Habitus, Political Culture, and African Legacies

THE OVERWHELMING MAJORITY of Haitian rulers, including Toussaint Louverture, Jean-Jacques Dessalines, François Duvalier, and indeed the elected and twice-deposed president of the Republic, Jean-Bertrand Aristide, have claimed that their own person embodied the popular will and that God had sanctified their mission. Haitian rulers have thus tended to run the country like messianic presidential monarchs. They have in their majority sought to suppress challenges to their supremacy and stifle the autonomous development of popular forms of power. Bent on monopolizing the political arena and convinced of their unique and direct relationship with the masses, they have shown little sympathy for democratic practice. JeanJacques Dessalines, military commander of the rebellious slaves and first ruler of an independent Haiti, nurtured the roots of the patronizing type of personal authoritarianism that Toussaint had implanted.1 On the very day he was named governor-general for life, he warned his compatriots against any form of dissent: And you, people. Remember that I sacrificed everything to fly to your defense—my parents, children, fortune, and that I am now rich only by dint of your freedom; that my name has become anathema to all those peoples desiring slavery, and that the despots and tyrants pronounce my name only to curse the day that I was born; and if you either refuse or accept with reluctance the laws dictated to me for your well-being by the spirit that watches over your destiny, you will deserve the fate of ungrateful people.2

Dessalines and most of his successors firmly believed in the messianic nature of their authority and lorded it over le peuple with 13

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the most acute paternalism.3 In 1837, Jonathan Brown defined Haiti’s authoritarianism as “a sort of republican monarchy sustained by the bayonet.”4 The question, then, is what are the roots and causes of this tradition? To address this issue, I suggest Pierre Bourdieu’s concept of habitus. Habitus should not be confused with habit or “political culture.” Habitus is a dialectical phenomenon that simultaneously structures and is structured by historical realities; it is a “structured structure” grounded in the material realities of a particular period. It engenders habit-forming practices and thoughts that correspond to the strategic possibilities opened to individuals and classes in a given historical moment. The habitus frames the field of the socially possible by generating historically determined expectations about “life chances”;5 thus, it erects culturally fabricated limitations to human action and shapes political predispositions. Ultimately, the habitus is rooted in society’s material matrix. As Bourdieu explains, Through the habitus, the structure which has produced it governs practice, not by the processes of a mechanical determinism, but through the mediation of the orientations and limits it assigns to the habitus’s operations of invention. As an acquired system of generative schemes objectively adjusted to the particular conditions in which it is constituted, the habitus engenders all the thoughts, all the perceptions, and all the actions consistent with those conditions, and no others. . . . Because the habitus is an endless capacity to engender products—thoughts, perceptions, expressions, actions—whose limits are set by the historically and socially situated conditions of its production, the conditioned and conditional freedom it secures is as remote from a creation of unpredictable novelty as it is from a simple mechanical reproduction of the initial conditionings.6

It is important to emphasize the crucial differences between habitus and the concept of “political culture.”7 The latter attributes human practices to a particular “mind frame,” whereas the former is both effect and cause of historical situations. Advocates of political culture argue that underdevelopment is caused by traditional and backward values rather than historical, economic, or political legacies. They claim that underdeveloped polities have a “parochial” culture that blocks the emergence of “specialized political roles.” In this perspective, such societies suffer from “the comparative absence of expectations of change initiated by the political system,” because the “parochial expects nothing from

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the political system,” and parochialism itself is an “orientation,” the “internalized aspects of objects and relationships.”8 Thus, parochialism appears to reflect an ingrained and virtually immutable culture that condemns underdeveloped societies to permanent stagnation. The problem with such an approach is that it privileges culture as the causal agent, without explaining how the causal agent itself became the cause. This approach fails to answer satisfactorily why people of poor societies continue to adhere to an alleged repertoire of “irrational” behavior, a repertoire that condemns them to reproduce the very conditions of their miserable existence. Instead of elucidating the sources of these conditions, the cultural paradigm generates a tautology: poor people are irrational because their culture is irrational. As Peter Hall has pointed out, “Unless cultural theories can account for the origins of . . . attitudes by reference to the institutions that generate and reproduce them, they do little more than summon up a deus ex machina that is itself unexplainable.”9 Moreover, and more importantly, there is no reason to believe that “modern” or “postmodern” societies exhibit a far higher degree of rationality than “developing” ones. People everywhere avail themselves of multiple methods to influence events and ultimately believe in different and indeed contradictory modes of causality. Depending on circumstances and objectives, they may resort to modern “rational” science while simultaneously appealing to the powers of the occult and sorcery. People of third world nations, like Haiti, are certainly not the only ones making use of these multiple and often inconsistent forms of explaining and shaping social reality. As Michael Schatzberg has pointed out correctly, “Reliance on alternative understandings of causality may be quite universal.”10 After all, under Ronald Reagan’s presidency, astrology played a decisive role in the day-to-day running of the White House. Similarly, the administration of George W. Bush is deeply embedded in Christian fundamentalism and has implemented “political agendas that seem to be driven by religious motivations and biblical worldviews.”11 Advocates of political culture and modernization have a static understanding of people’s values; they define these values as being either “modern” or “traditional.” This clear-cut dichotomy belies realities in both advanced and developing nations. However, the concept of the habitus rejects such simplistic antinomies; while it posits that the habitus is grounded in the material foundations of society, it does not assume that people cannot espouse alternative sets of values,

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which are independent from these material foundations. In other words, the authoritarian habitus can coexist with an emancipatory habitus; the dominance of one over the other, however, depends on the material structures of society. There can also be a gap between imagination and reality, aspirations and possibilities; for instance, the Haitian Revolution embodied the slaves’ quest for freedom, the belief that anything was, as it were, possible, without which the revolution itself would have never occurred. An emancipatory habitus was thus fueling the slaves’ revolutionary drive; in this sense it became material force. While this habitus contributed to the revolution’s success in overthrowing French colonialism and the rule of the white masters, it could not on its own erect a truly democratic and equitable society. The legacy of French autocracy, the constraining parameters of the plantation economy, the supremacy of white racist powers in the global system, and domestic class contradictions blocked the full development of the emancipatory habitus. The slogans of freedom, equality, and solidarity that flamed the fire of the revolution were soon confronting the harsh realities of severe material constraints and ultimately collapsed under the weight of manifold distortions and regressions. They left the stage to a triumphant authoritarian habitus. The concept of the habitus does not therefore deny the potential of people’s imagination, an imagination that at times overtakes historical possibilities and sets agendas that only future generations can fulfill. It rejects the fallacy that culture freezes individuals into set patterns of behavior and paralyzes history. Culture is not simply divided crudely into two incompatible and historically separate worldviews encapsulating the “traditional” and the “modern” stages of human development. Lawrence E. Harrison, a former director of the USAID mission in Port-au-Prince, falls into the cultural trap in his account of Haiti’s current predicament: I believe that culture is the only possible explanation for Haiti’s unending tragedy: the values and attitudes of the average Haitian are profoundly influenced by traditional African culture, particularly the voodoo religion, and by slavery under the French. . . . The Haitian people see themselves, their neighbors, their country, and the world in ways that foster autocratic and corrupt politics, extreme social injustice, and economic stagnation. . . . [Haitian society] is characterized by a limited radius of trust and identification, usually confined to the family. . . . The imprint of African culture, particularly Vodun, and slavery on Haiti, sustained by long

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years of isolation from progressive ideas, open political systems, and economic dynamism, is, I believe, the only possible explanation for the continuing Haitian tragedy.12

From this perspective, the African legacy has generated a backward-looking and superstitious culture. Because Haitians lack scientific and secular values as well as a strong individualistic ethos, they cannot hope to construct a modern, democratic society. In this version of things, Haiti’s tragedy, from its very inception, is its “Africanness,” which prevented it from acquiring Western norms and methods. In the eyes of those who give culture paradigmatic power, the country’s underdevelopment therefore reflects its rejection of the rational West and its inevitable espousal of its ancestral roots. In fact, they see Haiti as engulfed in the paralyzing sorcery of Vodou. Again, Harrison expresses unambiguously this culturalist vision: Voodoo has features that resist progress. Voodoo is not a religion that concerns itself with ethical issues: “the notions of sin and a moral law . . . are alien to Vodun.” Its followers’ destinies are believed to be controlled by hundreds of spirits, the loa, very human and capricious, who must be propitiated through ceremonies if one is to realize one’s desires. Voodoo is a species of the sorcery . . . [that is] one of the principal obstacles to progress. . . . “A society in which magic and witchcraft flourish today is a sick society ruled by tension, fear, and moral disorder. Sorcery is a costly mechanism for managing conflict and preserving the status quo, which is, importantly, what African society is about.” Voodoo discourages initiative, rationality, achievement, education, and a number of other factors.13

Haiti, in this view, is nothing but a Guinée américaine—an entity symbolizing a refusal of civilized modernity and an embrace of the lifestyle of the noble savage. The roots of this entity were implanted long ago and grew deep into the Haitian terrain with Toussaint’s demise. Pierre Pluchon, in his 1989 book on Toussaint Louverture, portrays the man as the embodiment of Western rationality fighting against the African irrationality of former slaves. For Pluchon, the eventual defeat of Toussaint ended Haiti’s hope of modernity and plunged the country into backwardness: The values that Louverture wanted to be the driving force behind a building project in the image of white societies are given the cold

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shoulder, rejected. The governor thinks as a European boss, his partisans as sons of Africa. He is the only one wanting to restore Saint-Domingue, its plantations, and its ports to the glory that he admired throughout his whole life. . . . Toussaint assesses the decided reluctance of his own people to follow him in the fulfillment of a collective project that is foreign to them—they who aspire only to do what they want and to cultivate a little field of their own. It is the clash between civilized man and man in the state of nature. . . . His blood brothers abandon him, refuse to reach for the heights that he designates for them: they turn away, succumbing neither to persuasion nor to violence.14

Thus, in Pluchon’s eyes, the Haitians’ flight from rationality is due to their African essence and their innate desire to return to their ancestral roots and create a Guinée américaine. This essence, as he describes it, is based on supernatural and paranormal beliefs, which he holds to be responsible for the slaves’ use of poisonous means against their colonial masters:15 The alleged poisoning cases catch like wildfire in the north where the acculturation of the masters, with more of a feel for magical reasoning than for a rational approach, is strong. One finds quite the opposite in the west and south; this type of crime does not arise, because there, long-standing and frequent mixing of the races guarantees the domination of European causality over African supernatural interpretations.16

In this sense, because of their cultural and indeed umbilical attachment to l’Africanité, Haitians have a mentalité that sets them apart from the currents of modern civilization. I want to contend that explanations of this kind, which represent a form of cultural determinism verging on an unconscious racism, are mistaken. This is not to deny that Africa’s legacy shaped Haitian political behavior, conceptions of hierarchy, moral norms, and forms of resistance to authority. The point, however, is what do we mean by an African legacy, and what was the impact of that legacy on the making of Haiti? It is estimated that in 1789, on the eve of the revolution, 465,000 slaves, 31,000 whites, and 28,000 free coloreds populated SaintDomingue.17 Clearly then, Saint-Domingue was overwhelmingly a slaves’ territory—that is, it was African. 18 But what does “African” imply? Slaves came from different areas of Africa, and a significant minority of them were born on the island. The extremely high death

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rates that afflicted them, due to the violent and exhausting discipline of plantation labor they endured, caused a continuous influx of new African slaves.19 As a result, at the time of the revolution, two-thirds of the slaves were African-born, the so-called Bossales.20 While the condition of slavery and the reality of Africanness generated among slaves a sense of community, this community was also divided by original differences in ethnicity and language and by the status they acquired in the slave-plantation system itself. In other words, it would be wrong to exaggerate the bonds of affection and unity derived from a totalizing idea of “Africa.” Ira Berlin points to the fact that rather than signifying a unique identity, Africanness evokes the multiple, contradictory, and at times antagonistic “nations” that it embodies. Moreover, the people of these “nations” were not frozen into their own practices; they underwent fundamental changes and adaptation in their new milieu of the Americas. They were creolized: Africa housed hundreds, perhaps thousands, of different “nations.” . . . The language, religion, domestic organization, aesthetics, political sensibilities, and military traditions that Africans carried from the interior to the plantations cannot be understood in their generality but only in their particulars, for the enslaved peoples were not Africans but Akan, Bambara, Fon, Igbo, or Mande. . . . New identities [in the Americas] took a variety of forms. . . . Competition, as well as cooperation, within the quarter compounded the remnants of ancient enmities, giving nationality or ethnicity an ever-changing reality and with it new meanings to Akan, Bambara, and Fon identity. In this changing world, nationality or ethnicity did not rest upon some primordial communal solidarity, cultural attribute, or common experience, for these qualities could be adopted or discarded at will. In the Americas, men and women identified as Angolans, Igbos, or Males frequently gained such identities not from their actual birthplace or the place from which they disembarked but because they spoke, gestured, and behaved like—or associated with—Angolans, Igbos, or Males. For most Africans, as for their white counterparts, identity was a garment which might be worn or discarded, rather than a skin which never changed its spots. . . . Choice, as well as imposition or birthright, determined who the new arrivals would be. . . . In short, identity formation for African slaves was neither automatic nor unreflective, neither uniform nor unilinear.21

Thus, the relative solidarity of the slaves was not an indication of the permanence of some African essence embodied in the creation of

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a Guinée américaine. In fact, the Middle Passage, the conditions leading to revolution, and the very process of eradicating French colonialism and fighting for independence transformed African slaves into Haitians. Slaves were not waging war and dying in the name of a primordial African essence; they were fighting for their individual freedom and unexpectedly ended up creating a nation of free blacks in a hostile and white-supremacist world. The model for such an enterprise was neither in Africa nor in the racist French colonial apparatus; in fact, there was no model. Africa came to confront this problématique only in the mid– twentieth century, more than 150 years later; it is simply hard to see how pristine African cultural antecedents could have played a determinant role in the making of Haiti. Moreover, to talk of Haiti’s African essence is to ignore the reality that slaves came from very different regions of the continent with diverse cultural, political, and material systems. Thus, although Haiti’s population was African or of African origins, it was extremely heterogeneous. As David Geggus explains, Split up into small units, tied six days a week to plantation labor, the slaves constituted a random agglomeration of individuals from diverse cultures; they spoke different languages and were at different stages of assimilation into colonial society. On a typical sugar estate of 200 slaves there could be Africans from twenty or more different linguistic groups. Mountain plantations were much smaller and even more isolated. Everywhere in Saint Domingue, however, Bantu slaves known as “Congos” constituted the largest of the African groups; they formed a third of the African population in the plains and well over half in the mountains. On the lowland sugar plantations about half the adults were Creoles—that is, individuals born locally and raised in slavery; they made up perhaps one third of the total slave population. Accustomed to producing their own food and marketing the surplus, they tended to be better off than the Africans. Fluent in the local Creole tongue, superficially Christianized, and united by at least limited family ties, they constituted the slave upper class. From their ranks were chosen the domestics, artisans, and slave-drivers who formed the slave elite. Elite slaves would have some familiarity with French, the language of the master class, and a few could read and write.22

The heterogeneity of Africanité contributed also to the persistence of tensions between slaves of different origins and to ethnic exclusivism.23 It did not, however, prevent the development of bonds

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of solidarity and community. There is no doubt that African traditions played a significant role in shaping these common norms, beliefs, and interests; but the Caribbean environment changed them drastically. This is especially the case with Vodou, which owes its initial implantation in Saint-Domingue to the multiplicity of interactions between religious practices of the Fon and the Yoruba of Dahomey, and the “Congos” of Central Africa.24 At the time of the revolution, Vodou was not a unified system of belief replicating a cohesive African cultural system into colonial Saint-Domingue. Relocated to the new environment of the plantation system and maroon communities, facing the impact of competing African systems of beliefs and a colonial Christianity, Vodou evolved into a new syncretic religion. As a fluid and living religion, absorbing and transforming other religious conceptions, Vodou has always been in flux to respond to the cosmological demands of its practitioners. In this perspective, Vodou’s pluralistic Africanness was the raw material upon which Haitians built their own religion to satisfy the needs of their own everyday life.25 Not surprisingly, Vodou’s diversity accommodated multiple ethnic claims and allegiances and thus facilitated the development of a wider moral community. This community in turn provided the space within which slaves associated, mobilized, and asserted their existential concerns outside of the white supremacist cage. To that degree, Vodou ceremonies and rituals imparted to its adherents an esprit de corps that helped fashion the “apocalyptic visions of freedom”26 without which the revolution would have been impossible. Vodou may also have forged a sacred and conspiratorial pact among the original leaders of the long war of independence; it inspired the ceremony of Bois Caïman where, it is believed, slave drivers headed by Boukman took a blood oath to wage war to win their freedom. Long celebrated by the “epic rhetoric of the Haitian tradition”27 as the pivotal moment that launched the Haitian Revolution, Bois Caïman seems in fact to embody a paradigmatic foundational myth. In other words, Bois Caïman is not an idle tale, an imaginary story, but rather a real event that has been aggrandized to serve and enhance Haitian nationalism.28 Deeply etched in the Haitian psyche, it marks a historical rupture with the colonial past and the unique beginning of a new people in their victorious struggle for emancipation. The story of Bois Caïman has changed and indeed has had multiple versions; its significance can wax and wane, and its interpretations have varied according to political and ideological interests, but the story

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has remained central to the fabric of Haitian society. It is indeed Haiti’s foundational myth. As Geggus argues: [The] Bois Caïman meeting has generally been mistaken for an earlier, probably larger and more important one, at which the insurrection was planned and that appears to have been a predominantly secular occasion. The ceremony’s significance was to sacralize a political development already brought to maturity. Oath-taking and divination forged bonds and gave courage, but the conspirators of 1791 were obeying other imperatives than just the voices of the mystères. Or as Haitian peasants still say, “Konplo pi fo pase wanga” (Conspiracy is stronger than magic charm).29

Thus, the role Vodou played as a transplanted African system of belief in the making of the Haitian Revolution may have been overstated.30 There is evidence that a majority of the key leaders of the uprising of 1791—Boukman himself as well as Jean-François and Toussaint—were “fairly certainly secular leaders” rather than Vodou priests or believers.31 However, if we take Vodou to mean a pluralistic whole, including fundamental elements of both Rada and Petro rites, it is clear that it inspired Bois Caïman.32 So while Vodou may have been a form of lakol lanmidon,33 which hardened the cohesiveness of the slaves and offered them a “space of freedom in the midst of a world of bondage,”34 it did so, particularly among subordinates, because it tolerated their religious and ethnic pluralism. In fact, it may well be that it is this very pluralism, accentuated by Saint-Domingue’s special circumstances, that facilitated the slaves’ attraction and adherence to Vodou.35 The multiplicity of ethnic backgrounds, the humiliating and dehumanizing Middle Passage, the divisions between African-born and Creole slaves, and the repressive viciousness of the colonial plantation economy eroded, disfigured, and ultimately transformed the “African soul,” if it ever existed. The point is not to deny Haiti’s Africanness, but to assert that “retentions” and “survivals” are not static; they reflect more profound discontinuities than permanent continuities.36 From the first, then, rather than being a pristine reflection of a frozen African heritage, Haiti’s culture was more a product of accommodation, resistance, and change in the new material environment of the colonial, racist plantation complex of the Caribbean. It expressed a disparate and contradictory amalgam of ever changing experiences and conditions; it symbolized a “callaloo” phenomenon.37

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This callaloo phenomenon is well described in Sidney Mintz and Richard Price’s classic, The Birth of African-American Culture: The Africans who reached the New World did not compose, at the outset, groups. In fact, in most cases, it might even be more accurate to view them as crowds, and very heterogeneous crowds at that. Without diminishing the probable importance of some core of common values, and the occurrence of situations where a number of slaves of common origin might indeed have been aggregated, the fact is that these were not communities of people at first, and they could only become communities by processes of cultural change. What the slaves undeniably shared at the outset was their enslavement; all—or nearly all—else had to be created by them. In order for slave communities to take shape, normative patterns could be created only on the basis of particular forms of social interaction. While immense quantities of knowledge, information, and belief must have been transported in the minds of the enslaved, they were not able to transfer the human complement of their traditional institutions to the New World.38

Thus, slaves were compelled to invent new ways of coping with an alien and harsh environment. Re-rooting themselves in the plantation fields, they had to map, with creolized African memories, the trajectory of their emancipation, which ultimately led to the creation of new citizens in a new nation. Far from meaning the “‘Europeanization’ of the oppressed slaves,” as Paul Lovejoy would have it,39 the process of creolization was a complicated invention of the enslaved themselves. It represented a fabricated amalgam of distinct cultures, ethnicities, and practices that were all transported to a completely different political economy. In this amalgam, neither “Europe” nor “Africa” prevailed. Moreover, the resulting creolization was certainly not a “mold that reenforced the domination of people of European descent.”40 In fact, nothing illustrates better creolization than the language of the Haitian Revolution: Haitian Creole. Thus, John Thornton may be right to claim: On the eve of the revolution in Saint-Domingue, Kikongo was . . . in all likelihood, the most commonly spoken first language, or was a close runner up to French. In fact, the creole leaders of the revolution in 1791 complained that most of their followers could “scarcely make out two words of French.”41

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This, however, did not mean that when the slaves were plotting their revolution they did so principally in French or Kikongo. In reality, as Price argues, “Haitians would in great majority have been speaking to each other in their own shared language—neither Kikongo nor French—but a new language that they (and generations of enslaved Africans and their descendants who preceded them) had created in Saint-Domingue: Haitian Creole.”42 Creolization went beyond language itself; it manifested itself in the highly symbolic act of naming. The very fact that upon declaring their independence as the first modern black republic the insurgents chose the Amerindian name Haiti, rather than an African one, indicates that their collective memories, imagination, and identification went beyond their distinctively African heritage.43 What these insurgents were seeking was primarily the end of white colonialism and racism and the establishment in the New World of the first independent black nation. When in 1804 Dessalines ordered the killing of the remaining white colonists to pay “these true cannibals back crime for crime, war for war, outrage for outrage,” he did so not to cleanse Africa of European atrocities but as he put it to “avenge America.”44 Thus, while Africanisms persisted and informed behavior, thoughts, and organizations, they did not represent “direct continuities from the African homelands.”45 They became inspiring elements of a new culture struggling to implant the dignity and the freedom of black people in a thoroughly racist and hostile world system. Haitians forged their identity by fighting against a global white supremacist system that excluded and rejected them from the moral community of the West. This exclusion reflected the conviction of Europeans and Americans that the slaves’ quest for liberty that led to their revolutionary insurrection and the making of Haiti itself were all “unthinkable.”46 Prior to 1791, the overwhelming sentiment among white colonialists was that slaves were docile and either resigned or happy with their condition. For most white masters, the notion that slaves could take up arms and wage war against them was unimaginable.47 It was not just that slaves were blissful and obedient, but if they failed to be so, they would suffer the brutal and often mortal punishment of colonial authorities. Slaveholders had therefore the amazing capacity to portray the slave as a violent barbarian capable of atrocious crimes while simultaneously claiming that he was meek, lazy, and submissive and in need of colonial assistance. This dichotomic ideology was a form of camouflaging the real despotism of the plantation system and justifying Europe’s mission civilisatrice. It made slave insurrections even more “unthinkable.”

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Barré Saint-Venant, a former colonist in Saint-Domingue, expressed well such “unthinkability.” First, he described Africans as the laziest of human beings, who could acquire some degree of civilization only if transplanted to “temperate” shores and compelled to labor. Once habituated to the conditions of hard work, Africans virtually became a new specie. Thus, for Barré Saint-Venant, thanks to slavery, the creolized Africans of the Caribbean morphed into robust industrious beings who no longer “resembled” the slothful “nègre d’Afrique.”48 In this perspective, slavery and the uprooting of Africans were a blessing, a contribution to Europe’s civilizing mission. It tamed the savagery of Africans and began the slow process of humanizing them. The Comte de Léaumont, a contemporary of Barré Saint-Venant’s, expressed the conventional wisdom of the time: Who can be unaware that the African Negro, in his savage and arid land, almost epitomizes the ferocious animal? The slave trade was for this species of mankind a civilization begun, and by means of the trading posts humanely established on the coasts of different rivers—the Zaire, the Congo, the Senegal, the Mozambique—the ancient and barbaric customs of these tribes were softened and changed. The most avid practitioners of these horrible feasts were the Ibos, the Mondongues, and the Bambaras. Slavery in Saint-Domingue, very far from being cruel as some have dared to say, was gentle and profited the Negroes.49

Thus, civilization was impossible without the coercive supervision of the colonialists; slaves did not know and could not imagine what freedom entailed. They were idle brutes. Left to their own devices, they would revert to an uncivilized life of indolence and voluptuous pleasures. For most colonialists and Europeans, the idea that slaves could revolt against their oppression and entertain thoughts of human dignity was indeed unthinkable. If they revolted, it was neither to gain freedom nor to build a new nation; no, it was simply to reclaim the life of idleness corresponding to their African ancestral roots.50 Because of these roots, slaves had few needs and desires; they cherished an existence of sheer indolence. As the Comte de Léaumont put it, “For the African, the absence of work is the best and most precious of gifts.”51 Haitians were thus inherently lazy and they lacked the individual drive to produce and enjoy wealth. Without coercive labor practices, Haitians were neither interested in production nor consumption; on their own, they were irrational economic actors condemned to backwardness. According to Barré Saint-Venan, “It is not the desire to work

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for themselves which has driven them to take up arms, but rather the longing for idleness which is so dear to them that they prefer it to all the pleasures that work can bring.”52 These voices of the past have their echo in modern, contemporary social sciences. The view that what causes underdevelopment and autocracy in poor countries such as Haiti is the incapacity of their people to generate a will to exploit economic opportunities is widespread. While this incapacity is no longer seen as necessarily hereditary, it is deeply rooted in the mental makeup of individuals. Influenced by Max Weber’s celebrated theory on the decisive role played by the protestant ethic in the development of capitalism and bourgeois individualism, cultural or psychological theories posit that norms and values are the causative factor in economic and political development.53 The fundamental issue for these theories is whether the “entrepreneurial drive” associated with its corollary elements of “rationality” and “trust” is the dominant form of individual behavior. When this drive is lacking, society will remain “traditional,” “parochial,” and “undifferentiated.”54 David C. McClelland has argued forcefully for such an approach. He contends that development stemmed from a psychological attribute, which he terms the “need for achievement,” or “n Achievement.” He defines it as “a desire to do well, not so much for the sake of social recognition or prestige, but to attain an inner feeling of personal accomplishment.”55 Development is thus a matter of increasing the amount of “n Achievement” in “low achieving countries.” To do so, McClelland advocates the transfer of entrepreneurial skills from modern to traditional societies through an inexpensive process whereby citizens of the latter would be exposed to the “achievement motivation training” of the former. The values that generated Western industrial capitalism would thus replace the irrational and backward norms that have paralyzed poor countries like Haiti. Individuals of these countries would soon acquire a new mentalité corresponding to the characteristic of the “modern man.” But who is this modern man? According to Alex Inkeles and David Smith, he “is an informed participant citizen; he has a marked sense of personal efficacy; he is highly independent and autonomous in his relations to traditional sources of influence, especially when he is making basic decisions about how to conduct his personal affairs; and he is ready for new experiences and ideas, that is, he is relatively openminded and cognitively flexible.”56 This “modern man,” however, is

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an idealized portrait of the paradigmatic bourgeois of the Western world;57 he seems unencumbered by structural constraints, as if his intellectual makeup is the deus ex machina driving with irresistible strength the forces of progress. In fact, in a revised version of modernization theory, Ronald Inglehart and Christian Welzel argue that while “modernization is not linear” it “brings cultural changes that lead to the emergence and flourishing of democratic institutions. The growth of human autonomy is the theme underlying the processes of modernization, rising self-expression values and democratization. These processes give rise to increasing humanistic societies, that is, societies with a people-centered orientation.”58 Moreover, modernization is marked by a developmental sequence; while the phase of industrialization gives rise to rationalization, bureaucratization, and secularization, these phenomena are not necessarily associated with democratic politics—they are as likely to coexist with authoritarian regimes.59 Inglehart and Welzel contend, however, that democracy becomes almost unavoidable in the postindustrial stage—the stage when “self-expression values” become hegemonic. Thus, “as the percentage of the work force in the service sector grows and the size of the industrial sector shrinks, a society’s belief system tends to shift from survival to self-expression values.”60 Self-expression values “give priority to individual liberty over collective discipline, human diversity over group conformity, and civic autonomy over state authority.”61 There is ultimately a striking resemblance between Inglehart and Welzel’s postmodern and Inkeles and Smith’s modern individual. In both the old and new paradigm of modernization, the shape and nature of society reflects a “state of mind”; what distinguishes them is that while the former assumed that modernization entailed Westernization, the latter contends that this is simply not the case. For Inglehart and Welzel, modernization is a set of socioeconomic changes that generates particular worldviews culminating in self-expression values that in turn make democracy almost inevitable. Given Haiti’s economic underdevelopment, the “mind-set” of Haitians is inimical to the development of a democratic culture. Inglehart and Welzel state with certainty that “under severe existential pressures, prodemocratic values that emphasize human self-expression cannot take root.”62 The problem with this unambiguous and deterministic assertion is that it could never explain how enslaved people could rise up and demand their freedom. It is bound to ignore the immense democratic impact of the Haitian Revolution. As Dubois states,

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By creating a society in which all people, of all colors, were granted freedom and citizenship, the Haitian Revolution forever transformed the world. It was a central part of the destruction of slavery in the Americas, and therefore a crucial moment in the history of democracy, one that laid the foundation for the continuing struggles for human rights everywhere. In this sense we are all descendants of the Haitian Revolution, and responsible to these ancestors.63

Treating the Haitian Revolution in such a way is, however, impossible for modernization theory. In fact, modernization theory conceives Haiti as outside the main currents of history—that is, outside the rational Western developmental enterprise—in spite of its revolution and in spite of its centrality to European imperialism. Such denials explain why Wallace Hodges, an American Baptist missionary, could contend that being neither Westernized nor part of the JudeoChristian tradition, Haitians externalize their guilt and are thus not responsible for their destiny. Allegedly, they can even steal without shame. Not surprisingly, for this school of thought, Haitians are different from “modern,” “rational” individuals and are possessed by “anti-progress values.”64 In fact, Haitians are prisoners of the whims of the “spirits” and feel in “continuous danger” and thus are “afraid of each other.” In this culturalist vision, Haitians emigrate not because of economic distress or political repression, but simply because they hate each other. In short, as Hodges put it, “You will find a high degree of paranoia in Haiti.”65 But this is not all. Some advocates of cultural explanations go so far as to contend that Haitian child-rearing practices generate an irresponsible, immoral, and helpless individual who is condemned to live in a thoroughly “uncivil” culture.66 Robert Rotberg and Christopher Clague advance a similar argument: Most Haitians seem to rear their children in a manner that is traumatic and conducive to later conflict. . . . Haitian children are highly indulged. They receive and learn to expect immediate and intense physical gratification. . . . [They] become deficient in . . . basic trust. . . . The Haitian boy is unready for justice, stunted in his appreciation of the meaning of moral responsibility and . . . he despairs of his own potency as an autonomous individual.67

In this perspective, Haitian culture generates passive human beings destined to accept their squalor because their child training prevents them from acquiring the will to resist. Moreover, Rotberg

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and Clague argue that such passivity reflects the fact that Haitians are “accustomed to adjusting their expectations downward as their capabilities decline,” and are “so inured to misery that even prolonged decline across the subsistence threshold does not usually occasion the violence inherent in a society with stable or improving conditions.” 68 In this view, poverty breeds both poverty and child-rearing practices that in turn generate even more poverty. The culture of poverty invites also a sense of resignation and submissiveness that ultimately generates an irresistible attraction to authoritarianism. Not surprisingly, Rotberg and Clague conclude, “Haitians therefore can be said to need and expect strong dictatorship.”69 This line of argument can go so far as to claim that the island’s undemocratic tradition reflects a genetic Haitian aversion to political compromises.70 Racist comments of this kind reflect, as Michel-Rolph Trouillot argues, the “dangerous and resilient . . . idea that the Haitian political quagmire is due to some congenital disease of the Haitian mind . . . [such comments make] Haiti’s political dilemma immune to rational explanation and therefore to solutions that could be both just and practical.”71 While it is true that the authoritarian habitus has colored Haitian history, its rise and persistence can hardly be ascribed to some indigenous mental deficiency. The Haitian authoritarian habitus is neither a product of some intrinsic messianic attributes, nor the result of a natural submissiveness of loyal followers. Far from being a predilection for domination and blind obedience, or an innate aptitude derived from an African “essence,” it is rooted in a particular material and historical legacy. The revolution against slavery and the persistent open and “hidden” forms of popular resistance against the repressive reach of the state indicate clearly that Haitians do not have a particular affinity for, and attachment to, dictatorial rule. Indeed, the old practice of marronnage,72 of exiting first the spaces of slavery and then the regimented arena of a predatory state to create communities of freedom and cooperation, has demonstrated the remarkable capacity of the poor peasant and urban majorities to revolt against, and withstand, the most severe forms of exploitation and domination. The history of marronnage is the history of the constant quest for liberty and solidarity by the abused Haitian masses.73 Marronnage, however, was neither a full frontal assault on the structures of slave society nor a national strategy of emancipation and independence. While it may have generated a cultural, political, and military repertoire for the war of independence, it was not

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revolutionary. Marronnage represented more a brave and dangerous escape from the atrocious conditions on the plantations than a systematic and powerful challenge to colonial slavery. Slaves became marrons because they sought to become autonomous beings freed from coercive labor regimentation, insufficient food, and brutal punishments.74 In fact, it may well be that it was precisely because marronnage was becoming a shrinking, costly, and difficult “exit” from slavery, that slaves had no other alternative but revolutionary insurgency to “voice” their “disloyalty” to the system.75 As Geggus explains, Marronage was primarily an alternative to rebellion, a safety valve that helps explain the remarkable absence of slave revolts in eighteenth-century Saint Domingue. However, it must have been increasingly difficult to become a successful (rural) maroon after the enormous expansion of coffee cultivation in the mountains that began at mid-century, the extradition treaty of 1777 with Santo Domingo, and the Maniel treaty of 1785.76

Thus, while marronnage may not have been revolutionary in the sense that it did not seek a systemic seizure of power, it was certainly an effective “weapon of the weak.” 77 It was an “insidious” form of resistance that put “a considerable amount of real power in the hands of the slaves.”78 It generated a sense of community among runaway slaves and served as a theater of rehearsal for military strategies that proved essential to wage the war of independence.79 Marronnage triggered patterns of guerrilla warfare simply because it was the logical military tactic to confront the better armed and organized colonial power.80 Moreover, these techniques of guerrilla warfare seem to have been part of the arsenal of resistance brought to the New World by African-born slaves who had participated in African wars. This is not surprising given that the main geographical areas from which Africans were taken as slaves had been entangled in major civil wars and armed conflicts. Thus, a significant number of slaves had been soldiers who put their military skills to new use in Haiti.81 In fact, Thornton argues, African soldiers may well have provided the key element of the early success of the revolution. They might have enabled its survival when it was threatened by reinforced armies from Europe. Looking at the rebel slaves of Haiti as African veterans rather than as Haitian plantation workers may well prove to be the key that unlocks the mystery of the success of the largest slave revolt in history.82

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To that extent, African “retentions” handed to insurgents fundamental tools with which they freed themselves from the bondage of slavery; at the same time, however, they contributed to the establishment of militaristic and autocratic politics. Thus, as I demonstrate in Chapter 3, Janus-faced, these retentions operated like any other cultural influence of the time; they nurtured both resistance to despotism and an acceptance of a “hierarchical ethic.” In fact, they were not the determinant influence on the making of the Haitian authoritarian habitus. The principal roots of this habitus were implanted by the despotic structures of the plantation system, the unadulterated racism of the colonial enterprise, and the inevitable means slaves used to emancipate themselves. Thus, the aspirations for freedom, equality, and universal democratic rights crystallized in a profoundly constraining and hostile environment. Ultimately, they were overwhelmed by the harsh realities of domestic material scarcity and the international threats of aggression and sanctions.

NOTES 1. François Blancpain’s description of Toussaint is equally applicable to the other “founding fathers” of Haiti (La Condition des Paysans Haïtiens [Paris: Karthala, 2003], p. 84); see also pp. 81, 95, 99: [Toussaint] wanted a strong state, and therefore sufficiently rich, to maintain its rank among the other nations and to defend itself against all attack, especially those attacks with the goal of reestablishing the slave order. He had been raised in the popular traditions of the seventeenth century and had seen all the excesses that could cause revolutionary outbursts. He was in favor of authority over democracy, order over liberalism, work over nonchalance and idleness, religion over atheism or superstition, family over cohabitation. In the twentieth century, if he had lived until then, he would have chosen the motto “Work-Family-Homeland,” minus submission to the foreigner. [Toussaint] voulait un état fort et, par conséquent, suffisamment riche pour tenir son rang parmi les autres nations et de se défendre contre toute attaque, notamment celles qui auraient pour but le rétablissement de l’ordre esclavagiste. Il avait été élevé dans les traditions populaires du XVII siècle et avait vu tous les excès que pouvaient causer les débordements révolutionnaires. Il était pour l’autorité contre la démocratie, pour l’ordre contre le libéralisme, pour le travail contre la nonchalance et l’oisiveté, pour la religion contre l’athéisme ou la superstition, pour la famille contre l’union

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libre. Au XX siècle, s’il eût vécu jusque là, il eût opté pour la devise “Travail-Famille-Patrie,” la soumission á l’étranger en moins. 2. As quoted in Claude Moïse, Constitutions et Luttes de Pouvoir en Haïti, vol. 1: La Faillite des Classes Dirigeantes (1804–1915) (Montreal: CIDIHCA, 1988), p. 30 (my translation): Et toi peuple. . . . Rappelle-toi que j’ai tout sacrifié pour voler à ta défense, parents, enfants, fortune, et que maintenant je ne suis riche que de ta liberté; que mon nom est devenu en horreur à tous les peuples qui veulent l’esclavage, et que les despotes et les tyrans ne le prononcent qu’en maudissant le jour qui m’a vu naître; et si jamais tu refusais ou recevais en murmurant les lois que le génie qui veille à tes destinées me dictera pour ton bonheur tu mériteras le sort des peuples ingrats. See also Alex Dupuy, Haiti in the World Economy (Boulder: Westview Press, 1989), pp. 78–81. Under Dessalines, Haiti became an empire and Dessalines himself an emperor with absolute power. As Dupuy, Haiti in the World Economy, put it, “[Dessalines] was given the right to nominate his successor, make all laws, and nominate or revoke all functionaries and military officers. He controlled the finances of the nation, was named commander-in-chief of the armed forces, was responsible for internal security, and had the right to declare war, make peace, and establish relations with foreign powers” (p. 79). 3. Claude Moïse, Le Projet National de Toussaint Louverture (Port-auPrince: Éditions Mémoire, 2001), pp. 33–35. 4. As quoted in David Nicholls, From Dessalines to Duvalier (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1996), p. 68. 5. Ralf Dahrendorf, Life Chances (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1979). According to Dahrendorf (pp. 29–30), Life chances are not attributes of individuals. Individuals have life chances in society; their life chances may make or break them; but their lives are a response to these chances. Life chances are a mould. They may be too big for individuals and challenge them to grow; or they may be too restricted and challenge them to resist. Life chances are opportunities for individual growth, for the realization of talents, wishes and hopes, and these opportunities are provided by social conditions. 6. Pierre Bourdieu, Outline of a Theory of Practice (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977), p. 95. 7. Gabriel A. Almond and Sidney Verba, The Civic Culture (Boston: Little Brown, 1965); see also Lawrence E. Harrison, “Voodoo Politics,” Atlantic Monthly 271, no. 6 (1993): 101–107; Lawrence E. Harrison and Samuel Huntington, eds., Culture Matters: How Values Shape Human Progress (New York: Basic Books, 2000); Lawrence E. Harrison, The Central Liberal Truth (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006). 8. Ibid., pp. 16–17.

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9. Peter Hall, Governing the Economy: The Politics of State Intervention in Britain and France (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986), p. 34. 10. Michael G. Schatzberg, Political Legitimacy in Middle Africa: Father, Family, Food (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2001), p. 205. 11. Kevin Phillips, American Theocracy (New York: Viking, 2006), p. ix. 12. Harrison, “Voodoo Politics,” pp. 105–107. 13. Harrison, The Central Liberal Truth, p. 30. I use the term Vodou because it is close to the Creole spelling; Vodun would be appropriate, but it corresponds more to African pronunciation than to the Creole, French, or English. I reject the term Voodoo because it tends to be associated with black magic and sorcery. I am indebted to Carrol Coates for this explanation. 14. Pierre Pluchon, Toussaint Louverture (Paris: Fayard, 1989), pp. 442–552 (my emphasis). Translated from the original French by Natasha Copeland, who, unless indicated otherwise, is responsible for all the translations into English in the book: Les valeurs dont Louverture voulait faire les moteurs d’une construction à l’image des sociétés blanches sont boudées, rejetées. Le gouverneur raisonne en chef européen, ses partisans, en fils de l’Afrique. Il est le seul à vouloir restaurer Saint Domingue, ses plantations, ses ports dans la splendeur qu’il a admirée tout au long de sa vie. . . . Toussaint mesure la répugnance décidée des siens à le suivre dans la réalisation d’un projet collectif qui leur est étranger, eux dont les aspirations se limitent à faire ce qu’ils veulent et à cultiver un petit champ bien à eux. C’est l’affrontement du civilisé et de l’homme de la nature. . . . Ses frères de sang l’abandonnent, refusent de marcher vers les cimes qu’il leur désigne: ils font le gros dos, ne cédant ni à la persuasion ni aux violences. 15. This view of Haiti’s alleged “irrational” and “magical” nature is also part of Haiti’s own intellectual history. See Nicholls, From Dessalines to Duvalier, pp. 130–132. 16. Pierre Pluchon, “Introduction: Haiti la Veille de la Révolution,” in Alexandre-Stanislas de Wimpffen, Haïti au XVIII Siècle, edition introduced and annotated by Pierre Pluchon (Paris: Karthala, 1993), p. 30 (my emphasis). Dans les prétendus cas d’empoisonnement, qui se répandent en traînées épidémiques, dans le Nord, où l’acculturation des maîtres, plus portés au raisonnement magique qu’à une démarche rationnelle, est forte. Au contraire, dans l’Ouest et le Sud, ce type de criminalité ne se manifeste pas, car un métissage ancien et nombreux y assure la domination de la causalité européenne sur l’interprétation surnaturelle de l’Afrique. 17. Laurent Dubois, Avengers of the New World (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2004), p. 30; statistics about Saint-Domingue’s population (i.e., the island of Hispanola) are rough and not absolutely reliable. David Geggus, Haitian Revolutionary Studies (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2002), p. 5, estimates a larger population: 500,000 slaves, 40,000 whites, and 30,000 free people. The census of 1788 gives the following

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numbers: 27,718 whites, 21,808 free people, and 405,528 slaves (de Wimpffen, Haiti au XVIII Siècle, p. 295). 18. The slave population had diverse African origins. According to Robin Law (“La Cérémonie du Bois Caïman et le ‘Pacte de Sang’ Dahoméen,” in Laënnec Hurbon, ed., L’Insurrection des Esclaves de SaintDomingue [Paris: Karthala, 2000], p. 132): Although slaves came from all regions of Africa, from Senegambia to Mozambique, two supply regions clearly predominated: West Central Africa (Angola) and “the Slave Coast” (the Gulf of Benin). Throughout the whole period, from 1720 to 1790, West Central Africa supplied almost half (45 percent) of the slaves whose ethnic groups were recorded and the Gulf of Benin supplied more than a quarter of them (28 percent). In addition, in each of these two regions, a particular slave ethnic group predominated. Those who had boarded in West Central Africa were in very large majority “Congos,” while those who had boarded in the Gulf of Benin represented nearly half (52 percent) from groups speaking gbe and commonly called “Rada” or “Arada” (from Allada, the dominant state in the region before the Dahomey uprising in the 1720s) in Haiti. Bien que les esclaves provinssent de toutes les régions d’Afrique, de la Sénégambie au Mozambique, deux régions d’approvisionnement prédominaient nettement: l’Afrique centrale de l’Ouest (Angola) et la “Côte des Esclaves” (Golfe du Bénin). Durant toute la période, de 1720 à 1790, l’Afrique Centrale de l’Ouest fournissait presque la moitié (45%) des esclaves, dont les ethnies ont été enregistrées, et le Golfe du Bénin en fournissait plus d’un quart (28%). De plus, dans chacune de ces deux régions, une ethnie particulière d’esclaves prédominait: ceux qui étaient embarqués de l’Afrique centrale de l’Ouest étaient en très grande majorité “Congos” tandis que ceux embarqués du Golfe du Bénin représentaient prés de la moitie (52%) et étaient issus de groupes parlant le gbe et communément appelés “Rada” ou “Arada” (de Allada, l’état dominant de la région avant le soulèvement du Dahomey dans les années 1720) en Haïti. 19. According to Dubois, Avengers of the New World, p. 40, On average, half of the slaves who arrived from Africa died within a few years. Children also died at incredible rates, reaching nearly 50 percent on some plantations. Each year 5 to 6 percent of the slaves died, and the situation was worse during the frequent epidemics in the colony. Birthrates, meanwhile, hovered around 3 percent. Focused on short-term gain and for the most part unburdened by humanitarian concerns, many masters and managers in Saint Domingue coldly calculated that working slaves as hard as possible while cutting expenses on food, clothing, and medical care was more profitable than managing them in such a way that their population would grow. They worked their slaves to death, and replaced them by purchasing new ones.

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20. Ibid., p. 42. 21. Ira Berlin, Many Thousands Gone: The First Two Centuries of Slavery in North America (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1998), pp. 103–105. 22. Geggus, Haitian Revolutionary Studies, p. 7. 23. Ibid., p. 76; see also Leslie Desmangles, The Faces of the Gods (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1992), pp. 34–37; Carolyn E. Fick, The Making of Haiti (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1990), pp. 58–59. 24. Fick, The Making of Haiti, pp. 58–59; Geggus, Haitian Revolutionary Studies, p. 36; Sidney Mintz and Richard Price, The Birth of AfricanAmerican Culture (Boston: Beacon Press, 1992), pp. 15–17. 25. See Patrick Bellegarde-Smith, Haiti: The Breached Citadel, rev. ed. (Toronto: Canadian Scholar’s Press, 2004), pp. 21–36; Desmangles, The Faces of the Gods; Laennec Hurbon, Voodoo: Search for the Spirit (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1995); Michel S. Laguerre, Voodoo and Politics in Haiti (London: Macmillan, 1990); Alfred Métraux, Voodoo in Haiti, with new introduction by Sidney Mintz (New York: Schocken Books, 1972). 26. Desmangles, The Faces of the Gods, p. 36. 27. Michel-Rolph Trouillot, Silencing the Past (Boston: Beacon Press, 1995), p. 175, note 65. 28. While I use the concept of foundational myth for Bois Caïman, I do not suggest that it never happened, as Léon-François Hoffmann claimed. In his view (p. 267), “Il s’agit non pas d’un événement historique mais plutôt d’un myth.” However, I agree with Hoffmann’s persuasive argument that Bois Caïman has been used and abused by opposing social forces for different political interests and agendas. See Léon-François Hoffmann, Haïti: Lettres et l’Être (Toronto: Éditions du GREF, 1992), pp. 267–301. 29. Geggus, Haitian Revolutionary Studies, p. 77. 30. Haitian historians have hotly debated the significance of Vodou for Haiti’s revolution—some denying its role altogether, others asserting its absolute centrality, and still others recognizing its capacity to effect the “mobilization from below” of the slaves. See Hoffmann, Haiti: Lettres et l’Être, pp. 245–266. 31. Geggus, Haitian Revolutionary Studies, p. 77. 32. In The Making of Haiti, Fick emphasizes the Vodou roots of Bois Caïman (p. 265): As to voodoo, we know . . . that one of the participants in the ceremony, Cécile Fatiman, was a mambo, a voodoo priestess, even though she was herself mulatto, the daughter of an African woman and a Corsican prince. Here, then, two points may be offered as conclusions. First, the Bois-Caïman ceremony following the 14 August Morne-Rouge assembly did indeed take place, and, secondly, it was a voodoo affair; that is, within the parameters of the larger interpretation of the term, which, as generally used . . . embraces the multiplicity of African cults alongside the specifically Dahomean cult of Vodu. The ceremony actually contained discernible elements of both

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rada (Dahomean) and petro rites. If the blood pact was characteristically Dahomean, the insistence upon vengeance, the militaristic atmosphere and initation to war, as well as the depiction of the whites as belonging to malevolent spirits, and the ritualistic sacrifice of a black pig (rather than a goat or fowl) all strongly suggest the predominance of petro rites. 33. Lakol means glue in Creole, lanmidon is the Creole word for starch. Michel-Rolph Trouillot, Ti Difé Boulé Sou Istoua Ayiti (New York: Koleksion Lakansiel, 1977), p. 74; see also Pluchon, Toussaint Louverture, p. 66; and Mariana Past, “Toussaint on Trial in Ti difé boulé sou istoua Ayiti, or the People’s Role in the Haitian Revolution,” Journal of Haitian Studies 10, no. 1 (2004): 87–102. 34. Dubois, Avengers of the New World, p. 43. 35. Jean Fouchard, Les Marrons de la Liberté (Port-au-Prince: Éditions Henri Deschamps, 1988), pp. 150–152. As Fick puts in The Making of Haiti (p. 59), “It was precisely this pluralistic nature of Saint Domingue voodoo and its disinclination to separate into ethnic cults . . . that allowed it to function as a far-reaching collective force.” 36. Mintz and Price, The Birth of African-American Culture, pp. 42–60. For an opposite view that rejects the uprooting effects of the Middle Passage, slavery, and the plantation system, see the important and revisionist work of John Thornton, Africa and Africans in the Making of the Atlantic World, 1400–1680 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992). Thornton argues that in spite of Africa’s ethnic pluralism, the continent has “at most . . . three truly culturally diverse areas”—Lower Guinea, the Angolan coastline, and Upper Guinea. While these three areas are themselves subdivided into other zones, these zones were culturally “often quite homogeneous.” He also contends that the conditions of enslavement were more conducive to homogeneity than heterogeneity. Thornton writes (pp. 195–196): [The] slave trade itself did little to break up cultural groupings. The breaking of cultural groupings was likely to occur in the process of sale and subsequent employment in American estates. Slaves were rarely sold all in one block once they reached America, and hence one might reasonably expect plantations and estates to mix up slaves from many different ships and cargoes. In some cases, masters tried deliberately to mix slaves from different origins in the belief that this would hinder attempts at rebellion. . . . This might then have served to hinder the direct establishment of an African culture in the Americas. But not every master shared these sentiments. French masters in the Lesser Antilles . . . sought to get as many slaves as possible from the same nation (terre in French sources) and to encourage them to marry each other, in the hopes that the stability of the community thus developed would improve efficiency and limit rebellion. 37. Robert Farris Thompson, as quoted in Mintz and Price, The Birth of African-American Culture, p. x.

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38. Mintz and Price, The Birth of African-American Culture, pp. 18–19. 39. Paul Lovejoy, “Identifying Enslaved Africans in the African Diaspora,” paper presented at the UNESCO/SSHRCC Summer Institute, York University, Toronto, 1997, p. 7. It is interesting to note that a revised and published version of this article is much more nuanced in its critique of creolization. In fact, the quotation above is no longer part of the new text; see Paul Lovejoy, ed., Identity in the Shadow of Slavery (New York: Continuum, 2000), pp. 1–29. 40. Ibid., p. 7. 41. Thornton, Africa and Africans, p. 321. 42. Richard Price, “The Miracle of Creolization: A Retrospective,” New West Indian Guide 75, no. 1–2 (2001): 42. 43. Geggus, Haitian Revolutionary Studies, pp. 207–220; the naming of Haiti may also have indicated a fissure between the emerging ruling class and the peasant majority. It is important to remember that the founding fathers did not come from that majority. As Geggus (p. 208) reminds us, “Of the thirty-seven officers who signed the declaration of independence, more than two-thirds were of mixed racial descent, and none was African.” See also Vertus Saint-Louis, “Les Termes de Citoyen et Africain Pendant la Révolution de Saint Domingue,” in Hurbon, L’Insurrection des Esclaves, pp. 75–95. 44. Dubois, Avengers of the New World, p. 301. 45. Mintz and Price, The Birth of African-American Culture, p. 52. 46. Trouillot, Silencing the Past, pp. 70–107. 47. Ibid., pp. 72–73. 48. Barré Saint-Venant, Des Colonies Modernes sous la Zone Torride et Particulièrement de Celle de Saint-Domingue (Paris: Chez Brochot Père et Compagnie, 1802), pp. 30–33 (available at the Centre des Archives d’OutreMer in Aix-en-Provence, France, 87 MIOM/53, Bibliothèque Moreau de Saint-Méry). 49. Le Comte de Léaumont, “Saint Domingue,” Imprimerie de Marchand du Breuil, Paris, le 28 Mars 1824, pp. 1–2 (available at the Centre des Archives d’Outre-Mer in Aix-en-Provence, France, CC9A54-216 MIOM/40): Qui peut ignorer que le nègre-Africain, dans sa sauvage et aride contrée, offre presque l’image de l’animal féroce? La traite fut pour cette espèce d’hommes une civilisation commencée, et par le moyen des comptoirs humainement établis sur les bords des differens fleuves, le Zaïre, le Congo, le Sénégal, le Mosambique, on adoucit, et on changea les anciens et barbares usages de ces peuplades, dont les plus avides de ces horribles festins, étaient les Ibos, les Mondongues et les Bambaras. L’esclavage a St.-Domingue, bien loin d’être cruel comme on a osé dire, était doux, avantageux aux nègres. Similarly, Saint-Venant, Des Colonies Modernes, p. 34, argues: It was not therefore a faulty scheme; it was therefore not a misfortune for the Negro to extract him from the horrors of Africa, to

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transform him into a laborer in our colonies. Because his fate in Africa was truly deplorable, and the one he found in our colonies would have led him to civilization and to happiness if European nations had known true principles for governing these countries. Ce n’était donc pas une fausse combinaison, ce n’était donc pas un malheur pour le nègre, de le tirer des horreurs de l’Afrique, pour le transformer en laboureur dans nos Colonies; car son sort, en Afrique, était véritablement déplorable, et celui qu’il trouvait dans nos Colonies l’aurait conduit à la civilisation et au bonheur, si les nations de l’Europe avaient connu les véritables principes du gouvernement de ces contrées. There were exceptions to this conventional wisdom, but they were exactly that, exceptions. See, for instance, Antoine Métral, Histoire de l’Insurrection des Esclaves dans le Nord de Saint-Domingue (Paris: F. Scherff, 1818) (available at the Centre des Archives d’Outre-Mer in Aix-en-Provence, France, 87Miom/46, Bibliothèque Moreau de Saint-Méry). Métral forcefully argues that the cause of the Haitian Revolution is the slaves’ profound desire to free themselves from the oppressive conditions of slavery (p. ix): Among the causes leading to the slave insurrection in northern Saint-Domingue, the principal one is the love of liberty that can be found in all men, and for which even animals show such vehement affection through their efforts to utterly destroy their prison with their teeth and their claws to the point that in this state of captivity, the majority, of a delicate and proud nature, refuse to feed themselves or to procreate. The more horrible the servitude, the more this love of liberty has strength. Parmi les causes qui ont amené l’insurrection des esclaves dans le Nord de Saint-Domingue, la principale est l’amour de la liberté qui se trouve dans tous les hommes, et pour lequel les bêtes mêmes montrent une si véhémente tendresse, par les efforts qu’elles font avec leurs dents et leurs griffes pour bien briser leur prison, au point que, dans cet état de captivité, la plupart, d’une nature délicate et fière, refusent de se nourrir ou d’engendrer. Plus la servitude est horrible, plus cet amour de la liberté a de force. 50. For Saint-Venant, Des Colonies Modernes, p. 48, the insurrection in Saint-Domingue was caused because as Africans, slaves had ultimately an irresistible “penchant à la paresse” (tendency to be lazy). 51. Le Comte de Léaumont, “Lettre Au Rédacteur du Drapeau Blanc,” Imprimerie de Marchand du Breuil, Paris, le 20 Juillet 1824, p. 1 (available at the Centre des Archives d’Outre-Mer in Aix-en-Provence, France, CC9A52216 MIOM/38): “L’absence du travail est pour l’Africain le premier, comme le plus précieux des biens.” 52. Saint-Venant, Des Colonies Modernes, p. 49: “Ce n’est pas le désir de travailler pour leur compte qui leur a mis les armes à la main, mais celui de vivre dans cette oisiveté qui leur est si chère, qu’ils la préfèrent à toutes les jouissances qu’on peut se procurer par le travail.”

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53. Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism and Other Writings, edited, translated, and with an introduction by Peter Baerh and Gordon C. Wells (New York: Penguin Books, 2002). 54. Almond and Verba, The Civic Culture; Everett Hagen, On the Theory of Social Change (Homewood, IL: Dorsey Press, 1962); Alex Inkeles and David H. Smith, Becoming Modern: Individual Change in Six Developing Countries (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1974); David C. McClelland, The Achieving Society (Princeton: Van Nostrand, 1961); David C. McClelland and D. G. Winter, Motivating Economic Achievement (New York: The Free Press, 1971); David Lerner, The Passing of Traditional Society: Modernizing the Middle East (New York: The Free Press, 1958); Lucian W. Pye and Sidney Verba, Political Culture and Political Development (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1965). 55. David C. McClelland, “The Achievement Motive in Economic Growth,” in Mitchell A. Seligson and John T. Passé-Smith, eds., Development and Underdevelopment (Boulder: Lynne Rienner Publishers, 1993), p. 143. 56. Alex Inkeles and David H. Smith, “Becoming Modern,” in Seligson and Passé-Smith, Development and Underdevelopment, p. 161. 57. Andre Gunder Frank, Latin America: Underdevelopment or Revolution (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1969), pp. 21–94. 58. Ronald Inglehart and Christian Welzel, Modernization, Cultural Change and Democracy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), pp. 5–6. 59. Ibid., p. 59. 60. Ibid., p. 60. 61. Ibid., p. 271. 62. Ibid., p. 161. 63. Dubois, Avengers of the New World, p. 7. 64. Harrison, “Voodoo Politics,” pp. 106–107. 65. Harrison, The Central Liberal Truth, pp. 30–31. 66. Ibid., p. 107. 67. Robert Rotberg with Christopher Clague, Haiti: The Politics of Squalor (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1971), pp. 19–21. 68. Ibid., p. 366. 69. Ibid., p. 24. 70. Robert Gelbard, US principal deputy assistant secretary of state for inter-American affairs during the period 1991–1993, argued that Haitians did not have “compromise in their genes.” See James Morrell, “Snatching Defeat from the Jaws of Victory: Haiti’s Aristide Had the Votes to Win, Yet Cheated and So Drained His Win of Legitimacy,” Haiti Democracy Project, August 2000, p. 7, available at www.haitipolicy.org/archives/Publications& Commentary/snatch2.htm. Similarly, Daniel Whitman, counselor for public affairs at the US embassy in Haiti from 1999 to 2001, argued that “intransigence” was a “national trait” of Haitians; see Whitman, A Haiti Chronicle: The Undoing of a Latent Democracy 1999–2001 (Victoria, BC: Trafford, 2005), p. 293.

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71. Michel-Rolph Trouillot, “Haiti’s Nightmare and the Lessons of History,” in North American Congress on Latin America (NACLA), ed., Haiti: Dangerous Crossroad (Boston: South End Press, 1995), pp. 121–122. 72. Richard Price, ed., Maroon Societies (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996); Gabriel Debien, Les Esclaves aux Antilles Françaises, XVIIe et XVIIIe Siècles (Basse-Terre: Société d’Histoire de la Guadeloupe, 1974); Fouchard, Les Marrons de la Liberté; Fick, The Making of Haiti; Geggus, Haitian Revolutionary Studies, pp. 69–80. Robert Maguire, “Bootstrap Politics: Elections and Haiti’s New Public Officials,” The Haiti Papers, No. 2, Hopkins-Georgetown Haiti Project, February 1996, p. 3, describes marronnage—in Creole, mawonaj—as a strategy from the country’s past and evocative of runaway slaves that boils down to “resistance through elusiveness.” When threatened, leaders and groups blended into the woodwork until it was safe to re-emerge. This practice would serve them well, not just during their early days of organization, but in the future. Using mawonaj, Haiti’s evolving grassroots movement survived Duvalier and the rapacious military regimes led by Henri Namphy, Prosper Avril and, finally, Raoul Cédras and his cohorts. 73. Fick, The Making of Haiti, p. 49. 74. See Fouchard, Les Marrons de la Liberté; Gabriel Debien, “Marronage in the French Caribbean,” in Price, Maroon Societies, pp. 106–134. Debien summarizes the fundamental causes of marronnage (p. 133): “There are two dominant ones: 1. the harsh treatment received at the hand of bookkeepers and managers, and the fear of punishment, and 2. an inadequate diet, which is often related to the first cause since it brings on exhaustion, which in turn provokes punishment.” See also Fick, The Making of Haiti, pp. 4–10. 75. Albert O. Hirschman, Exit, Voice, and Loyalty (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1970). 76. Geggus, Haitian Revolutionary Studies, p. 74; see also Dubois, Avengers of the New World, pp. 54–55. Michel-Rolph Trouillot, in his book, Ti Difé Boulé Sou Istoua Ayiti, written entirely in Creole (Kreyol) but unfortunately poorly circulated, argues along similar lines (pp. 75–76): In 1791, the call for liberty found a fertile soil to grow. The slaves were more numerous and their situation had worsened, they could therefore see more easily the contradictions confronting society. They realized that the liberty they sought would not come by itself. They started understanding that this liberty meant “cut off the head and burn down the house.” While the call for liberty of 1791 resembled the maroon’s quest for freedom, unlike the latter it went beyond a mere escape from the slave quarters; it meant war against slavery itself. In truth, in spite of their similarities, these two calls for freedom are different. . . . It is clear that marronage is a way to protest and to oppose the system. The trademark of marronage, however, is to flee from oppression. . . . But a social class arrives at a point

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where it either can no longer engage in marronage, or does not need to engage in marronage, or decides that it will stop engaging in marronage. In 1791 the slaves reached a crossroad where instead of fleeing behind freedom they preferred to fight for freedom. (emphasis in original; I want to thank Jean Jonassaint for helping me translate this passage). An 1791, modòd libèté-a té jouinn tè gras pou l-té pousé. Esklav yo té pi konsantré, sitiyason yo té pi rèd, yo té pi fasil ouè kontradiksion sosiété-a. Nan Nò-a sitou, anpil té kòmansé konprann libèté yo té bézouin an pat ap janm vini poukont li. Yo té kòmansé konprann libèté sila-a té vlé di: koupé tèt boulé kay. Modòd la té sanblé ak modòd ansyin maron yo, min angiz libèté té égal sové, pou ésklav 1791 yo, nan Nò-a sitou, libèté té égal goumin. An vérité, 2 modòd sa yo sanblé min yo pa minm. . . . Sé sètin, maronnay la sé youn fason pou youn group protésté, youn fason pou l-di li pa dakò ak system nan. Min mak fabrik maronnay la sé sové. . . . Min gin youn kafou youn klas rive, soua li pa kapab fè maronnay ankò, soua li pa bézouin fè maronnay ankó, soua li pa vlé fè maronnay ankó. Nan Nó-a sitou, an 1791 ésklav yo té rive nan youn kafou koté, angiz yo té sové dèyè libèté yo té pito goumin pou libèté. 77. James C. Scott, Weapons of the Weak (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1985). 78. Gwendolyn Middlo Hall, Social Control in Slave Plantation Societies: A Comparison of Saint Domingue and Cuba (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1971), p. 52. 79. Fick, The Making of Haiti, pp. 4–10. As Dubois writes in Avengers of the New World (p. 54), The presence of maroon communities in Saint Domingue contributed to the fissures in colonial society. In order to fight maroons the administration ultimately turned to free people of color. In so doing they laid the foundation for demands for inclusion that ignited the colony during the revolution. Maroons, by successfully flouting slavery, were also an inspiration and example for the enslaved, as well as for antislavery writers. The 1791 revolt, however, emerged from the heart of the thriving sugar plantations of the northern plain, and the existing maroon communities were not involved in its planning. More important for the revolt were the practices of marronnage on the edges of plantations, or in the towns, which had helped sustain a culture of autonomy and the networks that connected various plantations. Like religious ceremonies and Sunday gatherings, the practice of running away laid the groundwork for an uprising that united slaves across plantations and in so doing enabled them to smash the system from within. Once they had risen up in 1791, however, slave insurgents did use tactics pioneered by maroons in defending their mountain camps against French attacks.

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80. Orlando Patterson, “Slavery and Slave Revolts: A Sociohistorical Analysis of the First Maroon War, 1865–1740,” in Richard Price, ed., Maroon Societies (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996), pp. 278–279. 81. John K. Thornton, “African Soldiers in the Haitian Revolution,” Journal of Caribbean History 25, no. 1–2 (1991): 58–80; see also Dubois, Avengers of the New World, p. 109. 82. Thornton, “African Soldiers,” p. 74.

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Social Hierarchies and Authoritarian Legacies

IN THE PREVIOUS chapter, I criticized cultural explanations of Haiti’s dictatorial proclivity; it is not that culture and its legacies do not matter, but rather that culture is not a “given” standing in midair and controlling human behavior. It expresses neither an unchanging and uniform set of beliefs and practices nor a static legacy grounded in a supernatural and irrational African essence. Clearly, slaves brought into the New World the “baggage” of their former societies, but once they unpacked it in the alien environment of the plantation regime, it unleashed new practices, norms, and communities. Continuities were therefore enmeshed in a web of historical and cultural ruptures. In that sense, the Haitian authoritarian habitus drew from old customs and routines, but its deep foundations are rooted in the legacies of colonial domination and anticolonial resistance as well as in the vicissitudes of the early period of independence. As Gérard Barthélémy has put it, “First, there is a certain number of phenomena, habits, and beliefs that belong to the domain of general political behavior since 1804. . . . They are deep behaviors belonging to a particular origin and history of which a long-term evolution is in progress, although at a very slow rate.”1 Some key elements of these “deep behaviors” stemmed from the shaping influence of the repressive despotism of colonialism and the violence of the revolutionary struggle for emancipation. Colonial society was conflict-ridden; the profound antagonism between slave and master, the huge chasm between whites, blacks, and mulattoes, and the deep divide within these groups had a determinant impact on the making of the postcolonial order. While the 43

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fundamental social dichotomy was between the free population and slaves, these categories did not tell the whole story. The former was composed of whites and people of color, with no love lost between the two. Moreover, within each there were profound class divisions. In fact, whites did not represent a homogeneous group; united by their racist values, they had, nonetheless, diverging material and political interests. They fragmented into “grands blancs”—plantation owners, merchants, and lawyers—and “petits blancs”—poor whites who owned little or no property.2 Superimposed on the white colonists was the bureaucracy run by Frenchmen born in France. The bureaucracy sought to reconcile disagreements about the degree of political and economic autonomy the colony would enjoy from Metropolitan France. But whatever differences there might have been between bureaucrats, grands blancs, and petits blancs, race would dissolve them.3 For the white colonialist population, slavery and the structures of white supremacy were inviolable and sacrosanct. Not surprisingly, the French Revolution of 1789 and the ensuing discourse on the rights of man provoked panic among the colonialists. Terrified by the call for freedom and equality, Saint-Domingue’s deputies in Paris wrote, “People here are drunk with liberty. . . . The peril is great; it is near.”4 In the plantations, a similar fear existed. The manager of a plantation wrote to its owner, “The sight of the cockade is giving [slaves] ideas and even more, the news from France which is flaunted indiscreetly.” According to another colonialist, “Many [slaves] imagine that the king has granted their freedom and that it is their master who does not want to consent to it. Your plantation . . . has subjects who can only be restrained by fear of punishments.”5 Colonialists thus feared that their whole white supremacist edifice would come crashing down under the weight of the Declaration of the Rights of Man. While the declaration was revolutionary, it did, however, remain ambiguous about slavery and nonwhites. In fact, its universalism did not extend beyond the racial line. Moreover, it did not challenge the “sacred and inviolable right” to property and its entailing relation to the privileges of citizenship. In short, the principles of equality and freedom in the Declaration of the Rights of Man did not apply to enslaved and colonized blacks; the declaration was to a large degree an exclusive affair of and for whites.6 This is not to say that the declaration had no impact beyond European circles; in fact, fearing a dangerous revolutionary “contagion,” colonists actively sought to suppress the Parisian flow of information

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from reaching Saint-Domingue.7 Despite these efforts, slaves and “free” people of color—the so-called affranchis or gens de couleur, mainly the mulattoes—were well aware of the spirit of 1789. As Carolyn Fick writes, When news of the French Revolution reached the colony, slaves heard talk of liberty and equality, and they interpreted these ideals in their own way. Domestics listened to their masters argue over independence, while they perfunctorily served them their meals and drinks. Some had even traveled to France with masters who could not do without their servants. They were exposed to new ideas, to the principles upon which that revolution was being built, and they carried this experience back with them. In the ports, newly arrived French soldiers brought news of the recent events in France and spoke of them with great enthusiasm. Sailors aboard the merchant ships did the same as they worked side by side with the slaves, loading and unloading cargo in the harbors.8

French revolutionary ideas suffused Saint-Domingue’s politics and influenced the thinking and behavior of slaves and affranchis. The latter, led by men like Vincent Ogé, J.-B. Lapointe, Jean-Louis Villate, and François Raimond and his brother Julien, sought to capitalize on the declaration’s universalist claims to advance their political and economic interests. However, like the European colonialists, they were not prepared to include black slaves in their emancipated community. In fact, in the eyes of the mulattoes, slavery was indispensable, and the slaves’ yearning for freedom had to be repressed. As François Julien explained, “The worst are the blacks, who hearing that the cockade stands for liberty and equality, wanted to revolt. Several were lead to the scaffold, in the grands quartiers; that calmed everything down.”9 In fact, the affranchis sought to unfold a plan whereby men of property irrespective of their color would unite to form a new ruling class of planters.10 They wanted the privileges of whiteness in an otherwise unchanged structure of power. In their view, class interests could dissolve the most extreme forms of white racism. This is not altogether surprising, given that the affranchis had accumulated a significant amount of wealth, which they believed made them equals to whites. As David Nicholls points out, Despite the indignities to which the affranchis were compelled to submit, they managed to prosper, and by the time of the French revolution they possibly owned as much as one third of the land

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and one-quarter of the slaves in the colony. This suggests that, bearing in mind the difference in numbers, the average affranchi was as rich as the average white. . . . The stability of the colonial system depended to a considerable extent upon the affranchis believing that they had a fundamental interest in maintaining, in its substance, the economic system which prevailed in the colony, and the social relations which went with it.11

The affranchis and the mulattoes, in particular, were convinced that this was so; in fact, they attempted to obtain white support for their project by arguing that only an alliance between them and the Europeans could contain the revolt of the slaves.12 This partial retreat from race as the organizational matrix of Saint-Domingue ultimately failed because, on the one hand, race retained its primacy among most whites13 and, on the other hand, mulattoes rejected the colonists’ demand that they support independence, or at least autonomy, from France in exchange for full political and economic rights.14 Alienated by the determination of the whites to keep them barely above the humiliating status of slaves, mulattoes reluctantly realized that their emancipation was intimately linked to that of the black slaves. This realization, however, was slow to crystallize. Raimond sought to reassure the colonists that they had nothing to fear from the mulattoes, whose sole intention was to become full-fledged French citizens. As he put it, “The whites all fear now that the people of color might lead the blacks, in order to have them revolt. These are not their actual feelings, far from it, but the whites seek this by so wanting to keep this class in a debased state and to draw them toward the blacks.”15 Thus, white racism undermined whatever chances there might have been for an alliance between free men of color and white colonialists. In 1790, the French National Assembly exacerbated these conflictive racial relations when it adopted a series of ambiguous decrees giving internal autonomy to colonies and extending the vote to free and propertied men without specifying whether color mattered.16 Accordingly, the Colonial Assemblies could govern unrestrained by the French constitution or the principles of the Declaration of the Rights of Man. As Laurent Dubois explains, “The colonies were safe from the dangers of universalism. Indeed, the decree took aim at the abolitionists by declaring that ‘all those who worked to incite uprisings against the planters will be declared guilty of crimes against the nation.’”17 Not surprisingly, white colonists and mulattoes had opposing interpretations of the law. While the former took it to mean that the

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franchise was their exclusive right and did not extend beyond the color line, the latter argued that they were also citizens since they were free owners of property and thus entitled to vote. The colonists’ rejection of the mulattoes’ quest for equal rights stemmed not only from their ingrained racism, but also from some tactical considerations. In their eyes, concessions to the free people of color would shake the white supremacist system to its foundation and weaken the racial divide to such an extent that such concessions would lead to the abolition of slavery. C. L. R. James put it succinctly: “All white Santo Domingo . . . were united on one common ground—the maintenance of slavery. Rights for Mulattoes to-day? It would be rights for slaves tomorrow. They fought the Mulatto question as the first outpost of their precious gangs of slaves.”18 And yet, mulattoes resisted the idea of joining forces with slaves to overthrow white supremacy. It was not only that they feared that their material interests would suffer irreparably, but also that they shared with whites a deep racism against blacks. In Saint-Domingue, where color was everything, shades of differences and lightness of pigmentation had profound consequences for daily life and possibilities of advancement. For the overwhelming majority of mulattoes operating in this white supremacist system, human dignity went along with whiteness. Free light-skinned individuals therefore sought to distance themselves from black slaves and to embrace European culture and norms. Thanks to their color, they enjoyed certain rights and privileges denied to most blacks. Because they were educated in France, owned property, and worked as professionals, mulattoes saw themselves as superior to blacks and equal to whites.19 In their eyes, they deserved full-fledged citizenship. As Thomas Ott writes, The great desire of the gens de couleur was to obtain equal status with the whites, especially the grands blancs, and to blot out their Negro past. In fact, there were grounds for an alliance between the grands blancs and the gens de couleur: both were often large property holders, both disliked the petits blancs, and both desired French acculturation. On the other hand, their greatest divisive factor was skin color; the grands blancs could never quite overcome their prejudice.20

Yet, mulattoes hesitated to enlist the support of slaves even when they decided to resort to force to confront the intransigence of white racism. Threatening to inflict a “just vengeance” on whites if they did not acquiesce to grant full citizenship to all affranchis, the leader

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of the mulattoes, Vincent Ogé, declared that he would not dishonor himself by asking for the slaves’ assistance. As he put it, “I will not incite the slave quarters to revolt; this would dishonor me.”21 Ogé paid dearly for refusing to enlist the support of the slaves; he and his fellow conspirator Jean-Baptiste Chavannes were condemned to a most barbaric death for organizing an uprising against the colonists. Not only did both men have their bodies tied to a wheel and their “arms, legs and elbows broken on a scaffold,” but they had also their heads cut off and displayed on stakes to deter the spirit of revolt and terrorize affranchis as well as slaves.22 Instead of dissuading revolt, the vicious executions contributed to unleashing a series of events that accelerated the process leading to the Haitian Revolution. According to James, “It was the quarrel between whites and Mulattoes that woke the sleeping slaves.”23 Indeed, it had the unintended consequence of placing slaves at the very center of a growing military conflict; whites and affranchis began to enlist slaves in their armies promising them freedom. The inclusion of slaves into these armies led to an inevitable erosion of white supremacy and thus to a fundamental emasculation of slavery itself. Slaves quickly understood that they could use force and revolts to improve their condition and ultimately to gain their own freedom. Altough slaves demanded initially merely an amelioration of their labor situation—three free days and an end to brutal punishments— they soon wanted much more. Transforming slaves into soldiers unleashed a revolutionary process. Fick writes: The decision of the whites to arm their slaves was a perilous one that they would come to regret. In colonial times, the institution of slavery was reinforced by the rule of white supremacy and the existence of an intermediary caste of mulattoes and free blacks who, because of their racial origins, were to remain inferior in status and serve as an immutable barrier between the slave and the white master. Now, in the midst of revolution, that barrier had rapidly and violently broken down. One colonist, writing from Les Cayes earlier in July 1791, had foreseen this eventuality: “It is feared that the slaves, seeing that the mulattoes and free blacks will have gained [their rights] by insurrection will themselves come to regard insurrection not only as the means by which to be freed of slavery, but as the most sacred of their duties.”24

In fact, at the Bois Caïman ceremony, which probably took place on August 21, 1791, some 200 slaves sacralized the insurrectionary

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commitment that they had made a week earlier at the Lenormand de Mézy plantation in Morne-Rouge.25 Led by Boukman Dutty, JeanFrançois, Georges Biassou, and Jeannot Bullet, the conspirators, who were all commandeurs,26 launched their uprising against their white masters, on August 22–23. As commandeurs, these men represented the slave elites, tended to be Creoles, and had direct control over the laboring slaves. In fact, the commandeur enforced the regime of strict surveillance, harsh discipline, and violent punishment that governed the plantation of which he was the “soul.”27 In return, he gained the confidence of his master, who granted him certain privileges; commandeurs therefore received preferential treatment. Accordingly, they worked far less and enjoyed better health, food, and clothing than other slaves. Gabriel Debien describes the status and role of the commandeur: The emblem of his authority was a whip with either a long or short staff, which he always carried in his hand, or a stick that the blacks mockingly called “coco macaque.” . . . The commandeur undertook the subsidiary management duties of work, deciding on the jobs and therefore the pace of tasks, reprimanding or whipping the lazy and unruly. . . . Sunday, when the workshop was closed, the commander had to keep an eye on departures and returns from the market; and every day he had to account for everything that seemed to him to have appeared unusual. . . . The prestige of his role made of him an official petty tyrant, someone important. . . . [And] the commandeur more readily than anyone else was granted la liberté de savane [quasi-freedom], or even legal emancipation.28

Not surprisingly, relations between commandeurs and field slaves were fraught with tension. There was thus a cleavage between distinct categories of slaves, and it foreshadowed the future and more pronounced class divisions of an independent Haiti. The cleavage was not just a sign of material and political differences; it reflected the cultural gap between the Creole elite and the Bossales—Africanborn slaves. Born in Saint-Domingue, Creoles had had the time to plant certain roots in the hostile terrain of the plantation; there, they developed means of survival, accommodation, and resistance with which to cope with the ugliness and brutality of it all. Moreover, many of them had tasted the freedom of marronnage and dreamed of its full flowering.29 Bossales, however, had been recently and violently uprooted from their lands; still in shock from the horrors of the Middle Passage, they had little time to adjust to the daily suffering and humiliation of slave life.30 Bewildered and in the process of creating

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new “societies” with African “retentions,” the Bossales inevitably came under the organizational control of the Creoles. They soon understood, however, that their own interests and those of the Creoles were not necessarily identical. While they were all slaves, some slaves were more equal than others.31 Indeed, Creoles tended to consider Bossales as socially inferior and unsophisticated human beings, good only for the hard labor of the plantation. This was not just a matter of prejudice; it was also a self-serving justification for keeping Bossales as the lowest of the field workers. The simple and ugly reality was that the constant influx of new African slaves gave Creoles an opportunity to avoid the most dehumanizing and excruciating forms of labor. Denigrated by the Creoles, Bossales would always find themselves at the very bottom of the plantation hierarchy. As Barthélemy explains, The permanent [existence of the Bossales] barely unloaded from Africa, culturally uprooted and disoriented, was fundamentally necessary to the plantation system’s operation, which can only survive in its sugarcane fields thanks to this stunned workforce, psychologically damaged by capture, the trip, the sale, and the terror of it all. As soon as the uprooted African takes root in the colonial system, he will necessarily be replaced by a new arrival, by a new Bossale, because by becoming more Creole in order to ensure his survival, he will have begun to find the means to escape the terrifying hell little by little and thus also the destructive work system in the cane fields. If we recall that in 1790 more than 60 percent of SaintDomingue slaves were captives, exiles who had spent their childhood and sometimes their youth in Africa, we will have an idea of the gulf that separated this group from that of the Creoles, skilled slaves or household staff, who had from early in their childhood learned the laws of survival by skirting the plantation system. . . . Relations between these two groups, the movement from one to the other always in the same direction, that sort of social ascent, codified itself in contempt for the newcomer, le baptisé debout, le nègcheval, the one who must remain at work with the hoe so that the master is not tempted to send the Creole back there.32

Clearly then, Creoles and Bossales had conflicting relations and roles; but the realities of slavery were such that both had an interest in a tactical and opportunistic alliance against their white masters. Simply put, both wanted their freedom and dignity. Boukman’s passionate call “Couté la liberté li palé nan cooeur nous tous”—listen to

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the voice of liberty which speaks in the hearts of all of us—resonated among all slaves.33 Thus, once the Creole commandeurs decided at Bois Caïman that it was time to wage war on the colonists, the Bossales quickly joined them. The insurrection spread like wildfire; barely a week after it began, more than 15,000 slaves had become marrons engaged in the ruthless killings of their former masters and the demolition of their properties.34 The slaves’ passionate violence was the result of pent-up rage, which itself was the inevitable product of the savageries of slavery. Given the opportunity, slaves simply exploded in a fury of vengeance against white colonists. They reduced to ashes sugar and coffee plantations as well as whatever symbol reminded them of their lives as slaves. As Fick explains, “The slaves took care to destroy . . . not only the cane fields, but also the manufacturing installations, sugar mills, tools and other farm equipment, storage bins, and slave quarters; in short, every material manifestation of their existence under slavery and its means of exploitation.”35 Not surprisingly, the insurrection generated fear and panic among bewildered colonists, who could not conceive that slaves had managed to organize and revolt against the system of white supremacy. For them the revolution was simply “unthinkable.”36 A letter of Pierre Mossut, a surviving plantation manager, captures well this sense of “unthinkability” among white colonists: “There is a motor that powers [the slaves] and that keeps powering them that we cannot come to know. . . . All experienced colonists know that this class of men have neither the energy nor the combination of ideas necessary for the execution of this project, whose realization they nevertheless are marching toward with perseverance.”37 And indeed, the “project” would go well beyond what whites or slaves had imagined in the first days of the insurrection. In the early phase of the insurrection, few, if any, had envisaged the possibility of political autonomy, let alone national independence. As the revolution unfolded, however, the insurgents developed a new sense of possibilities; both their dreams and what they had never dreamed of were no longer unrealistic alternatives. The insurrection of 1791 started the long, violent, and unexpected journey that ultimately led to the creation of an independent Haiti. The journey, however, was full of detours, complications, and in some instances “betrayals.”38 Such “betrayals” denoted the internal rifts and conflicting interests that besieged the slave community and foreshadowed the unfulfilled promises of the revolution itself. They were soon in evidence

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in the aftermath of the August revolt. The ferocity of the revolt brought such massive destruction of the infrastructure that the slaves themselves faced potential starvation and defeat.39 By September 1791, fearing such an outcome, their leaders, Jean-François and Georges Biassou, decided to negotiate a peace with French colonial authorities. In the process, they were prepared to advance their own class interests as commandeurs and betray their comrades in arm. Biassou and JeanFrançois were ready to surrender and sacrifice the emancipation of the rank-and-file insurgents, provided the authorities guaranteed their freedom and that of a handful of leaders.40 In fact, Jean-François is reported to have asked for a mere “humanization” of slavery: In taking up arms I never claimed to fight for widespread liberty, which I know to be a pipe dream, as much due to France’s need for colonies as to the danger there would be in obtaining uncivilized hordes, a right that would become infinitely dangerous to them and that would undoubtedly bring about the annihilation of the colony; that if the owners had been at their dwellings, revolution would perhaps not have taken place.41

As a representative of the commandeurs, Jean-François portrayed them as moderate chiefs who would control and subdue their fellow rebels in return for receiving the amnesty that the French National Assembly had decreed for “acts of revolution.”42 Thus, the commandeurs had profound differences with the slave insurgents; in fact, their natural allies were the affranchis. Toussaint Louverture’s role in the negotiations with the colonists made this very clear. While Toussaint would become the central figure of the Haitian Revolution, in December 1791 he had yet to support wholeheartedly the concept of full emancipation.43 As a wealthy freedman,44 Toussaint was at that time sympathetic to the self-serving demands of the leaders of the insurgency and was prepared to help them restore slavery.45 His unwavering commitment to freedom would come later, seemingly in August 1793.46 The racist intransigence of the white colonists contributed to Toussaint’s transformation and to the collapse of the peace agreement that Biassou and JeanFrançois were negotiating with his help.47 Indeed, the colonists rejected the agreement because they would not contemplate to “lower themselves so far as to receive conditions dictated and demanded of them by their rebel slaves.”48 Moreover, extending the amnesty to these rebels would establish the dangerous precedent of considering

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them legitimate “revolutionaries” instead of criminal vagabonds. It would justify their uprising and their grievances, and this was simply unacceptable to the colonists. Finally, white leaders refused to be seen as caving in to the insolent warning of Biassou, who had threatened them with a “horrible carnage” if they rejected his demands.49 The chance for a settlement that would have sealed an alliance between gens de couleur and the white colonists and reestablished some form of slavery had passed. It was not just a matter of white intransigence, however; the rank and file of the insurgency became restless and increasingly suspicious of its leaders.50 It feared with good reason that it would be sacrificed in the name of peace and would be compelled to return to the harsh life of slave work on the plantation. In the eyes of the insurgents, war was the only way forward. The war not only continued but engulfed the whole country for more than thirteen years of violent devastation, culminating in Haiti’s independence in 1804. While it generated unity among the slaves, it was an opportunistic and fragile unity. The war was ultimately incapable of eradicating the profound wounds of racial and class enmity inherited from the colonial period. As this study endeavors to demonstrate, the divisions between mulattoes and blacks, Creoles and Bossales, military leaders and soldiers, and rulers and ruled were a chasm that neither the war nor independence would ever bridge. Moreover, once it gained its independence, the country confronted for more than a century the unmitigated hatred of white supremacist powers. At a time when its domination rested on the twin pillars of racism and colonial rule, Western imperialism was bound to fear that the vast areas it controlled would follow Haiti’s insurrectionary path. Indeed, the makers of 1804 disturbed the global system of exploitation; their victorious struggle “symbolized class and racial equality and revolutionary state-building by ex-slaves.”51 As Arthur Stinchombe points out, That revolutionary state-building was a deep challenge to European state finance as well as, of course, a symbolic challenge to the welfare of slaveowning sugar and cotton planters, especially in the Caribbean and North America. Haiti was the first of a number of third world revolutionary societies to become important objects in the politics of the hegemonic or core powers, especially those of the United States, and suffer the consequences of diplomatic isolation and the systematic attempts at subversion by those core powers.52

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In fact, on several occasions, France planned to violently reestablish its imperial sovereignty over the island. Former colonists were continuously agitating for a new military intervention and calling for an expeditionary army of some 25,000 soldiers to reconquer Haiti. The goal was to reinstate colonialism and slavery as well as the plantation economy. However, in the eyes of the ex-colonists, this project required the exercise of brute and terrific force. Nothing short of extermination or deportation of Haiti’s blacks and gens de couleur would do. Without these draconian measures, the ex-colonists feared that order would never be restored, because the Haitian population had demystified white supremacy by destroying its aura of inevitability and invincibility. Simply put, the ex-colonists were bent on avenging with the most ferocious violence the humiliation of 1804. In his 1805 Mémoires pour le Comité des Notables de Saint Domingue, a certain Mr. Mansur was clear about the matter: It is better to sacrifice a large part of the current population than to open one’s self up to a new insurrection. . . . Woe to the government if clemency carries it away and if we go to Saint-Domingue intending to use sweetness. Without a great example of vengeance ordered by the government, this colony cannot pick itself up from its ruins. Without this terrible example, the blacks and the mulattoes will never recover from the contempt that they developed for the white caste ever since the revolution. . . . In order to ensure ourselves of perfect tranquility down the line, it will be necessary to arrest the free black population and colored men. . . . All the formerly free blacks and men of color must be exterminated or deported. . . . War of extermination is the only war advisable for Saint-Domingue: it is the only one that offers us the means to reconquer this island and to save the blood of our soldiers.53

Leaders of Haiti took the threat of extermination very seriously, for they had suffered a similar attempt when Napoleon’s army sought to suppress Toussaint Louverture’s drive for autonomy. The French, led initially by General Leclerc and then Rochambeau, were not merely attempting to firmly reintegrate Haiti into their empire, but were also planning to reinstate slavery; and to do so, they used terror as their preferred means.54 Leclerc was explicit in a letter addressed to Napoleon: “We must destroy all the blacks of the mountains—men and women—and spare only children under twelve years of age. We must destroy half of those in the plains and must not leave a single colored person in the colony who has worn an epaulette.” 55

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The perversity of Napoleon’s envoys was such that they brought from Cuba ferocious dogs that had apparently been trained specifically to savagely devour black people. To “lift white morale,” Rochambeau’s regime had the dogs eat black prisoners alive in organized public killings.56 The unleashing of this savage intoxication of cruelty failed to dissuade Haitians; in fact, it strengthened their resolve and made compromise impossible. French imperialism became their absolute enemy. They had to defeat it and then prevent it from reestablishing its control over the country. Thus, French imperial despotism left Haiti with a profoundly authoritarian legacy and a series of massive social burdens derived from the effects of white supremacy and the racial and class divisions that it entailed. It is true that the republican values of 1789 resonated with the slaves’ quest for freedom, but Frenchmen conceived these values for Frenchmen; they were not intended for the colonized, let alone Saint-Domingue’s blacks. Indeed, when Léger Félicité Sonthonax, the French commissioner in the colony, decreed, “Men are born and live free and equal in rights” to announce the emancipation of the slaves in August 1793, he was simply recognizing a fait accompli, which he did not particularly celebrate.57 Moreover, Sonthonax’s abolition responded more to strategic considerations than to a humanitarian devotion to freedom. In fact, while Sonthonax had real sympathies for the plight of the slaves, a few months before declaring emancipation, he defended slavery “as necessary to the cultivation and prosperity of the colonies.”58 Pluchon’s harsh assessment of both Sonthonax and Republican France’s commitment to abolition seems therefore warranted: The widespread abolition of bondage proclaimed on August 29, 1793, reeks of subterfuge, pathetic deceit: it regulated the freedom of men who had wrested full control of their destiny through violence! . . . Sonthonax is not the liberator of blacks, whom he disdains: if everything went as they wished, these enemies of modern progress would dump a backward Guinea into the middle of the Caribbean Sea. . . . Ideological quarrels about the slave trade and slavery are the White man’s business, like the Declaration of Human Rights whose effects do not extend beyond the white citizens’ enclave.59

In spite of a certain cultural appeal, French imperialism had no universal vocation; blacks who acquired French nationality did so to

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gain advantages within the colonial system, and France granted it to them for purely strategic reasons. The whole exercise was built not on mutual loyalty but on mercenary relations. Toussaint’s alliance with the Spanish and flirtation with the British and the Americans, and his ultimate quest for autonomy from France, indicated clearly that in the eyes of most blacks, becoming a French citizen was an opportunistic act. A similar opportunism, and indeed cynicism, guided France’s behavior; the citizenship it gave to blacks it was prepared to take away and replace with slavery. Expediency was thus the very fabric of French colonialism. When the price of reinserting Haiti into the empire became too high, France decided to recognize its former colony’s independence in 1825, but only after compelling the Haitian government of President Boyer to pay an indemnity of 150 million francs.60 Threatened by a fleet of fourteen warships, Boyer had no room to maneuver; he could do little but submit to French demands. The process through which Haiti gained recognition for its independence indicated not only the permanent dangers to which independence was exposed, but also the extreme fragility of the country’s sovereignty. Not surprisingly, facing armed threats and the determined hostility of international powers, Haiti’s rulers had no choice but to embark on a program of militarization. The militarization of society had profoundly harmful consequences for any sustained process of democratization; it subordinated civilian politics to the diktat of the guns. The hegemony of the men in uniforms “had an overwhelmingly negative impact on the ability of [Haitian] citizens to build public channels of communication between the state and civil society.”61 It contributed to the development of a predatory system in which those who were not born into wealth and who lacked weapons were systematically marginalized. For men with limited means, however, military service provided an avenue for social and material advancement; it also gave them status, access to land ownership, and arbitrary authority.62 The militarization of Haitian society generated a deep fracture between the men in uniform and the rest of the population, particularly the peasantry. In fact, from the very beginning of the Republic, militarization implied political despotism, social exclusion, and economic exploitation—a triple legacy that still fuels the contemporary Haitian authoritarian habitus. Dessalines, the first ruler of an independent Haiti, sought to solidify the foundations of the militarized state he inherited from Toussaint and from which flourished this triple legacy. As James Leyburn explained in The Haitian People,

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Every citizen, [Dessalines] announced, must consider himself in one of two categories, laborer or soldier. There were to be no shirkers in the new Haiti; if a man was not in the army, he must do manual work. . . . This step of Dessalines’s was a radical one. It proclaimed the mastery of state over individual. . . . All people except soldiers, ran the decree, must be “attached as cultivators to a plantation.” The vast majority of the people were forced willy-nilly into agriculture. It was “formally prohibited for a cultivator to desert the plantation to which he was assigned”; conversely, it was a crime to give asylum to a runaway cultivator, male or female. If such conditions differed from slavery, they were at least close to what the medieval world knew as serfdom.63

The militarized state was responsible for enforcing this new serfdom. While life as a cultivator in independent Haiti was not as wretched as it had been under slavery, it remained precarious and unhappy. Torture and murder were no longer part of the violent arsenal unleashed to discipline and punish agricultural workers, but managers were now beating their workers with lianes (whips) and cocomacacs (clubs) to maximize profits.64 In addition, the military sought to repress any potential rural discontent and confine laborers to their designated plantation. “The army was the great power in the country. . . . One tenth of all able-bodied men were constantly in active army service. . . . A military mentality was nourished, the people early learning the lesson . . . that the army should rule and the people obey.”65 Thus, the colonial habit of using coercion as the primary means of ruling the country persisted under Dessalines’ regime, albeit in a less cruel form. In fact, compulsion has always been the norm rather than the exception in Haitian politics. Emancipation changed the racial composition of those at the top but it failed to bridge the deep social, political, and material divide separating rulers from rural laborers. Both Haitian rulers and their imperial predecessors had only contempt for the masses, which they regarded as mere instruments of production and as useful soldiers in the quest for wealth and power. As Dessalines put it, “The laborers can be controlled only by fear of punishment and even death; I shall lead them only by these means; my morale shall be the bayonet.”66 At its very dawn, Haiti was thus besieged by militarization, but it suffered also from the material devastation brought about by the bloody struggle for emancipation.67 The economy had collapsed and huge numbers of men and women had died. While estimates vary wildly, it is safe to say that out of a total prewar population of about 500,000, more than 140,000 people perished during the revolution

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and many others were crippled or fled the country.68 Haiti was decimated and its economy was doing no better. Although Haiti was, in 1790, the “centerpiece of the Atlantic slave system” and “the most productive bit of real estate in the world,” turning out “half the world’s coffee” and exporting “almost as much sugar as Jamaica, Cuba, and Brazil combined,” by the 1800s, it was in severe crisis even if it had somewhat recovered from the total economic collapse of 1795.69 “Sugar exports declined from seventy thousand tons in 1789 to nine thousand tons in 1801. Although Haiti continued to export some sugar even after independence, it was no longer a supplier of any importance to the world market. Only sixteen tons were exported in 1826.”70 Thus, by the time Dessalines assumed the reins of power, Haiti’s development and full democratization confronted a series of heavy burdens inherited from plantation slavery, French imperial domination, and the struggle for emancipation in a hostile white supremacist world. Colonial despotism and barbarism, racial and class tensions, insurrectionary violence, economic devastation, a militarized state, and political reflexes of command and control would inevitably nurture the authoritarian habitus of history’s first independent black state. The harsh and dehumanizing discipline of slavery and the plantation system characterizing the colonial period had a profound impact on patterns of popular obedience and resistance. While the Code Noir, decreed in 1685 by Louis XIV, codified protective measures to control the excesses of slavery, it lacked any serious means of enforcement.71 In fact, there is no evidence that a single slave in Saint-Domingue benefited from the code’s regulations.72 Slave owners simply ignored it and used it only when it served their purposes. The code provided for the exclusive hegemony of Catholicism and prohibited work on Sundays and church holidays, but it was profoundly anti-Semitic, and it treated blacks as less than human beings. It represented, in the words of Louis Sala-Molins, the “worst refinement in wickedness, the most glacial technicality in the commerce of human flesh and in genocide.”73 Thus, the code had little if any restraining effect on the cruelties and savagery of slave owners. Its sixty articles were at best an exercise in utter prevarication, taking us into “a chilling series of qualifications: prohibitions that permit, limitations that invite excess, and a king’s grandiloquence that ensures divestment.”74 Not surprisingly, Saint-Domingue’s slaves were coerced into literally laboring to death under the brutal surveillance of commandeurs who were compelled to use the crack of the whip to force

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acquiescence to an infernal regime of domination. And if the whip did not suffice, the colons (colonists) were always ready to unleash a sadistic arsenal of bodily mutilation, public hangings, and torture against slaves75 who dared to trespass the barbaric boundaries that incarcerated them into the confining despair of living as “socially dead” beings.76 Slaves were therefore considered a “thing”—treated as “being-for-others”77—whose sole function was to produce at minimum cost maximum and immediate gains for their owners. Life for slaves was thus exhausting and brutish, and for a substantial number simply miserable and short. According to Pierre Pluchon, mortality rates were excruciatingly high: More than one-third of the Bossales die in three years and more than half in eight years; men succumb in greater numbers than their companions. In the mixed Bossale and Creole workshops, the mortality rate ranges from 3.5 percent to 8.5 percent, the birth rate not exceeding 2.5 percent: from this there is an average annual deficit ranging from 1 to 6 percent. In order to compensate for this slaughter, the French islands bought some 1,500,000 captives, SaintDomingue acquiring for itself alone about 1,000,000. This permanent human hemorrhage . . . demonstrates to the most skeptical minds that the material life of slaves does not satisfy the most ordinary of demands.78

Threatened by massive violence, utterly excluded from the human community, and degraded by virtue of their race, slaves were the paradigmatic moun andeyo.79 Slaves, however, were indispensable as units of production; their labor generated the wealth and the material matrix of their own exploitation. In its determined efforts to both exclude slaves from its moral community and forcefully integrate them as producers in the plantation economy, colonial power was unconditionally arbitrary in its exercise of violence. The state as an institution and the colonizers as individuals behaved with brutalizing commandements; with or without the law, and indeed placing themselves above the law, they wantonly punished, tortured, and killed.80 The colonized were never safe; they were always subject to the capricious will and cruelty of their masters. As Achille Mbembe explains, One characteristic of commandement in the colonies was the confusion between the public and the private; the agents of the commandement could, at any moment, usurp the law and, in the name of the state, exercise it for purely private ends. But what marked

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violence in the colony was, as it were, its miniaturization; it occurred in what might be called the details. It tended to erupt at any time, on whatever pretext and anywhere.81

Not surprisingly, the struggle for emancipation inherited this pervasive violence whose indelible mark has colored Haitian politics from the early days of independence to the contemporary period. Slaves understood that to achieve their freedom, they had to demolish the white supremacist plantation system and this could only be done through military bloodshed. As James points out, The slaves destroyed tirelessly. Like the peasants in the Jacquerie or the Luddite wreckers, they were seeking their salvation in the most obvious way, the destruction of what they knew was the cause of their sufferings; and if they destroyed much it was because they had suffered much. They knew that as long as these plantations stood their lot would be to labour on them until they dropped. The only thing was to destroy them. From their masters they had known rape, torture, degradation, and, at the slightest provocation, death. They returned in kind. . . . And yet they were surprisingly moderate, then and afterwards, far more humane than their masters had been or would ever be to them. . . . The cruelties of property and privilege are always more ferocious than the revenges of poverty and oppression.82

While the slaves’ revolutionary violence may have been “moderate,” it nonetheless contributed to the predatory character of Haitian politics. Haitian rulers came to conceive of governance as a zero-sum game; virtually all of them looked at political power as a brutal, indivisible quantity that could be won collectively but that had to be kept individually and exercised absolutely. This authoritarian habitus was a reflection of a long history of violence rooted in the harsh realities and requirements of the colonial economy. It was also a legacy inherited from certain hierarchical and ideological patterns of African political life. A significant majority of Haiti’s population was born in the Kongo area and not surprisingly, as John Thornton has argued, must have come under the influence of its conceptions of governance. Accordingly, the conflicting “absolutist” and “republican” philosophies that divided the Kongo had repercussions on Haiti’s political development.83 It seems clear, however, that the conditions of warfare and the imperative of defending Haiti’s independence contributed to emasculating the republican tradition of ruling by consent

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and favored the absolutist and untrammeled forms of power. Similarly, it may well be that the “hierarchical ethic” suffusing what Igor Kopytoff has called the African “ecumene” had a shaping influence on the Haitian authoritarian habitus: A hierarchical ethic means that one finds it normal to be at either side of a culturally sanctioned hierarchical relationship. Behaviorally, it means that whether one is subordinate or in command is accepted as being a matter of circumstance, maneuver, and optimizing strategy. Psychologically, it means that one is both comfortable about exercising authority and not discomfited by subordination to authority. In the realm of values, it means that one prizes both one’s standing over others and one’s being attached to a superior power—hence, the inherent value that was usually granted to chieftainship and kingship in Africa.84

Chieftainship and kingship did not necessarily, however, imply absolute despotism. The principle of equity and a moral economy of reciprocal exchanges mitigated the worst excesses of absolutism; and yet, in the Haitian revolutionary context, that principle was easily manipulated by vested interests to promote new hierarchies and justify a politics of command and control. Clearly, however, this hierarchical ethic was not the expression of an African “exceptionalism”; it was part and parcel of the Western political and philosophical tradition. Absolutist rule and patterns of crude domination had particular intensity in the royal systems of Europe and were incorporated with a vengeance in all European colonial structures. In addition, Western imperial powers added to their own hierarchical ethic their unmitigated racism, which in turn had a particularly deleterious and savage impact on their colonized victims. To that extent, the Haitian authoritarian habitus drew on a multiplicity of sources and was, in fact, most decisively shaped by the despotic legacy of French absolutism and imperialism. After all, Toussaint was not a “black Jacobin,” but rather a man of the ancien régime whose abhorrence of white supremacy and slavery led him to espouse insurgency rather than submission. His transformation into an insurgent and eventually into the supreme leader of the revolution did not undermine his own royalist convictions. As Pluchon reminds us, [Toussaint] does not belong to the “generation of ’89” like many of the leaders of the Metropolitan Regeneration. A rather old man for his century, he is in his fifties when in 1791 the uprising of the

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northern slaves breaks out, launching Saint-Domingue’s black revolution. . . . At age fifty, [Toussaint] does not burn the bridges of what he respected his whole life. On the contrary—and given the time period—he remains loyal to the values and to the colonial system that had established his mérite by acquiring his freedom for him through emancipation and who let him become a valued little colonist, master of slaves and goods. . . . The first black general of French history is an heir to the ancien régime, evident in all facets of his personality. . . . He extols authority, order, work, and obedience. He condemns la liberté-droit and the defects that it causes: debauchery, vagrancy, idleness, laziness in all its forms. . . . Toussaint, by proclaiming himself governor for life and by granting himself the right to choose his successor, gives the Grande Île a monarchy.85

Thus, the hierarchical ethic, whether of African or European origin, served well the Creole leaders, who justified their domination in the name of national security and sovereignty. It helped them establish strong military organizations capable of challenging and ultimately defeating French imperialism. However, neither the African “ecumene” nor its European counterpart was just hierarchy; each also embodied a strong sense of equality. While the latter was derived from the equality of “possessive individualism,” the former was grounded in membership in a kin group—what many observers of Saint-Domingue have called “nations.”86 In these “nations,” the group had primacy over the individual, but each individual expected equal treatment from the group. Kopytoff defines this relationship as symbolizing a principle “of equal potentiality, embodied in the equality of potential access to authority. The principle is frequently celebrated in sayings to the effect that “every man is a chief.”87 To that extent, the principles of authoritarian hierarchy, republican bourgeois equality, and African “equal potentiality” generated contradictory tendencies. The resulting product was a form of patrimonial rule whereby “the polity was an extension of the ruler’s household.”88 Since independence, patrimonialism in a dictatorial or more benign configuration has defined Haitian politics. On the one hand, the ugly face of despotism was always lurking behind the harsh and violent discipline of revolutionary warfare, and on the other hand, the aspirations for equality nurtured the quest for emancipation, liberty, and human dignity. Under the material pull of the economy, the tensions between these two opposing forces always tended

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to bend toward the most authoritarian solution. The plantation regime was the foundation of Saint-Domingue’s wealth, and yet it was also the matrix of subjugation and servitude. This cruel reality clashed with the struggle for emancipation. Slaves knew that their freedom depended on the destruction of the plantation system; this in turn was problematic, given Haiti’s place in world production and its utter dependence on sugar exports. The wealth of the country was inextricably connected to the survival of the plantation, which hinged upon slavery or forced labor. This was the predicament that Toussaint and his immediate successors had to face. As Fick puts it, Freedom for the mass of insurgent slaves, if it was to be realized at all, was fundamentally intertwined with an independent claim to land. Work and labour for the profit of another or for the production of export crops on which the colony’s existence depended was profoundly antithetical to their own vision of things. And so if we measure the post-emancipation realities and reactions of the exslaves, who were to remain as servile but legally free plantation labourers, against their self-defined aspirations and expectations, we can begin to see in embryonic form the essence of the agrarian problem that beset not only the French civil commissioners once they proclaimed the legality of general emancipation, but later Toussaint Louverture and the Haitian state itself under its postindependence rulers, Jean-Jacques Dessalines (1804–6), Henri Christophe (1807–20) and Alexandre Pétion (1807–18).89

It is this agrarian problem rooted in the material matrix of the plantation system that created Haiti’s historical fissure between a militaristic state of the few and the wider society of the many. The fissure persists to this day in spite of a changing mode of production. The point is that emancipation did not end despotic forms of governability.90 In fact, at independence, Haitian rulers confronted a cruel choice. If they preserved emancipation by supporting the former slaves’ aspirations to become independent peasants, they would ultimately condemn the country to material underdevelopment. If they promoted an immediate economic recovery, they would be compelled to impose a military-like discipline on the newly freed masses, and they would thus emasculate emancipation itself. Moreover, the high army officers who led the revolution were determined to keep and expand their power; this in turn required maximizing revenues and foreign exchange. The means to that end was the restoration of the

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plantation system, because it facilitated the collection of taxes and privileged the concentration of land ownership in the hands of the new ruling class.91 Thus, the imperatives of recovering economically and defending emancipation against the potential military aggressions of the great powers coincided with the class interests of the first postcolonial leaders to create patterns of unequal landownership92 and of forced labor. Gross material inequalities and political despotism widened further what was already a massive chasm between rulers and citizens. The great divide between Creoles and Bossales that the war against Napoleon’s army had temporarily bridged resurfaced in the immediate aftermath of independence. The two groups entered into an opportunistic alliance, the Creoles offering the organizational skills and the political and military leadership, and the Bossales providing the majority of the soldiers. This division of labor and the “haughty disdain”93 Creoles had for the Bossales generated a cultural and moral fissure between rulers and ruled that would not only mold the early postcolonial period but also remain a persistent reality throughout Haitian history. Bossales would eventually imply much more than mere subordination of the African-born population; it became a term of insult conveying utter inferiority and ignorance. In fact, it came to define the conception that dominant classes have developed for le peuple: a horrifying dangerous and subhuman mass of moun Ginen.94 Not surprisingly, Thornton reaches the conclusion that the “postrevolutionary period was a partially successful creole (and mulatto) counterrevolution directed at African culture as well as against the former African slaves.”95 Thus, the offspring of the slaves’ revolution for freedom was paradoxically a new authoritarianism in the name of emancipation. As David Geggus explains: Although fiercely committed to the liberty of the blacks, [Toussaint] believed it essential that the plantation regime be revived in order to restore Saint Domingue’s prosperity. With no export economy, there would be no revenue to maintain his army of 20,000 to 40,000 men. And without the army, the gains of the revolution would be at the mercy of France’s unstable politics. Toussaint therefore continued with the schemes of Commissioner Sonthonax, whereby the ex-slaves were compelled to work on the plantation in return for a share of the produce. It was a difficult policy to implement, for increasingly the blacks preferred to establish smallholdings of their

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own and had little desire to work for wages. . . . Toussaint, however, refused to break up the great estates. He used the army to impose the regime of forced labor and sanctioned the use of corporal punishment; he even supported the reintroduction of the slave trade to make up the loss of manpower.96

Thus, the struggle for and the defense of emancipation generated militaristic patterns of behavior and a hierarchical social structure.97 Top officers not only gave orders and expected obedience, but they also reaped the spoils of power. They greatly benefited from the state’s grossly unequal redistribution of land, through which they sought to establish themselves as a new class of planters.98 It is true that the attempt to restore the plantation system was not completely self-serving; it responded also to the desperate need to reinvigorate a devastated economy. This was not merely a matter of improving material well-being, but also a question of survival, of generating the resources for a strong military with which to defend Haiti’s independence. Haitian rulers had good reason to fear the aggression of the great powers of the time; they knew that these powers abhorred the first successful black revolution against slavery and feared its consequences for their respective empires. They were thus compelled to devote huge resources to the military and had little choice but to raise revenues and foreign exchange. 99 This, in turn, implied the revival of the plantation system and its accompanying despotic methods of labor control. Paradoxically, the preservation of emancipation rested on a material basis that was itself inimical to individual freedom. Indeed, material recovery depended on agricultural exports based on plantation production, which in turn required coercive forms of labor. Haiti’s first rulers—Toussaint, Dessalines, Christophe, Pétion, and Boyer— were all bent on revitalizing this mode of production.100 While each elaborated different ways to do so, they all used a form of caporalisme agraire (agrarian authoritarianism), which sought to compel rural laborers into becoming cultivateurs portionnaires (sharecroppers).101 Military coercion and legal codes bound these workers into staying and working on the plantations to which they were attached. To be freed from this condition of serfdom, one had to have the financial wherewithal to buy large properties and become a latifundista. François Blancpain’s description of Toussaint’s regime characterizes well the governmental practices and conditions of rural

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workers that defined much of the politics of the young Republic under successive “founding fathers”: The individual liberty of the majority of citizens is subordinated to the need to affirm the supremacy of both the state and the army so that the country can resist all foreign ventures. The result of this is that the rural laborer finds himself again subjugated to a military regime that makes of him a serf attached to a dwelling, subject to the power of the owner or of the farmer, constrained in his private life to respect the apostolic Roman Catholic religion, and forbidden to stay outside of his dwelling without a permit from the military authority. His servitude is permanent and hereditary, since rare are the ways for a cultivateur portionnaire to find the necessary funds to acquire a piece of property of at least 50 carreaux [3.3 acres], giving him access to the property owners’ class, in other words, the bourgeoisie.102

Rural workers were thus facing a new serfdom, but they could ignore the state, escape to the mornes (mountains) and choose the life of marronnage.103 In fact, the final phase of Toussaint’s rule marks the beginning of the gradual disintegration of the large estates as a growing number of cultivateurs rejected the despotic discipline of caporalisme. In spite of their totalitarian attempts to control the cultivators, Toussaint and his successors failed to prevent them from fleeing the plantation economy. Rural workers were determined to assert both their disdain for centralized legal authority and their aspirations to become a class of small peasant owners. The state simply lacked the capacity to impose its surveillance and punishments on an agrarian population that had acquired in its resistance against slavery a powerful ability to engage in “fugitive political conduct.”104 The ultimate result of this fugitive conduct is a four-decades-long transformation of Haiti’s rural scene; between independence and the late 1840s, the plantation economy gave way to the regime of small peasant production. Paul Moral describes well this great transformation: The great plantation economy finally disintegrates; the vitality of the mountainous sector feeds, on the other hand, the progress of the small farmer. A new rural base establishes itself despite the resistance of traditional authority in the form of Christophe’s kingdom and in the form of the pseudo-liberalism put into effect by presidents Pétion and Boyer. . . . All of a sudden the masses of independent small farmers increase. Established in dwellings or on plots of abandoned dwellings, there they carve out property for

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themselves from which it will be quite difficult to dislodge them. From all of these local modifications, against which political power is disorganized and obviously powerless to change, is born the fundamental contradiction that from then on will never be resolved between the de facto state and the law, between occupation of land by individual initiative and the eminent property of the state, between exploitation and concession.105

The mutually conflictive relations between state and masses indicated the utter failure of the former to impose its law, and the absolute disdain of the latter for the law itself. In the long run, this relationship engendered a generalized indiscipline that incited governments to rule with brutal coercion and people to resist by inventing new means of fugitive conduct. Despotism led to popular exit from the legal and constitutional system, and this exit in turn precipitated rulers to intensify their repressive ways. This rupture between the rural majority and the repressive state is rooted in the founding fathers’ failed attempt to restore the large estates system. They confronted a crucial dilemma: how to reconcile both the safeguard of emancipation and the former slaves’ aspirations to become an independent peasantry with the drastic labor discipline that the plantation economy required. Ultimately, the reconciliation proved impossible. As Fick puts it, there was an “unbridgeable gap between the state structure, which was a military one, and the rural agrarian base of the nation.”106 Despotism was in this sense an inevitable outcome of the material legacy of colonialism at a time when the world capitalist economy rested on slavery and the dominant powers espoused white supremacist values. Leyburn could not have been more wrong when he asserted: If ever a country had an opportunity to start absolutely fresh in choosing its own social institutions, Haiti had that opportunity in 1804. Free at last, with no traditions to uphold, the first independent Negro state in the world, owing allegiance to no man or nation, the Haitians might . . . have invented an entirely new little world of economic, political, religious, and social life. All paths were open to them.107

In fact, Toussaint and his followers achieved the “unthinkable” by abolishing slavery and creating the first independent black nation— they went beyond where no civilization had dared to go: they extended citizenship across the racial divide and expanded humanity’s

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notion of equality. But the critical juncture that made it all “unthinkable” imposed its obdurate limits on what was possible. While it generated the conditions for the slaves’ revolutionary emancipation, it undermined and ultimately derailed democracy because it carried with it the heavy burdens of a stultifying militarization of society, persisting racial hierarchies, widening class divisions, menacing imperial threats, and acute material scarcity.

NOTES 1. Gérard Barthélémy, “Le Discours Duvalieriste Après les Duvalier,” in Gérard Barthélémy and Christian Girault, eds., La République Haïtienne (Paris: Karthala, 1993), p. 180 (my translation). 2. C. L. R. James, The Black Jacobins (London: Allison & Busby, 1980), pp. 27–61; Thomas Ott, The Haitian Revolution (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1973), pp. 9–12. 3. David Geggus, Haitian Revolutionary Studies (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2002), p. 10. 4. Lettres des Députés de Saint-Domingue à Leurs Comettants en date du 12 Août 1789, Paris, 1790. 5. As quoted in Carolyn E. Fick, The Making of Haiti (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1990), p. 86. 6. Pierre Pluchon, Toussaint Louverture (Paris: Fayard, 1989), pp. 548–549. Clearly, however, there were whites who opposed slavery, but the abolitionist movement at the time of the Haitian Revolution had a long way to go before it established its hegemony. Even groups and individuals who defended the emancipation of slaves and blacks, such as Les Amis des Noirs and the French radical thinker Garran-Coulon, had their limits. For instance, J. P. Garran-Coulon, An Inquiry into the Causes of the Insurrection of the Negroes in the Island of St. Domingo (London: J. Johnson, St. Paul Church Yards, 1792), described the “dispositions” of Africans as “fierce and savage” (p. 3). See also Marcel Dorigny, ed., The Abolitions of Slavery (Paris: UNESCO, 2003). 7. Laurent Dubois, Avengers of the New World (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2004), p. 77. 8. Fick, The Making of Haiti, p. 86. 9. As quoted in Pluchon, Toussaint Louverture, p. 40: “Le plus terrible sont les Noirs, qui, entendant que la cocarde est pour la liberté et l’égalité, ont voulu se soulever. On en a conduit plusieurs à l’échafaud, dans les grands quartiers; cela a tout apaisé.” 10. David Nicholls, From Dessalines to Duvalier (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1996), pp. 21–27. 11. Ibid., p. 26. 12. Pluchon, Toussaint Louverture, p. 83; see also James, The Black Jacobins, p. 77.

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13. Not surprisingly, it appears that white racism was more virulent among the petits blancs than among the grands blancs. The latter understood better that their class interests and their wealth would be served by an alliance with the affranchis; the former, lacking property and education, knew that their only claim to status rested on a clear and unambiguous system of white supremacy. See Fick, The Making of Haiti, pp. 130–131. 14. Pluchon, Toussaint Louverture, pp. 46–51; James, The Black Jacobins, p. 69. 15. As quoted in Pluchon, Toussaint Louverture, p. 41: “Tous les Blancs craignent dans ce moment que les gens de couleur ne se mettent à la têtes des Noirs pour les faire révolter. Ce n’est pas leur sentiment, il s’en faut bien, mais les Blancs cherchent cela en voulant trop tenir cette classe dans l’avilissement et les rapprocher des Noirs.” 16. Claude Moïse, ed., Dictionnaire Historique de la Révolution Haïtienne (1789–1804) (Montreal: Éditions du Cidihca, 2003), pp. 126–138; see also Dubois, Avengers of the New World, pp. 84–85. 17. Dubois, Avengers of the New World, p. 85. 18. James, The Black Jacobins, p. 75. 19. In The Black Jacobins, James captures well the pervasive nature of racism in Saint-Domingue (pp. 42–43): The advantages of being white were so obvious that race prejudice against the Negroes permeated the minds of the Mulattoes who so bitterly resented the same thing from the whites. Black slaves and Mulattoes hated each other. Even while in words and, by their success in life, in many of their actions, Mulattoes demonstrated the falseness of the white claim to inherent superiority, yet the man of colour who was nearly white despised the man of colour who was only half-white, who in turn despised the man of colour who was only quarter white, and so on through all the shades. The free blacks, comparatively speaking, were not many, and so despised was the black skin that even a Mulatto slave felt himself superior to the free black man. The Mulatto, rather than be slave to a black, would have killed himself. See also Nicholls, From Dessalines to Duvalier, p. 26. 20. Ott, The Haitian Revolution, p. 13. 21. As quoted in Pluchon, Toussaint Louverture, p. 49: “Je ne ferai pas soulever les ateliers; ce moyen est indigne de moi”; see also Dubois, Avengers of the New World, pp. 87–88; and James, The Black Jacobins, p. 74. 22. James, The Black Jacobins, pp. 73–75; Dubois, Avengers of the New World, pp. 87–88; Fick, The Making of Haiti, pp. 82–84; Pluchon, Toussaint Louverture, pp. 49–51. 23. James, The Black Jacobins, p. 73. 24. Fick, The Making of Haiti, p. 133. 25. The debate about what exactly occurred at Bois Caïman has not been settled. What seems certain, however, is that the ceremony is a real historical event where slaves organized some sort of religious ceremony inspired by Vodou and took an oath to wage war against their masters. The

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other details of what happened remain uncertain and open to speculation. See Geggus, Haitian Revolutionary Studies, pp. 81–92; Geggus (p. 87) makes a convincing case for “the evening of August 21st” as the “most likely time for the ceremony” to have taken place. See also Fick, The Making of Haiti, pp. 91–117 and 260–266; Jean Fouchard, Les Marrons de la Liberté (Port-au-Prince: Éditions Henri Deschamps, 1988), pp. 410–419; Léon-François Hoffmann, Haïti: Lettres et l’Être (Toronto: Éditions du GREF, 1992), pp. 267–301. 26. The commandeur, or driver, was himself a slave; the violence of the master was thus partly mediated and exercised by its own victims. See Fick, The Making of Haiti, pp. 28–30. 27. Gabriel Debien, Les Esclaves aux Antilles Françaises (XVII–XVIII Siècles) (Basse-Terre: Société d’Histoire de la Guadeloupe, 1974), p. 119. 28. Ibid., pp. 124–126, 133: L’emblème de son autorité était un fouet à manche tantôt long, tantôt court qu’il portait toujours à la main, ou une baguette que les noirs par dérision appelaient “coco macaque.” . . . Le commandeur remplissait les fonctions subalternes de direction du travail, réglant les occupations, et donc le train des tâches, réprimandant ou fouettant les paresseux et les indociles. . . . Le dimanche, quand l’atelier ne travaillait pas, le commandeur devait avoir l’œil sur les sorties, sur les retours du marché et tous les jours il avait à rendre compte de tout ce qui lui avait paru insolite. . . . Le prestige que son rôle lui donnait le faisait tyranneau officiel, grand personnage. . . . [Et] le commandeur obtenait plus facilement que tout autre la liberté de savane, ou même l’affranchissement régulier. 29. Fouchard, Les Marrons de la Liberté, pp. 352–433; Fick, The Making of Haiti, pp. 94–95; Geggus, Haitian Revolutionary Studies, pp. 69–74. 30. Gérard Barthélemy, Le Pays en Dehors, 2nd ed. (Port-au-Prince: Éditions Henri Deschamps, 1989), pp. 86–91. 31. John Thornton, Africa and Africans in the Making of the Atlantic World, 1400–1680, 2nd ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), pp. 332–334. 32. Barthélemy, Le Pays en Dehors, pp. 90–91: [L’existence] permanente [des Bossales] à peine débarqués d’Afrique, culturellement déracinés et désorientés, était fondamentalement nécessaire au fonctionnement du système de la plantation qui ne peut survivre, dans ses champs de canne, que grâce à cette main-d’œuvre abrutie, brisée psychiquement par la capture, le voyage, la vente, et la terreur. Au fur et à mesure que l’Africain déraciné prendra racine dans le système colonial, il devra obligatoirement être remplacé par un nouvel arrivant, par un nouveau bossale, parce qu’en se créolisant pour assurer sa survie, il aura commencé à trouver les moyens d’échapper, peu a peu, à l’enfer de la terreur et donc au système destructeur du travail dans les champs de canne. Si l’on se rappelle qu’en 1790, plus de 60% des esclaves de StDomingue étaient des captifs, des déportés, qui avaient passé leur

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enfance et parfois leur jeunesse en Afrique, on aura une idée du fossé qui séparait cette masse de celle des créoles, esclaves à talents ou gens de maison, qui avaient dès leur enfance appris les lois de la survie en contournant le système de la plantation. . . . Les relations entre ces deux groupes, le passage de l’un à l’autre, toujours dans le même sens, celui en quelque sorte de l’ascension sociale, se codifient autour du mépris pour le nouvel arrivé, le baptisé debout, le nèg-cheval, celui qui doit rester au travail de la houe pour que le maître ne soit pas tenté d’y renvoyer le Créole. 33. James, The Black Jacobins, p. 87. 34. Ibid., p. 88; see also Fick, The Making of Haiti, pp. 108–109; and Eugene D. Genovese, From Rebellion to Revolution (New York: Vintage Books, 1979), pp. 104–110. 35. Fick, The Making of Haiti, p. 97. 36. Michel-Rolph Trouillot, Silencing the Past (Boston: Beacon Press, 1995), pp. 70–107. 37. As quoted in Dubois, Avengers of the New World, p. 97. 38. James, The Black Jacobins, p. 106. 39. The devastation brought about by the rebellion of August 1791 was enormous. In The Making of Haiti, Fick writes (p. 105): Within eight days, the slaves had devastated seven parishes and completely destroyed 184 sugar plantations throughout the northern province; in less than one month, the count rose to over 200, to which would be added nearly 1,200 coffee plantations. An early estimate placed the loss in productive value for the sugar plantations alone at nearly forty million livres. By September, all of the plantations within fifty miles either side of le Cap had been reduced to ashes and smoke; twenty-three of the twenty-seven parishes were in ruins, and the other four would fall in a matter of days. 40. Geggus, Haitian Revolutionary Studies, pp. 37–38, 125–127; James, The Black Jacobins, pp. 103–108. 41. As quoted in Pluchon, Toussaint Louverture (p. 70): En prenant les armes, je n’ai jamais prétendu combattre pour la liberté générale, que je sais être une chimère, tant par le besoin que la France a de ses colonies, que par le danger qu’il y aurait à procurer à des hordes incivilisées, un droit qui leur deviendrait infiniment dangereux, et qui entraînerait indubitablement l’anéantissement de la colonie; que si les propriétaires avaient été sur leurs habitations, la révolution n’aurait peut être pas eu lieu. 42. Dubois, Avengers of the New World, p. 125. 43. Geggus, Haitian Revolutionary Studies, pp. 124–128. 44. Toussaint became a freedman at the age of thirty-three, in 1776, the year after he was already a slaveowner. See Marie-Antoinette Menier, Gabriel Debien, and Jean Fouchard, “Toussaint Louverture Avant 1789: Légendes et Réalités,” Conjonction: Revue de l’Institut Français d’Haïti, No. 134 (1977), reproduced in Jacques de Cauna, ed., Toussaint Louverture

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et l’Indépendance d’Haïti (Paris: Karthala, 2004), pp. 61–67. In Toussaint Louverture, Pluchon claims (p. 61): “Toussaint dispose, lors du soulèvement des esclaves d’un pécule appréciable, voire d’une petite fortune. Il est un homme du système colonial” (At the time of the slave uprising Toussaint has at his disposal a noticeable nest egg, indeed a small fortune. He is a man of the colonial system). 45. Geggus, Haitian Revolutionary Studies, p. 125. 46. Ibid., p. 128. 47. Dubois, Avengers of the New World, pp. 125–127; James, The Black Jacobins, pp. 103–108. 48. As quoted in Dubois, Avengers of the New World, p. 126. 49. Ibid., pp. 125–126. 50. Pluchon, Toussaint Louverture, pp. 72–75. 51. Arthur Stinchombe, Sugar Island Slavery in the Age of Enlightenment (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995), p. 239. 52. Ibid. See also David P. Geggus, ed., The Impact of the Haitian Revolution in the Atlantic World (Columbia: University of South Carolina, 2001); Mimi Sheller, Democracy After Slavery (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2000), pp. 80–86; and Michael Dash, Haiti and the United States: National Stereotypes in the Literary Imagination, 2nd ed. (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1997). As Michel-Rolph Trouillot, “From Planters’ Journals to Academia: The Haitian Revolution as Unthinkable History,” Journal of Caribbean History 25, no. 1–2 (1991): 92, emphasizes, The international recognition of Haitian independence was even more difficult to gain than military victory over the forces of Napoleon. It took more time and more resources, more than a half century of diplomatic struggles. The United States and the Vatican, notably, recognized Haitian independence only in the second half of the nineteenth century. Diplomatic rejection was only one symptom of an underlying denial. The very deeds of the revolution were incompatible with major tenets of the dominant Western ideologies. They remained so up to at least the first quarter of [the twenty-first century]. Between the Haitian independence and World War I, in spite of the successive abolitions of slavery, little changed within the ontological ladder that ranked humankind in the minds of the majorities in Europe and the Americas. In fact, some views deteriorated. . . . Thus in most places outside of Haiti, more than a century after it happened, the Revolution was still largely unthinkable history. 53. Mémoires pour le Comité des Notables de Saint Domingue, CC9A40216MIOM/28, Centre des Archives d’Outre-Mer in Aix-en-Provence, France, pp. 3–6, 19: Il vaut mieux sacrifier une grande partie de la population actuelle que de s’exposer à une nouvelle insurrection. . . . Malheur au gouvernement, si la clémence l’emporte, et si on va à St. Domingue dans l’intention d’employer la douceur. Sans un grand exemple de

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vengeance commandé par la Politique, cette colonie ne peut se relever de ses ruines. Sans cet exemple terrible les noirs et les mulâtres ne reviendront jamais du mépris qu’ils ont conçu pour la caste blanche depuis la révolution. . . . Pour s’assurer d’une parfaite tranquillité à venir il faudra arrêter la population des noirs libres et des hommes de couleur. . . . Tous les anciens libres noirs et hommes de couleur doivent être exterminés ou déportés. . . . La guerre d’extermination est la seule qu’il convient de faire à St. Domingue: c’est la seule qui nous offre les moyens de reconquérir cette isle et d’épargner le sang de nos soldats. 54. Antoine Métral, Histoire de l’Expédition des Français à Saint Domingue (Paris: Karthala, 1985), pp. 166–190. Rochambeau was particularly vicious inventing new ways of torturing and killing Haitian rebels. Métral put it succinctly (p. 166): “[Rochambeau] désola l’humanité.” 55. As quoted in Dubois, Avengers of the New World, pp. 291–292. 56. Ibid., pp. 182–183; see also Dubois, Avengers of the New World, pp. 292–293; Joan Dayan, Haiti, History, and the Gods (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995), p. 155. 57. As quoted in Dubois, Avengers of the New World, p. 163. For a sympathetic account of Sonthonax’s commitment to abolition, see Robert L. Stein and Serge Barcellini, Léger Félicité Sonthonax: The Lost Sentinel of the Republic (Toronto: Dickinson University Press, 1984). Pluchon, Toussaint Louverture (pp. 90–92), offers a much more negative interpretation of Sonthonax’s role in the process of emancipation. See also “Two Memories in the Present: Léger Félicité Sonthonax, Victor Schoelcher,” in Marcel Dorigny, ed., The Abolitions of Slavery (Paris: UNESCO, 2003), pp. 340– 352. See also Pluchon, Toussaint Louverture, pp. 90–92. 58. As quoted in Dubois, Avengers of the New World, p. 144. 59. Pluchon, Toussaint Louverture, pp. 91–92, 548: L’abolition générale de la servitude, proclamée le 29 août 1793, participe du subterfuge, de la tromperie dérisoire: elle accorde une liberté réglementée a des hommes qui ont conquis la pleine possession de leur destin par la violence! . . . Sonthonax n’est pas le libérateur des Noirs, qu’il méprise: si tout allait à leur gré, ces ennemis du progrès moderne planteraient une Guinée arriérée au milieu de la mer des Antilles. . . . Les chamailleries idéologiques sur la traite et l’esclavage sont affaires de Blancs, comme la Déclaration des droits de l’homme dont les effets ne dépassent pas le cercle des citoyens blancs. 60. This huge indemnity contributed to the growing debt of the country and to domestic discontent. The United States recognized Haiti only in 1862. See Nicholls, From Dessalines to Duvalier, pp. 62–66; Sheller, Democracy After Slavery, p. 56; Dubois, Avengers of the New World, pp. 303–304. 61. Sheller, Democracy After Slavery, p. 39. 62. Ibid., p. 53; see also François Blancpain, La Condition des Paysans Haïtiens (Paris: Karthala, 2003), pp. 17, 60–61.

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63. James Leyburn, The Haitian People, with a new introduction by Sidney Mintz (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1966), p. 34. 64. Carolyn Fick, “Emancipation in Haiti: From Plantation Labour to Peasant Proprietorship,” in Howard Temperley, ed., After Slavery: Emancipation and Its Discontents (London: Frank Cass, 2000), p. 30. 65. Leyburn, The Haitian People, pp. 36–37. 66. As quoted in ibid., p. 41. 67. See Mats Lundhal, “Toussaint L’Ouverture and the War Economy of Saint Domingue, 1796–1802,” in Hilary Beckles and Verene Shepherd, eds., Caribbean Freedom (London: James Currey, 1993), pp. 2–11. The economy was in ruins, according to Lundhal (p. 4): If the amount exported of the four most important export products in 1789 is assigned an index number of 100, coffee exports were down to a figure of 2.8 in 1795, sugar was down even more, to 1.2, and cotton and indigo exports had fallen to a mere 0.7 and 0.5 percent, respectively, of their former levels. In other words, export agriculture was virtually dead. The economy had become a closed one, based in subsistence production and production for limited, fragmented domestic markets. 68. Ibid., p. 3; see also Ott, The Haitian Revolution, p. 190; Dubois, Avengers of the New World, p. 302. 69. David Brion Davis, “Impact of the French and Haitian Revolutions,” in Geggus, The Impact of the Haitian Revolution in the Atlantic World, p. 4; Gordon S. Brown, Toussaint’s Clause (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2005), pp. 25–26. 70. Paul Lachance, “Repercussions of the Haitian Revolution in Louisiana,” in Geggus, The Impact of the Haitian Revolution in the Atlantic World, p. 211. 71. Robin Blackburn, The Making of New World Slavery (London: Verso, 1997), pp. 290–292; Louis Sala-Molins, Le Code Noir, ou, le Calvaire de Canaan (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1987). 72. The Baron Alexandre-Stanislas de Wimpffen, Haiti au XVIII Siècle, edition introduced and annotated by Pierre Pluchon (Paris: Karthala, 1993), pp. 84–85. The baron, who visited Haiti in the 1790s, claimed that colonial authorities “ne sont pas même encore parvenus à mettre en vigueur un seul article du Code Noir” (have not yet managed to enact a single article of the Code Noir). See also, Dayan, Haiti, History, and the Gods, p. 202. 73. Sala-Molins, Le Code Noir, ou, le Calvaire de Canaan, p. 80: “Le pire raffinement dans la méchanceté, la plus glaciale technicité dans le commerce de la chair humaine et dans le génocide.” 74. Dayan, Haiti, History, and the Gods, p. 203. 75. Pierre Pluchon, “Introduction,” in de Wimpffen, Haïti au XVIII Siècle, p. 30. 76. Orlando Patterson, Slavery and Social Death (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1982). 77. Antoine Gisler, L’Esclavage aux Antilles Françaises (XVII–XIX Siècle) (Paris: Karthala, 1981), pp. 29–31.

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78. Pluchon, “Introduction,” in de Wimpffen, Haiti au XVIII Siècle, p. 28: Plus d’un tiers des Bossales décède dans les trois ans, et plus de la moitié dans les huit ans, les hommes succombant beaucoup plus nombreux que leurs compagnes. Dans les ateliers mélangés de Bossales et de créoles, le taux de mortalité varie de 3.5% à 8.5% le taux de natalité ne dépassant pas 2.5%: d’où un déficit annuel moyen de 1 à 6%. Pour pallier cette hécatombe, les îles françaises achètent quelque 1 500 000 captifs, Saint-Domingue en acquérant à elle seule 1 000 000 environ. Cette hémorragie humaine permanente . . . démontre aux esprits les plus sceptiques que la vie matérielle des esclaves ne satisfait pas aux exigences les plus communes. 79. The moun andeyo is the Creole word for “outsiders,” those who are not part of the nation and are excluded from its benefits and recognition. See Barthélémy, Le Pays en Dehors. 80. Fick, The Making of Haiti, pp. 34–39; see also James, The Black Jacobins, pp. 11–15; and Dubois, Avengers of the New World, p. 50. Fick describes the masters’ atrocities (p. 35): The barbarism of some masters left little to the imagination. While administering the whip, they would stop, place a burning piece of wood on the slave’s buttocks, and then continue, rendering the subsequent blows all the more painful. Common was the practice of pouring pepper, salt, lemon, ashes, or quicklime on the slave’s open and bleeding wounds, under the pretext of cauterizing the skin, while at the same time increasing the torture. . . . Other examples exist of slaves being thrown into ovens and consumed by fire; or of being tied to a skewer above an open fire, there to roast to death; or having white-hot slats applied to their ankles and soles of their feet, this being repeated hour after hour. There were masters who would stuff a slave with gunpowder—like a cannon—and blow him to pieces. Women had their sexual parts burned by a smoldering log; others had hot wax splattered over hands, arms, and backs, or boiling cane syrup poured over their heads. 81. Achille Mbembe, On the Postcolony (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001), p. 28. 82. James, The Black Jacobins, p. 88. 83. John K. Thornton, “‘I Am the Subject of the King of Congo’: African Political Ideology and the Haitian Revolution,” Journal of World History 4, no. 2 (Fall 1993): 187–195; see also John K. Thornton, “African Soldiers in the Haitian Revolution,” Journal of Caribbean History 25, no. 1–2 (1991): 59–80. 84. Igor Kopytoff, “The Internal African Frontier,” in Igor Kopytoff, ed., The African Frontier (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987), p. 36. 85. Pluchon, Toussaint Louverture, pp. 553–555: [Toussaint] n’appartient pas à la “génération 89,” comme nombre de conducteurs de la Régénération métropolitaine. Il est un quinquagénaire,

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un bien vieil homme pour son siècle, quand éclate, en 1791, le soulèvement des esclaves du Nord qui donne le départ de la révolution noire de Saint-Domingue. . . . À cinquante ans, [Toussaint] ne brûle pas ce qu’il a respecté toute sa vie, au contraire—et par la force de l’age—il reste fidèle aux valeurs et au système colonial qui ont consacré son mérite en lui procurant la liberté par affranchissement et qui lui ont permis de devenir un petit colon apprécié, maître d’esclaves et de biens. . . . Le premier général noir de l’histoire française est un héritier de l’Ancien Régime, par toutes les facettes de sa personnalité. . . . Il célèbre l’autorité, l’ordre, le travail et l’obéissance. Il condamne la liberté-droit et les tares qu’elle engendre: libertinage, vagabondage, oisiveté, paresse sous toutes ses formes. . . . Toussaint, en se proclamant gouverneur à vie et en s’octroyant le droit de choisir son successeur, donne une monarchie à la Grande Île. 86. African slaves in Haiti were divided into “nations” according to their language and other forms of group identification, such as scarifications. See Thornton, Africa and Africans in the Making of the Atlantic World, pp. 184–185. 87. Kopytoff, “The Internal African Frontier,” p. 18. 88. Ibid., p. 63. 89. Fick, “Emancipation in Haiti,” pp. 15–16. 90. Claude Moïse’s description of Toussaint’s authoritarian regime is equally valid for the first rulers of an independent Haiti (Le Projet National de Toussaint Louverture [Port-au-Prince: Éditions Mémoire, 2001], p. 47): The Louverturian social project does not transcend the social contradictions arising from dismemberment of the colonial slave regime. It cannot reconcile antagonistic interests. It tends to enclose them in a repressive and authoritarian regime strongly modeled on the absolute personal power that Toussaint institutionalized. The masses do not count in the economic and social politics of Toussaint Louverture. Rural laborers seek all ways to escape the constraints of the system: escape into the hills, refusal to work. It is a rather long story that goes from passive to active resistance and that gets mixed up with the story of colonization and slavery. Le projet social louverturien ne transcende pas les contradictions sociales issues du démembrement du régime colonial esclavagiste. Il ne peut concilier les intérêts antagoniques. Il tend à les enfermer dans un régime autoritaire et répressif fortement modelé par le pouvoir personnel absolu que Toussaint a fait institutionnaliser. [Les] masses ne trouvent pas leur compte dans la politique économique et sociale de Toussaint Louverture. Les cultivateurs cherchent par tous les moyens à échapper aux contraintes du système: fuite dans les mornes, refus de travailler. C’est une assez longue histoire qui va de la résistance passive à la résistance active et qui se confond avec celle de la colonisation et de l’esclavage.

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91. Lundhal, “Toussaint L’Ouverture and the War Economy of Saint Domingue,” argues (p. 5): [The] transaction costs connected with making a smallholder system produce foreign exchange to the desired extent were exceedingly high. Turning to the restoration of the plantation system, we face a different set of costs. It would be less costly to create incentives for export production. This was to a large extent a result of technological factors. Large units were much better suited to the production of sugar for example. . . . Thus, the large estates were able to produce sugar much more profitably than the smallholdings. The income distribution problem would also have been solved. Putting the plantations directly into the hands of the politically important people would make the redistribution problem simply disappear, provided only that labour to man the plantations could be obtained. The collection costs, finally, would be substantially lower than under the smallholder system, because the number of production units in a grande culture system would be lower. With all these three problems being reduced, the need for a trained bureaucracy would be correspondingly reduced. 92. Robert K. LaCerte, “The Evolution of Land and Labour in the Haitian Revolution, 1791–1820,” in Hilary Beckles and Verene Shepherd, eds., Caribbean Freedom (London: James Currey, 1993), pp. 42–47. LaCerte points out that Toussaint “prohibited the sale of parcels of less than fifty carreaux; a stipulation which made it impossible for the ex-slaves to acquire land legally” (p. 43). Toussaint’s successor, Dessalines, may have wanted a more “democratic form of landownership,” but according to Lacerte, the “evidence is strong that he sought to preserve the large plantation” (p. 44). Christophe did not depart from the commitment to the plantation system; in fact he “continued the pattern of large landholding granting concessions of between 400–500 carreaux to his nobles.” Pétion in the south, however, carried a wider distribution of land; his goal was to coopt the black majority by offering it the possibility of becoming peasant smallholders. In 1809, he gave land to the veterans of the wars of independence in accordance with their rank. Colonels . . . 25 carreaux; Battalion chiefs . . . 15 carreaux; Captains to Second Lieutenants . . . 5 carreaux. It was followed in 1814 by a second distribution of land to all officers below the rank of colonel. . . . Exactly how much land was distributed is difficult to say because adequate statistics are lacking. One Haitian scholar, writing in 1888, estimated that 76,000 carreaux were distributed among 2,322 civil and military officers. Only 134 of them received entire plantations. The remaining 2,188 got grants of 35, 30, 25, and 20 carreaux. They formed an intermediate class of landholders beneath whom were 6,000 soldiers who received grants of 5 carreaux. (pp. 45–46) 93. Thornton, Africa and Africans in the Making of the Atlantic World, p. 334.

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94. Moun Ginen can be translated as “people of African descent,” but it conveys a pejorative evaluation of what Africa and Africans imply. For the overwhelming majority of the members of the ruling class, it tends to signify barbarism, sorcery, and inferiority. 95. Thornton, Africa and Africans in the Making of the Atlantic World, p. 334. 96. Geggus, Haitian Revolutionary Studies, pp. 22–23. 97. Blancpain, La Condition des Paysans Haitiens, p. 103. 98. See Moïse, Le Projet National de Toussaint Louverture, pp. 43–50; and Blancpain, La Condition des Paysans Haïtiens, pp. 116–119. 99. Lundhal, “Toussaint L’Ouverture and the War Economy of Saint Domingue,” p. 3, reports that in 1800, 30,000 muskets plus huge quantities of ammunition had been imported from Britain and the United States. The following year, 4.5 million francs were expended on the army and an unknown amount was used for acquiring military supplies in the United States. At the time of Toussaint’s death, different Philadelphia banking institutions contained deposits in his name of more than 6 million francs destined to secure purchases of war material. 100. Paul Moral, Le Paysan Haitien (Port-au-Prince: Éditions Fardin, 1978), pp. 12–33. 101. Ibid., p. 13. Toussaint Louverture issued a “Règlement Relatif à la Culture,” comprising thirteen articles that sought to discipline and punish cultivators who decided to flee from the plantation and move to the mornes or the urban areas. Such cultivators would be immediately jailed and if found guilty forced to join the army or compelled to go back to the plantation. Those who would host cultivators in the urban areas, and rural proprietors who would employ cultivators from other estates, would have to pay large fines and, in case of recidivism, would be condemned to go to jail for three months. Toussaint’s caporalisme agraire was meant to combat what he perceived as vagabondage and oisiveté. Louverture, Règlement Relatif à la Culture, le 20 Vendémiaire, an 9 de la République Française, CC9B18, 217MIOM/12, Centre des Archives d’Outre-Mer in Aix-en-Provence, France. 102. Blancpain, La Condition des Paysans Haïtiens, p. 103. See also Toussaint Louverture, Arreté, le 18 Pluviose, an 9 de la République Française, CC9B18, 217MIOM/12, Centre des Archives d’Outre-Mer in Aix-enProvence, France: La liberté individuelle de la majorité des citoyens est subordonnée à la nécessité d’assurer la puissance de l’état et de son armée de sorte que le pays puisse résister contre toutes les entreprises des étrangers. Il en résulte que le cultivateur se retrouve soumis à un régime militaire qui fait de lui un serf, attaché à une habitation, soumis au pouvoir du propriétaire ou du fermier, contraint dans sa vie privée au respect de la religion catholique, apostolique et romaine et interdit de séjour hors de son habitation sans un permis de l’autorité militaire. Sa servitude est permanente et héréditaire

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car les échappatoires sont exceptionnelles qui permettraient à un cultivateur portionnaire de trouver les fonds nécessaires à l’acquisition d’une propriété d’au moins 50 carreaux lui donnant accès à la classe des propriétaires fonciers, c’est-à-dire la bourgeoisie. 103. Moral, Le Paysan Haïtien, pp. 19–21. 104. James C. Scott, Weapons of the Weak (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1985), p. xii. 105. Moral, Le Paysan Haïtien, pp. 27–28: L’économie des grandes plantations achève de se désagréger; la vitalité du secteur montagneux nourrit, par contre, les progrès de la petite paysannerie. Une assiette nouvelle du monde rural s’établit, en dépit des résistances de la tradition autoritaire représentée dans le royaume de Christophe et du pseudo-libéralisme mis en œuvre par les Présidents Pétion et Boyer. . . . [La] masse des petits cultivateurs indépendants grossit d’un coup. Installés sur des habitations ou des parcelles d’habitations abandonnées, ils s’y taillent des domaines dont il sera bien difficile de les déloger. De tous ces réajustements locaux, contre lesquels le pouvoir politique, inorganisé, est évidemment impuissant, naît la contradiction fondamentale, et qui ne sera dès lors jamais résolue, entre l’état de fait et la loi, entre l’occupation de la terre par initiative individuelle et la propriété éminente de l’état, entre l’exploitation et la concession. 106. Fick, “Emancipation in Haiti,” p. 23. 107. Leyburn, The Haitian People, p. 32.

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THE POLITICAL AND ECONOMIC dilemma created by the plantation system was never satisfactorily resolved. Beginning with Toussaint and continuing for more than four decades after independence, Haitian rulers used harsh discipline in an effort to preserve the system, but they ultimately failed.1 They deployed state power to compel former slaves to become a servile class of workers whose labor on the plantations would fuel the development of a black bourgeoisie. Their despotism degenerated into a presidential monarchism that has shaped decisively the history of Haitian statecraft. I analyze in this chapter the style and development of this form of governance and its long and mutually supportive relationship with the country’s authoritarian habitus. As I argued in Chapter 3, the habitus is rooted in the multiple hierarchies of the colonial heritage that survived and indeed consolidated in the early period of independence. The rupture with the past that the abolition of slavery entailed did not eradicate the divide between Bossales and Creoles, rulers and ruled, and blacks and mulattoes. On the contrary, the postcolonial state was a mirror image of its predecessor. As Jacky Dahomay argues, What happens in independent Haiti is that the heads of the war of liberation will become owners [grands dons] of the former colonists’ lands. And the mulatto and black class will become the dominant class, replacing the former colonists and ruling in a colonial way the great majority of people—black bossales, essentially peasants. The state therefore exercises its authority as a form of internal colonial domination. Moreover, even if slavery were abolished, all notions of authority were based on the image kept of the master-slave relationship.2

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Haiti’s founders were bent on consolidating their new status and on becoming a ruling class. They desperately sought to establish their hegemony but failed, and this in turn undermined Haiti’s saturnalia of emancipation. Incapable of constructing an “integral” state, they resorted to despotic and coercive means to keep power. The integral state is a state that organizes both the political unity of the different factions of the ruling class and the “organic relations between . . . political society and civil society.”3 It contains social conflicts within constitutional limits and manages processes of class formation, struggles, and compromises. Ultimately, it expresses the hegemonic governance of the ruling class—the capacity to command effectively without permanent resort to brute force. This requires the development of the “consensual aspect of political control.”4 In such situations, subordinate classes come to tolerate their subordination as an acceptable, if not necessarily natural or inevitable, condition. The consensual aspect of politics should not, however, be exaggerated. Subordinate classes never wear their chains in utter submissiveness; they never completely fall for the hegemonic constructs of the ruling class. Their subordination stems from what Karl Marx called the “dull compulsion of economic relations” and the multifaceted forms of coercion that persistently constrain their behavior into patterns of reluctant obedience. Pragmatic calculations lead subordinate groups to opt for more mundane, circumspect, and muted types of resistance. As James Scott argues, There is no basis for supposing that subordinate classes equate the inevitable with the just, although the necessity of pragmatic resignation may often make it seem so. There is no basis for imagining that any of the common historical patterns of domination so completely control the social life of subordinate classes as to rule out the creation of partly autonomous and resistant subcultures. Finally, there is no reason to assume that the lower orders are so encompassed by an existing system of domination that they cannot either imagine its revolutionary negation or act on that negation.5

To that extent, hegemony refers less to the acquiescence of subordinate classes to the moral, intellectual, and ideological dominance of the ruling class than to the capacity of the ruling class to organize its own cohesion to govern effectively. This in turn entails the relative reconciliation of the fundamental interests of the ruling class with certain aspirations and demands of subordinates. As Antonio Gramsci explains,

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The fact of hegemony presupposes that account be taken of the interests and the tendencies of the groups over which the hegemony is to be exercised, and that a certain compromise equilibrium should be formed—in other words, that the leading group should make sacrifices of an economic-corporate kind. But there is also no doubt that such sacrifices and such a compromise cannot touch the essential.6

It is this “compromise equilibrium” that makes possible the integral state. Without it, as the history of Haiti shows, politics tends to become predatory and chaotic, even if revolutionary moments crystallize occasionally. Thus, the absence of an “integral state” strengthened the despotic legacy of colonialism and nurtured the development of presidential monarchism. The emergence of presidential monarchism responds to the disorganized and embryonic nature of class dominance and to conditions of institutional vacuum. This critical juncture, where no social group is capable of imposing its hegemonic rule, favors the ascension of a providential leader. Empowered by a fabricated or deserved heroic stature, the presidential monarch can soar above contending forces and represent, albeit temporarily, the “general interest.” Soon, however, the hero becomes an impostor who asserts his absolute authority behind the mask of paternalism. He presents himself as the indispensable father of the nation without whom chaos and civil strife would be inevitable. As a good father, the presidential monarch likes to be perceived as a selfless provider for the “family” to whom filial respect is always due. He demands and expects such respect; and he always disciplines and punishes the “sons” and “daughters” who have dared to go astray. But he uses his paternal love to capriciously forgive those who have repented and reformed. He proclaims himself a messianic figure endowed with mysterious, religious, and mystical powers. Embodying and indeed sitting above the constitution and the law, he governs as he pleases. Surrounded by sycophants and always ready to suppress dissent and eliminate foes, the presidential monarch soon falls into the sleaze of corruption and the vulgarities of demagoguery. He finally embraces a form of brute, naked, military dictatorship. The arbitrary powers of the presidential monarch serve not only his own material interests, but also those of a parasitic class of officeholders and cronies. In fact, the presidential monarch uses state power to extract from the popular masses those resources needed to nourish “an enormous bureaucracy . . . an artificial caste, for which the maintenance of his regime becomes a bread-and-butter question.”7 Moreover, the presidential monarch does not tolerate the

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emergence of pluralistic sources of authority and is at ease only when surrounded by the silent mediocrity of a submissive entourage. The ideological apparatuses of his state continuously emphasize his absolute centrality. In an effort to legitimate his rule, these apparatuses incessantly nurture the cult of his personality, imparting to him supernatural powers and unlimited knowledge. Attending to the most trivial family conflict as well as to the weightiest national crisis, the presidential monarch always pretends to have an all-encompassing sphere of competence. His presence has to be felt everywhere; he is the sun around which everything revolves. While rooted in the authoritarian habitus, presidential monarchism becomes an autonomous set of arbitrary and despotic political practices, which ultimately reinforce the habitus itself. This set of practices flourishes in what Arthur Stinchombe has characterized as a “culture of caudillismo.” Six principles defines this culture: (1) the belief that the leader could manage the uncertainties of politics, and so would be able to reward followers . . . (2) the belief that good luck (especially in politics and military ventures) was a virtue, a result of “political genius” of a mysterious sort, occasionally with supernatural sources; (3) the belief that ruthlessness and corruption were practical or responsible, and that a politics of principle or lawfulness was utopian or idealistic; (4) the belief that loyalty was the main responsibility of followers (and perhaps of leaders as well) and that there was always a substantial risk of disloyalty for which the proper response was revenge; (5) the belief that sumptuous consumption . . . and generosity to followers were obligations of political leaders; and (6) the belief that conflicts, disintegration of social relations, and political troubles generally should be solved by concentration of power and discretion on the leader, because unity, loyalty, and the application of genius all require absolute power.8

These beliefs fuel personal rule regardless of whether this type of statecraft is primarily attributed to the power of tradition, the heroic charisma of the leader, the incomplete transition to “modernity,” or the absence of an hegemonic class. In fact, while both Marx’s concept of Bonapartism9 and Max Weber’s notion of extreme patrimonialism or sultanism10 differ significantly on the causal mechanisms generating the autocratic rule of a single individual, they share a similar understanding of the discretionary and arbitrary nature of this mode of governance. Both emphasize the elements of charisma, capriciousness, and folie des grandeurs that animate the supreme leader. They also

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concur that personal rule is based on the incentives of corruption and generalized grafts as well as on the distribution of the spoils of power to a chosen group of cronies. Moreover, both ascribe strong militaristic tendencies to this regime. As Weber argues, Patrimonialism and, in the extreme case, sultanism tend to arise whenever traditional domination develops an administration and a military force which are purely personal instruments of the master. . . . There is a wide scope for actual arbitrariness and the expression of purely personal whims on the part of the ruler and the members of his administrative staff.11

While Marx points out in the same vein the ostensible autonomy of the Bonapartist leader, he emphasizes the social basis on which his power rests. The autocrat’s apparent autonomy is temporary and, more importantly, reflects the absence of class hegemony and the search for its establishment. Thus, a Bonaparte may acquire power on the basis of his apparent independence from social forces, but ultimately such independence is nothing but a mirage. Dictators do not stand in midair above society; they are inevitably embedded in processes of class formation and conflicts. In the eyes of Marx, the personal ruler is nothing but “a grotesque mediocrity” that comes to “play a hero’s part” in an unfolding struggle for power.12 This struggle takes place in rather unique historical circumstances characterized by the incapacity of the dominant class to impose its hegemony over subordinate classes. This incapacity stems not only from the fact that the dominant class is disorganized or embryonic, but also from its fear—real or imaginary—that subordinate classes can challenge it. In these conditions, contending social forces confront each other in a dangerous standoff that facilitates the emergence of a presidential monarch. In his classic analysis of Bonapartism, Marx explains the consequences of such equilibrium of power: France . . . seems to have escaped the despotism of a class only to fall back beneath the despotism of an individual and, what is more, beneath the authority of an individual without authority. The struggle seems to be settled in such a way that all classes, equally impotent and equally mute, fall on their knees before the club. . . . [The] state [seems] to have made itself completely independent. . . . And yet the state power is not suspended in mid-air. . . . Bonaparte would like to appear as the patriarchal benefactor of all classes. But he cannot give to one class without taking from another.13

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Thus, even if the autocrat has wide latitude to express his “personal whims,” he is nonetheless subjected to his social base, which aspires to become a ruling class. In other words, the autocrat cannot escape being an element, albeit critical, in the wider process of class formation. He ultimately represents an ascending class in the making or a class seeking to preserve its dominant position. In spite of his relative absolutism, the presidential monarch is ultimately never free to do as he pleases. Not only does he have to distribute the spoils of power to his cronies, but he is also compelled to embody the project of the class that he represents. The presidential monarch therefore enjoys a relative autonomy. Having drawn the general contours of presidential monarchism, let us now investigate its historical specificity and unfolding in the Haitian context. As I emphasized in previous pages, Haiti’s presidential monarchism is deeply rooted in the authoritarian habitus—the dispositions acquired by experiencing the racism and brutalities of colonial domination, the violence and destruction of the revolutionary war, and the conflict-ridden process of class formation that marked the early period of independence. Governing with this historical legacy implied confronting material devastation, foreign threats, and domestic divisions. To do so, Haitian rulers resorted to inherited military practices of command and control as well as to emerging homegrown norms of authority. Not surprisingly, the vast majority of these rulers became presidential monarchs upon assuming power. This syndrome has several key components: 1. It is symbolized by the rise of a providential chef with absolutist pretensions seeking to establish his own pouvoir à vie (lifelong power). However, processes of class formation and weak if not nonexistent hegemony curb these pretensions. Presidential monarchs must therefore resort continuously to repressive measures to stay in power. This in turn generates constant instability fueling coup d’états and emasculating any functioning institution. 2. The resort to repression invites a growing militarization of society. This entails not just the dominant role of national armed forces, but also the monarch-driven development of private or “parastatal” militias. These militias are the presidential monarch’s shock troops that he deploys to counter potential threats from the armed forces themselves. In this environment, violence becomes the primary and decisive means of settling political conflicts and transfers of

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power. Presidential monarchs create therefore a régime sécuritaire that paradoxically invites greater opposition and resistance to their own rule. 3. In his efforts to stave off such opposition and gain popular support, the presidential monarch fabricates a cult of personality that portrays him as a paterfamilias endowed with messianic powers. Depicted in a veiled propaganda as empowered by God, he is the supreme and infallible guide of the nation. Not surprisingly, he deems himself indispensable to the health of his society; he is simply irreplaceable. Ceding the reins of government would be abandoning the nation and his sons and daughters; it would be an unthinkable betrayal. In fact, he believes that such thoughts are so unthinkable that he bans their public airing. Thus, in order to stay in power, the presidential monarch silences dissent. Clearly, however, he knows that purely coercive means do not suffice; he “oils” his regime with the grease of corruption. 4. The presidential monarch entrenches corruption in all the fibers of his regime; it becomes an independent force that suffuses society and undermines any idea of the collective good. Its corrosive effects engender a systemic crisis of morality that makes the acquisition of “fast money” the summum bonum of human aspirations. Honest behavior, productive investments, and a sense of decency all become aberrations and symptoms of irrational stupidity. Ultimately, life itself turns into a cheap commodity—a “thing” that can be exchanged for ransom or terminated for a fee. 5. The presidential monarch defends his regime by appealing to nationalistic and racist sentiments. He blames the outside world, the blancs, for all the country’s problems while shamelessly begging for more foreign assistance. He attacks imperialism while entrusting his own personal security and survival to imperial troops and agents. In his black incarnation, he incites the masses against light-skinned privilege and exploitation while keeping these masses in their condition of destitution and marginalization. Conversely, in a veiled racist slogan, the mulatto presidential monarch disenfranchises the poor majority by proclaiming “le pouvoir au plus capable.” In either case, the presidential monarch has very little to offer to the moun andeyo; he is interested exclusively in the preservation of his own power. These five elements of presidential monarchism have devastated Haitian society; they have plunged it into a cruel hell. Let us now

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examine their historical specificity as well as the critical junctures that have facilitated their ascendancy. Toussaint Louverture’s constitution of 1801 is the founding document of Haitian presidential monarchism. Written under Toussaint’s order by Saint-Domingue’s Central Assembly, which comprised ten plantation owners who had little in common with the overwhelming majority of the population, the constitution symbolized the chasm between rulers and ruled that has characterized Haitian society. Not a single black person was included in this privileged circle of writers, which was composed of seven whites and three mulattoes.14 According to Bernard Borgella, president of the Central Assembly, Toussaint wanted the constitution written far from popular “passions and tumult.” It had to be the product of the “enlightened reflections of educated men.”15 Alexander Hamilton, one of the celebrated founding fathers of the United States, influenced the authors of the constitution by advising them that the backward nature of the black race made the “regular system of Liberty” unsuitable for the country. “The government if independent must be military—partaking of the feudal system,” he suggested. Moreover, he advocated military rule and compulsory military service under the regime of a presidency for life.16 The Central Assembly adopted in large measure Hamilton’s recommendations. In fact, the constitution of 1801 enshrined despotic rule into the very fabric of the country’s political life; its legacy shaped decisively the development of Haiti’s presidential monarchism. While it was the product of the nation’s early authoritarian habitus, the constitution contributed to the further consolidation of the habitus itself. In fact, Toussaint’s charter became a heavy and indissoluble burden to the unending quest for democratic accountability and practices. The constitution of 1801 established Toussaint’s absolutist rule and made him governor for the “rest of his glorious life.” Article 28 bestowed on him this power by virtue of both the “important services he had rendered” and the “desire of a grateful population.”17 But this was not all; Article 29 entrusted him with the choice of his own successor. In the most sycophantic rhetoric, Article 29 decreed: In order to consolidate the peace that the colony owes to the firmness, to the efforts, to the tireless zeal and to the rare virtues of General Toussaint-Louverture, and as a sign of the unlimited trust of Santo-Domingo’s residents, the constitution exclusively attributes to

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this general the right to choose the citizen who, on the sad occasion of his death, must replace him immediately.18

And yet, in spite of the “unlimited [popular] trust” Toussaint allegedly enjoyed, he was given special powers to repress any organized opposition. He was above the law and given the right to incarcerate and interrogate anyone he thought might be involved in any presumed “conspiracy” against his regime.19 In addition, he was entitled to censor any writing he found offensive to Saint-Domingue’s mores.20 Finally, Toussaint was not only the commander in chief of the armed forces; he was also in charge of the overall policing and surveillance of the population and of all civil or military appointments. Not surprisingly, he, alone, could promulgate the law.21 Toussaint’s panoptic rule became the archetype of Haitian politics; since independence and with virtually no exception, all the leaders of the Republic have attempted with lesser or greater success to establish their own version of presidential monarchism. They have all sought to establish their permanent and all-encompassing rule by proclaiming their own persona: governor, king, emperor, or president for life. As Claude Moïse points out, One will find . . . in the first constitutions of the Haitian state, in forms more or less toned down, certain modifications in the absolute personal power directly inspired by the Louverture regime. Dessalines, first governor general for life (1804) then emperor (1805 constitution); Christophe, northern head of state (1807 constitution) then king (1811 charter); Pétion and Boyer, presidents for life (1816 constitution). In these different cases, legislative authority of various shades is shared, but only the executive in power introduces bills.22

While panoptic rule never fully achieves its absolutist and totalitarian pretensions, it is a militarized system that consistently unleashes its repressive power. Not surprisingly, all the founders and the overwhelming majority of Haitian presidential monarchs were top officers of the armed forces.23 Those who were not desperately sought the military’s favors or developed their own militias or armed gangs. Under Dessalines, as James Leyburn explains, the army “was the great power in the country, for the new state was a military one. . . . One tenth of able-bodied men were constantly in active army service. . . . A military mentality was nourished, the people early learning the lesson that the army should rule and the people obey.”24

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The war of independence had legitimated the men in uniform; when they assumed power, they kept their habit of commanding and disciplining as well as expecting blind obedience to their orders. As Leslie Péan explains, The dominant values of burgeoning Haitian society portrayed the military as the most important agent on the social ladder. Since freedom and independence won from the French are the elements legitimating the violence inflicted on the latter, the fiercest fighters initiating these conflicts, and normally their victors, become the models and guides for the new society. Hence the gratitude to Dessalines himself and his bravery. . . . But the courage that had been necessary to defeat Napoleon Bonaparte’s troops could not be transformed into a positive force for national construction. On the contrary, Dessalines thought that one could achieve national unity through dictatorship.25

The main target of this dictatorship was the poor cultivator who was the subject of an array of restrictive laws that sought to keep him working on a particular plantation. The single most important goal of rural strategies designed by Toussaint and his immediate successors was to confine the cultivators to a form of serfdom. The caporalisme agraire came to embody Haitian governmental policy for the better part of the nineteenth century; and while it was later modified, it continued to mold state relations with the peasantry.26 The 1812 Loi Concernant la Culture, the edict of King Henry Christophe, rested on Toussaint’s repressive Règlement de Culture and represents the paradigmatic legal expression of the state’s attempt at oppressing and regimenting cultivators.27 It punished any individual who was “idle and vagabond.” “Idle and vagabond,” as defined by Article 17, were “rural laborers of both sexes who having left or leaving the dwellings where they had usually chosen to reside in order to go and take refuge in another dwelling, without a valid reason, in the villages, towns, or in any other place where residence is forbidden to them by law; those to whom this Article applies will be punished.”28 The Règlement de Culture did not merely target cultivators; it was a frontal attack on the poor, unemployed, and those who wanted to escape from the harsh labor of the plantation. Article 19 stipulates: Begging is strictly prohibited; all idle people, beggars, women of loose morals, all wanderers in towns, villages, and on roads will be arrested by the police in order to be sent back to their dwellings;

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those who are not affiliated with any particular dwelling will be sent to the dwelling or workshop assigned to them by the higher authorities. The governors, king’s lieutenants, fortress and police commanders will strictly uphold full and complete enforcement of the present Article; and all the good and loyal subjects of his Majesty are invited to denounce the above-mentioned individuals to the authorities.29

The curtailment of the cultivators’ freedom was completed by the state-imposed labor discipline that compelled them to a regimen of harsh and exhausting work. Article 22 specifies: The farm laborers’ work schedule is irrevocably set as follows: each morning at the crack of dawn, work will start and last without interruption until eight o’clock; a one-hour period will be devoted to the farm laborers’ lunch, which will occur in their same workplace; at nine o’clock they will resume their work until noon at which time two hours of rest will be granted to them; at precisely two o’clock they will resume their work, not to end before nightfall.30

Failure to follow these strict orders would lead to the intervention of the king’s military representative and the police and to the incarceration of the violators. Society was thus thoroughly disciplined and militarized. The problem with such a system, however, is that it invited resistance, generally hidden and surreptitious, and occasionally frontal and violent. Most cultivators did not want to put up with the miserable life on the confining and regimented habitation; they had expected much more from the war of independence. They were not prepared to settle down as serfs; they wanted to become selfsufficient and free peasants. Their resistance implied not only the persisting phenomenon of marronnage but also the increasing irrelevance of officialdom. Faced with repressive laws, people simply ignored and bypassed them.31 The consequence was that the state, in spite of its repressive capacity, gradually lost its authority to enforce its own directives. In the process, a systematic lese grennen32 eviscerated institutions and weakened the sense of civic obligation. This lese grennen became particularly acute under the twentyfive-year rule of Jean-Pierre Boyer. Paradoxically, when he assumed the presidency for life in 1818, Boyer was bent on reconstituting and consolidating his predecessors’ futile attempts at establishing a panoptic form of governability. His Code Rural of 182633 represented

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the most comprehensive and detailed plan for the revitalization of the plantation economy and the firm implantation of a virtual form of serfdom. The overwhelming majority of the population would be legally attached to a plantation and watched and disciplined by a rural police, which in turn would be controlled by a military chef de section specially appointed by the president. Those who refused their “obligation” to work the soil would be severely punished and incarcerated. The code sought also to silence any voice of protest; it prohibited, under penalty of a jail sentence, any cultivator from “insulting” his manager.34 But Boyer’s grand vision of a large, efficient, and productive plantation economy never materialized; it failed miserably. The state lacked the bureaucratic capacity to enforce its own panoptic plan, which the population simply ignored. As Scott has emphasized, “We must keep in mind not only the capacity of state simplifications to transform the world but also the capacity of the society to modify, subvert, block, and even overturn the categories imposed upon it. Here it is useful to distinguish what might be called facts on paper from facts on the ground.”35 The facts on the ground indicated that the laboring masses were no longer accepting servility to the exploitative and repressive reach of the state. They had tasted freedom and they were not ready to relinquish it. As Leyburn points out, When Toussaint had first introduced serfdom, many Negroes quietly moved up into remote hills where they would be out of sight; a good number had remained away from surveillance, raising children who cherished their own independence of action. The influence of this group gradually spread. . . . [The] masses had had increasing experience of economic freedom. There is no doubt that the majority of the people preferred a low standard of living with liberty to great national prosperity depending on personal compulsion. . . . Such complete, antagonistic inertia toward the law made its enforcement impossible. Individual cases of sabotage might be dealt with, but not wholesale refusal of the group to sign contracts.36

Ignoring the law and avoiding officialdom did not imply, however, the absence of state repression; nor did it mean that rural workers enjoyed a decent standard of living. In fact, if cultivators circumvented the state, the state ultimately chose to turn its back on them. By the late 1840s, it became clear that the urban and rural world existed as relatively autonomous entities. Except for coffee, which was critical to Haitian exports, the emerging peasantry was primarily involved in subsistence production. Residing in the cities, the dominant class engaged in commercial activities, and its different factions

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fought each other ferociously to control the state, which had always been the prime vehicle for the illicit acquisition of wealth. The practice of using the state to support patrons and reward cronies is profoundly ingrained in the political habitus of Haitian rulers. It generated widespread patterns of corruption, because powerful public officials have historically tended to transform themselves into an embezzling class of “big men.” Since 1804, politicians have legitimated their illicit behavior by claiming, as Dessalines did, that they are “plucking the chicken without making it cry.”37 In fact, another founding father, Pétion, argued that “all men are robbers” and that “stealing from the state is not stealing.”38 Such practices and convictions reflect la politique du ventre,39 the politics of the belly, whereby different factions of the Haitian political class have traditionally vied with each other to “eat” and indeed devour the fruits of power. La politique du ventre represents a form of governability based on the acquisition of personal wealth through the conquest of state offices. It is a logical consequence of the material scarcity and unproductive economy that have marked the history of Haiti. Given that poverty and destitution have always been the norm, and that private avenues to wealth have always been rare, politics became an entrepreneurial vocation, virtually the sole means of material and social advancement for those not born into wealth and privilege. Controlling the state turned into a zero-sum game, a fight to the death to monopolize the sinecures of political power. The tragedy of Haiti’s systemic foundation is that it has literally eaten away at the decency and humanity of perfectly honest men and women, transforming them into what people have now dubbed grands mangeurs, big eaters—a rapacious species of officeholders who devour public resources for their exclusive private gains.40 This metamorphosis into grands mangeurs spares no one; deformed by la politique du ventre, rulers of all political stripes and socioeconomic backgrounds have been unable to resist the temptations of prebendary gains. Regimes promising to turn society upside down and empower the poor as well as those bent on repressing and marginalizing the moun andeyo have all fallen into the gutter of corruption. The phenomenon of the grands mangeurs is as old as the Republic. As Péan emphasizes, The outrageousness of this politique du ventre will lead to indigestion for the social organism, thereby corrupting the virtues inscribed in the politics of national liberation. The appropriation of colonial

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corruption by the new elite happens with remarkable vigor. As a foundation stone for much political turmoil, corruption develops to the point where everything becomes edible.41

Corruption, however, has its political rationality; it generates support, builds loyalty, and “pacifies” dissent. It moves opponents into the orbit of the presidential monarch. Thus, even when the presidential monarch is not bent on accumulating a huge personal fortune, corruption remains essential to his rule. In fact, without it, Haiti’s presidential monarchism, already fraught with instability and uncertainties, would not last long. Toussaint understood this and tolerated and indeed encouraged governmental sleaze as a calculated strategy to solidify his hold on power. Under his regime, top officials took advantage of organized financial anarchy and fraudulent budgetary expenses to hone their kleptocratic practices and enrich themselves. As Pierre Pluchon argues, Fiscal and financial disorder is not just an illness of [Toussaint’s] administration but also a governing technique: it helps it to save money and to build up funds in a coffer obscured by an impenetrable smoke screen. This method, irrational for a good administrator, can be quite useful for a politician.42

Moreover, the unpredictability with which the presidential monarch appoints and dismisses members of his entourage incites them to resort to corruption as a means of ensuring their continued privileged economic position. Public officials seek the acquisition of “fast money” to alleviate their fears of losing the presidential monarch’s trust. Life as a courtier of the chef suprême can be comfortable, but it has its risks; it can end abruptly and brutally. Corruption is thus viewed as a logical compensation for the perils of sudden political death. The unremitting anxiety of being part of a regime that can collapse at any time or “terminate” one’s sinecure at the whims of the presidential monarch nurtures very short-term and purely mercenary calculations. This anxiety, which has characterized Haitian politics since independence, was acutely felt in the early period of the Republic. At that time, public officials confronted not only the potential wrath and capricious power of the presidential monarch, but also the threats of imperial military interventions that endangered the very survival of the country. The expectation of an impending demise spawned among members of the political class a psychosis that made them

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adopt fast and lavish living as their prime objective. Fearing a brutal military invasion from France, Boisrond Tonnerre, a trusted aide of Dessalines, explained well the consequences of this decadent psychosis: “Having only a few days to live, it is imperative to enjoy life to the fullest. Only money gives access to pleasures and luxuries; consequently all means to accumulate wealth are permissible.”43 In this environment of sleaze, immediate self-gratification, and mismanagement, norms of discipline and self-restraint vanish. Leaders are those who routinely steal from the national treasury; they are the gran nègres, the big men, who dole out public funds to their cronies and political allies. Corruption becomes therefore an accepted sign of success, the means of social advancement, and the prime object of political power. The extraction of rents through the control of the state has its roots in the early days of the Republic and has remained the dominant characteristic of the contemporary political economy of Haiti.44 It is the material basis of the authoritarian habitus, the driving incentive to conquer and keep the highest positions of public office. It creates an insidious sense of immorality that undermines civic behavior and celebrates cunning and deceit as the highest form of statecraft. The Creole proverb volè volé volè—robbers rob robbers—expresses well the pervasive sense that Haitian politics is nothing but institutionalized thievery. Thomas Madiou describes this reckless profligacy: Corruption was such that in many circles composed of well-off people of a certain education who called themselves respectable, one did not fear saying out loud that a state employee should take personal advantage, to the detriment of society and the state, of the very administrative, financial, and political position that he occupied. One went so far as to consider incompetent, simple, without savoir-faire or initiative the truly honest man whom one met on rare occasions; and a good many people forged currency publicly and with impunity. . . . Could we have not thought that we had simply discovered the moral standards of penal servitude?45

This was Madiou’s depiction of high society in 1812 under Pétion’s regime; after more than two centuries of independence, it is a depiction that continues to hold. As recent political history has demonstrated, the same kind of predatory and corrupt practices still prevail, whether it be under conservative dictatorships defending the privileges of the propertied classes, like the military dictatorship of Raoul Cédras, or under populist regimes claiming to advance the interests

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of the poor, like Jean-Bertrand Aristide’s Lavalas.46 Rulers who have had either the cruel experience of living in squalor or the chance of being born into privilege have historically succumbed to the hallucinating allures of great wealth; for both, political power has been the instrument with which to acquire or preserve that wealth. While people have historically tolerated the presidential monarch’s “eating,” they have imposed limits on it. These limits are, however, uncertain and depend on whether the general level of consumption remains within the accepted bounds of a particular period. “Eating” becomes excessive when it takes place in conditions of aggravated scarcity and trespasses what it had typically been. In such a situation, people are likely to stop putting up with the presidential monarch. In 1980, the unraveling of Jean-Claude Duvalier’s regime seemed to acquire steam with his extravagant wedding to Michelle Bennett, the daughter of a well-to-do light-skinned businessman. It was not merely that the celebration cost about US$7 million in a time of severe popular deprivation, but that it cemented an alliance with the rich mulatto elite.47 The unspoken contract that his father, François Duvalier, had sealed with Haiti’s masses, was broken; unobtrusive “eating” had given way to reckless and conspicuous consumption, and noirisme was threatened by the potential reassertion of unmediated light-skinned power. Jean-Claude Duvalier had thus violated the political code that had sustained his father; his union with Bennett precipitated the gradual disintegration of his regime. Confronting growing popular resistance, the regime collapsed five years later. Haiti’s history is full of similar tales—of presidential monarchs exceeding “acceptable” eating habits and forced out of office violently. Ironically, Dessalines, who claimed he knew how to “pluck the chicken without making it cry,” was assassinated and dismembered by an enraged citizenry.48 Soon after he became governorgeneral, his rule degenerated into a “despotism without limits.”49 He followed the example of Toussaint, who “had become the omnipotent agent of a centralization à outrance.”50 Dessalines, however, was not satisfied with the title of governor for life and the power to nominate his successor.51 Upon hearing that Napoleon had crowned himself emperor, Dessalines decided that he too should acquire the title. The constitution of 1805 made him emperor and legalized his omnipotence; he was his “Majesty,” and his person was “sacred” and “inviolable.” In addition, he was the supreme chief of the army and had the right to designate his successor in whichever way he found appropriate either

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before or after his death. Finally, Article 14 claimed that Dessalines was the father of all Haitians, who constituted “one united family” and could be referred to “only by the generic term black.”52 Dessalines the father, however, had little patience with his sons and daughters; under his reign, “discipline backed by force was the guiding principle in dealing with them.”53 Repression was not the only means he used to govern; he also allowed sleaze to permeate his regime. According to Alex Dupuy, Corruption among functionaries and military officers pervaded throughout Dessalines’ government and caused widespread discontent. Functionaries and officers took advantage of their discretionary powers to enhance their economic situation by plundering the public treasury, by privately appropriating the soldiers’ pay, and by arbitrarily dispossessing citizens from their properties.54

The corruption and repression that characterized Dessalines’ rule generated profound discontent not only among the landed oligarchy and his own generals, but also among the population at large. Dessalines professed, however, that he was defending the interests of “my poor blacks” against the privileges and claims of the “sons of colonists.” He is reported to have argued: Before we took weapons against Leclerc, the men of color, sons of whites, did not inherit anything from their fathers; how can it be that since we defeated the colonists their children request their property? The blacks, whose fathers are in Africa, will they then have nothing? . . . . . . Beware, Negroes and mulattoes, we have all fought against the whites; the goods that we have won in spilling our blood belong to every one of us; I intend that they be shared fairly.55

Dessalines was right in accusing wealthy mulattoes of systematically refusing to share with the black majority the land they had taken over from the defeated blancs.56 But it is highly unlikely that the land he was seeking to expropriate would have been redistributed among the poor landless. In fact, the Dessalinian state was the largest landowner of the country, but the main beneficiaries of its largesse were high state officials and top military officers loyal to Dessalines.57 Moreover, the emperor’s policies were aimed at reviving the plantation economy and compelling his “poor blacks” into a new serfdom.58 It is therefore hard to accept Louis-Joseph Janvier’s assertion

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that Dessalines desired to “create a genuinely autonomous peasant by making him a landowner.”59 Similarly, David Nicholls grossly exaggerated when he claimed that Dessalines “brought the question of social injustice out in the open, and was a spokesman for the disinherited.”60 In fact, the emperor manipulated the plight of the cultivators and their thirst for land to launch his program of state expropriation that would have ultimately benefited only a few. Moreover, in his efforts to confiscate those he deemed confiscators, Dessalines targeted the mulattoes especially. In the process, he began to privilege the use of color to seek the support of the black masses. The emperor knew, however, the dangers of playing the “color card.” He had forcefully argued for the unity of mulattoes and blacks: Blacks and mulattoes, whom sophisticated European duplicity has sought for so long to divide, today you make up but one whole, but one family; do not doubt it, your absolute reconciliation had to be sealed in the blood of our torturers. Now your precious concord, this happy harmony among you is the guarantor of your happiness, of your salvation, of your success: it is the secret to being invincible. 61

In an attempt to seal this unity, Dessalines offered the hand of his daughter, Célimène, to General Pétion, leader of the mulattoes, who refused for a series of personal reasons.62 The refusal precipitated a growing rift between the two men and accentuated the tensions between blacks and mulattoes.63 Infuriated, Dessalines reignited the old practice of exploiting color for political ends. This practice has always played a major role in Haitian history and reflected the continuing persistence of racial divisions and inequalities inherited from the colonial period.64 The long dictatorial presidency of Boyer (1818–1843) reinforced these inequalities;65 it solidified mulatto privilege and prepared the terrain for the politique de doublure—the politics of the understudy—whereby the predominantly light-skinned anciens libres ran the country under the cover of a black ruler.66 As leading members of the black elite of Les Cayes put it in a petition following Boyer’s fall, “Everywhere and always Boyer showed himself to be nothing but the enemy of black men. In this Haiti conquered at the price of the blood of both noirs and jaunes, Boyer has succeeded in establishing a veritable aristocracy: he had made the colored class the dominator of the black class.”67 Not surprisingly, the legacy of this aristocracy of color generated popular resentment and frustration and made the mulatto minority an easy target for

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black political entrepreneurs. In their efforts to gain political power, these entrepreneurs could mobilize the majority against the lightskinned exploitative minority by attacking the jaunes for enjoying illegitimately a virtual monopoly of status, privileges, and wealth. Color has thus been a historic weapon in the struggle for power. In reality, however, both mulatto and black elites have behaved with similar contempt for the poor black majority.68 They have manipulated color to fully benefit from the spoils of la politique du ventre. As Péan explains, The economic motive for corruption can be found between the need to give something “to the poor blacks whose fathers are in Africa,” as noirisme wants it, and the desire to create a class of rich Haitians, as mulâtrisme understands it. The difference between noirisme and mulâtrisme is here a difference of degree and in no way a difference in substance. The two devour society with the same voraciousness. If noirisme is devoid of hypocrisy and says “pluck the chicken,” mulâtrisme presents itself more subtly in its predations. It is what tends to make noirisme more odious in the embezzlement of state coffers. But in fact, corruption, whether carried out in a brutal or in a policed manner, is the same. Different sides of a same coin. From this perspective, one can understand the original purpose of corruption as the creation and consolidation of elites, its evolution, its relevance to the stability of the social system, and especially why this umbilical cord of “pluck the chicken” was never cut.69

Immediately after independence, noirisme was a means for the nouveaux libres70 to gain political power and its spoils and climb the social ladder. The practice had been ingrained in colonial times by both the colonists and the affranchis.71 Noirisme simply sought to continue the practice and legitimize it in the name of the “poor blacks.” Color was thus manipulated to justify the illicit appropriation of public funds by a small, emerging class of propertied blacks. In this perspective, noirisme, which hails the occupation of the highest political offices by blacks as the inevitable conquest of power by the poor masses, is nothing more than the ideology of an emerging class of black rulers in search of hegemony. For instance, the “darkening,” as it were, of the upper sectors that occurred under François Duvalier’s regime did not translate into any meaningful improvement in the life of the destitute majority. “Black power” in this instance was a cover that masked the ascendancy of a black bourgeoisie, who lorded it over the poor majority. As Etzer Charles puts it,

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If, in principle, noiriste philosophy can be summarized as wanting to give power to the blacks, that means giving power to its defenders—that is, to a few of the upper black bourgeois and a significant part of the petty black bourgeoisie, and defending their class interests or personal ambitions. That petty bourgeoisie, by its situation in the fields of social activity, is simply dreaming of power and opulence. The color question then becomes a politico-ideological weapon used by [Duvalier] with the goal of garnering the support of the dominated classes (the black majority).72

Noirisme can also undermine mulatto politicians by marginalizing them or forcing them out of office. By brandishing the specter of a unified, racist, exploitative, and wealthy mulatto bourgeoisie, black politicians can become “color entrepreneurs” and mobilize mass support against light-skinned opponents. For instance, under the Préval regime, a power struggle between different factions of the Lavalas movement degenerated into an antimulatto campaign. Three lightskinned leaders—Robert Manuel, secretary of state for public security; Pierre Denizé, director of the Police Nationale d’Haïti; and Jean Dominique, the country’s leading progressive journalist—faced orchestrated public attacks. While they had been old allies of Lavalas and Jean-Bertrand Aristide, they sought to reform the police and insulate state institutions as well as President Préval from the overwhelming influence of Aristide himself. They also criticized mounting governmental corruption and, more importantly, attempted to curb the growing presence of the Colombian drug cartels. Not surprisingly, their efforts met serious opposition, and they soon became the target of vicious propaganda. A series of ominous graffiti began to appear on public spaces in Port-au-Prince denouncing the three men as exploitative “ti wouj” and claiming “Bob Manuel vle touye Titid.”73 Eventually Manuel and Denizé were compelled to resign and flee the country, while unknown assassins murdered Dominique.74 The color card is thus a means of both keeping the spoils of power flowing and shrinking the size of the group of grands mangeurs. It masks the corruption and exploitative practices of emerging and consolidating black elites. The manipulation of color is only one of the multiple techniques used by predatory rulers to acquire power and keep it. The presidential monarch also seeks to portray his absolutism as a form of paternal authority, and society as a family that owes him obedience. In turn, he nurtures, rewards, and punishes citizens like a father. The metaphor

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of the father and the family has had a sustained political life in Haiti that goes well beyond the common foundational myth associated with the birth of a nation. Originating in the colonial period with the white master as the slaves’ stark, racist, and brutal father, it has consistently kept an authoritarian character. While the myth acquired a more benign aura with the founders—Toussaint, Dessalines, Pétion, and Christophe—it continued to entail fearful submission rather than loving veneration.75 In fact, it incarnated a familialisme asservissant to use Franklin Midy’s terminology.76 For if the presidential monarch always claims that his paternalism is based on affection, he demands absolute obedience from his people. He never contemplates the possibility that his sons and daughters might reach adulthood and become autonomous individuals. His rule is always regimented; visible or invisible codes of behavior discipline citizens and specify what is permissible and forbidden. This in turn generates a submissive “public transcript”77 that infantilizes the population and is well embodied in the Creole expression “Papa, gade pitit ou, sa pa bon ditou, fè pa m” (Father, look at your child, things are going terribly, give me a break).78 Paternalism is expected, and in some instances requested, as a form of government that might tame the worst excesses of presidential monarchism. J. B. Bayard, president of the senate, virtually begged for such a system; in 1816, he declared at the investiture of Pétion as president for life that he hoped that a “paternal government would be the hallmark of [Pétion’s] political existence.”79 Paternalism gives absolute power a less brutal and cruel face; it becomes therefore an ideal tool for presidential monarchs. In fact, it is a fundamental element of Haiti’s authoritarian habitus. As Moïse explains, Throughout the history of Haiti, this paternalism will permeate relationships with authority, with the powerful. It started to appear with Toussaint Louverture who, after having recognized Laveaux, governor-general of Saint-Domingue (1793–1797) as a father figure, became himself the father of his citizens and recommended the transposition of the family model onto work relations. Article 15 of the 1801 constitution reads: “Each habitation is a factory that requires that rural laborers and workers come together: it is the peaceful refuge of an active and steadfast family of which the landowner or his representative is necessarily the father.” Dessalines (Article 14 of the 1805 constitution) makes himself out to be the father of all Haitians, blacks and mulattoes. Christopher is the Bogeyman, severe, even cruel, but full of concern for his child subjects. Pétion,

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a good daddy, swung over into dictatorship but being “goodnatured . . . he made it tolerable.”80

Virtually uninterrupted, the paternal tradition of life presidencies continued with François Duvalier, who became “Papa Doc.” Duvalier was known as Papa Doc partly because of his earlier work as a doctor fighting against malaria and yaws, but for most Haitians the appellation inspired utter fear rather than gratitude. Papa Doc was not just a father; he was the father of all fathers. According to regime propaganda, “Dessalines, Toussaint, Christophe, Pétion, and Estimé are five distinct Chiefs of State who are substantiated in and form only one and the same President in the person of François Duvalier.”81 In fact, Duvalier liked to describe himself as an “immaterial being” whose power derived from God.82 A front-page montage in a governmentsponsored newspaper depicted Christ tapping Duvalier’s shoulders and declaring, “I have chosen him.”83 In public schools, children recited the Duvalierist version of the Lord’s Prayer: “Our Doc, who art in the Palais National for life, hallowed be Thy name by present and future generations. Thy will be done in Port-au-Prince as it is in the provinces. Give us this day our new Haiti and forgive not the trespasses of those antipatriots who daily spit upon our country; lead them into temptation, and, poisoned by their own venom, deliver them from no evil.”84 Not surprisingly, Duvalier was convinced, as he himself put it, that he “had to fulfill a holy mission, a mission which will be fulfilled entirely.”85 When Papa Doc died in April 1971, Félix Diambois, one of the judges of the Haitian supreme court, declared in the funeral oration that Duvalier “was the Messiah!”86 Messianic pretensions were not unique to François Duvalier; they have always weighed like a nightmare on the reign of Haiti’s presidential monarchs. Such hallucinations have not spared present-day politics. Legitimated by two electoral landslides, the twice-deposed president Aristide believed that he had a sacred bond with the country’s moun andeyo and that God entrusted him to be their voice and defender.87 As he put it in his autobiography, “The people’s sufferings are my own. I have shared them for so long that there can never be a gap between the president and the aspirations of the majority of Haitians.”88 The presidential monarch thus sees himself as indispensable, convinced that his continued rule is the sine qua non for “his” society’s well-being and prosperity. The nation and the leader are one—they cannot be apprehended separately; for instance, the Lavalas

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regime popularized the slogan “Pèp ayisyen se Titid” (Haiti is Aristide).89 Duvalier was also clear on the matter and declared, “I am the Haitian flag, united, indivisible”;90 and he added, “I have assumed for Myself the authority of the State and entire responsibility for the nation.”91 Not surprisingly, Duvalier asserted, “I have no enemies except the enemies of the Nation.”92 The problem with such convictions is that the population at large does not ultimately share them; the chasm that has traditionally existed between rulers and ruled is so vast that it has always invited cynicism, plotting, and coups. The anti-Dessalines tract, Résistance à l’Oppression, symbolizes a recurring story of Haitian politics: the disenchantment of the citizen body with the arbitrary excesses of a leader who once enjoyed popular support. It is a tract that could have been written at virtually any moment of the Republic’s history: A horrible tyranny, exercised for too long on the people and the army, has finally exasperated all sensible people, and brought them, by a movement worthy of the motive that gave it birth, to rise up en masse to form a powerful dam against the destructive flood that threatens it. . . . The head of the government has unjustly ordered the dispossession of thousands of families who are now reduced to abject misery, under the pretext that they could not justify the titles of their properties, but, in fact, designed to increase his estates. . . . The laws of the land are not respected. The emperor ordered his own constitution, and violated and trampled under foot his regulations. No protective law guarantees the people against the barbarism of the sovereign. . . . So many crimes, so many transgressions, so many molestations could no longer remain unpunished.93

Dessalines’ arbitrary rule was not merely rooted in an authoritarian reflex; it reflected also his desperate attempt to restore the plantation economy with its inevitable harsh labor discipline. Former slaves would not put up with such restoration; they dreamed of an agrarian egalitarianism and simply wanted to own some land and subsist independently on it. Thus, emancipation generated the eventual abandonment of the estate economy and the rise of a smallholding peasantry.94 The plantation system was ultimately doomed not only because emancipation could not be turned back, but also because it would have necessitated a massive bureaucratic despotism that the Haitian state could not deploy. Former slaves could not be easily compelled into a new servitude; they always had the opportunity to exit the plantation cage and

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become marrons. Thus, in spite of repressive measures and the use of the cocomacacs (clubs), there were more marrons in many districts in 1800 than under the period of colonial slavery.95 Moreover, the reimposition of patterns of forced labor became politically untenable, particularly for the mulatto elite led by Pétion. Pétion understood that if the small mulatto minority was to continue to rule, it had to coopt the black majority by offering it a stake in landownership.96 He thus set in motion the parceling of the plantation system that eventually engendered a republic of peasant proprietors bent mostly on subsistence production. Pétion’s agrarian reform did not, however, challenge basic patterns of inequities and power. Moreover, it followed the old practice of rewarding family, political cronies, and the military. Among the men in uniform, land was given according to rank, those at the top receiving the largest acreage.97 In spite of these severe limitations, Pétion’s reforms were significant because more than 10,000 people benefited from a redistribution of some 170,000 hectares (425,000 acres).98 The gradual rise of a peasant class had profound consequences for the future development of Haiti. It hindered whatever limited chances there might have been for the productive development of capitalism on the island. Although taxed, peasants existed more like marrons, individuals “uncaptured” by and suspicious of the state. Freedom in this sense implied freedom from any central authority— representative or otherwise. And yet, the steady material decline that the triumph of peasant subsistence entailed contributed to the continuity of authoritarianism and eventually to the increasing pauperization of the peasantry itself. Eugene Genovese explains in stark terms this agrarian “counter-revolution”: Haiti slipped into a system of peasant proprietorship and self sufficiency—wonderful euphemisms for the poverty and wretchedness of bourgeois-egalitarian swindles—and the dream of a modern black state drowned in the tragic hunger of an ex-slave population for a piece of land and a chance to live in old ways or ways perceived as old. The Haitian peasants . . . turned toward a centralized authoritarian state to protect their hard won claims to independent proprietorship. But the Haitian state did not have to tread easy in the face of a powerful and dangerous bourgeoisie; much less did it have to support the programmatic aspirations of that bourgeoisie— to advance . . . the cause of capitalist development.99

But the absence of a productive capitalism cannot be blamed solely on “peasant proprietorship and self sufficiency” or on “agrarian tradition”; it is principally the consequence of the utter deficiencies of

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state assistance to the agricultural sector and a lack of significant incentives for peasant production. Peasants, as Sidney Mintz points out, “have been given no assurance that an intensified effort will lead to gains for them; and they are unprepared to make such an effort merely because they are told that it will be good for Haiti.”100 Peasants are thus “rational actors” even if their justified distrust of any centralizing state project of “development” may have also contributed to economic backwardness. The point is that most Haitian rulers have come to see peasants as lesser human beings—as inférieurs, moun mòn, moun bwa, santi bouk—who had no moral claim on state resources.101 Peasants have always been the quintessential moun andeyo, those who are taxed but have no representation. Not surprisingly, they engaged not only in “silent” forms of protest, but also violent resistance against large landowners and repressive state agents. In the south of the country, in the mid-1840s, the “army of the suffering people” emerged as a political movement committed to both the redistribution of land from latifundistas to poor peasants, and the introduction of civil rights for the marginalized black population. In a proclamation, Louis Jean-Jacques Acaau, “general en chef des réclamations de ses concitoyens,” warned the government and the well-todo that “the rural population awakened from the sleep in which it had fallen, grumbled of its poverty, and decided to work to gain its rights.”102 The “army of the suffering people,” known also as the piquets,103 was bent on turning the world upside down. Its insurgents challenged mulatto supremacy, but they did so not on the basis of color per se but rather because of privilege and wealth. Acaau announced that the piquets had nothing against the jaunes; they simply wanted a more egalitarian society.104 In fact, Acaau uttered the well-known Creole proverb “Neg rich sé mulat, mulat pov sé noua” (the rich Negro is a mulatto, the poor mulatto is a Negro).105 Thus, while the question of color was inevitably raised, the more significant issue was the redistribution of resources among the population; Acaau and his insurgents were no longer prepared to put up with being the victims of obscene inequalities. As Madiou explains, “The goal of the insurrection . . . was to dispossess wealthy citizens irrespective of their color, and to redistribute their property to the proletarians. . . . This marked the beginning of the war against the large estates.”106 Not surprisingly, the French consul, Maxime Reybaud, labeled the piquets’ ideology a form of “Negro communism.”107 The “army of the suffering people” was ultimately coopted and defeated, and peasants failed to extricate themselves from their historic

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conditions of moun andeyo. However, the piquets left a legacy of resistance that sparked future agrarian revolts. In fact, in 1867, a new insurrection erupted in the north; peasants, organized as guerrillas and known as the cacos, destroyed property and attacked governmental institutions and forces. Showing surprising strength, the cacos spread their rebellion in vast areas of the country and fought the regime of President Salnave for the two and a half years it remained in office. This “long civil war” reinvigorated the authoritarianism and militarism that had characterized Haitian politics. Threatened and alarmed by the cacos, top officers and propertied classes called for further centralization of power and the unleashing of military repression against the insurgents.108 Thus, both the piquets and the cacos failed to transform the social structure of the country; instead of fostering democratic accountability and material equity, their struggle was hijacked by new rising elites. As François Blancpain explains, the peasant revolts that followed the fall of Boyer’s dictatorship marked an important period in history: At first it is an attempt, however fleeting, to end military authoritarianism once and for all, giving the power back to civil administration. The quasi-serf status of the rural masses dawns on them, and [their revolt represents] their demands for the distribution of land and for greater liberty. But it is also the ambitions of a young bourgeoisie wanting to take the place of the mulatto gerontocracy on which Boyer relied. At the end of the day, it is the new bourgeois who succeeded in seizing the revolution, and the peasantry fell back quite quickly into its inferior station.109

Historically, the possessing classes have always contained and ultimately repressed the struggles of the peasantry and urban poor for emancipation. Their success in doing so has contributed to widening inequalities, aggravating economic underdevelopment, and exacerbating acute patterns of class exploitation.110 These conditions have in turn nurtured the authoritarian habitus and led to the growing pauperization of the population. Despotic rule and mounting poverty have fanned the flames of the politique du ventre. Thus, freedom in Haiti has consistently faced severe material constraints that have accentuated ferocious processes of class formation in a context of profound racial divisions. Scarcity has meant that those holding political power have used any means available to maintain their position of privilege and authority. The fight for political office has historically been a

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Hobbesian war between small personalistic clans of big men. Jacques Fourcand, François Duvalier’s personal physician, expressed in no uncertain terms the consequences of challenging his patient’s rule. He warned of a “Himalaya of corpses” and added, “Blood will flow in Haiti as never before. The land will burn from north to south, from east to west. There will be no sunrise or sunset—just one big flame licking the sky. The dead will be buried under a mountain of ashes because of serving the foreigner.”111 And indeed under Duvalier’s dictatorship, blood did flow and terror became the prime instrument of statecraft.112 The Volontaires de la Sécurité Nationale, better known as the Tontons Makouts,113 played a fundamental role in unleashing state violence and keeping Duvalier in power. They not only became a counterweight to the armed forces and neutralized the traditional capacity of the military to wage a coup d’état, but they also represented a significant popular mass of support for Duvalier’s regime. In this sense, the Makouts constituted more than just terrorizing storm troops; like the mafia they extracted resources and distributed them to their “community of disciples.” In so doing, they bought people’s allegiance and “gangsterized” further la politique du ventre. Haiti’s dire poverty facilitated the development of this perverse environment supportive of violent extortions. Duvalier understood that scarcity could easily become a useful tool in enhancing his popularity; he knew that la politique du ventre could help him draw the new class of “urban parasites” as well as the “lumpen” into his own orbit. In fact, minuscule payoffs with promises of larger future gains for a chosen few became an attractive proposition for a destitute population. As Michel-Rolph Trouillot argues, [The] most original characteristic of Duvalierist violence . . . was the extent of its social base. Duvalierist totalitarianism did not involve simply a willingness to use force, but also a strategy of economic redistribution that permitted it to recruit, at a low price, the individuals who executed it. . . . [The] shrewdness of Duvalierist redistribution . . . was that everyone could hope to profit some day. . . . [The] state apparatus could support an extraordinary number of cheap allegiances at the bottom of the pyramid and at the same time provide ever increasing incomes for the shrinking minority that reached the upper echelons. . . . Contrary to what one might think, it was not the most prominent tonton-makout who maintained the regime of François Duvalier, but the high number of actual or potential makout of second

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rank whom the government bought at very low price. The ferocious competition at the bottom of the ladder, which evokes the image of a basket of crabs, neutralized the potential for mass revolt. . . . Average individual gains were low, but the number of claimants for crumbs who remained convinced of their chance was always sufficient to hinder the group solidarity necessary for effective action.114

While Duvalier was the master in manipulating la politique du ventre in the interest of his ruthless repression, this strategy of violence has been a persistent phenomenon of Haiti’s history. For instance, “barbarism and tyranny” characterized the reign of self-proclaimed emperor Soulouque in the mid–nineteenth century. He organized paramilitary forces, the zinglins,115 to smash the opposition and to suppress the piquets peasant uprising.116 Péan observes how Soulouque behaved like the mafia’s godfather: The Haitian state readily fits the characteristics identified by Charles Tilly, who explains that the state’s function is to organize crime. One can see it under Soulouque’s government in particular with organized repression by the so-called zinglins gangs [and by] the Tontons Macoutes before the name existed, who had been recruited by the police chief, General Maximilien, also known as Similien. Soulouque also put former piquet chiefs in his pay, with Pierre Noir, Voltaire Castor, and Jean Denis carrying out unprecedented massacres against all those who were suspected of conspiring against their government. The Soulouque dictatorship shows noiriste populism at work. It is a conservative, nationalist, authoritarian movement in which all powers are absorbed by the chief, who himself creates his own clientele. There is no popular participation except when it comes to mobilizing the masses into armed groups to spread terror, as was the case with the zinglins.117

Similarly, Raoul Cedras’s military dictatorship, which overthrew President Aristide in a bloody coup in 1991, created its troupes de choc, the attachés, to smother supporters of Lavalas.118 And when Lavalas returned to power, particularly in Aristide’s second presidency, it unleashed its own brutal gangs, the Chimères, to intimidate, harass, and brutalize its opponents. The Chimères’ slogan “jan-l pase, l-pase” (the way it will get through, it will get through) signaled not the reign of anarchy, as Hurbon would have it, but rather the enforcement of Lavalas’s agenda no matter what.119 In other words, jan-l pase, l-pase indicated that if constitutional or electoral means did not bring about the changes desired by Aristide, extraconstitutional means

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would have to be used. The slogan was a clear warning to Lavalas’s foes; it was a determined authoritarian gesture. It was also a typical embodiment of la politique du ventre; it expressed the attraction of being identified as a loyal disciple of Aristide, of being close to power, because closeness to power meant material rewards, jobs, and higher status. Those supporting jan-l pase, l-pase were thus seeking a place at the table; they desperately wanted to eat the spoils of the Lavalasian state. Theirs was the calculus of the belly, of “doing whatever it takes” to “move up” in a corrupt society, to finally become a gran neg or at least a ti chef.120 This also means that loyalty to the presidential monarch is purely mercenary, that it rests on prebendary gains rather than ideological principles. Not surprisingly, some of the Chimères that Aristide created turned against him and entered into an alliance with his foes. The volte-face occurred with the assassination of Amiot “Cubain” Metayer, leader of the Chimères of Gonaïves, the “Cannibal Army.” The assassination generated violent anti-Lavalas protests and marked the beginning of the armed insurrection that ultimately forced Aristide into exile. Convinced that it was Aristide himself who ordered Metayer’s murder, the Cannibal Army, led by Metayer’s brother Butteur, swore to wage war against the president until he was overthrown.121 In the process, Aristide lost the ability to coopt and play his Chimères off against one another. When former soldiers and death squad leaders of the disbanded army joined forces with the “Cannibals,” Aristide’s fate was sealed. This pattern of treachery, double-crossing, and violence continued under the interim regime of Prime Minister Gérard Latortue, which took power in the aftermath of Aristide’s forced departure in February 2004. While in the major slums of Port-au-Prince, especially Cité Soleil, many Chimères remained loyal to Aristide and engaged in a wave of kidnappings and violent confrontations against United Nations peacekeepers and Haiti’s police, other Chimères shifted allegiance to become the gangs of both narcotrafficants and certain sectors of the business community.122 Rumor had it that in his efforts to be restored to power, Aristide was financing the Lavalas Chimères to destabilize the interim regime.123 At the same time, in their determination to “clean up” the slums of Lavalas followers, wealthy businessmen apparently continued to sponsor the insurgents of the disbanded army and “bought” gangs that had been previously affiliated with Aristide.124 While these allegations were difficult to substantiate and verify, it is clear that the extreme poverty besieging a large pool

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of young urban dwellers created a class of “lumpen-criminals” prepared to sell its despicable services to the highest bidder. In the process, violence became indiscriminate and political alliances reflected nothing but mercenary affairs. La politique du ventre, however, had been privatized; the collapse of the state limited the prebends that could be extracted from it and transformed the unpoliced “private domain” into a Hobbesian arena within which crime became a business. The logic of la politique du ventre has not changed; it extended beyond the confines of the state. What Charles says about this logic now suffuses all spheres of society and not merely the political system; it encompasses all social classes: The underdevelopment from which Haiti is suffering has transformed the apparatuses of the political system into a veritable field of action in which the elites of the petty bourgeoisie may be found seeking their fortune and social ascension. For these elites, who generally have knowledge at their disposal, the state apparatus becomes the only path that they must follow in order to reach the high spheres of the social hierarchy and enjoy all its privileges. From that point onward, the dialectic of social dynamisms between different classes crystallizes. The political universe seems to be a veritable arena where classes, fragmentary parts of classes, clans, etc., confront each other with the principle “to each his turn.”125

This principle explains well how the authoritarian habitus is above all a reflection of predatory class interests.126 In Haiti, relinquishing office peacefully is an extremely costly, difficult, and rare occurrence; acquiring it becomes therefore a violent struggle against those who have it. It is in this vein that one cannot be surprised when René Préval, during his first term as president, declared, “Nou pran pouvwa, nou pran’l net” (We have taken power, and we will keep it forever)!127 While Préval ultimately respected the constitution and stepped down peacefully from office, his remark indicated a syndrome of Haitian politics: power taken should not be relinquished. François Duvalier embodied this syndrome in its most brutal and unrestrained form; he defined it in the crudest way: Listen carefully, people of Haiti, in only once every forty years a man is found capable of becoming the symbol of an idea. Every forty years. I am the personification of the Haitian fatherland. Those who wish to destroy Duvalier wish to destroy the fatherland.

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I am and I symbolize a historic moment in your history as a free and independent people. God and the people are the source of all power. I have twice been given the power. I have taken it, and damn it, I will keep it forever.128

Power cannot be shared; it is the springboard to material wellbeing and class-climbing for the relatively marginalized educated petite bourgeoisie from whose ranks come most Haitian politicians. The quest for office responds, therefore, to the desire to meet primary needs and ultimately to satisfy the aspirations of becoming “bourgeois.” Again, Charles’ words are worth quoting at length: [The] desire to get rich and to belong to the dominant class becomes the motivation of every political attitude for many people. It follows that every individual placed at a level that is more or less high in the hierarchy of power thinks only of using that power in order to gather as much money as possible, of living in opulence, and thus displaying his greatness or, better still, his newly acquired status as a “bourgeois.” “To each his turn”; his turn to get rich is the principle that seems to direct administrative action in the upper spheres. This principle, recognized and accepted by all the holders of power, seems to be the very rule of political morality. Thus, throughout the circuitous paths of the political system, there is continual confrontation among all those aspiring to change class. And, in order to succeed, any means is valid: misappropriation of funds, influence peddling, despoiling, etc.129

This permanent quest for power is not new; it has always symbolized the struggle for appropriating the prebendary gains of public office. It has permeated politics since the dawn of the Republic. While the presidential monarch is at all times feared, his courtiers are always secretly coveting his supreme position. The presidential monarch cannot therefore tolerate the ascendancy of a challenger or a presumed successor; he must be the only center of power around which gravitates multiple ti chefs, mutually suspicious of each other and always in fear of demotion. In such conditions, stability is precarious, and the presidential monarch often resorts to purges to minimize any potential challenge and assert anew his supremacy. Duvalier, in his acceptance speech when he became president for life, explained well the logic of presidential monarchism: “[Dr. Duvalier] is a very distrustful man. He wants to lead as a master. He wants to lead as a true autocrat. That is to say, I repeat, he does not accept anybody before him but his own person.”130

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There was nothing new, however, in Duvalier’s logic, except the intensity and extent of his destruction of all forms of opposition and his determination to exterminate any possible pretender to the throne. Dessalines had, in fact, perfected the art of political elimination; for instance, he engineered in a cold, calculated way the demise of Charles Belair, a nephew of Toussaint Louverture’s and one of the first anciens libres to take arms against the expeditionary forces of Leclerc.131 Dessalines’ ruthless march to power obliterated the potential challenge of Belair. Thus, the urge of the presidential monarch to create le vide absolu (total void) around his persona is profoundly Dessalinian. As Péan emphasized, This way of eliminating political competitors is the base on which political battles for power will be waged. The foundation of this type of governability is individualized power—its true driving force. The dynamic determinant of Dessalinien action is the consolidation of power as patrimony proper.132

Despotism and plotting have thus historically characterized Haitian governability. Patterns of brutal internecine struggles within the ruling class can be detected as early as 1800. French agents described how such patterns besieged Toussaint’s inner circles: The greatest discord reigns between Toussaint Louverture and the different generals under his orders. General Moyse is on very bad terms with his uncle; he has even a desire to supplant him. Dessalines apparently enjoys Toussaint Louverture’s chief confidence, but may shortly form a new party different from that of Moyse. In such an event, Maurepas, inclined to revolt like the others, would be ready to join Dessalines. Christophe is excessively disconnected with Toussaint Louverture, and the white inhabitants would be for him. . . . The rivalries of Generals Moyse and Dessalines presage new storms for the colony. Toussaint holds them only by hopes of higher command and greater wealth.133

Eventually, Toussaint managed to have Moyse arrested, condemned, and, executed without a trial.134 L’affaire Moyse as well as the successful conspiracy to assassinate Dessalines demonstrated that from its very inception, Haitian politics was a deadly game. In the grim words of Péan, this method of violent killings heralded “the political class’ obsession with death.”135 The emergence of potential challengers has always posed a mortal danger to the reigning presidential monarch, who in turn has never displayed any inhibition in using all

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necessary means to obliterate them. This perilous form of governability has been and continues to be rooted in the material matrix of the authoritarian habitus and la politique du ventre, even if the idiosyncrasies of personality and leadership have contributed to exacerbate it. Haiti’s political history reflects ultimately the predatory nature of the dominant class, which has persistently refused to ground its rule in a meaningful system of accountability. The dominant class has controlled the state for its exclusive benefit, using it to extract resources from the poor majority. The predatory character of that class derives more from its own class interests and rationality than from some inherent Haitian cultural norm.136 The violence of the dominant class has always reflected its determination to prevent subordinate groups from redistributing or expropriating its power, wealth, and privilege. This became evident again in the aftermath of Aristide’s second exile, when a new crisis of governability exploded. The dominant class unleashed a powerful ideological war by manipulating the term Chimères. It developed the equation Chimères equals Lavalas equals criminals as a self-serving strategy that ultimately demonizes the great majority of urban poor who tend to be strong Lavalas sympathizers. It is true that many Chimères have supported and are connected to certain sectors of Lavalas; but this makes neither all Lavalasians Chimères nor all Chimères Lavalasians. Indeed, Chimères are located not only in the bidonvilles of Port-au-Prince, especially Cité Soleil, but also in the wealthy hills of Pétionville.137 The result of the ideological war, however, is that the traditionally marginalized segments of the population, the moun andeyo, can now all be labeled rat pa kaka (scummy gangsters), who deserve nothing better than to be brutally repressed or “terminated.” This has had serious and deadly consequences for the residents of Haiti’s slums, who have been reduced to what Giorgio Agamben defines as homo sacer—people who can be killed with impunity.138 By drastically excluding them from the moral community of the nation and from all political life, the dominant classes have compelled all slum dwellers “to a bare life stripped of every right by virtue of the fact that anyone can kill [them] without committing homicide.”139 Thus, the marginalized urban poor have had to confront not only the violence of all sorts of brutal Chimères, but that of the state itself. As the International Crisis Group explains, In the capital’s poor neighbourhoods, the police not only have failed to regain public trust, but they are increasingly perceived as

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an aggressive force. The HNP [Haitian National Police] seems to be criminalising many of the urban poor through indiscriminate declarations by senior officers and indiscriminate repressive operations in the slums. This same pattern appears in the media, which systematically associates residents of poor neighbourhoods with “chimères” or, more commonly, “chimères Lavalas.” Members of the business elite have fuelled this campaign, demanding a tougher stance towards “chimères Lavalas,” ignoring the fact that many other gangs also are engaged in criminal, violent and destabilising acts. Repeated killings during pro-Lavalas demonstrations have been a consequence. Unfortunately, most Haitian human rights NGOs have not been [speaking] about these abuses.140

It is not, however, a simple matter of unreported killings; it is a strategy bent on “rabble cleansing,” on marginalizing and silencing the poor and making society safe for the well-off. It is, in fact, nothing but a naked class struggle that has little to do with a special Haitian attraction to brutality or despotism; the possessing class is simply not going to put up with a challenge to its status, wealth, and privileges. Thus, the authoritarian habitus has never been a balloon floating in midair independently of social realities, nor a simple recurring cultural reflex indicating a natural predisposition to despotic behavior. In reality, such political behavior has at all times been rooted in the material configuration of society; it is an expression of the virulence of class conflicts as well as the brutal zero-sum game for the conquest of public office. The authoritarian habitus is therefore ingrained in powerfully constraining structures. The slaves’ revolution of Haiti has taught us that human actions generate unintended consequences and that the majestic powers of imagination cannot will away objective necessity. The year 1804 was the triumph of the illusion that emancipation would bring both freedom and well-being simultaneously; it eradicated the barbarism of slavery, but it failed to fulfill its democratic promise. Born in the most constricting and hostile international environment and confronting the devastation of war and extreme material scarcity, the revolution survived but became disfigured. These scars, however, should not mask the unprecedented achievement of slaves rising against their masters and winning their emancipation in a world dominated by the utter violence of racism. While a new despotism soon tainted freedom’s dawn, it never approached the cruel savagery of slavery. As C. L. R. James put it, “Behind this despotism the new order was vastly different from the old. The black labourers were

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free, and though there might be dissatisfaction with the new regime . . . there was no regret for the old.”141 And yet, the revolution did not soar above the constraining realities of the world economy or the contradictions of class and race. Unfortunately, as Marx put it long ago, human beings “make their own history, but they do not make it just as they please.” This is the hard lesson of a glorious revolution. This is a lesson that the United States as an imperial power would learn twice in the twentieth century. Believing in its Manifest Destiny and believing that its strategic interests always overlapped with the spread of liberties, the United States occupied Haiti from 1915 to 1934 and again from 1994 to 1996. Using its vast financial and military arsenal, the United States set to restore order and implant a “free society” in Haiti. While the first occupation smacked of a naked imperialism and generated local resistance and resentment, the population initially welcomed the second intervention because it had the explicit consent of the elected exiled government of Jean-Bertrand Aristide. Both reflected, however, US imperialism, which like any other, was neither benign nor particularly effective in its democratizing mission. In fact, the two occupations failed to create the institutional environment conducive to long-term democratic accountability and selfsustaining development. At the end of each, the United States left Haiti with a liberal constitutional façade and a veneer of an infrastructure that soon fell apart under the continued weight of inequalities, corruption, and militarism. In the next two chapters, I analyze not only how the United States was incapable of taming the authoritarian habitus, but also how it contributed to its modernization.

NOTES 1. Eugene D. Genovese, From Rebellion to Revolution (New York: Vintage Books, 1979), pp. 88–89; David Geggus, Haitian Revolutionary Studies (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2002), p. 29. 2. Jacky Dahomay, “La Tentation Tyrannique Haïtienne,” Chemins Critiques 5, no. 1 (January 2001): 17. Ce qui se passe dans l’Haïti indépendante, c’est que les chefs de la guerre de libération deviendront des propriétaires [“grands dons”] des terres des anciens colons et que la classe des noirs et mulâtres deviendra la classe dominante, remplaçant les anciens colons et exerçant sur l’immense majorité du peuple, noirs bossales essentiellement des paysans, une domination de nature coloniale. L’état

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exerce donc son autorité comme un état colonial à usage interne. De surcroît, même si l’esclavage était aboli, toute notion d’autorité se fondait sur l’image conservée du rapport maître/esclave. 3. Antonio Gramsci, Selections from Prison Notebooks (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1971), p. 52. 4. Joseph Femia, Gramsci’s Political Thought (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987), p. 25. 5. James Scott, Weapons of the Weak: Everyday Forms of Peasant Resistance (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1985), p. 335. 6. Gramsci, Selections from Prison Notebooks, p. 161. 7. Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, The Marx-Engels Reader, 2nd ed., edited by R. C. Tucker (New York: Norton, 1972), p. 520. 8. Arthur Stinchombe, Sugar Island Slavery in the Age of Enlightenment (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995), p. 300. 9. Marx and Engels, Marx-Engels Reader, pp. 436–525. 10. Max Weber, Economy and Society, edited by Guenther Roth and Claus Wittich (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1978), pp. 231–241. 11. Ibid., pp. 231–239; see also H. E. Chehabi and Juan J. Linz, eds., Sultanistic Regimes (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998). 12. Marx and Engels, Marx-Engels Reader, p. 436. 13. Ibid., pp. 513, 515, 523. 14. Claude Moïse, Le Projet National de Toussaint Louverture (Port-auPrince: Éditions Mémoire, 2001), pp. 20–21. 15. Bulletin Officiel de Saint-Domingue, No. 58 (19 Messidor, l’An Neuvième de la République Française), CC9A27-216MIOM/20, Centre des Archives d’Outre-Mer, Aix-en-Provence, France, p. 235 (my translation). 16. Gordon S. Brown, Toussaint’s Clause (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2005), p. 152; see also Leslie J. R. Péan, Économie Politique de la Corruption (de Saint Domingue à Haïti 1791–1870) (Port-au-Prince: Éditions Mémoire, 2000), pp. 104–105. 17. Moïse, Le Projet National de Toussaint Louverture, p. 76. 18. Ibid., pp. 76–77: Pour affermir la tranquillité que la colonie doit à la fermeté, à l’activité, au zèle infatigable et aux vertus rares du général ToussaintLouverture, et en signe de la confiance illimitée des habitants de Saint-Domingue, la Constitution attribue exclusivement à ce général le droit de choisir le citoyen qui, au malheureux événement de sa mort, devra immédiatement le remplacer. 19. 20. 21. 22.

Ibid., p. 79. Ibid. Ibid., p. 78. Moïse, Le Projet National de Toussaint Louverture, p. 33:

On retrouvera . . . dans les premières constitutions de l’État d’Haïti, sous des formes plus ou moins atténuées, certains aménagements du pouvoir personnel absolu directement inspirés du

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régime louverturien. Dessalines, d’abord gouverneur général à vie (1804), puis empereur (Constitution 1805); Christophe, chef de l’État du Nord (Constitution 1807) puis roi (Charte de 1811); Pétion et Boyer, présidents à vie (Constitution de 1816). Dans ces différents cas l’autorité législative est partagée, avec des tonalités diverses, mais seul le Pouvoir exécutif a l’initiative des projets de loi. 23. Claude Moïse, Constitutions et Luttes de Pouvoir en Haïti, vol. 1: 1804–1915 (Montreal: Éditions CIDIHCA, 1988), p. 254. 24. James Leyburn, The Haitian People, with a new introduction by Sidney Mintz (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1966), p. 34. 25. Péan, Économie Politique de la Corruption, p. 129: Les représentations et valeurs dominantes dans la société haïtienne naissante font du militaire, l’agent social le plus important dans l’échelle sociale. Puisque la liberté et l’indépendance gagnée contre les Français sont les éléments qui donnent à la violence contre ces derniers un sens, ceux qui sont les plus acharnés dans cette lutte, dirigent ces conflits et en sont les vainqueurs deviennent normalement les modèles et les guides de la nouvelle société. D’où la reconnaissance à Dessalines et à sa bravoure. . . . Mais ce courage qui a été nécessaire pour vaincre les troupes de Napoléon Bonaparte n’a pas pu être transformé en force positive pour la construction nationale. Au contraire, Dessalines a pensé qu’on pouvait arriver à la cohésion nationale par la dictature. 26. Paul Moral, Le Paysan Haïtien (Port-au-Prince: Éditions Fardin, 1978), pp. 27–72. 27. François Blancpain, La Condition des Paysans Haïtiens (Paris: Karthala, 2003), pp. 136–139. 28. “Loi Concernant la Culture,” Communications Received at the Foreign Office Relative to Hayti, House of Commons (17 February 1829), CC9A54-216MIOM/40, Centre des Archives d’Outre-Mer, Aix-en-Provence, France, p. 138: Les agriculteurs des deux sexes qui sortis ou sortiront des habitations où ils ont choisi leur demeure habituelle, pour aller se réfugier, sans cause valable, sur une autre habitation, dans les bourgs, villes ou dans toute autre endroit, dont la résidence leur est interdit par la loi; ceux d’entr’eux qui se trouveront sous le coup du présent Article, seront punis. 29. Ibid.: La mendicité est sévèrement prohibée; tous gens oisifs, mendians, femmes de mauvaises mœurs, tous divagans dans les villes, bourgs et grands chemins, seront arrêtés par la police, pour être renvoyés sur leurs habitations; ceux qui ne sont attachés à aucune habitation, seront envoyés sur l’habitation ou la manufacture qui leur sera désignée par les autorités supérieures.

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Les gouverneurs, les lieutenans de roi, commandans des places et de police, tiendront sévèrement la main à la pleine et entière exécution du présent Article; et tous les bon et fidèles sujets de sa Majesté sont invités a dénoncer aux autorités les individus mentionnés ci-dessus. 30. Ibid.: Les heures de travail des agriculteurs sont irrévocablement fixées ainsi qu’il suit: Le matin, dès la pointe du jour, les travaux commenceront, et dureront sans interruption jusqu’à huit heures; l’espace d’une heure sera consacrée au déjeuner des agriculteurs, qui aura lieu dans l’endroit même où ils sont occupés; à neuf heures, ils reprendront leurs travaux jusqu’à midi, alors deux heures de repos leur seront accordées; à deux heures précises, ils reprendront leurs travaux, pour ne les abandonner qu’à la nuit fermante. 31. Moral, Le Paysan Haïtien, p. 56. 32. Lese grennen is the Creole expression conveying the sense that things are falling apart and that society norms and institutions are decaying. Its French equivalent would be laisser-aller. 33. Code Rural d’Haïti (Port-au-Prince: Imprimerie du Gouvernement, 1826), CC9A54-216MIOM/40, Centre des Archives d’Outre-Mer, Aix-enProvence, France. 34. Article 4 of the Code Rural d’Haïti stipulates (p. 2): Citizens engaging in agricultural professions will not be able to leave the countryside to live in the towns or villages without authorization from the justice of the peace of the commune that they wish to leave, and from that of the commune where they will settle. The justice of the peace will only give that authorization after ascertaining that the requesting party is of good moral standing, that he behaved properly in the district that he is about to leave, and that he has means of existence in the town in which he wants to live. All those who do not conform to the rules established above will be considered vagabonds and treated as such. Les Citoyens de profession agricole, ne pourront quitter les campagnes pour habiter les villes ou bourgs, sans une autorisation du juge de paix de la commune qu’ils voudront quitter, et de celui de la commune où ils devront se fixer, le juge de paix ne donnera l’autorisation qu’après s’être assuré que le réclamant est de bonnes mœurs, qu’il a tenu une conduite régulière dans le canton qu’il se dispose à quitter, et qu’il a des moyens d’existence dans la ville qu’il veut habiter. Tous ceux qui ne se conformeront pas aux règles ci-dessus établies, seront considérés comme vagabonds et traités comme tels. Article 69 states (p. 18): “Rural laborers will be submissive toward and respectful of the owners and farmers with whom they have entered into contract as well as toward the managers.” (Les agriculteurs seront soumis et

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respectueux envers les propriétaires et fermiers avec lesquels ils auront contracté, ainsi qu’envers les gérans.) And Article 70 adds (p. 18): “The rural laborers will have to execute with zeal and exactitude all the agricultural work that is ordered by the proprietors, farmers or managers with whom they will have entered into contract.” (Les agriculteurs devront exécuter avec zèle et exactitude tous les travaux agricoles qui leur seront commandés par les propriétaires, fermiers ou gérans avec lesquels ils auront contracté.) 35. James C. Scott, Seeing Like a State (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998), p. 49. 36. Leyburn, The Haitian People, p. 69. 37. Péan, Économie Politique de la Corruption, p. 93: “Plumez la poule mais ne la laissez pas crier.” 38. Ibid; see also Alex Dupuy, Haiti in the World Economy (Boulder: Westview Press, 1989), p. 80. 39. Jean François Bayart, L’État en Afrique: La Politique du Ventre (Paris: Fayard, 1989); the book was translated in English as The State in Africa: The Politics of the Belly (New York: Longman, 1993). Bayart’s definition of the politics of the belly characterizing postcolonial Africa fits well with Haitian realities: It refers chiefly to the food shortages which are still so much part of life in Africa. Getting food is often a problem, a difficulty and a worry. Yet, very often, the term “eating” conveys desires and practices far removed from gastronomy. Above all, it applies to the idea of accumulation, opening up possibilities of social mobility and enabling the holder of power to “set himself up.” Women are never very far from the scenario. . . . The politics of the belly are also the politics of intimate liaisons, and mistresses are one of the cogs in the wheel of the postcolonial State. “Belly” also of course refers to corpulence—fashionable in men of power. It refers also to nepotism which is still very much a social reality with considerable political consequences. And, finally, in a rather more sinister way, it refers to the localization of forces of the invisible, control over which is essential for the conquest and exercise of power. (p. xviii) See also Péan, Économie Politique de la Corruption, pp. 98–99. 40. The term grands mangeurs became very popular in the 1997 carnaval. See “Carnaval Grands Mangeurs,” Haïti en Marche, February 12–18, 1997, pp. 1–8; and Haïti en Marche, February 19–25, 1997, p. 12. During the 1997 carnaval, huge dancing crowds chanted accusatory songs against the Haitian political class for “getting fat” at the expense of the poor majority. Vilified as obese characters who had been deformed by the corruption of power, the grands mangeurs became the target of popular mockery and insults: “Gad grosé kravat yo . . . Gad grosé tét bèf yo . . . Gad grosé bank yo” and “Yo manje jistan yo gonfle” (Look at their huge ties . . . watch their humongous sport utility vehicles . . . look at their fat bank accounts . . . they eat to the point of ballooning). Thus, grands mangeurs refers not only to the voracious appetite for the personal consumption of state resources; it symbolizes

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also the intimate relationship between the acquisition of power and growing physical corpulence. In a country where malnutrition and hunger are a permanent predicament for the vast majority, the conquest of public office is a meal ticket to corpulence, a sign of growing status and privilege. 41. Péan, Économie Politique de la Corruption, p. 99: La démesure de cette politique du ventre va se traduire par une indigestion dans l’organisme social pervertissant ainsi les vertus inscrites dans la politique de libération nationale. L’appropriation de la corruption coloniale par les nouvelles élites se fait avec une singulière vigueur. En tant que point d’ancrage de nombre de convulsions politiques, la corruption se développe à un point tel que tout deviendra comestible. 42. Pierre Pluchon, Toussaint Louverture (Paris: Fayard, 1989), p. 416: Le désordre financier et fiscal n’est pas qu’une maladie de l’administration [de Toussaint,] il est aussi une technique de gouvernement: il l’aide à économiser et à entasser des fonds dans une caisse masquée par un impénétrable rideau de fumée. Cette méthode, irrationnelle pour un bon gestionnaire, ne manque pas de pertinence pour un politique. 43. As quoted in Péan, Économie Politique de la Corruption, p. 125: “Dans cette prévision, n’ayant que peu de jours à vivre, il nous faut largement jouir de la vie. Ce n’est qu’avec de l’argent que nous obtiendrons des jouissances; eh bien, pour se le procurer, tous les moyens sont bons.” 44. Mats Lundahl, “History as an Obstacle to Change: The Case of Haiti,” Journal of Interamerican Studies and World Affairs 31, no. 1–2 (Spring–Summer, 1989): 1–21. 45. Thomas Madiou, Histoire d’Haïti, vol. 5: 1811 à 1818 (Port-auPrince: Éditions Henri Deschamps, 1989), p. 108: La corruption était telle que dans de nombreux cercles, composés de personnes ayant l’aisance, une certaine instruction, se disant respectables, on ne craignait pas de dire hautement qu’un fonctionnaire devait exploiter à son profit au détriment de la société et de l’état la position administrative, financière et politique même qu’il occupait. On allait jusqu’à considérer comme niais, incapable, sans savoir-faire, sans initiative, l’homme vraiment honnête qu’on rencontrait à de rares intervalles; et bien des gens faisaient publiquement et impunément de la fausse monnaie. . . . N’aurait-on pas cru découvrir le niveau moral des bagnes? 46. Robert Fatton Jr., Haiti’s Predatory Republic (Boulder: Lynne Rienner Publishers, 2002); see also Michael Deibert, Notes from the Last Testament: The Struggle for Haiti (New York: Seven Stories Press, 2005). 47. James Ferguson, Papa Doc, Baby Doc: Haïti and the Duvaliers (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1988), pp. 72–73. 48. Joan Dayan, Haiti, History, and the Gods (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995), pp. 16–29.

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49. François Dalencour, Précis Méthodique d’Histoire d’Haïti (Port-auPrince: Chez l’Auteur, 1935), p. 34. 50. Placide David, as quoted in David Nicholls, From Dessalines to Duvalier (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1996), p. 39. 51. Claude Moïse, Constitutions et Luttes de Pouvoir en Haïti, vol. 1: 1804–1915 (Montreal: Éditions du CIDIHCA, 1988), pp. 31–33. 52. “Constitution D’Haïti, le 20 Mai 1805,” Communications Received at the Foreign Office Relative to Hayti, House of Commons (17 February 1829), CC9A54-216MIOM/40, Centre des Archives d’Outre-Mer, Aix-enProvence, France, pp. 133–134. 53. Leyburn, The Haitian People, p. 41. 54. Dupuy, Haiti in the World Economy, p. 80. 55. Thomas Madiou, Histoire D’Haïti, vol. 3: 1803 à 1807 (Port-auPrince: Éditions Henri Deschamps, 1989), pp. 309–310 (my translation). 56. Nicholls, From Dessalines to Duvalier, p. 38; see also Blancpain, La Condition des Paysans Haïtiens, pp. 124–128. 57. Dupuy, Haiti in the World Economy, pp. 79–81; see also Madiou, Histoire D’Haïti, vol. 3, pp. 287–290; Moral, Le Paysan Haïtien, p. 30. Péan, Économie Politique de la Corruption, p. 144, establishes well the devastating effects of corruption on Dessalines’ rule: The destabilization launched by “pluck the chicken” is to be put side by side with another one of Dessalines’ well-known lines: “And the poor blacks whose fathers are in Africa, will they not have anything?” Dessalines uttered this phrase to protest the monopoly of former French colonial properties by the already free mulattoes to the detriment of the newly freed blacks. However much Dessalines’ call was presented as proof of his wish to give land to the masses of rural laborers, in reality, this call worked as code for the general’s black elite to claim a part of the landed properties left by the white colonists. In terms of the distribution of land, “the poor blacks whose fathers are in Africa” did not receive anything. La déstabilisation introduite par le “plumez la poule” est à mettre à cote d’une autre expression très connue de Dessalines, “Et les pauvres Noirs dont les pères sont en Afrique, n’auront-ils donc rien?” Dessalines a prononcé ces mots pour protester contre l’accaparement des anciennes propriétés des colons français par les mulâtres anciens libres au détriment des Noirs nouveaux libres. On aura beau présenter ce cri de Dessalines comme la preuve de sa volonté de donner des terres aux masses de cultivateurs, dans la réalité, et, son gouvernement, on constate que ce mot de Dessalines a fonctionné comme un mot de code pour revendiquer une partie des propriétés terriennes laissées par les colons blancs au profit de l’élite noire des généraux. “Les pauvres Noirs dont les pères sont en Afrique” n’ont rien eu en terme de distribution des terres. 58. Moïse, Constitutions et Luttes de Pouvoir en Haïti, vol. 1, pp. 33–35. According to Moral, Le Paysan Haïtien (p. 29):

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Dessalines did not stop vigorously applying petty agrarian officiousness. As of 1799, his name is associated with the most brutal conduct of workshops. Under his reign, the rural labor force submits to merciless military discipline. The flight of rural laborers increases. The urban census of October 25, 1804, “considering that a large number of inhabitants leave the countryside to take refuge in the towns without any means of existence,” is designed to bring the “vagrants” back into farming. Dessalines n’a cessé d’appliquer le caporalisme agraire avec une extrême vigueur. Depuis 1799, son nom reste attaché à la conduite la plus brutale des ateliers. Sous son règne, la main-d’œuvre rurale est soumise à une discipline militaire impitoyable. Le marronage des cultivateurs s’amplifie. Le recensement urbain du 25 octobre 1804, “considérant qu’une grande partie des habitants abandonne la campagne pour se réfugier dans les villes, sans nul moyen d’existence,” a pour objet principal de ramener les “vagabonds” à la culture. 59. Louis-Joseph Janvier, Les Affaires d’Haïti (Paris: Flammarion, 1885), p. 42; see also René Depestre, Bonjour et Adieu à la Négritude (Paris: Robert Laffont, 1980), pp. 182–184. Depestre sees Dessalines in a similar way; in fact, he argues that the assassination of the emperor constituted a Haitian Thermidor. As he put it (p. 183), “The tragic disappearance of Dessalines . . . definitively compromises the chances of agrarian reform favorable to a revolutionary peasantry” (La disparition tragique de Dessalines . . . compromit définitivement les chances d’une réforme agraire favorable à la paysannerie révolutionnaire). 60. Nicholls, From Dessalines to Duvalier, p. 39. 61. Madiou, Histoire d’Haïti, vol. 3, p. 409: Noirs et jaunes que la duplicité raffinée des européens a cherche si longtemps à diviser, vous ne faites aujourd’hui qu’un seul tout, qu’une seule famille; n’en doutez pas, votre parfaite réconciliation avait besoin d’être scellée du sang de nos bourreaux. Maintenez votre précieuse concorde, cette heureuse harmonie parmi vous; c’est le gage de votre bonheur, de votre salut, de vos succès: c’est le secret d’être invincibles. 62. Ibid., pp. 307–309. 63. Pétion’s refusal to marry Célimène reflected on the one hand his rejection of marriage as such and on the other hand the fact that he knew that she was in love with Captain Chancy, who was a nephew of Toussaint Louverture. Because of his profound dislike of Toussaint, Dessalines rejected any idea of a possible blood union between his daughter and a descendant of his nemesis. He jailed Chancy, who ultimately committed suicide rather than confront the wrath of the emperor (see Madiou, Histoire D’Haïti, vol. 3, pp. 311–313). 64. Nicholls, From Dessalines to Duvalier, p. 39. 65. Péan, Économie Politique de la Corruption, p. 255, argues that Boyer’s regime “once and for all created a power for the benefit of the anciens libres whose majority was mulatto.”

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66. The paradigmatic form of la politique de doublure was the regime of Philippe Guerrier, a black maréchal de camp who became president in 1844 at the age of eighty-seven. Guerrier was known to have a serious drinking problem and had little real power. Power was in the hands of Beaubrun Ardouin, a mulatto with close connections to the light-skinned bourgeois elite. As Hérard Dumesle, an opponent of both Guerrier and Ardouin, put it (as quoted in Thomas Madiou, Histoire d’Haïti, vol. 8: 1843 à 1846 [Port-au-Prince: Éditions Henri Deschamps, 1991], p. 141): “Ardouin will govern behind the mask of Guerrier.” 67. As quoted in Thomas Madiou, Histoire D’Haïti, vol. 7: 1827 à 1843 (Port-au-Prince: Êditions Henri Deschamps, 1988), p. 503: “Partout et toujours Boyer ne s’était montre que l’ennemie des hommes noirs. Aussi dans cette Haïti conquise au prix du sang des noirs et des jaunes, a-t-il réussi à établir une véritable aristocratie: il a fait de la classe colorée la dominatrice de la classe noire.” 68. Micheline Labelle, Idéologie de Couleur et Classes Sociales en Haïti (Montreal: Presses de l’Université de Montréal, 1978). 69. Péan, Économie Politique de la Corruption, p. 146: Le calcul économique de la corruption se situe entre la nécessité de donner quelque chose “aux pauvres Noirs dont les pères sont en Afrique” comme le veut le noirisme et la volonté de création d’une classe d’Haïtiens riches comme l’entend le mulâtrisme. La différence entre noirisme et mulâtrisme est ici une différence de degré et en aucune façon une différence de fond. Les deux dévorent la société avec la même voracité. Si le noirisme est dénué d’hypocrisie et dit “plumez la poule,” le mulatrisme se veut plus subtil dans ses prédations. C’est ce qui tend à rendre le noirisme plus odieux dans la dilapidation des caisses de l’état. Mais en fait, la corruption, qu’elle soit exercée de manière brutale ou policée, est la même. Des formes différentes d’une même expression. Dans cette optique, on peut comprendre la fonction originelle de la corruption pour la création et la consolidation des élites, son évolution, sa pertinence pour la stabilité du système social et surtout pourquoi ce cordon ombilical du “plumez la poule” n’a-t-il jamais été coupé. 70. Nouveaux libres was the term used to describe the predominantly black population of slaves that had been emancipated by the revolutionary war of independence. 71. Péan, Économie Politique de la Corruption, pp. 82–84. 72. Etzer Charles, Le Pouvoir Politique en Haïti de 1957 à Nos Jours (Paris: Karthala, 1994), pp. 253–254: Si, en principe, l’idéologie noiriste se résume à vouloir donner le pouvoir aux Noirs, il s’agit en fait pour ses défenseurs, c’est-à-dire pour quelques grands bourgeois noirs et une partie importante de la petite-bourgeoisie noire, de défendre leurs intérêts de classe ou leurs ambitions personnelles. Celle-ci, par sa position sur le terrain des pratiques sociales, ne rêve que de pouvoir et d’opulence. La question de couleur devient alors une arme politico-idéologique

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que [Duvalier] utilise dans le but d’acquérir l’appui des classes dominées (a majorité noire). 73. In Creole, ti wouj is a slur to describe mulattoes as “little reds”; and Bob Manuel vle touye Titid means Bob Manuel wants to kill Aristide. The use of color in this political instance is depicted well in Michael Deibert, Notes from the Last Testament: The Struggle for Haiti (New York: Seven Stories Press, 2005), pp. 89–96. 74. Ibid., pp. 97–98; see also Michèle D. Pierre-Louis, “Pourquoi Tuer Jean Dominique?” Chemins Critiques 5, no. 1 (January 2001): 105–111. 75. Franklin Midy, “Le Pouvoir: Volonté de Puissance et d’Humiliation,” Chemins Critiques 5, no. 1 (January 2001): 75–104, argues (p. 79): [In] the colonial system of slavery, the master of slaves is the father of his slaves and the head of the family established by the attachment of slaves to their master by virtue of the Code Noir. In the postcolonial system of independent Haiti’s semi-serfdom, the owner-master of the plantation remains the father of the serf-laborers and the head of the family instituted by the attachment of these cultivators to their master-proprietor by virtue of the Code Rural. In each system of subservient relationships before and after 1804, the master-father is the head of an enslaved family and the master-father-family unit makes up a cursed trinity, considering the condition of the oppressed! [Dans] le système colonial d’esclavage, le maître d’esclaves est le père de ses esclaves et le chef de la famille instituée par l’attachement des esclaves à leur maître en vertu du Code Noir. Dans le système post-colonial de mi-servage de l’Haïti indépendante, le propriétaire-maître de plantation reste le père des cultivateurs-serfs et le chef de la famille instituée par l’attachement de ces cultivateurs à leur maitre-propriétaire en vertu d’un Code rural. Dans l’un et l’autre système de rapports d’asservissement, avant et après 1804, le maîtrepère est le chef d’une famille asservie et l’unité maître-papa-famille forme une trinité maudite, au regard de la condition d’opprimés! 76. Ibid., p. 77. 77. Scott, Weapons of the Weak. 78. Midy, “Le Pouvoir.” 79. Beaubrun Ardouin, Études sur l’Histoire d’Haïti, vol. 8, 2nd ed., annotated and prefaced by a bibliographic note on B. Ardouin, edited by François Dalencour (Port-au-Prince, Fardin, 1958), p. 52; see also Madiou, Histoire D’Haïti, vol. 5, pp. 377–378. 80. Moïse, Constitutions et Luttes de Pouvoir en Haïti, vol. 1, p. 58: Tout au long de l’histoire d’Haïti, ce paternalisme imprégnera la relation à l’autorité, aux détenteurs du pouvoir. Il a commencé à se manifester avec Toussaint Louverture qui, après avoir reconnu son père en Laveaux, gouverneur général de St-Domingue (1793– 1797), devint à son tour le père de ses gouvernés et recommanda la transposition du modèle familial dans les relations de travail. Article

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15 de la Constitution de 1801: “chaque habitation est une manufacture qui exige une réunion de cultivateurs et ouvriers; c’est l’asile tranquille d’une active et constante famille, dont le propriétaire du sol ou son représentant est nécessairement le père.” Dessalines (article 14 de la Constitution de 1805) se donne pour le père de tous les Haïtiens, noirs et mulâtres. Christophe, le père fouettard, sévère, cruel même, mais plein de sollicitude pour ses enfants sujets. Pétion, bon papa a basculé dans la dictature, mais “débonnaire . . . il la rendit supportable.” 81. As quoted in Robert Debs Heinl and Nancy Gordon Heinl, Written in Blood: The Story of the Haitian People, 1492–1995, revised and expanded by Michael Heinl (Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 1996), p. 608. 82. Bob Nérée, Duvalier: Le Pouvoir sur les Autres, de Père en Fils (Port-au-Prince: Éditions Henri Deschamps, 1988), pp. 104–105. 83. Robert Rotberg with Christopher Clague, Haiti: The Politics of Squalor (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1971), p. 233. 84. Heinl and Heinl, Written in Blood, p. 608. 85. Rotberg with Clague, Haiti: The Politics of Squalor, p. 234. 86. Heinl and Heinl, Written in Blood, p. 625. 87. Laennec Hurbon, “La Dé-Symbolisation du Pouvoir et ses Effets Meurtriers,” Chemins Critiques 5, no. 1 (January 2001): 56. 88. Jean-Bertrand Aristide, An Autobiography (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1993), p. 154. 89. Jean-Bertrand Aristide, Dignity (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1996), p. 55. 90. As quoted in Heinl and Heinl, Written in Blood, p. 614. 91. As quoted in Rotberg and Clague, Haiti: The Politics of Squalor, p. 247. 92. As quoted in Heinl and Heinl, Written in Blood, p. 565. 93. As quoted in Dupuy, Haiti in the World Economy, p. 80. 94. Sidney Mintz, Caribbean Transformations (Chicago: Aldine, 1974), argues (p. 274): The land is invested with considerable affect: gods live in it; it is the ultimate security against privation; family members are buried in it; food and wealth come from it; and it is good in itself, even if not cultivated. While such attitudes are common in peasant societies, Haiti’s history of slavery, and the acquisition of access to land through revolution, has perhaps given a special symbolic significance to landowning. Land is valued above else and is sometimes held “uneconomically”—that is, even when the capital and labor power to work it are lacking. 95. Gabriel Debien, Plantations et Esclaves à Saint-Domingue, Publication No. 3, Section d’Histoire (Dakar: Université de Dakar, Faculté des Lettres et Sciences Humaines, 1962), p. 161. 96. Blancpain, La Condition des Paysans Haïtiens, p. 131. 97. Ibid., pp. 131–135. 98. Moral, Le Paysan Haïtien, pp. 31–33.

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99. Genovese, From Rebellion to Revolution, p. 89. 100. Mintz, Caribbean Transformations, p. 279. 101. Inférieurs, moun mòn, moun bwa, santi bouk—inferior, hillbilly, goat-smelling—are all clearly pejorative stereotypes of peasants meant to exclude them from the moral community of “proper” citizens. 102. As quoted in Madiou, Histoire D’Haïti, vol. 8, p. 134: “La population des campagnes, réveillée du sommeil ou elle était plongée, murmura de sa misère, et résolût de travailler a la conquête de ses droits.” 103. The name piquets was given to the insurgents—comprising mainly peasants—because they carried as weapons only sharpened wooden pikes. See Mimi Sheller, “The Army of Sufferers: Peasant Democracy in the Early Republic of Haiti,” New West Indian Guide 74, no. 1–2 (2000): 36; see also Madiou, Histoire D’Haïti, vol. 8, pp. 131–153. 104. In their first proclamation, the piquets clearly stated: “Jamais il n’a été de notre pensée de prétendre à la guerre de caste; non, non vous ne verrez jamais cela parmi nous, et nous appelons tous nos frères sans distinction a prêter leur concours au bonheur de la Patrie.” As quoted in Moïse, Constitutions et Luttes de Pouvoir en Haïti, vol. 1, p. 105. 105. Madiou, Histoire d’Haïti, vol. 8, pp. 147–148. 106. Ibid., p. 131: “L’insurrection avait pour objet . . . de déposséder les citoyens reputés riches, de n’importe quelle couleur, et de partager leurs biens entre les prolétaires. . . . [C’était] l’inauguration de la guerre à la grande propriété.” 107. As quoted in Sheller, “The Army of Sufferers,” p. 50. 108. Moïse, Constitutions et Luttes de Pouvoir en Haïti, vol. 1, pp. 164–171. 109. Blancpain, La Condition des Paysans Haïtiens, pp. 158–159; see also Moral, Le Paysan Haïtien, pp. 58–59: C’est d’abord une tentative, éphémère, d’en finir avec l’autoritarisme militaire pour redonner le pouvoir à l’administration civile. C’est aussi la prise de conscience des masses paysannes de leur statut de quasi-servage et leur revendication pour le partage des terres et une plus large liberté. Mais c’est aussi l’ambition d’une jeune bourgeoisie de prendre la place de la gérontocratie mulâtre sur laquelle s’appuyait Boyer. En fin de compte, ce sont ces nouveaux bourgeois qui réussirent à confisquer la révolution et le peuple paysan retomba bien vite dans sa condition subalterne. 110. Mintz, Caribbean Transformations, pp. 267–301; Blancpain, La Condition des Paysans Haïtiens. 111. As quoted in Bernard Diederich and Al Burt, Papa Doc: The Truth About Haiti Today (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1969), p. 203. 112. Michel-Rolph Trouillot, Haiti: State Against Nation (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1990), pp. 139–216. 113. The Creole term tonton makout means “the bogeyman” in Haitian popular folktales. During the 1957 electoral campaign that led to his election, Duvalier had already organized a paramilitary group known as the Cagoulards, who harassed and intimidated his opponents in a series of brutal nighttime

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raids. Once in power, Duvalier institutionalized the Cagoulards into the Makouts. For a fuller discussion of macoutisme, see Gérard Barthélémy, Les Duvalieristes Après Duvalier (Paris: Éditions l’Harmattan, 1992), pp. 44–46; Michel Laguerre, The Military and Society in Haiti (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1993), pp. 114–117; Heinl and Heinl, Written in Blood, pp. 561–636; and Trouillot, Haiti: State Against Nation, pp. 152– 156. 114. Trouillot, Haiti: State Against Nation, pp. 153, 155–156. 115. Péan, Économie Politique de la Corruption, pp. 348–349. 116. Nicholls, From Dessalines to Duvalier, pp. 82–84; see also Sheller, “The Army of Sufferers,” pp. 33–55; Moïse, Constitutions et Luttes de Pouvoir en Haïti, vol. 1, pp. 123–136. 117. Péan, Économie Politique de la Corruption, pp. 348–349: L’état d’Haïti répond bien aux caractéristiques mises en évidence par Charles Tilly quand il explique que la fonction de l’état est celle d’organiser le crime. On le voit particulièrement sous le gouvernement de Soulouque avec l’organisation de la répression par les bandes dites de Zinglins, des Toton-macoutes avant la lettre, qui avaient été recrutés par le chef de la garde, le général Maximilien dit Similien. Soulouque mit également a sa solde d’anciens chefs piquets dont Pierre Noir, Voltaire Castor et Jean Denis qui se livrèrent à des massacres sans précédents contre tous ceux qui étaient soupçonnés de conspirer contre son gouvernement. La dictature de Soulouque montre le populisme noiriste à l’œuvre. C’est un mouvement nationaliste, conservateur et autoritaire dans lequel tous les pouvoirs sont accaparés par le chef qui crée lui-même sa propre clientèle. Il n’y a aucune participation populaire sauf quand il s’agit de mobiliser les masses dans des groupes armés pour semer la terreur comme ce fut le cas avec les Zinglins. 118. Sarah A. DeCosse, Thirst for Justice: A Decade of Impunity in Haiti (New York: Human Rights Watch, 1996). 119. Hurbon, “La Dé-Symbolisation du Pouvoir et ses Effets Meurtriers,” p. 55. 120. Gran neg means a big or important man, while ti chef means an aide to the gran neg. 121. Deibert, Notes from the Last Testament, pp. 353–359. 122. As the International Crisis Group, “Spoiling Security in Haiti,” Latin America/Caribbean Report No. 13 (May 31, 2005), p. 10, explains: Among the spoilers are warring gangs who dominate much of the slums of Port-au-Prince and receive varying degrees of political and criminal support. Many are manipulated by factions sympathetic to former President Aristide and his Lavalas movement, others by anti-Aristide groupings, elements of the business elite, drugtraffickers or other criminal organizations—all of which have a clear interest in delaying the elections and in destabilisation. Although no longer an effective military force, another group of spoilers are armed former rebels and members of the Haitian Armed

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Forces (ex-FAd’H), who are an intimidating presence in the countryside. Thousands of weapons remain in the hands of all these groups. 123. “Haïti: Un Pays à la Dérive,” L’Humanité, March 5, 2005. According to L’Humanité, Aristide has a fortune of 800 million dollars with which he continues to pay his Chimères and a large group of international lobbyists. 124. Irwin P. Stotzky and Thomas M. Griffin, “Haiti Human Rights Investigation: November 11–21, 2004,” Center for the Study of Human Rights, University of Miami School of Law. According to this report, Thomas Robinson, alias “Labanye,” a notorious gang leader in the neighborhood of Boston in Cité Soleil, “receives financial, firearms, and political support from wealthy businessman and politico Andy Apaid and businessman Reginald Boulos. Cité Soleil witnesses and police officers reported that Apaid’s support of Labanye keeps the police from arresting him” (p. 5). 125. Charles, Le Pouvoir Politique en Haïti, p. 24 (my translation): Le sous-développement dont souffre Haïti. . . . a transformé les appareils du système politique en un véritable champ d’action où se retrouvent les élites de la petite bourgeoisie, en quête de fortune et d’ascension sociale. Pour ces élites disposant généralement du savoir, l’appareil d’état devient le seul chemin par où elles doivent passer pour parvenir aux hautes sphères de la hiérarchie sociale et jouir de tous les privilèges. Dès lors, la dialectique des dynamismes sociaux entre classes différentes s’affirme pleinement. L’univers politique apparaît comme une véritable arène où s’affrontent les classes, les fractions de classe, les clans, etc., avec pour principe: “à chacun son tour.” 126. Trouillot, Haiti: State Against Nation; and “Haiti’s Nightmare and the Lessons of History,” NACLA 27, no. 4 (January–February 1994): 46–51. 127. My translation; as quoted in Hervé Denis, “Pour que Gagne Haïti,” Haitionline, September 5, 2000; see also “René Préval: Lavalas Pran Pouvwa, li Pran’l net,” Le Matin (Port-au-Prince), August 30, 2000; Hurbon, “La Dé-Symbolisation du Pouvoir,” pp. 66–67. 128. As quoted in Diederich and Burt, Papa Doc, p. 216. 129. Charles, Le Pouvoir Politique en Haïti, p. 27 (my translation): [Le] désir de s’enrichir et d’appartenir à la classe dominante devient pour beaucoup de gens le mobile de toute attitude politique. Il s’ensuit alors que tout individu placé a un niveau plus ou moins élevé de la hiérarchie du pouvoir ne pense qu’à utiliser ce dernier pour amasser le plus d’argent possible, vivre dans l’opulence et manifester ainsi sa grandeur, ou mieux, sa nouvelle situation de “bourgeois.” “A chacun son tour,” son tour de s’enrichir, tel est le principe qui semble guider l’action administrative dans les hautes sphères. Ce principe, reconnu et admis par l’ensemble des dirigeants, semble être même une règle de la morale politique. Aussi à travers tous les circuits du système politique, c’est l’affrontement continuel entre ceux qui aspirent à un transfert de classe. Et pour y parvenir, tous les moyens sont bons: concussion, traffic d’intraffice, spoliation, etc.

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130. As quoted in Diederich and Burt, Papa Doc, p. 281. 131. Claude Moïse, ed., Dictionnaire Historique de la Révolution Haïtienne (1789–1804) (Montreal: Éditions du Cidihca, 2003), pp. 48–51. 132. Péan, Économie Politique de la Corruption, p. 123: Cette forme d’élimination des compétiteurs politiques est le socle sur lequel vont s’ériger les luttes politiques pour le pouvoir. Le fondement de la gouvernementalité est le pouvoir individualisé. Son véritable moteur. La dynamique déterminante de l’action dessalinienne est la consolidation du pouvoir en tant que patrimoine propre. 133. As quoted in Lundhal, “Toussaint L’Ouverture and the War Economy of Saint Domingue,” p. 3. 134. Roger Dorsinville, Toussaint Louverture (Montreal: Éditions CIDIHCA, 1988), pp. 208–215; Laurent Dubois, Avengers of the New World (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2004), pp. 246–248; C. L. R. James, The Black Jacobins (London: Allison & Busby, 1980), pp. 276–279; Thomas Madiou, Histoire D’Haïti, vol. 2: 1799 à 1803 (Port-au-Prince: Éditions Henri Deschamps, 1989), pp. 143–155; Pluchon, Toussaint Louverture, pp. 433–438. The conflict between Toussaint and Moyse reflected both a raw competition for power and two distinct visions of agrarian policy after slavery’s abolition. While Toussaint was a firm and dictatorial supporter of the plantation system, Moyse supported the division of the large estates and the creation of an independent peasantry. The latter argued that the end of slavery could not give way to the inevitable serfdom entailed by l’habitation, and the former could not envisage a developing economy without the restoration and revival of the plantation economy. In addition, Moyse’s popularity with the former slaves had the potential of challenging Toussaint’s supremacy. And this Toussaint could not tolerate; his nephew had to be eliminated. 135. Péan, Économie Politique de la Corruption, p. 162. 136. See Trouillot, Haiti: State Against Nation; and “Haiti’s Nightmare and the Lessons of History.” 137. For instance, Stanley Handal, a wealthy businessman, was arrested and then released under mysterious circumstances for being the ringleader of a kidnapping gang that had accomplices in the Haitian police; see “Haïti— Sécurité: Arrestation de l’Inspecteur de Police en Fuite James Bourdeau,” AlterPresse, September 16, 2005; “Possible Libération d’un Homme d’Affaires Haïtien Soupçonné d’Implication dans les Enlèvements, le Trafic de la Drogue et d’Autres Activités Illicites,” Radio Kiskeya, January 2, 2006; and “Un Policier, Témoin à Charge dans une Importante Affaire de Kidnapping, Affirme Avoir été Victime d’un Attentat,” January 15, 2006. Moreover, as Michaël Lucius, general inspector of the Judicial Police explained, violent gangs involved in kidnappings are also located in the wealthy area of Pétionville (“Les Kidnappeurs Disposent de Cachettes dans les Quartiers Résidentiels et les 11 Personnes Enlevées Fin Décembre Ont été Gardées à PétionVille, Selon le Responsable de la Police Judiciaire,” Agence Haïtienne de Presse, January 13, 2006). See also International Crisis Group, “Spoiling Security in Haiti,” Report No. 13, May 31, 2005.

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138. Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998). 139. Ibid., p. 183. 140. International Crisis Group, “Spoiling Security in Haiti,” p. 11. 141. James, The Black Jacobins, p. 242.

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IN CHAPTER 4, I stressed how the predatory character of the ruling class and its incapacity to impose its hegemony spawned a zero-sum politics of brutal and deadly struggles to monopolize state power. By the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, these struggles intensified and degenerated into chronic political instability and chaos; they contributed to aggravate further the persisting and ever more acute economic crisis. Not surprisingly, the deterioration of the material structures widened the chasm separating the ruling and possessing classes from the moun andeyo and the peasantry. Peasants, who had always rejected their confinement on large estates as propertyless and exploited laborers, increasingly engaged in violent resistance to claim or retain small-scale ownership of the land. While their resistance was sometimes autonomous and expressed their own genuine grievances and aspirations, it was also hijacked by political entrepreneurs in their personal quest for power. Peasant discontent became therefore the opportunistic vehicle for aspiring leaders who had little interest in land reform or the improvement of the material conditions of the moun andeyo. Politics at this level was nothing more than patron-client relationships: “big men” offering peasants some immediate gratification of small cash and empty promises of ownership of land in return for their support.1 In fact, at the beginning of the twentieth century, groups of peasants became the private armies of politicians seeking the presidency. The scenario was simple: challengers to the existing regime would enlist a few hundred peasants into their own militia and threaten to overthrow the occupant of the presidential palace. Most often created 131

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in the north, the militias would march south toward Port-au-Prince to confront weak and illegitimate central authorities who would either give up power and depart into exile, or die defending their collapsing regime. Roger Gaillard describes well the rise and fall of what Haitians called the éphémères—governments characterized by their extremely short life spans: We know, indeed, that the “revolutionaries” were used to seizing the Cape and heading toward the south to take Gonaïves and then Saint Marc. They stopped there for several days to give the vanquished president time to set sail for a neighboring island; then they made a solemn entrance at Port-au-Prince, welcomed by a State Security Committee, largely made up of the same key figures regularly playing the same role. It was then the Te Deum, followed by the meeting of the chamber and of the senate, recognizing as president of the Republic the general who had been proclaimed chief of executive power in the north by his troops.2

The phenomenon of the éphémères was most pronounced from 1908 to 1915, the period that preceded the US occupation. During that time, seven governments fell; and 1914 was marked by several violent insurrections that toppled three presidents. Finally, on July 28, 1915, President Vilbrun Guillaume Sam, facing Rosalvo Bobo’s armed militias, sought refuge in the French Embassy, only to be lynched and dismembered by an enraged crowd.3 This event precipitated on that very day the long-anticipated US military intervention that transformed Haiti into an occupied country for close to twenty years. The US occupation was indeed not unannounced; it was the logical outcome of the intersection of local and international political economies. It was an additional piece in the making of the imperial US puzzle. It was the culmination of the Monroe Doctrine and the expression of the Manifest Destiny. To that extent, the white man’s burden and his “civilizing mission” legitimated the fusion of strategic concerns and economic interests.4 In these circumstances, Haiti was bound to fall under the unmitigated hegemony of the United States. Relations between the two countries had historically been opportunistic and tense. During the colonial period, Saint-Domingue was a major economic center. By 1790, more than 500 US ships visited the island’s ports. “Trade expanded so rapidly that, by the same year, St. Domingo had become the second trading partner of the United States, with over 10 percent of total trade, and exceeded only by Great Britain.”5 Not surprisingly, at that time, relations with France—

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the imperial power—were quite good. In fact, the Treaty of 1778 committed the United States to help France retain its West Indies colonies in case of external aggression. 6 The slave revolts of the 1790s consolidated temporarily the alliance between the United States and France. It was not merely that Saint-Domingue was an economic bonanza for the two nations, but also that they shared a pervasive racism and fear of black revolutions elsewhere. On the one hand, France dreaded the possibility that the potential freedom of blacks would threaten its imperial hold in other colonies; on the other hand, the United States, and particularly its southern slave-owning aristocracy, were horrified by the impact of emancipation in Saint-Domingue on their own wealth, status, and interests.7 Neither power was going to tolerate a world upside down; slaves had to be put back in their place. Freedom for blacks was not merely unthinkable—it was intolerable and had to be repressed. There was no doubt, as President Washington put it, “how well disposed the United States are to render every aid in their power to our good friends and allies the French to quell ‘the alarming insurrection of the Negroes in Hispaniola.’”8 Things, however, changed rather rapidly as a result of new historical developments. The slave uprising in Saint-Domingue soon became a revolutionary wave that precipitated both Toussaint’s ascendancy as the de facto autonomous ruler of the island and a growing exodus of French colonialists to the United States. These two factors, coupled with a transformation of the European strategic theater brought about by Napoleonic wars and global aspirations, fueled a new US diplomacy toward what would become the first independent black republic. This new diplomacy was more opportunistic than principled. While it was still decisively informed by racism and the fear that Haitian emancipation would spread like a mortal virus to other slave-owning regions, and specifically the US South, it had significant elements of pragmatism. In fact, in 1795, the United States and Great Britain signed the Jay Treaty, which was an implicit annulment of the Treaty of 1778, which gave preferential treatment to France. Not surprisingly, Paris hit back by decreeing in 1797 that it would seize all US vessels trading with the British West Indies. The United States, in turn, retaliated by formally repealing the 1778 treaty and suspending for nine months all trade with France, “or elsewhere under the acknowledged authority of France.”9 Saint-Domingue, as a French colony, suffered the consequences of the suspension of trade, but this was short-lived. On February 9, 1799, President Adams signed into law what came to be known as “Toussaint’s

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Clause,” which prolonged the US embargo on France but made an exception for Saint-Domingue. The US goal was to take advantage of profitable economic activities with the island, undermine France, and build the foundation of its own hegemony in the Caribbean. Toussaint’s Clause, however, brought the United States into the paradoxical situation of supporting Toussaint’s autonomous rule and of eventually helping former slaves establish Haiti as the first independent black republic. Indeed, commercial activities survived under the rabidly anti-emancipation administration of Thomas Jefferson. In spite of his racist phobias, fueled by his interests in preserving the institution of slavery in the southern United States, Jefferson secretly helped Toussaint’s heirs defeat Napoleon’s army headed by General Leclerc. Bent on abating Leclerc’s 40,000 troops, he provided weapons to Dessalines’ revolutionaries and denied France economic and maritime support. Jefferson knew that the making of Haiti would spell the end of French imperial power in the Americas and facilitate greatly the acquisition of Louisiana by the United States. In fact, had it not been for the devastating blow that Haiti’s black revolutionaries inflicted on Napoleon’s armada, the Louisiana Purchase, which doubled the size of the United States, would have been impossible. According to Gordon Brown, America was able to buy a vast and incredibly rich territory because Napoleon had lost the fight for time; his window of opportunity to establish a new French empire in America had all but closed. He turned away from America because the endless fight in St. Domingo had cost so much in time, money, and men that he could not justify continuing. Louisiana had become expendable because St. Domingo had not been reconquered. Toussaint and Dessalines . . . had finally won—and their success served both their people and the United States.10

Once Haiti became independent, however, the Jefferson administration confronted the thorny question of its diplomatic recognition. Would a government controlled by a racist, slave-owning class grant international legitimacy to a black revolutionary regime? In spite of abhorring some contradictory theoretical sympathies for Haiti’s revolutionaries, Jefferson himself called them “cannibals of the terrible republic” and likened them to murderers and assassins.11 In fact, Jefferson believed that “blacks, whether originally a distinct race, or made distinct by time and circumstances, are inferior to whites in the

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endowments of both body and mind.”12 His son-in-law, John W. Eppes, had a similar attitude, which expressed well the collective thinking of southern slaveholders; in his view, the interest of the United States was “to depress and keep down” Haitians, with whom diplomatic and economic relations would only lead to “the immediate and horrible destruction on the fairest portion of America.”13 The racist phobias of Jeffersonian America depicted blacks as uncivilized, dangerous, and treacherous, and as Brenda Gayle Plummer argues, “To accord members of this race recognition of sovereign status, particularly in light of the way they had achieved it, was unthinkable.”14 Not surprisingly, not only did the United States deny recognition of Haiti, but it also decided to impose an economic embargo on the newly independent nation.15 Haiti’s leaders tried in vain to placate US fears of their capacity and desire to export revolutions abroad. In 1804, in his first declaration as governor-general for life, Dessalines emphasized that the country’s survival and independence presupposed resisting the temptation of inciting rebellions elsewhere. Moreover, this declaration of intentions was enshrined in Article 36 of the constitution of 1805, which stipulated that the “emperor will not undertake any enterprise with a view to making conquests or to troubling the peace and internal regime of foreign colonies.”16 Clearly this did not assuage the slave-holding US regime whose desire, as Senator James Jackson of Georgia suggested, was that the “government of that unfortunate island must be destroyed.”17 Not surprisingly, the Jefferson administration ignored Dessalines’ ouvertures to establish profitable and stable economic relations between the two nations. In a letter to President Jefferson, Dessalines called for renewed and vigorous trade: The people of St. Domingue have thrown off the yoke of tyranny and sworn the expulsion of their executioners. . . . Trade with the United States, Mr. President, with an immense harvest in the warehouses and still more plentiful one expected, presents an opportunity for the mariners of your nation. Their old relations with St. Domingue should have convinced them of the honesty and good faith with which their ships will be welcomed in our ports. . . . I will assure, with all the authority that has been confided in me, that United States ships will be safe and able to profit from our exchanges.18

Jefferson never responded to Dessalines. Haiti was to be quarantined by the United States and the other great Western powers. The

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black republic served well US interests. The slave revolution that led to its creation undermined Napoleon’s hegemonic aspirations in the New World and facilitated the incorporation of Louisiana into the emerging US imperium. At the same time, the rise of the first independent and sovereign black nation offered slaveholders an object of fear and derision that united them as a class and fueled white racist phobias. The decline of Saint-Domingue’s economy, which in turn was brought about by the material and human devastation of the slave revolution, greatly facilitated the Jeffersonian embargo. The volume of trade between the United States and Haiti had diminished significantly.19 The collapse of the plantation economy in the island meant that the days of the lucrative sugar business were over. In addition, the United States was no longer dependent on Haiti’s cheap molasses, which were now produced by US rum distilleries. Finally, the development of subsistence agriculture in the black republic reduced the demand for US foodstuffs.20 Thus, the embargo came at little cost to the United States; the wages of racism and the fears of emancipation had free rein. According to Tim Matthewson, From the start of the Haitian Revolution, the example of the slave revolt had become an effective tool in the hands of southerners for checking discussion of slavery, the slave trade, and related issues, including Haiti. Firmly rooted in the interests and culture of the planter class, defenders of slavery felt compelled to deny recognition to the new order of things in Haiti. Haitian independence was a compelling rejection of the legitimacy of slavery and the southern way of life, which left slaveholders with the realization that they could never again feel confident of their claims that slaves were contended with bondage. One historian suggested that the South sought to “banish the reality of St. Domingo.”21

In a paradoxical way, the emancipation of the slaves of SaintDomingue contributed to entrench for some sixty years the racist phobias and policies of the United States. It was only in 1862 that the first US diplomat, Tobias Lear, was officially accredited to Haiti. Until then, the United States remained steadfast in its determination to quarantine Haiti diplomatically. The trauma of secession and the Civil War finally created the circumstances for Abraham Lincoln’s formal US recognition of Haiti’s independence and sovereignty, in 1863.22 It is true that although commerce between the two nations was allowed to resume in 1810, by that time, the dire economic conditions

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in the island, brought about by both the Jeffersonian embargo and uninterrupted domestic political crises, drastically limited the impact of renewed trade. As Brown emphasizes, When America’s foreign shipping resumed in 1810, attention had shifted to more promising, growing markets, such as the China trade. The prolonged suspension in the Haiti trade, and its decreased profitability, made it unfamiliar, unattractive, or both to traders who sought good profits. It would be years before the Haiti trade once again reached any level of importance, and even that was a pitiful reminder of the golden days before the French Revolution.23

Thus, the United States was uninterested in helping Haiti restart its economy. Moreover, it was opposed to the nation-building project of the black republic, which it viewed as a threatening and despotic phenomenon. In fact, Jefferson believed that Haiti lacked the prerequisites for democratic life and, as he put it, “[The] island will need an oriental government; after Toussaint another despot will be necessary.”24 This was not just a conviction of US southerners, but was also espoused by Alexander Hamilton, who argued that only a militarized society governed by a president for life would do for Haiti.25 In short, white America was convinced that the tree of liberty could not take root in the soil of a black republic. Racism erased the possibility that people of African descent could aspire to freedom and democratic rule. As Brown explains, “American public opinion simply could not accept that the free mulattos and blacks of St. Domingo might be seen as counterparts to the propertied gentlemen who had led the American rebellion.”26 Such convictions were clearly not the monopoly of the United States; the great powers of the time shared similar views. They feared the consequences of the rise of an independent black republic. For instance, British prime minister Henry Addington summarized his position, as well as that of the French, on Toussaint’s ascendancy: “The interest of the two governments is absolutely the same, namely, the destruction of Jacobinism and that of the blacks in particular.”27 It is true that both Great Britain and the United States collaborated with the Haitian insurgents to defeat Napoleon’s army, but the collaboration was opportunistic and short-lived. The British and the Americans were simply bent on weakening France for their own strategic purposes; the independence of Haiti was the unintended outcome of their systematic attempt to curb Napoleon’s influence in the Americas.

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Haiti had few friends and few resources. It was a poor, dependent, agricultural country that could not defy an international order bent on denying its existence. It was thus compelled to learn how to survive in a hostile environment. It had to manipulate conflicts between the major powers to gain some room to maneuver and limit the consequences of their enmity. As Plummer explains, “Shifting allegiances and intrigues during the colonial wars and the revolution had taught the value of playing larger powers off against each other to gain time and advantage.”28 Not surprisingly, Haiti sought to mitigate its diplomatic isolation by developing and expanding trade relations with these very powers. The goal was to have multiple economic partners in order to neutralize the influence of any single one. Haiti courted France, Great Britain, Germany, and the United States. Initially, the British were the great beneficiaries of the French and US embargoes; they monopolized virtually all Haitian trade.29 The island, however, returned to the French orbit especially after Paris recognized its independence in 1825. It was not until 1915 and the US occupation that France’s hegemonic cultural and economic position began to decline. Haiti exported virtually all of its coffee to France but was dependent on the United States for its basic staples. 30 In the mid- and late nineteenth century, German entrepreneurs arrived in the island and became prominent traders and wholesale merchants; they married Haitian women to circumvent legal barriers to alien property ownership.31 Germans grew increasingly influential in the economy; by 1885, their ships carried much of Haiti’s trade,32 and by 1914 they came to control 80 percent of the republic’s commercial activities. 33 These realities prompted Georges Blondel to claim, “Haiti is in the process of becoming a colony of Hamburg.”34 Germans and Germano-Haitians soon translated their economic power into political capital. They interfered and intervened directly into Haitian affairs; they funded candidates and coup leaders who they thought would be servile to their interests.35 Moreover, like other white expatriates, they could count on the military threats of their homeland to compel the Haitian government to compensate them for any personal or economic loss. In the most imperial form of gunboat diplomacy, the Germans, the French, and the British navies would sail to Haiti’s shores, seize Haitian ships, bomb Haitian towns, and force the island’s rulers to acquiesce to the claims of their respective nationals. With increasing frequency, the great powers were asserting their hegemony over a weak and divided Haitian polity.36 They were

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determined to humiliate Haitian authorities and extract resources from a country on the verge of bankruptcy. As Plummer explains, The veritable expatriate industry of damage claims against the state tarnished many countries’ relations with Haiti during the late nineteenth century. Correspondence about these claims filled reams of paper and comprised a great part of the daily discussions between envoys and Haitian foreign ministry officials. Demands for reparations generally stemmed from casualties expatriates suffered as a result of revolution and civil strife. If a major power represented diplomatically in Port-au-Prince supported the claims, the Haitian government would sooner or later have to pay, even if the damages were sustained during a prior administration. Aliens thus joined the ranks of other parasites who subsisted from the diminishing coffers of the national treasury.37

Foreign interventions and the presence of expatriates contributed little to the development of Haiti. In fact, both generated patterns of political destabilization and economic dependence; expatriates behaved recklessly as if they were en territoire conquis. Writing in 1885, Léon Laroche emphasizes, “We are dupes of their politics, victims of their intrigues, slaves of their capital.”38 The grievances of a GermanoHaitian, Emil Lüders, illustrate well how a single expatriate could come to rely on his imperial motherland to humiliate and punish the Haitian government.39 In 1897, Lüders was convicted of assaulting the police, sentenced to jail, and ordered to pay a fine. When his appeal was rejected, the German ambassador, Count von Schwerin, pressured President Simon Sam’s administration to release him. Eventually, Lüders was freed and deported. Unsatisfied by this outcome, the German government dispatched two warships, which anchored in the waters of Port-au-Prince and gave a three-pronged ultimatum to Sam’s regime. The German Kapitän-zur-See August Thiele ordered the Haitian government to write a formal letter of apology to the German emperor, readmit Lüders into the country, indemnify him with $20,000, and honor the German flag with a twenty-one-gun salute. Thiele warned President Sam that unless Haiti met these demands, he would order the bombing of the capital, the sinking of all Haitian ships, and the destruction of the Palais National. While Sam was tempted to resist, he soon realized that he lacked the means to withstand German aggression. His regime was compelled to surrender; a white flag flew over the Palais, replacing the Haitian flag, and in humiliating fashion, all German demands were satisfied.40

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This type of German intervention in Haitian affairs prompted some Haitian leaders, including Presidents Salnave and Sam,41 to appeal to the Monroe Doctrine and call for US assistance to check growing European encroachments into the country’s sovereignty. President Monroe had invoked the doctrine in 1823, declaring that he considered any European imperial intrusion into the Americas a threat to the national security and strategic interests of the United States. The United States would therefore assume its responsibility to protect and defend the independence of the nations of the Western Hemisphere from “outside” encroachments into their sovereignty.42 In the case of Haiti, however, it was not until the United States sought to justify its decision to occupy the country in 1915 that it invoked the Monroe Doctrine. In fact, Monroe himself had decided that Haiti was not in the moral community of civilized and sovereign nations and thus was not covered by his doctrine. As Matthewson argues, During the Monroe administration, President Boyer of Haiti had requested formal recognition. But President Monroe directed that the letter from Boyer should not be answered, saying later, in a formal address to Congress, that the Haitians constituted a “separate interest” or a threat to the United States. In doing so, Monroe cast doubt on the common humanity of the former slaves, stigmatized them as social pariahs, and consigned them to a social netherworld, shifting to Haitians the onus for aggressive behavior against the United States. In 1823, therefore, when he issued his famous Doctrine, Monroe omitted reference to Haiti, thus tacitly approving of the publicly declared French intention to restore French power in their former colony of Saint Domingue.43

By the 1910s, however, the United States began to look through the doctrine’s lenses at the growing German presence and interference in Haiti, which turned into one of the pretexts it used to justify its decision to invade and occupy the country. The decision was also a reflection of the economic ascendancy of US capitalism, which led to an increasingly assertive imperial policy not only in the Caribbean but also in Central America and the Pacific. At the turn of the nineteenth century, the United States had developed the military and material means to impose the continental domination the Monroe Doctrine had contemplated. In addition, with the outbreak of World War I, European powers were undermining each other and contributing to the rise of US supremacy. Indeed, by that time, the Caribbean was fast becoming the “American Mediterranean.”

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It is in this context that Haiti developed into a prime target of US imperialism. As early as the 1860s, the United States considered the Môle St. Nicolas, at the northwest tip of Haiti, a potential military base and a most valuable strategic asset.44 In 1897, however, the planners of the United States’ naval expansion selected Guantánamo Bay in Cuba over the Môle St. Nicolas as the base that best served US interests.45 Once the United States secured Guantánamo Bay in 1903, Haiti’s significance diminished and many in Washington viewed it as “a public nuisance at our doors”;46 but others started planning its economic penetration. In 1898, the US minister in Haiti, W. F. Powell, asserted, “American capital is about to seek an entrance into Haiti to develop its resources.”47 In fact, the United States was bent on incorporating Haiti into its exclusive sphere of influence, just as it was doing for the rest of the Caribbean. The United States had decided that it would no longer tolerate European, particularly German, competition in its own backyard. The United States began to practice an open-door policy that applied only to its economic agents and that sought to close doors on other capitalist actors. This was a far cry from the so-called liberal internationalism that supposedly would spread throughout the world the ideals of freedom and equality. Liberal internationalism was nothing but an ideological cloak masking the emergence of a US imperialism that was neither benign nor democratic. As Hans Schmidt points out, “The occupation of Haiti clearly was a case of closed-door, sphere-of-influence diplomacy, as illustrated by the systematic deportation of German businessmen from Haiti by the United States military authorities in the early 1920s.”48 The imperial designs of the United States were driven by strategic and economic considerations. Bent on protecting maritime routes for its expanding navy in the context of the building of the Panama Canal, Washington considered the Windward Passage critical to its national security.49 Simply put, the United States was determined to transform Haiti, and the Caribbean in general, into its exclusive strategic preserve. Moreover, it began to impose its economic supremacy in the area; by the turn of the nineteenth century, US entrepreneurs established themselves in Haiti and invested in companies doing business in copper mining, timber, and water supplies. Leslie Manigat has argued convincingly, however, that this short period—1909 to 1911— marked the determinant moment when European, specifically French and German, preponderance gave way to that of the United States. As Manigat explains, it was during these two years that was “created the

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decisive weapon of America’s victory: its economic and financial implantation.”50 In 1910, the Haitian government contracted James P. McDonald to build a railroad from Port-au-Prince to Cap Haïtien on very advantageous terms. The concession was to last for fifty years, and the government guaranteed the payment of 6 percent interest and 1 percent amortization on the cost of construction, at a rate of up to $20,000 per kilometer of track completed. In addition, the concession granted McDonald 12 miles of land on both sides of the railroad to grow bananas, for which he obtained a monopoly on their export.51 The venture, which was a complete disaster, had dire consequences for Haiti. Indeed, Haitian sovereignty was at bay once a powerful New York syndicate, “headed by W. R. Grace and Company with participation by two Wall Street firms, National City Bank and Speyer and Company,”52 took over the concession in 1911. Haiti from now on would confront not only private US interests, but also the unmitigated interference of the ultimate defender of these interests—the US government itself. This became clear when Haiti had to stop foreclosure proceedings against the railroad syndicate because of intense pressures from the US secretary of state, William Jennings Bryan. The Haitian government had complained that the railroad had been very poorly built and failed to connect Port-au-Prince to Cap Haïtien. In fact, the company constructed “only three disconnected sections totaling 108 miles. A gap of 40 miles between Saint Marc and Gonaïves and another gap of 30 miles over the mountains between Cap Haïtien and Ennery made through traffic impossible and necessitated the maintenance of three separate sets of rolling stock.”53 In spite of its shoddy work, the railroad syndicate argued that the project was completed and that political instability and revolutions were responsible for whatever imperfections there might be. It had no qualms about claiming that it had built 110 miles of track or about requesting $33,000—the highest possible rate—for each mile. Initially, the Haitian government refused to acquiesce to the syndicate but found itself impotent in the face of US threats.54 Not only did its foreclosure proceedings never take place, but years later, under the occupation, the United States compelled Haiti to pay the syndicate in full. While this episode reflected the symbiosis between private interests and public power in the making of an imperial US foreign policy, it was in the politics of banking that this symbiosis was most evident. The Banque Nationale d’Haïti, which was the country’s economic nerve center, became entangled in a maze of great power politics.55

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French, Germans, British, and Americans knew that whoever controlled the Banque would ultimately control Haiti itself.56 Not surprisingly, the imperial ascendancy of the United States meant that Washington was determined to impose its financial power and take it over. The Banque was established in 1880 when the Haitian government granted a fifty-year concession to French commercial and financial interests. It became the country’s major bank as well as the Haitian government’s treasury. Because of widespread fraudulent practices, the Banque, in 1905, began a process of reorganization. This process involved the major powers and ended the European preponderance of French and German economic interests. Supported by the US State Department, US financial forces took control of the Banque Nationale d’Haïti. In 1910, a new contract was signed, and a year later US personnel replaced the Banque’s French managers. The Banque had sole right to issue currency; “it received all Government funds; it was further empowered to hold such funds intact until the end of the fiscal year, and it was in no way legally obligated to make advances.”57 The Banque and the government, however, reached annual agreements—the so-called convention budgétaire—that allowed the latter to obtain monthly drafts to cover operating expenses. Finally, the contract forbade the Banque to call for any diplomatic intervention in case of disputes with the Haitian government. In 1914, however, things began to fall apart; the Banque decided to starve the government of resources by refusing its request for monthly advances. The decision had clear political motivations; the Americans sought to use their control of the Banque to force Haiti into absolute submission and to provoke a long-sought-after US takeover of the island’s customhouses.58 The US minister in Haiti, Madison R. Smith, acknowledged this much in a report to Secretary of State Bryan: [The] suspension of the convention budgétaire most likely would bring the Government to a condition where it could not operate. It is just this condition that the bank desires, for it is the belief of the bank that the Government, when confronted by such a crisis, would be forced to ask assistance of the United States in adjusting its financial tangle and that an American supervision of the customs would result.59

The Haitian government sought to retaliate against what it viewed as the illegal cessation of the convention budgétaire. It adopted a law

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that authorized it to bypass the Banque and issue currency on its own. In addition, in November 1914, the new regime of Davilmar Théodore, pressed for funds, threatened to seize Haiti’s gold reserve from the Banque. Alarmed, the Banque urged the US State Department to take action and transfer the reserve out of reach of the Haitian government. On December 17, 1914, US marines under orders from Secretary of State Bryan forcibly removed from the Banque’s vaults Haiti’s own gold reserve to the value of US$500,000. The bullion was transported to New York on the gunboat Machias and deposited in the National City Bank.60 Meanwhile, the French tricolore came down at the Banque’s headquarters in Port-au-Prince, only to be replaced by the US flag. US imperialism was clearly announcing its designs; it was just a matter of time before it fully implanted itself in Haitian soil. Haitians understood well that the United States was bent on starving the country of needed resources to provoke conditions that would justify a full US takeover. On January 1, 1915, Solon Menos, Haiti’s ambassador in Washington, explained the gravity of the situation to Haitian foreign minister Louis Borno: Through a progressive system of strangulation, they will try to have us want the recommended solution. In reality, the removal of the withdrawal funds is part of the program to force us to present our wrists for shackling. Of course, we cannot commit a single mistake—we cannot tolerate more unrest; otherwise, we would be done. It is indeed more than probable that the detachments the United States would unload would start by besieging our customhouses.61

Soon after he had written these words, Menos’s fears that the United States would take advantage of any future Haitian crisis to assert its full imperial domination materialized. The fall and dismemberment of President Vilbrun Guillaume Sam, the culmination of a long and violent period of political instability, was the occasion seized by the United States to justify its occupation of the island. In 1904, the United States had warned, under President Roosevelt’s doctrine of “international police power,” that it would not tolerate incessant chaos and revolutions in Latin America. Roosevelt declared to Congress: Chronic wrongdoing, or an impotence which results in general loosening of the ties of civilized society, may in America, as elsewhere, ultimately require intervention by some civilized nation, and in the Western Hemisphere the adherence of the United States

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to the Monroe doctrine may force the United States, however reluctantly, in flagrant cases of such wrongdoing or impotence, to the exercise of an international police power.62

The rising US empire would not tolerate any form of political disorder that would damage its strategic and economic aspirations. In Roosevelt’s eyes, Latin America and the Caribbean, in particular, had to enjoy a form of political stability that served US interests. Failing this, the United States would land its marines to establish “civilization” and set the occupied territory on its way to “progress.” A decade later, President Woodrow Wilson expressed the same messianic fervor for promoting abroad the United States’ version of political order. It was a political order that had little to do with democracy; rather, it was a form of government subservient to US interests and imposed by US weapons. In a letter to Secretary of State Bryan, dated January 13, 1915, Wilson asserted: “The more I think about [the Haitian] situation, the more I am convinced that it is our duty to take immediate action there such as we took in San Domingo. I mean to send commissioners there who will . . . say to them . . . firmly and definitely . . . that the United States cannot consent to stand by and permit revolutionary conditions constantly to exist there.”63 In fact, Wilson and his advisers looked at Haiti with contempt, as an area of backwardness that lacked the basic requirements for democracy. According to them, Haitians were utterly irresponsible and corrupt, and had shown “complete political incompetence.” “These facts,” in the eyes of the assistant secretary of state, William Phillips, “point to the failure of an inferior people to maintain the degree of civilization left them by the French, or to develop any capacity of self-government entitling them to international respect and confidence.”64 Robert Lansing, who succeeded Bryan as secretary of state, summarized bluntly the racist US view: The experience of Liberia and Haiti show that the African race are devoid of any capacity for political organization and lack genius for government. Unquestionably there is in them an inherent tendency to revert to savagery and to cast aside the shackles of civilization which are irksome to their physical nature. Of course there are many exceptions to this racial weakness but it is true of the mass, as we know from experience in this country. It is that which makes the Negro problem practically unsolvable.65

In this context, the US occupation of Haiti was inevitable. It was not an accident provoked by the violent collapse of Sam’s regime. As early as 1900, the French embassy in Haiti had assumed that Haiti

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would become a US protectorate. In a report to the Quai d’Orsay, it argued, The imperialist politics of the United States are nowhere followed with greater interest than in Haiti, where one feels directly threatened to follow Cuba’s and Puerto Rico’s lot sooner or later. Here the population is distinctly hostile to all foreign domination and to that of the United States more than any other, but the Haitians have no illusions about their own strength and would not even try to resist any power that would attempt to annex them.66

In fact, well in advance of its effective occupation of Haiti, the United States had already demonstrated its imperial intentions; on eight occasions, its marines had landed temporarily in the country to “protect American lives and property.”67 These skirmishes were the prelude to the occupation, which had been carefully planned long before it occurred. By November 1914, the US Navy had elaborated a “Plan for Landing and Occupying the City of Port-au-Prince.”68 The plan called for a military intervention in case of further chaos or revolution in Haiti. The justification would simply be that mob violence and political instability endangered foreign interests. The president of the United States would also claim that the takeover was “solely for the establishment of law and order.”69 Not surprisingly, the overthrow of President Sam gave carte blanche to the US occupation. In the eyes of Secretary of State Lansing, the only practical way to “cure the anarchy and disorder” prevailing in Haiti was to have “marines policing” Port-au-Prince, even if this was “high handed.”70 While the military occupation proceeded duplicitously and in spite of Haitian protestations,71 it went smoothly and faced little open resistance in its first few days. The United States, however, had no clear idea of how to rule effectively and with a semblance of legitimacy. The problem was how to keep firm control of the country, impose unpopular policies, and at the same time find Haitian politicians who would be willing to govern as servile clients of racist US forces. The first task was to select a new president to replace Sam. Rosalvo Bobo, who had started the insurrection leading to Sam’s brutal demise, was on the verge of moving into the Palais National. The United States, however, had other ideas; Washington viewed Bobo as too nationalistic and too anti-American to assume the reins of power. Captain Edward Beach, chief of staff of Admiral Caperton, who led the marines’ takeover of Haiti, described Bobo as “utterly unsuited to be Haiti’s President” because he was “an idealist and dreamer.” Beach,

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who was the key negotiator between the occupiers and Bobo, acknowledged, however, that Bobo “was greatly beloved in Haiti because the poor and needy sick always had the first call on his services, and none of these ever received a bill from him.”72 Bobo’s popularity was irrelevant to US imperial aims; Washington was interested only in an utterly pliant customer. In fact, Beach informed Bobo that the United States considered him to be “a menace and a curse to [Haiti]” and thus forbade him to become a presidential candidate.73 A revolutionary like Bobo was simply unacceptable to US interests; the new Haitian president, as Admiral Caperton put it, would have to be someone who “realizes that Haiti must agree to any terms laid down by the United States.”74 That someone was Philippe Sudre Dartiguenave, because, in Secretary of the Navy Josephus Daniels’s words cabled to Caperton, “The U.S. prefers election of Dartiguenave.”75 On August 12, 1915, the Haitian legislature “chose” Dartiguenave as president in what the US chargé d’affaires, R. B. Davis, euphemistically called elections “held under protection of marines.”76 Once elected, Dartiguenave, in the approving words of Captain Beach, “repeatedly and publicly made known his intention, without reservation, to do everything the U.S. wishes.”77 Meanwhile, fearing for his life, Bobo took refuge in the British Embassy, and the United States ultimately sent him into exile.78 The US claim that the only reason for the marines’ landing was “to insure, establish and help to maintain Haitian independence and the establishing of a stable and firm government by the Haitian people” and that US troops would remain in the country “only so long as will be necessary for this purpose,”79 was specious. In fact, the whole justification for the intervention represented a public exercise in prevarication. Caperton’s declaration to the US press that the “occupation of Port-au-Prince by the forces of the United States will be of short duration”80 was disingenuous. In reality, the US troops were there to stay for an expanded period of time. The United States was interested neither in the independence of Haiti nor in the establishment of a democratic government accountable to its citizens. They simply sought to neutralize European powers and impose their strategic and financial domination on Haiti. In a 1915 memorandum to President Wilson, Secretary of State Lansing spelled out clearly the objectives of US policy in the Caribbean: The opposition to European control over American territory is not primarily to preserve the integrity of any American state. . . . The essential idea is to prevent a condition which would menace the

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national interests of the United States. . . . I make no argument on the ground of the benefit which would result to the peoples of these republics by the adoption of this policy.81

President Wilson’s pious injunctions that “it is our duty to insist on constitutional government [in Haiti]” and that the United States “must take charge of elections and see that real government is erected which we can support”82 were paternalistic and misleading. Under the occupation, Haitians simply had no choice in determining their leaders; the occupiers selected which Haitians could help them run the country. The idea that Haitians could run their own affairs, choose on their own who was to govern them, and decide autonomously what constitutional norms they should follow was in the minds of the occupiers utterly unacceptable. The United States not only imposed the unpopular Dartiguenave on Haiti but also compelled him and his cabinet to sign a treaty legitimating and legalizing the occupation. On August 17, 1915, Robert Beale Davis, the US chargé d’affaires, presented to Dartiguenave a draft of the treaty. Secretary of State Lansing had instructed Beale to inform Dartiguenave that it was the United States’ belief that “as a guarantee of sincerity and interest of the Haïtiens in orderly and peaceful development of their country . . . the Haïtien Congress will be pleased to pass forthwith a resolution authorizing the president elect to conclude, without modification, the treaty submitted by you.”83 For all practical purposes, the treaty was placing Haiti under US protectorate for ten years. The United States was to take full control of the country’s financial system, law enforcement, and military. In addition, the United States, and the United States alone, was to have the right to acquire parts of the Haitian territory.84 Initially, Dartiguenave believed that the Haitian congress would approve the treaty, but he soon found out that there would be strong opposition to it. Two members of his cabinet, the foreign minister, Pauleus Sannon, and the minister of agriculture and public works, Antoine Sansaricq, resigned in protest. On September 3, Sannon explained his resignation: Accepting the American project would place our unhappy country under the triple economic, financial, and political protectorate of the United States. . . . If, by not relying on any rights in the treaty, the American government offered the civilized world the revolting show of violence and abuse we have experienced for several days now, what would it not do tomorrow if it could invoke the outrageous privileges that the treaty itself would grant it.85

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Sannon’s resignation did not, however, stop the Dartiguenave administration from ultimately accepting to sign, on September 16, a mildly amended treaty. After a few weeks of negotiations, the United States agreed to withdraw from the original draft the sentence that granted it exclusive authorization to acquire Haitian territory.86 This was the sole significant US concession to a Haitian government that was not only forced into submission by the occupiers’ power, but that seemed also convinced of the virtues of that submission. Louis Borno, who replaced Sannon as foreign minister, and who would eventually succeed Dartiguenave as president, viewed the occupation as a liberating necessity: As long as I thought that our unhappy homeland could free herself on her own, I drove off foreign intrusion. But when I saw her fall, exhausted, drained of life in the bloody mud of July, I understood—and all that is honest and pure in the country understood— that henceforth we no longer had a choice: either permanent evaporation into abjectness, famine, and blood, or else redemption with the help of the United States. I preferred this redemption.87

Most Haitians did not share Borno’s vision of redemption; the senate opposed the treaty but ultimately gave in to US threats and Dartiguenave’s bribery. On November 9, two days before the senate’s vote, Wilson’s secretary of the navy, Daniels, cabled Caperton ordering him to inform Dartiguenave that “public sentiment” was favorable to the treaty and that “there is a strong demand from all classes for immediate ratification and that [the] treaty will be ratified Thursday.”88 In addition, Daniels instructed Caperton to warn Haitian authorities that even if ratification failed, the United States had every intention “to retain control in Haiti until the desired end is accomplished, and that it will forthwith proceed to the complete pacification of Haiti.”89 Not surprisingly, on November 11, the senate voted twenty-six to seven in favor of the treaty. The occupation was now legalized, but this required, on the one hand, Caperton to follow Washington’s orders to “remove all opposition and to secure immediate ratification,”90 and, on the other, Dartiguenave to pay off key senators to obtain their support.91 These repressive and fraudulent means leading to the ratification of the treaty symbolized what “democracy” and “constitutional rule” meant under the occupation. But the United States, not satisfied with the mere legalization of its occupation, was now bent on compelling the Haitian national assembly to adopt a constitution “made in Washington.” When the assembly refused and sought instead to write its own anti-American constitution, Major

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Smedley Butler, commandant of the Gendarmerie d’Haïti, simply dissolved it. Dartiguenave signed the decree of dissolution, but he had no room to maneuver as he faced unbearable US pressures. The occupying forces had waged their own coup d’état; they not only continued a longheld practice of Haitian politics, but they modernized it. As Butler explained, the assembly had become “so impudent that the Gendarmerie had to dissolve [it], which dissolution was effected by genuinely Marine Corps methods.”92 The “impudence” of the assembly partly stemmed from its opposition to granting foreigners the right to own property in Haiti. The United States found this unacceptable and decided that a coup was warranted to impose the laws of the market. The US minister in Haiti, Bailly-Blanchard, wrote Secretary of State Lansing: [The] Assembly was in every way reactionary and opposed to the best interests of Haiti, refusing to adopt any article permitting foreign ownership of land in any manner whatsoever, and when matters in the Assembly had proceeded thus far . . . it was decided in a conference held at the legation on June 18 . . . to prevent the Assembly from passing such a Constitution by causing its dissolution, if occasion demanded it, preferably by a Presidential Decree, but if necessary by order of the Commander of the Occupation.93

It is clear, therefore, that unless Haitian public opinion happened to coincide with the occupiers’ interests, it was irrelevant to their political calculations. This was only logical given that the US occupiers who took over Haiti had a worldview deeply colored by imperial arrogance and racist phobias. For them, Haitians were inferior human beings; at best, they had to be treated like children who lacked the maturity, education, and discipline required for self-government. Ultimately, the occupation symbolized a militarized and racist US hegemonic structure on which rested a collaborating Haitian dictatorship. The next chapter studies the authoritarian legacy of the occupation and how it shaped future developments in Haiti.

NOTES 1. Kethly Millet, Les Paysans Haïtiens et l’Occupation Américaine (1915–1930) (La Salle, Québec: Collectif Paroles, 1978), p. 10, explains: At times, also, this peasantry found itself mixed up in politics by the parties’ intervention during their battles for power. As much as

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in the armed ones, they were then used as an unskilled labor mass by one or the other of the groups in their electoral confrontations. With vague promises for the distribution of state land and money, the destitute agricultural workforce was mobilized as a force making possible the overthrow of the established government and the installation of the winner into power. Parfois, aussi, cette paysannerie s’est trouvée mêlée à la politique par l’entremise des parties dans leurs luttes pour le pouvoir. Elle était, alors, utilisée comme masse de manœuvre par l’un ou l’autre groupe dans leurs confrontations tant électorales qu’armées. Avec de vagues promesses de distribution des terres de l’état, d’argent, la masse paysanne démunie était mobilisée pour fournir une force permettant le renversement du gouvernement établi et l’installation au pouvoir du vainqueur. 2. Roger Gaillard, as quoted in Claude Moïse, Constitutions et Luttes de Pouvoir en Haïti, vol. 2: 1915–1987: De l’Occupation Étrangère à la Dictature Macoute (Montreal: Éditions CIDIHCA, 1990), p. 26: On sait, en effet, que les “révolutionnaires” avaient coutume de s’emparer du Cap, de se mettre en route vers le Sud, d’enlever Gonaïves, puis St-Marc. Ils s’y arrêtaient durant quelques jours, pour donner le loisir au Président vaincu de s’embarquer pour une île voisine, puis ils faisaient une entrée solennelle à Port-au-Prince, accueillis par un Comité de Salut Public, formé en gros des mêmes personnalités jouant régulièrement le même rôle. C’était ensuite le Te Deum, suivi de la réunion de la Chambre et du Sénat reconnaissant comme Président de la République le Général qui avait été, dans le nord, proclamé par ses troupes Chef du Pouvoir Exécutif. 3. The ending of Vilbrun Guillaume Sam’s life and presidency is recounted in François Blancpain, Haïti et les États Unis, 1915–1934 (Paris: L’Harmattan, 1999), pp. 46–56. The ferocity with which Sam was murdered was not accidental—in his last hours as president, he had apparently ordered the slaughter of all political prisoners. Jailors savagely killed 167 prisoners whose relatives, friends, and supporters retaliated by storming the French Embassy and carrying Sam’s dismembered body through the streets of Portau-Prince. Rosalvo Bobo was a self-styled “supreme revolutionary” and nationalist who commandeered a caco army that took control of Cap-Haïtien and was marching toward Port-au-Prince to take over the presidency. However, the US occupiers, who began their occupation of Haiti in the immediate aftermath of Vilbrun Guillaume’s killing, thwarted Bobo’s aspirations. Bobo never ascended to the presidency and died in exile. Bobo’s main and ultimately fabricated charge against Sam was that the latter was prepared to “sell the country to the United States.” See Roger Gaillard, Les Blancs Débarquent, vol. 2: (1914–1915) Les Cent Jours de Rosalvo Bobo (Port-auPrince: Presses Nationales, 1973).

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4. Blancpain, Haïti et les États Unis, 1915–1934, pp. 7–59; Brenda Gayle Plummer, Haiti and the United States (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1992), pp. 81–120; Mary A. Renda, Taking Haiti (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2001), pp. 3–181; Hans Schmidt, The United States Occupation of Haiti, 1915–1934, with a new foreword by Stephen Solarz (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1995), pp. 3–81. 5. Gordon S. Brown, Toussaint’s Clause (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2005), p. 30. 6. Ibid., p. 53. 7. Brown (ibid., p. 5) describes well the fundamental objectives and prejudices that animated US foreign policy toward Haiti: To begin with, the Haitian revolt was egalitarian in the most blatant way, at a time when our founding fathers were unready for any leveling of class distinctions. . . . Americans could . . . see little in the politics of Haiti’s revolution beyond the fact of a slave revolt. . . . Was there an element of racism in the American attitude? Of course; racism was pervasive in American society at the time. . . . That the implications of Haiti’s slave revolt also posed a threat to public security in the fledgling and insecure United States . . . made it doubly suspect. Most Americans had been frightened enough by the social upheaval and threat to order and property exemplified in Shay’s and then the Whiskey rebellions. Few were prepared to laud a foreign rebellion that compounded the same threat of anarchy with the potential to serve as a model for domestic slave unrest. 8. As quoted in ibid. 9. As quoted in ibid., p. 129. 10. Ibid., p. 227. 11. As quoted in Tim Matthewson, “Jefferson and Haiti,” Journal of Southern History 61, no. 2 (May 1995): 217. 12. Thomas Jefferson, Notes on the State of Virginia (New York: Harper & Row, 1964), p. 138. 13. As quoted in ibid., pp. 235–236. 14. Plummer, Haiti and the United States, p. 37. 15. US secretary of the treasury Albert Gallatin argued that “one of the principal motives for passing [the embargo] was the apprehension of the danger which at that time (immediately after the massacre of the whites there) might on account of our numerous slaves, arise from the unrestricted intercourse with the black population of that island” (as quoted in Matthewson, “Jefferson and Haiti,” p. 237). 16. Claude Moïse, Constitutions et Luttes de Pouvoir en Haïti, vol. 1: 1804–1915 (Montreal: Éditions CIDIHCA, 1988), p. 32; Maurice A. Lubin, “Les Premiers Rapports de la Nation Haïtienne avec l’Étranger,” Journal of Inter-American Studies 10, no. 2 (April 1968): 277–278: “l’Empereur ne formera jamais aucune entreprise dans la vue de faire des conquêtes ni de troubler la paix et le régime intérieur des colonies.”

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17. As quoted in Matthewson, “Jefferson and Haiti,” p. 235; see also Lubin, “Les Premiers Rapports,” pp. 289–290. 18. As quoted in Brown, Toussaint’s Clause, p. 233. 19. According to Matthewson, “Jefferson and Haiti,” p. 238, the “value of American exports to the French islands had stood at $6.7 million in 1806, but fell to $5.8 in 1807, and $1.5 in 1808.” Brown, Toussaint’s Clause, p. 176, points out: “In 1801, raw sugar production was less than 20 percent of its 1789 amount, while refined sugar and coffee production were only slightly better at 35 percent and 55 percent, respectively. In short, the profit motive, which had been the primary motivator of America’s traditional relationship with St. Domingo, was gradually but severely eroding.” 20. Brown, Toussaint’s Clause, pp. 285–286. 21. Matthewson, “Jefferson and Haiti,” p. 237. 22. Brown, Toussaint’s Clause, pp. 294–295; see also Rayford W. Logan, The Diplomatic Relations of the United States with Haiti, 1776–1891 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1941), pp. 283–314. 23. Ibid., p. 291. 24. As quoted in ibid., p. 197. 25. Ibid., p. 152. 26. Ibid., p. 151. 27. As quoted in Matthewson, “Jefferson and Haiti,” pp. 218–219. 28. Plummer, Haiti and the United States, p. 31. 29. David Nicholls, Haiti in Caribbean Context (London: Macmillan, 1985), p. 92. 30. Plummer, Haiti and the United States, p. 39. 31. Schmidt, The United States Occupation of Haiti, p. 34. 32. Nicholls, Haiti in Caribbean Context, p. 109. 33. Schmidt, The United States Occupation of Haiti, p. 35. 34. As quoted in Nicholls, Haiti in Caribbean Context, p. 109. 35. Ibid. 36. As Nicholls, Haiti in Caribbean Context, pp. 108–109, explains: As the nineteenth century progressed, Haiti was the scene of increasing foreign intervention. Often the cause was some loss suffered by foreign businessmen resident in the country. During the rising in Cap Haïtien against [President] Geffrard led by General Silvain Salnave in 1865, for example, the property of a certain German businessman was destroyed. The cause of the destruction was the bombardment of the city by the British, whose ambassador, the notorious Sir Spenser St John, was sympathetic to the cause of Geffrard. The businessman, together with another German who had suffered a similar loss at Miragoâne, claimed compensation from the government. . . . The claims of these foreign merchants were not accepted by the government and in 1872 German frigates appeared in Haitian waters, seized two Haitian ships and demanded US$3,000 compensation. The government of Nissage Saget agreed to pay the sum, but when the ships were returned, the Haitian flag had been desecrated by the Germans.

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37. Plummer, Haiti and the United States, pp. 78–79. 38. Léon Laroche, Haiti: Une Page d’Histoire (Paris: 1885), p. 59: “Nous sommes dupes de leur politique, victimes de leurs intrigues, esclaves de leurs capitaux.” 39. Solon Menos, L’Affaire Luders (Port-au-Prince: Imprimerie J. Verrollot, 1899). 40. Ibid.; see also Robert Debs Heinl and Nancy Gordon Heinl, Written in Blood: The Story of the Haitian People, 1492–1995, revised and expanded by Michael Heinl (Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 1996), p. 304; and Nicholls, Haiti in Caribbean Context, p. 109. The Lüders affair was only one instance of German imperialism; another example demonstrating greater and indeed determined Haitian resistance is Admiral Hammerton Killick’s refusal to surrender to German orders. Nicholls, Haiti in Caribbean Context, p. 109, describes the event: A further case of German intervention occurred during the struggle for power between Nord Alexis and Antenor Firmin in 1902, when a German ship carrying arms for Alexis was seized by the Crête-àPierrot. The Haitian vessel, normally under the command of a british officer, had been taken over by Admiral Hammerton Killick, acting on behalf of Firmin. The Germans sent a warship, the Panther, to capture the Crête-à-Pierrot, but Killick blew up himself and the Haitian flag ship rather than hand it over. 41. Heinl and Heinl, Written in Blood, p. 304; Nicholls, Haiti in Caribbean Context, pp. 108–109. 42. Plummer, Haiti and the United States, p. 32; see also Logan, The Diplomatic Relations of the United States with Haiti, pp. 368–396. 43. Tim Matthewson, A Proslavery Foreign Policy: Haitian-American Relations During the Early Republic (Westport: CT: Praeger, 2003), p. 145. 44. Logan, The Diplomatic Relations of the United States with Haiti, pp. 315–352. According to Logan (p. 321), in 1865, in exchange for obtaining US assistance in overthrowing President Geffrard, the would-be revolutionary Sylvain Salnave “offered to construct [at the Môle St. Nicolas] a naval station and arsenal for the United States.” Salnave, however, was not prepared to surrender Haiti’s sovereignty over it. “From this time on [Logan adds, p. 321] Môle St. Nicolas becomes the focus of strategical interest in place of Cap Haitien.” See also Yves L. Auguste, Haiti et les Etats-Unis, 1862–1900 (Port-au-Prince: Imprimerie Henri Deschamps, 1987), pp. 102–106. 45. Schmidt, The United States Occupation of Haiti, p. 31. 46. As quoted in ibid. 47. As quoted in Nicholls, Haiti in Caribbean Context, p. 111. 48. Schmidt, The United States Occupation of Haiti, p. 6. 49. David Healy, Gunboat Diplomacy in the Wilson Era: The U.S. Navy in Haiti, 1915–1916 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1976), p. 4. 50. Leslie F. Manigat, “La Substitution de la Prépondérance Américaine à la Prépondérance Française au Début du XX Siècle: La Conjoncture de 1910–1911,” Revue d’Histoire Moderne et Contemporaine 14, no. 4 (1967): 323 (my translation): “s’est forgé l’arme decisive de la victoire americaine: l’implantation économique et financier.”

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51. Ibid., p. 29; Schmidt, The United States Occupation of Haiti, p. 37; Arthur C. Millspaugh, Haiti Under American Control 1915–1930 (Boston: World Peace Foundation, 1931), p. 21. 52. Schmidt, The United States Occupation of Haiti, p. 37. 53. Ibid., p. 38. 54. Healy, Gunboat Diplomacy in the Wilson Era, p. 30, notes: “The Haitian government had threatened to foreclose on the completed portion of the railroad when the State Department entered the picture. Secretary of State William Jennings Bryan strongly supported the railroad interests, asking the Haitians to accept United States arbitration of the dispute and warning them against taking hasty action.” See also Millspaugh, Haiti Under American Control 1915–1930, p. 22. 55. Manigat, “La Substitution de la Prépondérance Américaine,” pp. 337–351. 56. Manigat, ibid., p. 337, argues convincingly: The battle for a new national bank is not only a battle for economic control, given that the institution is destined to be the tool for loans, the conduit for investments, and the regulator of commerce and business; but also, and perhaps even most importantly, it is a battle for political control, the deciding fight for absolute supremacy. La bataille pour une nouvelle banque nationale est non seulement une bataille pour le contrôle économique du fait que l’institution est appelée à être l’instrument des emprunts, le canal des investissements et la régulatrice du commerce et des affaires mais aussi et peut-être même avant tout une bataille pour le contrôle politique, la lutte décisive pour la prépondérance générale. 57. Millspaugh, Haiti Under American Control 1915–1930, p. 22. 58. In 1914, the Haitian government resisted repeated US efforts to take over Haitian customs. Paul Douglas, “The American Occupation of Haiti I,” Political Science Quarterly 42, no. 2 (June 1927): 232, notes, “From the middle of 1914 on, the United States Government made no less than six attempts to induce the Haitian government to grant control over the Haitian customs. Indeed, two special missions were sent by the State Department to negotiate such a treaty but the Haitians steadfastly refused.” Roger Farnham became the éminence grise behind US power in Haiti. Farnham was vice president of National City Bank of New York and of the Banque Nationale d’Haïti; he was also president of Haiti’s national railway. These positions gave him preferential access to Secretary of State Bryan and a dominant voice in elaborating US diplomatic strategy toward Haiti. In fact, the US schemes to take over Haiti’s customhouses came to be known as the Farnham Plan. Farnham had to wait for the occupation itself to see his plan materialize. No Haitian government was prepared to negotiate surrendering the country’s sovereignty; only the force of arms and the landing of the marines could achieve Farnham’s objectives (see Schmidt, The United States Occupation of Haiti, pp. 60–61). 59. As quoted in Schmidt, The United States Occupation of Haiti, p. 51. 60. See Blancpain, Haïti et les États Unis, pp. 32–33; Douglas, “The American Occupation of Haiti I,” pp. 236–238; Millspaugh, Haiti Under

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American Control, pp. 23–24; Schmidt, The United States Occupation of Haiti, pp. 60–61. 61. As quoted in Blancpain, Haïti et les États Unis, p. 37: Par un système d’étranglement progressif, on va chercher à nous faire désirer la solution préconisée. En réalité, l’enlèvement des fonds du retrait fait partie du programme qui veut nous forcer à tendre la main aux chaînes. Bien entendu, il n’y a plus une faute à commettre, car c’en serait fait de nous s’il y avait encore des troubles. Il est, en effet, plus que probable que les détachements qu’on débarquerait commenceraient par investir nos douanes. 62. As quoted in Millspaugh, Haiti Under American Control, p. 197. 63. As quoted in Healy, Gunboat Diplomacy in the Wilson Era, p. 34. 64. As quoted in Schmidt, The United States Occupation of Haiti, p. 63. 65. Ibid., pp. 62–63. 66. As quoted in Blancpain, Haïti et les États Unis, pp. 23–24: La politique impérialiste des États-Unis n’est suivie nulle part avec plus d’intérêt qu’en Haïti où l’on se sent directement menacé de suivre tôt ou tard le sort de Cuba et de Porto-Rico. Ici la population est nettement hostile à toute domination étrangère et à celle des États-Unis plus qu’à toute autre, mais les Haïtiens ne se font pas d’illusions sur leur propre force et n’essaieraient même pas de résister à la puissance quelconque qui tenterait de les annexer. 67. Lester Langley, The United States and the Caribbean in the Twentieth Century, 4th ed. (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1989), p. 69. 68. Schmidt, The United States Occupation of Haiti, pp. 64–65. 69. Ibid., pp. 64–65. 70. As quoted in Healy, Gunboat Diplomacy in the Wilson Era, p. 131. 71. The Comité Révolutionnaire de Port-au-Prince, which was set up to fill the vacuum left by the murder of Sam, told Captain Beach that there was no reason to have US troops on Haitian soil since order had been reestablished. According to the British ambassador in Haiti, the Comité agreed to the landing of the marines for the sole purposes of protecting foreign legations. See Gaillard, Les Blancs Débarquent, pp. 104–105. 72. As quoted in Schmidt, The United States Occupation of Haiti, p. 71. 73. As quoted in Healy, Gunboat Diplomacy in the Wilson Era, p. 96. 74. As quoted in Millspaugh, Haiti Under American Control, p. 38. 75. As quoted in Schmidt, The United States Occupation of Haiti, p. 73. 76. As quoted in Millspaugh, Haiti Under American Control, p. 41. 77. As quoted in Schmidt, The United States Occupation of Haiti, p. 74. 78. Bobo died in Paris on November 30, 1929. See Gaillard, Les Blancs Débarquent, pp. 204–231; Healy, Gunboat Diplomacy in the Wilson Era, p. 143. 79. As quoted in Millspaugh, Haiti Under American Control, p. 38. 80. As quoted in Healy, Gunboat Diplomacy in the Wilson Era, p. 69. 81. As quoted in Schmidt, The United States Occupation of Haiti, p. 59.

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82. As quoted in Healy, Gunboat Diplomacy in the Wilson Era, p. 129. 83. Ibid., p. 133. 84. Ibid., pp. 133–158; Blancpain, Haïti et les États Unis, pp. 61–85. 85. As quoted in Blancpain, Haïti et les États Unis, p. 64. Sannon’s reference to US abuses is an allusion to the occupiers’ violent seizure of Haiti’s customhouse: L’acceptation du projet américain placerait notre malheureux pays sous un triple protectorat économique, financier et politique au profit des États-Unis. . . . Si, ne s’appuyant sur aucun droit conventionnel, le gouvernement des États-Unis a pu donner au monde civilisé le spectacle de violences et d’abus aussi révoltants que ceux auxquels nous assistons depuis quelques jours, que ne fera-til pas demain lorsqu’il pourra invoquer les privilèges exorbitants que consacrerait, en sa faveur, la Convention en question. 86. Ibid., pp. 76–79. 87. Ibid., pp. 64–65: Tant que j’ai cru que notre malheureuse patrie pouvait se délivrer elle-même, j’ai repoussé le concours étranger. Mais quand je l’ai vue tomber, épuisée, saignée à blanc, dans la boue sanglante de juillet, j’ai compris, et tout ce qu’il y a d’honnête et pur dans le pays a compris que nous n’avons plus désormais que le choix: ou bien la disparition définitive dans l’abjection, dans la famine, dans le sang, ou bien la Rédemption avec l’aide des États-Unis. J’ai préféré cette Rédemption. 88. As quoted in Douglas, “The American Occupation of Haiti I,” p. 247. 89. 90. 91. 92. 93.

Ibid. Healy, Gunboat Diplomacy in the Wilson Era, p. 180. Ibid. As quoted in Schmidt, The United States Occupation of Haiti, p. 97. Ibid., p. 98.

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THE UNITED STATES’ authoritarianism during its occupation of Haiti was not surprising; it reflected its tradition of brutalizing its own Native American and African American populations and the alien people it conquered in Central America, the Caribbean, and the Philippines. As Hans Schmidt has explained, when Americans took over Haiti, they “came equipped with a store of . . . prejudices to go along with their superior firepower. This was a world apart from “civilized” Western wars and the refinement of European diplomacy.”1 In fact, key figures of the US personnel and a large number of the marines operating in Haiti had served in previous imperial ventures and “banana wars” and hailed from the segregationist South of the United States.2 They exhibited deeply contemptuous attitudes toward Haitians that reflected both their experiences and their roots. In fact, racist phobias and stereotypes depicting Haitians as “savages,” “cannibals,” “gooks,” and “niggers” were pervasive among the occupiers.3 These stereotypes were associated with a paternalistic outlook that differentiated between “bad” and “good” Haitians. The former constituted the small class-conscious elite, which Americans defined as those wearing shoes; and the latter represented the overwhelming shoeless majority. Those who were wearing shoes were all “crooks” and a “joke”;4 in fact, Colonel Littleton Waller, the second in command of the occupation, described them as “niggers in spite of the thin varnish of education and refinement. Down in their hearts they are just the same happy, idle irresponsible people we know of.”5 The shoeless, on the other hand, were the “most kindly, generous, hospitable, pleasure-loving people.”6 The shoeless, however, became 159

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dangerous when incited by the elite wearing “vici kid shoes with long pointed toes and celluloid collars.”7 When this happened, the shoeless were “capable of the most horrible atrocities.”8 The point is that the US occupiers never understood how the apparently meek and docile masses could turn on their own, as we shall see below, into fierce guerrilla fighters. The occupiers expected absolute obedience and deference from Haitians, and since many members of the elite were “uppity niggers” who did not “know their place,” they were always blamed for provoking any form of resistance from below. The distinction between shoeless and shoe-wearing Haitians was spurious; ultimately, Americans believed that all Haitians were inferior barbarians “born with a semi-ape’s brain.”9 As Brigade Commander Cole put it, “Fully 75 percent are of very low mentality and ignorant beyond description . . . no matter how much veneer and polish a Haitian may have, he is absolutely savage under the skin and under strain reverts to type.”10 Haitians were also duplicitous and could not be trusted. In Colonel Waller’s words, “There is not an honest man in the whole of Haiti of Haitian nationality.”11 To this intense and crude racism must be added an equally pervasive disdain for “Latin” culture, which in the eyes of the occupiers aggravated the “irrational” nature of Haitians. The US chargé d’affaires in Haiti, Stuart Grummon, offered in 1930 a cultural explanation of Haiti’s predicament that still resonates in Washington’s contemporary policy discourse and US political science: In general, while the Anglo-Saxon has a deep sense of the value of social organization and of the obligation of democratic government to assume a large share of responsibility for the social welfare of the masses, and has in addition a profound conviction of the value of democratic government, the Latin mind, on the contrary, is apt to scorn democracy and neglect activities looking to the health and educational welfare of the masses. . . . The Anglo-Saxon who excels in collective action is apt to be impatient with the Haitian characteristic of intense individualism inherited from the French regime. . . . The action common with the Latin in general, is in the main directed by emotion rather than by reason, which in the main dictates the action of the Anglo-Saxon.12

The occupiers therefore saw Haitians as “emotional” and, as Brigade Commander Cole put it, “vain, loving praise, excitable, changeable, beyond belief illogical, and double-faced.”13 Not surprisingly, the US occupiers were convinced that any serious dialogue with

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Haitians was impossible. High Commissioner Russell expressed bluntly the US viewpoint: “Haitian mentality only recognizes force, and appeal to reason and logic is unthinkable.”14 And, indeed, the occupation used brutal force to squash Haitian opposition and impose its grip on Haitian society. Admiral Caperton declared martial law on September 3, 1915, in his efforts to compel Haitians into accepting and signing the Treaty of 1915 legalizing the occupation. Moreover, martial law, which lasted until 1929, facilitated both the establishment of a new regime of corvée and the ghastly suppression of guerrilla resistance against the US imperial presence. The corvée was a massive mobilization of press-gang peasant labor to build roads that would reach remote areas of the territory. The creation of a viable network of transportation was not merely a means of spurring economic and commercial development, but it responded above all to strategic considerations. 15 The repression of the cacos, who had supported Bobo, and then of the popular guerrillas of Charlemagne Péralte required, in the minds of US strategists, the penetration of the countryside to prevent any further recruitment of peasants into the forces of resistance.16 The corvée and the military repression of the guerrillas were thus symbiotically connected; the forced labor of the peasants would contribute to disciplining and punishing them into building a more efficient system of transportation, which in turn served as a powerful policing network that would block their potential participation in the nationalist guerrilla movement. The corvée was, however, extremely unpopular, and it fueled greater opposition to the occupation.17 Placed under the control of the Gendarmerie, it was riddled with abuse. Compelled to work as virtual “slave gangs,” peasants revolted against the system. US authorities eventually abolished the corvée in August 1918, but peasants continued to suffer ill treatment. Not surprisingly, popular support to fight the occupiers grew, and the cacos became an embryonic movement of national liberation with an increasingly sophisticated guerrilla force under the leadership of Charlemagne Péralte.18 According to Arthur Millspaugh, the financial adviser–general receiver of Haiti from 1927 to 1929, Péralte’s guerrillas “did not at any one time exceed 2,000, but it was estimated that one-quarter of the country was involved and one-fifth of the population.”19 They represented therefore a real army of resistance to US imperialism. In a letter to the French ambassador in Haiti, Péralte, who called himself “Chef Suprême de la Révolution en Haïti,” explained why he was fighting the occupiers:

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The deceptive promises made by the Yankees when they landed on our soil were carried out over these four years as perpetual humiliations, vicious crimes, assassinations, thefts, and acts of barbary which, out of the whole world, only the American has the secret. We come today, our patience having run out, to reclaim the rights we did not know, scorned by the unscrupulous American who, destroying our institutions, strips the Haitian people of all of their resources and gorges itself on our name and on our blood. . . . Today . . . we demand the liberation of our territory as well as the benefits granted to free and independent states recognized by international law.20

In the eyes of US authorities, however, the cacos, Péralte, and his supporters were nothing but “bandits,” “criminals,” and “killers”;21 they had to be thoroughly “pacified,” and, according to Caperton, that was impossible without “the loss of life.”22 In fact, the killing during the early period of pacification, which preceded the rise of Péralte’s insurgency in late 1918, was so indiscriminate that Secretary of the Navy Daniels cabled Caperton to plead that “in view of the heavy losses to Haitians in recent engagement,” the military “offensive be suspended in order to prevent further loss of life.” Caperton reluctantly stopped the carnage but only after his protests were rejected by Daniels’s order that pacification had to continue without “further offensive operations.”23 The differences in firepower, weapons, and training between the marines and the insurgents were such that confrontations between the two could only end in the latter’s massacre. In spite of their great tactical skills and knowledge of the landscape, the predominantly peasant cacos, with their machetes and outdated rifles, were no match for the vastly better equipped forces of the occupation. The charismatic leadership of Péralte gave impetus to a second wave of violent resistance, which had no success, however, in dislodging the occupiers from Haitian soil. Péralte was shot on November 1, 1919, and his successor, Benoît Batraville, suffered a similar fate on May 19 of the following year. The US “pacification” of the country was thus virtually complete by 1921; it killed some 2,000 insurgents and incarcerated more than 11,000 of their sympathizers.24 The guerrilla fight against American imperialism failed not only because of a lack of weapons, but also because of both the very nature of peasant aspirations and the incapacity of Péralte and his followers to create alliances with the urban poor and the progressive intelligentsia.25 As Suzy Castor explains,

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The fundamental cause of this defeat seems to be of a political nature. The northern small farmers had thrown themselves into the fight but without formulating clear revolutionary objectives. They failed to make demands of a social and economic character, like agrarian reform and improvements for the rural laborer. There is no doubt that the avant-garde of the cacos had political power as their goal. . . . However, this avant-garde was not able to awaken all social layers of the country to guarantee their active participation in the movement. This explains, to a certain degree, the localization of the war in the central and northern regions of Haiti. Instead of facing several sites of battle or a front of national scale, the occupation forces were able to concentrate and take direct action without having to spread themselves out. One of their first measures in facing the rebellion was to eliminate forced labor in the north to reduce popular unhappiness aroused by the corvée system.26

In addition, the peasants’ own goals contributed to the failure of the movement. While peasants were fighting for dignity and for improvement in their material conditions, they did not seek a total transformation of their world. What they wanted was the preservation and revitalization of the regime of the minifundia, which would guarantee them a life as small property owners and independent rural producers. They feared and opposed the occupiers’ attempts to attract US capital by establishing large-scale plantations. Millspaugh, the financial adviser–general receiver, had argued: “Individualistic small farming appeared to present serious obstacles to the employment of capital, irrigation, skilled management, technical methods and efficient marketing.”27 He lamented, however, that while there was “no doubt that a superior yield would obtain under plantation methods,” by 1929 not “one modern coffee plantation” had been established in Haiti. Moreover, a year later, “only about 2% of Haiti’s agricultural exports” were “produced by the plantation method.”28 Ultimately, fearing peasant discontent and revolt, US authorities limited their efforts to transform the country’s economy into a plantation system.29 This decision reflected also the reality that there was little economic investment in Haiti despite occupation policies privileging the penetration of US capital.30 Ultimately, a few large-scale agricultural ventures crystallized, but they settled on less than 50,000 acres.31 Peasants who had historically opposed the plantation economy were determined to resist its further development. Their vision was thus still anchored in the dream of agricultural self-sufficiency and independence; in this sense, it limited the possibilities of an urban rural alliance capable of forcing

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the departure of the occupiers, let alone of transforming systematically Haitian society. Finally, the other major factor that facilitated the occupation was the collaboration of the traditional elites with US imperialism. This collaboration did not last long however; the unmitigated racism of the occupiers transformed early supporters into nationalist opponents. Erstwhile allies of the US presence suffered such indignities that they soon turned against it. While most of them eschewed backing the cacos insurgents, they developed a nationalist ideology and a sense of nationhood that curbed the significance of color but had little impact on the salience of class identities. As David Nicholls emphasizes, The clumsy actions of the Americans who insisted on treating all Haitians of whatever colour as “niggers” contributed to this growing solidarity. Paradoxically the Americans unintentionally succeeded . . . in uniting all Haitians under the name “black.” The twenties saw a growing solidarity among Haitians; collaborators like Presidents Dartiguenave and Borno found themselves virtually isolated from national life, being maintained in office solely by United States military support.32

Thus, only members of the client regimes pursuing their own personal and corporate interests continued to endorse the US presence. They all had authoritarian reflexes bordering on fascist tendencies that drew them into the paternalistic orbit of the imperial project. They shared the occupiers’ conviction that Haitians were not prepared for any democratic pattern of self-government; they believed in the despotisme éclairé of the plus capables. Louis Borno, who followed Dartiguenave as president in 1922, became the symbol of this form of tropical fascism.33 In a 1925 letter to the prefects, he displayed very publicly his absolute disdain for the vast majority of Haitians: Our rural population, which represents nine-tenths of the Haitian population, is almost totally illiterate, ignorant and poor; although its material and moral situation has been appreciably bettered in these last few years, it is still incapable of exercising the right to vote, and would be the easy prey of those bold speculators whose conscience hesitates at no lie. As for the urban population, one tenth of the total population, those of its members who are capable of expressing an intelligent vote . . . have for a long time, for the most part, renounced their

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electoral rights, disgusted by the immoral and insolent frauds which render and would still render illusory their efforts as intelligent electors. The remainder is the small group of professional politicians, with their followers of every sort, who are mainly illiterate. This is the present electoral body; it is characterized by an absolute lack of organization as to the little number of its useful elements, and for the rest, by a flagrant inability to assume, in the decisive period through which we are passing, the heavy responsibilities of a political action.34

Borno was indeed a dictator, but a dictator under US control.35 His rule embodied what Haitians called la dictature bicéphale, the dual despotism of US imperialism and its domestic client. This pattern of authoritarian governance expressed the symbiotic relationship between the US high commissioner, Russell, and President Borno. While Russell had ultimate veto power on all important matters, he had little use for it since he found in Borno a kindred spirit. As Millspaugh explains, President Borno quite consistently gave to the high commissioner and treaty officials cordial and intelligent cooperation. His attitude was by no means servile or unquestioning. He had ideas of his own, expressed them forcefully and in some cases insisted on their adoption. . . . He controlled the Council of State, the members of which he removed and appointed at pleasure. . . . President Borno dictated Haitian legislation, subject to the advice and consent of the high commissioner, who usually acted in matters of legislation on instructions from the State Department. . . . Thus, government in Haiti took the form of a joint dictatorship. It would have been difficult at any time to determine which was the controlling partner—Mr. Borno or General Russell. There was understanding, friendship and cooperation between them; each was ready to yield at times; and each needed the other.36

La dictature bicéphale contributed to the utter centralization of power in Port-au-Prince and to the modernization of the monarchical presidentialism that had always characterized Haitian politics. While it weakened dramatically the role of both the major provincial towns—Cap-Haïtien, Jacmel, Gonaïves, Jérémie—and the legislature, it enhanced the historical preponderance of an all-powerful executive. From now on, however, to remain in office, the executive would have to depend on the support of the military, which had also been centralized in Port-au-Prince.37 With the US occupation, praetorian power

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came to reside in the barracks of the capital, which had supplanted the regional armed bands that had hitherto been decisive in the making, and unmaking, of political regimes. Moreover, the subordination of the Haitian president to the marine forces nurtured a politics of military vetoes and interference that would eventually undermine civilian authority and incite the numerous coups of postoccupation Haiti. Writing in 1927, E. G. Balch observed prophetically that the supremacy of the marines and the US creation of a centralized military force would have disastrous consequences: “One possible result is self-maintenance in power of whomsoever has control of this force, subject only to the development of a situation where, like the Praetorian guard, the soldiers sell themselves to the highest bidder.”38 The US occupiers pursued a systematic policy of bureaucratic penetration and encadrement that sought the “pacification” of the country. This implied imposing the disciplinary and coercive reach of the state on every area of the territory and eliminating real and potential competitive centers of regional power. Michel Laguerre explains: [The occupation] built a hierarchical system with regional centers, forming a pyramid with Port-au-Prince at the apex. This structure led to an increase in military presence throughout the territory and at the same time made traditional regions of belligerence less capable of mounting a successful revolution because they could be easily neutralized. So too, by diffusing power and centralizing the general staff of the army in Port-au-Prince, the hierarchical organization prevented the rise of regional strongmen and curtailed their ability to march into the capital city, as they were once able to do in the nineteenth century. If there is one organizational principle that characterizes the restructuring of the army during this period, it has to be centralization. The American occupation diminished the importance and autonomy of regional armies. Port-au-Prince became the power center of the republic.39

The supremacy of Port-au-Prince implied also the privileging of urban classes to the detriment of the rural population. Peasants continued to be excluded from the moral community of les plus capables and came under a strict policing regime of law and order. In January 1925, the occupation enforced a new system of rural surveillance: “chefs de section were appointed in rural zones and were aided by two gardes-champetres [rural police].”40 This program was part of a larger paternalistic project that sought to “civilize” and “educate” what US

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authorities perceived as a thoroughly ignorant population. In the words of the commandant of the Gendarmerie, Butler: “We were all imbued with the fact that we were trustees of a huge estate that belonged to minors. That was my viewpoint; that was the viewpoint I personally took, that Haitians were our wards and that we were endeavoring to develop and make for them a rich and productive property.”41 High Commissioner Russell had similar views; in his eyes, Haitian peasants had the “mentality of a child of not more than seven years of age reared under advantageous conditions.”42 The occupiers were therefore convinced that they had to lead Haitians into adulthood; in turn, that required a long period of tutelage, which had its challenges since a large segment of the island’s population was in Russell’s opinion “bordering on a state of savagery, if not actually existing in such a state.”43 Paternalism presupposed not only making a benign effort to raise the level of education of those “minors,” but also disciplining them with the whip if necessary because they were, after all, virtual “savages.” Paternalism was thus double-edged: benevolent to those who were utterly obedient, and punishing to those who resisted. Mary Benda explains well its functionality to the imperial project: Paternalism was an assertion of authority, superiority, and control expressed in the metaphor of a father’s relationship with his children. It was a form of domination, a relation of power, masked as benevolent by its reference to paternal care and guidance, but structured equally by norms of paternal authority and discipline. In this sense, paternalism should not be seen in opposition to violence, but rather as one among several cultural vehicles for it. . . . Paternalism . . . was the cultural flagship of the United States in Haiti. It served practical military purposes, including, but not limited to, announcing the identity of the invading force. As such, it must be understood as thoroughly as any military technology.44

Paternalism, however, was not new to Haiti; domestic ruling classes had always used it as a method of exercising their domination over the poor majority. What the occupation changed was that it superimposed its own brand of paternalism on the preexisting one. Haitians of all social classes were thus treated at best like “minors,” and at worst like ungrateful transgressors who had to be repressed. The occupation enforced martial law, used the Gendarmerie to subjugate violently local insurgents and nationalists, and imposed press

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censorship to silence any voices contesting its continued rule. La dictature bicéphale was benevolent only in its own eyes. Balch, in a 1927 report for the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom, summarized the situation: Today a foreign power enforces order in Haiti, and puts down all lawlessness but its own. Extorting votes by refusing to pay official salaries, influencing elections, closing the National Assembly, and refusing to allow a new one to be elected, high handed imprisonment of journalists, refusal to permit court awards to be honored—these do not spell order, they spell despotism—benevolent in the opinion of the despots, but not in the minds of all those who are supposed to enjoy it.45

La dictature bicéphale kept a tense peace up to the Great Depression of 1929. The earlier violent suppression of the cacos had contained nationalist resistance, except for some protests against the USstaged reelection of Borno in 1926. The Great Depression, however, caused the collapse of the coffee market and an acute economic crisis, which in turn exacerbated existing social tensions and political conflicts. Moreover, most Haitians feared that the council of state, which was President Borno’s own political instrument, would both reappoint him to a third term and suspend the parliamentary elections that were to be held in 1930. These elections were supposed to replace the council itself and pave the way for a more accountable form of governance. The conjuncture was thus ripe for a social explosion, and in October 1929, a series of student strikes sparked a growing movement of discontent that culminated in a national uprising against the occupation. Politicians, workers, and peasants joined the students and called for President Borno’s ouster as well as an end to US imperial abuse. The occupiers and their client government had none of it; they reimposed the curfew, martial law, and press censorship. Moreover, fearing that the Gendarmerie would side with the insurgents, they revoked the independent status that it had recently gained. High Commissioner Russell gave the marines freedom to use the repressive machinery to control what he described as immature, dangerous, rabble-rousers.46 Russell contended: Until the mentality of the people becomes accustomed to stable government, and as long as ignorance and poverty of the people furnishes a revolutionary field for irresponsible politicians, as long as a large, irresponsible, mob element of the population exists, as

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long as cheap alcohol can be obtained for this “hoodlum fringe,” any police force in Haiti must be ready to act promptly and decisively and, until the courts are reorganized, to do their share in preserving public order, extraordinary measures must occasionally be taken.47

Repression, however, had unintended consequences: it intensified the level of nationalist resistance to the occupation and contributed to a convergence of interests between students, public workers, and peasants. This growing mobilization against the occupation precipitated the “Marchaterre massacre,” which set in motion a series of events that would eventually lead the United States to reassess its policies and end its imperial presence in Haiti. The massacre occurred on December 6, 1929, when some 1,500 peasants protesting against high taxation confronted armed marines who opened fire on the crowd. Twenty-four Haitians died and fifty-one were wounded.48 The massacre outraged an already angry Haitian population and provoked a certain panic among the occupiers, who requested military reinforcements.49 Isolated and thoroughly unpopular, President Borno called for “energetic measures of repression” and blamed the “leaders of the opposition” for the massacre.50 President Hoover, however, feared the consequences of a “big stick” policy and decided to dispatch a commission to Haiti in an effort to study the “difficult problem, the solution of which is still obscure.” Hoover hoped that the commission would “arrive at some more definite policy than at present.”51 An earlier US Senate inquiry in 1922 had contended that the United States had no option but to remain in Haiti. The alternative to this policy was “immediate withdrawal of American support and the abandonment of the Haitian people to chronic revolution, anarchy, barbarism and ruin.”52 Seven years later, things had changed; not only were Haitians no longer putting up with the occupation, but Hoover was claiming that he had no “desire for representation of the American Government abroad through our military forces.”53 Not surprisingly, when Hoover announced the creation of the Commission for the Study and Review of Conditions in the Republic of Haiti, on February 4, 1930, he stated: “The primary question which is to be investigated is when and how we are to withdraw from Haiti. The second question is what we shall do in the meantime.”54 While the treaty legalizing the US occupation was set to expire in 1936, the United States had “an obligation to the people of Haiti . . . to build up a certainty of efficient and stable government, in order

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that life and property may be protected after we withdraw.”55 Hoover thus believed that it was critical to plan for such a withdrawal and asked the commission to “recommend the sequent and positive steps which will lead to the liquidation of our responsibilities.”56 Chaired by Cameron Forbes, who served in the Philippines as chief constabulary and then as governor, the commission took his name and ultimately recommended the withdrawal of the United States from Haiti.57 The commission realized that Haitians detested both the occupation and Borno’s client regime. It acknowledged its deep disappointment at “the lack of appreciation on the part of the educated and cultured Haitians of the services rendered them by the occupation and their own Government.” In fact, the commission praised effusively the occupation’s record of achievements and specifically the work of Commissioner Russell. In its eyes, the US presence generated “great material progress,” and Russell demonstrated “whole-hearted and single-minded devotion to the interests of Haiti.” The commission warned, however, that significant problems had yet to be addressed effectively. It lamented that US authorities in Haiti “did not seem to take into account that their work should be completed by 1936,” and that “the preparation for the political and administrative training of Haitians for the responsibilities of government had been inadequate.” Finally, the commission acknowledged that the United States had not accomplished its mission: “The failure of the occupation to understand the social problems of Haiti, its brusque attempt to plant democracy there by drill and harrow, its determination to set up a middle class . . . all these explain why, in part, the high hopes of our good works in this land have not been realized.”58 The Forbes Commission did not, however, call for an immediate withdrawal; such a withdrawal, it advised, could take place only after the successful Haitianization of the public service and of the Gendarmerie. Moreover, there were pressing practical problems to resolve. Forbes understood that Borno had no legitimacy and ultimately hindered long-term US plans. According to Forbes, Borno was “living in a world of illusion or delusion in regard to the depth of the feeling which had been engendered against him by the Haitian populace.”59 US officials knew that “something had to be done to allay popular sentiment and find a way out of the electoral impasse.” They also recognized that “the election of a new President by the means practiced in the last two elections, namely, by the Council of State, would not be accepted quietly by the populace.”60 Thus, the occupiers’ first task was to engineer the departure of Borno while preventing the coming to

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power of the most radical nationalists. They resolved this dilemma by compelling their client president into both accepting his own retirement and arranging through his own council of state the election of an interim successor who would in turn organize general elections as soon as possible.61 Eugene Roy, a Haitian businessman acceptable to Borno, the Americans, and the Haitian opposition, became the compromise president on May 15, 1930. As agreed, Roy convened legislative elections in October, which resulted in the humiliating defeat of supporters of the US presence and of Borno. Sténio Vincent, a moderate nationalist who favored a negotiated and gradual ending of the occupation, was elected president by the two parliamentary chambers in November 1930.62 Vincent’s gradualism was in tune with the Forbes Commission’s recommendation for the accelerated Haitianization of the commanding heights of the government and the eventual withdrawal of all US troops.63 The commission had suggested that the office of high commissioner be abolished and replaced by a new civilian minister who would “be charged with the duty of negotiating with the Haitian Government further modifications of the existing treaty and agreements providing for less intervention in Haitian domestic affairs and defining the conditions under which the United States would lend its assistance in the restoration of order or maintenance of credit.”64 General Russell, the high commissioner, resigned on November 1 and was replaced by Dana G. Munro, who had previously headed the Latin American Division of the US State Department. The arrival of Munro coincided with a relative shift in US foreign policy. While the Forbes Commission operated on the basis that the occupation would “remain in force until 1936,” and that the nature of the US presence would be “more wisely decided” thereafter, Secretary of State Henry Stimson had a shorter time frame. He instructed Munro that the United States desired “to withdraw from any participation in the internal affairs of Haiti at the earliest moment when such withdrawal can be effected with a reasonable hope that there will be no return to the conditions which compelled its intervention in 1915.” 65 With the election of Franklin D. Roosevelt in November 1932, the process of US disengagement from Haiti took new urgency. While Roosevelt’s “Good Neighbor” policy toward Latin America did not mark a fundamental departure from the earlier period of brazen US interventionism in the region,66 it signaled a new strategy of control that facilitated negotiations for the formal end of the occupation. Good Neighbor was based on the premise that direct military intervention

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and control was expensive, counterproductive, and in most cases ultimately unnecessary. It is not that intervention was precluded; it simply became a means of last resort. Under Roosevelt, the United States realized that it could impose its hegemony through local allies and, particularly, the military that it had trained and organized. Hegemony simply did not require occupation. This assessment informed the US decision to end the occupation before 1936, the date of expiration of the Treaty of 1918. In a series of agreements between Washington and Port-au-Prince, the process of Haitianization was accelerated, culminating in the accord of August 7, 1933, which stipulated that the marines would all depart from Haiti by October 1934. The road to Haitian sovereignty was, however, encumbered by significant obstacles. President Vincent faced the mounting opposition of more radical forces that had little sympathy for the painstaking negotiations with the occupiers. He felt compelled to introduce martial law in 1932 to quash dissent. In a rhetoric similar to Borno’s and Russell’s, he defended the crackdown because of “the growing public unrest due to the subversive activities of professional agitators and the persistent and criminal excesses of a certain press.”67 Vincent’s regime resorted therefore to the authoritarianism that had characterized both traditional Haitian politics and the US-controlled pattern of governance. The authoritarian habitus had not disappeared; Vincent emasculated parliament and reasserted the monarchical presidentialism of the past. A sense of déjà vu permeated society in spite of the coming “second independence.” The second independence arrived two months earlier than expected; in a visit to Cap Haïtien, President Roosevelt himself announced that the US occupation would end on August 15. Vincent took full credit for this second independence and compared himself to the revolutionary founding fathers. In a ceremony organized on August 21, he claimed that history was repeating itself and that he was duplicating the achievement of 1804. Vincent’s messianism soon degenerated into an obsession with keeping power for the longue durée; he arranged in 1936 an electoral farce in which citizens were presented with the choice of voting for “unopposed government candidates for every seat in the Chamber of Deputies, and with preprinted government slates . . . of members for the electoral college.”68 Vincent turned soon into a dictator who saw the state as his own preserve. As he put it himself, “The Government makes the Constitution, the Laws, the Regulations and Agreements; such instruments could

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not handicap its activities and it must dispense with them, whenever measures deemed necessary for the maintenance of the Government rendered such a decision necessary.”69 The authoritarian habitus resurfaced, but it did so under new conditions. The US occupation had failed and ultimately never intended to cut its roots; the habitus took on a more rational and modern configuration. The occupation centralized power, established a communication network that became a means of policing and punishing the population, and created a more effective and disciplined coercive force. In fact, it suppressed whatever democratic and popular forms of accountability and protests it confronted. It left a legacy of fraudulent electoral practices dominated by the surveillance and ultimate veto of the military. Elections during, and for more than fifty years after, the occupation were never truly free and fair. In most cases, particularly for presidential elections, they involved political bodies that had limited representative legitimacy and that were selected or appointed by the powers that be. Thus, elections lacked the degree of honesty and openness required to define a remotely democratic order. The occupation imposed its rule through fraud, violence, and deceit, and little changed after it ended. Moreover, its unmitigated racism blinded it from seeing any Haitian predilection for democratic governance. The occupiers were at ease only with the docile and obedient politician who shared their racist, paternalistic, and authoritarian personality. Haitians, in the eyes of US authorities, were at best inferior human beings in dire need of tutelage and at worst primitive savages. In such conditions, the occupiers saw in dictatorship the best means to transform Haiti into a civilized nation; otherwise, political decay and corruption would inevitably set in. It was racism that generated this sense of inevitability. US authorities regarded Haitians as the product of a bizarre mixture of African and Latin cultures that made them uncivil, irrational, emotional, and selfish. 70 In fact, they believed that since the Haitian essence was predominantly of African descent, there was little hope for progress. Responding to president-elect Roosevelt’s question about whether the occupation had accomplished its pacifying mission in Haiti, Secretary of State Stimson stated, “I did not think it would stay permanently put and asked him whether he knew of any self-governing Negro community which had stayed put, and he could not suggest any.”71 US policymakers were thus dismissive of the possibility of a democratic dispensation for Haiti; in fact, they were uninterested in holding any meaningful elections in the country

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because Haitians were, in Munro’s view, “too ignorant and too much out of touch with the world.”72 The occupiers were concerned principally with establishing a stable political order that would be subservient to their strategic and economic interests. Democracy was an objective only insofar as it was compatible with these interests. The United States was thus bent on maintaining and enhancing its hegemonic position in the Americas and the Caribbean. It knew that its decision to end the occupation would not undermine its control of Haiti. The United States’ continued grip on Haiti’s financial and banking sectors thoroughly circumscribed Haiti’s sovereignty. The second independence was fictitious; Vincent’s regime was hardly in charge of the economy. As Schmidt pointed out, “An American fiscal representative continued to supervise Haitian finances until 1941, when his functions were transferred by a new agreement to the fiscal department of the Banque Nationale, which remained under United States supervision until full redemption of the 1922 loan was completed in 1947.”73 America’s hegemony was not merely upheld by economic power; the marines’ Trojan horse, the Gendarmerie, which was renamed Garde d’Haïti, also sustained it. The Garde’s mission was to ensure order and Haiti’s continued subservience to US interests. While US authorities publicly claimed that the Garde had been trained as a professional military force that would not interfere in politics, the reality was vastly different. In fact, Russell believed that once the occupation ended, Haiti would revert to “a system of military dictatorships” that, thanks to US training, would “not be as cynical, cruel, and reactionary as in the past.”74 The Garde was therefore a good and cheaper substitute for the marines. It would maintain order and spare the United States costly and unpopular interventions. Not surprisingly, before departing from Haiti, US authorities took care of selecting the key officers of the Garde; they looked for decisive and authoritarian figures capable of either taking over the government or controlling it from a distance. Major Thomas Clarke, the marine in charge of the Département du Centre, recommended thus Colonel Démosthène Calixte, the eventual commander of the Garde: “I believe that if he were left in supreme command he has the strength of character to withstand political assaults on the Garde. I believe he is absolutely ruthless and that he will be the power behind the administration if left as Commandant of the Garde.”75 Calixte, however, failed to meet these expectations. Not only did he declare his subordination to Vincent in a public oath of personal

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fealty, but also when he decided to revolt against him in a coup d’état, he failed miserably.76 Vincent sent Calixte into French exile and imposed his own control on the Garde. Under Calixte, the military proved therefore neither professional nor apolitical. In fact, the military was politicized and transformed into the executive’s personal instrument of power. Calixte reported that Vincent manipulated assignments and retirements to emasculate and undermine the autonomy of the Garde. In addition, he placed arms and ammunition under his own control by storing them in the national palace itself.77 Elie Lescot, who succeeded Vincent as president in 1941, continued—and indeed intensified—the politicization of the Garde. A new law made him both the supreme chief of the army and its acting commander in chief, and at the same time abolished the rank of “commander of the Garde d’Haïti,” which was replaced by the weakened position of “chief of the general staff of the Garde d’Haïti.”78 The president was now empowered to appoint, promote, and dismiss officers. The chief of the general staff of the Garde d’Haïti had been relegated to execute the orders of the president. These changes, however, backfired; they exacerbated existing tensions of class and race dividing the army and eventually provoked both the botched coup of 194579 and the successful intervention of 1946 that overthrew the authoritarian, racist, and unpopular Lescot regime.80 The coup was not merely a rejection of Lescot’s despotic mulatto power and attempt to prolong his term in office by two years, but was also motivated by US and elite fears of communism. But as Robert Heinl and Nancy Heinl argue, the coup cannot be understood without paying attention to the emergence of communist forces as the vanguard of the vast protest movement against Lescot. The coup was therefore a “preventive if not preemptive action” in defense of both privileged Haitians and the United States.81 It marked the ascendancy of the “communist threat” as a critical political element fomenting an opportunistic but long-lasting convergence of interests between Haiti’s reactionary ruling classes and successive US governments. The Garde represented the coercive arm of this alliance; it protected it by intervening as a last resort against any significant popular uprising. The coup of 1946 is also significant because it marked a rupture with certain practices of the past. As Laguerre writes, The importance of the military intervention of 1946 cannot be overstated. This intervention served as a model for later military interventions in Haiti and provided the military with the opportunity to

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change the course of Haitian politics. If the period from the US occupation to 1945 can be singled out as the era of mostly mulatto presidents, the post-1945 era must be identified as that of black presidents. And if the pre-1915 era can be identified as that of regional military coups, the post-1945 era must be seen as that of centralized bureaucratic-administrative coups. From 1946 onward, the most successful coups were engineered and manned by the general staff of the army headquarters.82

The coup therefore announced the end of mulâtrisme as a doctrine of mulatto superiority bent on having mulattoes “occupy the top of the system and all the positions of command.”83 The decline of mulâtrisme as a system of governance marks the political ascendancy of noirisme. Noirisme found its inspiration in the “ethnological movement” of the early twentieth century. Created by Justin Chrysostome Dorsainvil and Jean Price-Mars,84 the “ethnological movement” developed a form of black consciousness that celebrated and claimed Haiti’s African heritage.85 According to Dorsainvil and Price-Mars, Haitians had a “Guinean soul” and thus an African set of beliefs, practices, and traditions. Haitians, and particularly the elites, had to jettison their slavish espousal and imitation of everything French and come, at long last, to acknowledge their Africanness. This Africanness gave them a type of reasoning that privileged intuition and emotion and a personality that was ill suited for Western individualism. Moreover, Price-Mars and Dorsainvil rejected the elite’s dominant view that Vodou was nothing but sorcery, superstition, and magic. In fact, it was a religion, because its practitioners believed in spiritual beings and its institutional organization rested on a community of the faithful, which was led by priests who in turn sanctioned rituals and ceremonies. Like any other religion, however, Vodou tended to confine its adherents to an impractical world of spirituality that had little to offer in the struggle against poverty and injustice. Dorsainvil and Price-Mars were bent on demonstrating that Africa had a history and a sophisticated civilization. They proclaimed that instead of being ashamed of their African descent, Haitians should be proud of it. They lambasted Haiti’s elites for their “bovarysme collectif,” their incapacity to assume their real identity, and for believing that they were “colored Frenchmen.” In short, Dorsainvil, Price-Mars, and the “ethnological movement” sought to encourage Haitians to take pride in their African essence, which they had hitherto denigrated

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or denied. In their eyes, all Haitians had to share Dorsainvil’s own avowal: “I am an African whom a historical accident has displaced from his original milieu.”86 This call for acknowledging the African roots of Haitians did not, however, imply a negation of other cultural influences. Dorsainvil and Price-Mars did not espouse a theory of black or African “exclusivism” but in fact contended that Haiti embodied a French and African métissage that produced distinct and multiple individual types as well as social forces. The “ethnological movement” was therefore an inclusive form of cultural nationalism that nonetheless maintained the preponderance of the African impact on Haiti’s making; ultimately, it called for the awakening of people’s pride in their African heritage. Dorsainvil and Price-Mars argued that without such awakening, Haiti would never free itself from foreign domination and take its rightful place in the world of nations. They were particularly critical of the elites that had “fallen from their historic role as leaders of the nation because of inertia, cowardice, or failure to adapt,” and because they had failed in “their duty to mix with the rest of the nation.”87 This failure reflected the elites’ rejection of their African heritage and their exclusive love affair with European and white culture in general. Dorsainvil and Price-Mars urged the elites to accept their African identity, assume their responsibility, and take charge of a process of nation building that would unite Haitians across class, color, and religion. To that extent, as Gordon K. Lewis has contended, the “ethnological movement” was one of the forerunners of “the leading ideas of the modern world especially relevant to Third World problems: négritude, black power, black nationalism.”88 In fact, it was a contemporary of négritude, with which it shared profound similarities. It indicated a rupture with the prevailing imperial and colonial notions that the black race was inferior and that Africa had no history. Not surprisingly, the ethnological movement was a fertile soil in which a new and more radical generation of black intellectuals implanted the seeds of noirisme in the 1930s. Led by the “three Ds”—Louis Diaquoi, Lorimer Denis, and François Duvalier—the noiriste movement, known also as the griots, represented a reaction to the US occupation, a cultural celebration of Africanness, and a political strategy for unseating mulatto supremacy and establishing the rule of the authentiques—the black middle classes as representatives of the black Haitian masses. The noiristes found in the ethnological movement, and particularly in Price-Mars’s Ainsi

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parla l’oncle, “a kind of profession of faith,”89 but it did not go far enough in celebrating Africa and its civilization and in emphasizing the centrality of race and color in human affairs. Thus, while PriceMars was the “Gospel”90 of the noiristes, his version of black cultural nationalism lacked the unequivocal embrace of Vodou as the “transcendent expression of racial consciousness before the enigmas of the world,”91 the conviction that people’s mentality is racially inherited, and the passionate call for replacing mulatto supremacy with an authoritarian form of black power. As Nicholls explains, These noiristes of the 1930s emphasised Haiti’s African past, believing that as Haitians were basically African in their genetic composition, their culture and social structure should be allowed to mirror this fact. In particular they insisted on the centrality of Voodoo in the life of the country, and they assailed the Roman Catholic church for its attempts to impose upon the country an alien European culture. Furthermore they saw the history of Haiti largely in terms of a struggle between a mulatto elite and the black masses, and they attacked the church as one of the principal means by which the elite was able to retain credibility. . . . [The noiristes] believed that power should be in the hands of an authoritarian government composed of middle-class blacks acting on behalf of the masses whose basic interests they were said to share.92

The noiristes believed that the dominant mulatto elite had to be forced out of power and replaced by the rising black middle class, which would in turn improve the long-neglected welfare of the black majority. The conviction of the griots that black middle-class politicians would be natural allies of the masses stemmed from their conviction that their common racial makeup generated shared values and interests. Far from being the emancipatory medium of these masses, this racialist ideology became instead a moral mask hiding the reality that the rule of the emerging small black middle classes turned into nothing but rule for the small black middle classes. When these classes eventually captured political power, they used it to acquire wealth and privilege, which eventually allowed them to forge an uneasy alliance with their erstwhile enemies in the dominant and mulatto classes. This alliance, as I argue in the next chapter, was fraught with tensions, hesitations, and violent struggles. The noiristes knew that to wrest political power from the traditional light-skinned elite would be a complicated and brutal process. They clearly understood the zero-sum quality of Haitian politics and, not surprisingly, they did

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not favor the elusive niceties of democratic liberalism. In fact, the noiristes defended a form of authoritarian corporatism that celebrated order, discipline, hierarchy, and the exercise of brute power. René Piquion, another noiriste and future “organic intellectual” of François Duvalier’s regime, argued for the creation of a dictatorial system that he depicted as “reason and will allied to force in the service of the nation.” In an appropriately titled article, Force ou Dictature (force or dictatorship), he celebrated the virtues of force: “Authority is a sacred thing. Let us establish the mystique of authority. Force remains a beautiful thing, to be respected even when it crushes us.”93 Piquion’s eulogy of dictatorship and force offered a foretaste of the violent reign of his fellow noiriste François Duvalier. The “mystique of authority” was not, however, the only factor promoting the noiristes’ attraction to dictatorial means; their cultural and racial conception of class led them also to embrace violence as the means to conquer and keep power. Duvalier and Denis, in their critical contribution to noiriste ideology, Le Problème des Classes à Travers l’Histoire d’Haïti,94 defined class in Haiti’s context in essentially racial terms. For them, the Haitian class struggle had always been the struggle between the mulatto minority and the black majority; class in Haiti embodied race. This conflation of class and race represented an explosive political situation. As Duvalier and Denis put it, In Haiti, as soon as one studies the class problem, one begins to look like a fisherman in murky water. It is a matter of stirring up or tackling nasty questions that are susceptible to bringing about grave consequences. It is in a way to want to awaken the old quarrel between blacks and mulattoes.95

For the noiristes, four key principles defined class: (1) a collective group psychology, (2) a shared moral conception or worldview, (3) a demographic reality of size and thus of power in a particular territory, and (4) a consciousness of solidarity derived from experiencing similar suffering and promoting common interests.96 Moreover, Duvalier and Denis contended that “ethnic sentiments” fueled class morality, which in turn engendered class solidarity. Not surprisingly for the griots, their fundamental task was the development of a theory grounded in the “methodical detection of the bio-psychological components of the Haitian man.”97 Duvalier and Denis maintained:

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Class morality is based on similarities of a physical and psychological nature and especially the sum total of all of the suffering that constitutes the common heritage of members of a same group. From this should be born obligations to each other of which the main one is class solidarity.98

Thus, from the noiriste’s perspective, common suffering and physical appearance in Haiti implied that blacks, who had been victimized by mulattoes and who belonged to the same racial family, formed a class. They were, however, a rather inchoate mass that lacked the solidarity that would give them a true class consciousness. It was the mission of black middle-class intellectuals—like Duvalier, Denis, and Piquion—to instigate this solidarity and unfold “l’Unité morale de la Nation haïtienne.”99 Thus, for the griots, “the Haitian problem is above all a cultural problem. Its solution can only stem from a total reform of the Haitian mentality.”100 The griots worked hard to create their cultural hegemony; they succeeded in developing a powerful black nationalism that helped set the stage for the coming to power of the moderate noiriste Dumarsais Estimé in 1946. Estimé’s election marked the ascendancy of the noiristes,101 who would eventually culminate their full-fledged seizure power a decade later with Duvalier’s ascendancy to the presidency. Estimé, who came from a modest peasant background, emerged as the compromise candidate of the military who could bridge the gap between the radical left and the more militant noiristes allied to the charismatic and populist figure of Daniel Fignolé.102 While Estimé had been called a “mangeur de mulâtres,” he quickly established a modus vivendi with his light-skinned adversaries while drawing support from the black middle classes.103 Like most of his predecessors, however, Estimé committed the mistake of seeking to extend his mandate by changing the constitution.104 As Claude Moïse explains, Haitian political history has shown it clearly: government decay starts with the drive for “constitutional review” when the latter aims to amend the clause that forbids immediate reelection. By unleashing this mechanism, the president knows that he runs the risk of clashing with the challengers on both sides of the chessboard.105

Not surprisingly, Estimé’s maneuver alienated key actors within his own constituency, particularly in the military. Colonel Paul Magloire, who had his own pressing presidential ambitions, seemed to have been frustrated by Estimé’s plans to prolong his term in office. History

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repeated itself: seeking constitutional manipulations to keep power for la longue durée, Estimé generated a backlash from the political class. Because key figures of that class had themselves presidential aspirations, he unleashed a zero-sum game culminating in Magloire’s coup of 1950.106 Magloire portrayed himself as the only individual capable of preserving order, uniting disparate and contradictory interests, and saving the nation from chaos and civil strife. He successfully marginalized the hard-core “Estiméists” as well as the radical left and formed a government incorporating members of the overthrown regime as well as the opposition. Magloire was the “Bonapartist” figure par excellence. The ruling classes and their representatives hailed him as “God’s Savior”;107 and for a while he seemed to govern above politics and to represent the interests of all classes. Magloire himself knew, however, that this was a farce and that he was neither “God’s Savior” nor the embodiment of the popular will. He was the coercive expression of both the army and the ruling classes. Responding to Fignolé’s call to respect the “will of the people,” Magloire stated, “Mon cher, de qui peuple ouap palé moin? Nan pays ça, cé dé force qui gaignin, l’Armée et la bourgeoisie!” (My dear friend, what people are you talking about? In this country only two forces matter, the army and the bourgeoisie!)108 Magloire was bent on establishing order and stability, without which, he claimed, development was impossible. In addition, his rhetoric emphasized his desire to reinforce the union of the “Haitian family” and heal the injuries of class and color. In reality, however, as Moïse argues, Magloire’s objective was “the search for a consensus among the ruling class that would ensure a peaceful management of the state.”109 Magloire’s regime sought to unify the different factions of the ruling class by promoting a process of economic modernization in close association with the United States. This project did not receive unanimous support; in fact, trade unions and socialist parties as well as Estiméists challenged Magloire’s rule in a series of strikes and protests. Soon the regime appealed to a crude anticommunism to ban and repress all progressive forces. Magloire became increasingly authoritarian as he jailed and exiled any serious dissenter. As Moïse explains, As far as liberty and constitutional rights are concerned, the history of the government of Magloire could hold its own in a long saga of dictatorship—a rather weak dictatorship that was nonetheless sufficiently repressive to reduce the democratic movement to a desperate fight.110

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The United States welcomed the neutralization of progressive forces and the establishment of a relatively stable political order. These conditions generated a veneer of development and “good times.” The Magloire years were indeed a period of ruling-class bamboche and excesses until the spree was interrupted in October 1954 by the devastating hurricane Hazel. The southern part of the country was destroyed and at least a thousand people died. Agricultural production and exports took a serious plunge as coffee trees and banana plantations were ravaged. The economic predicament exacerbated social tensions and fueled another political crisis, which was in turn ignited by Magloire’s determination to remain in power beyond his six-year term, which ended in 1956. Not learning the lesson from his predecessor, Magloire entangled himself in a vain attempt to violate the constitution and remain in power. Behaving like a messianic figure after parliament gave him the title of general and promised him promotion to supreme chief of the army once he stepped down from the presidency, Magloire believed in his own indispensability. He interpreted these honors as “an order to remain at the service of the Nation.”111 His interpretation proved deeply mistaken; his own fellow officers in the army forced him into exile. A new and short episode of éphémères governments crystallized only to end in the election of François Duvalier in 1957. The coming to power of Duvalier inaugurated a descent into the most brutal despotism the country had ever known and generated a hereditary life presidency. The regime, which would last almost thirty years, had a devastating impact on Haiti’s politics, society, and economy. Duvalier’s systematic deployment of the most horrible aspects of the authoritarian habitus—what I call extremism in the next chapter—was not alien to the autocratic and militaristic legacy of the US occupation. In fact, although the occupation had contributed to the building of a modest infrastructure of roads and clinics, it did so with the most paternalistic and racist energy. US authorities convinced themselves that their mission was to bring development and civilization to Haiti. They presumed that Haitians were utterly incapable of doing so on their own. Not surprisingly, they used exclusively methods of command and control to achieve their project. Such methods were self-defeating; they centralized power, militarized politics, and reinforced the patterns of unaccountable and undemocratic governance that characterize the authoritarian habitus. The occupiers’ strategy embraced what US sociologist Ulysses Weatherly called approvingly an “experiment in pragmatism.”112 In his

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view, the occupation was entirely justified because “the social order . . . had broken down” and “the right of self-government” “did not exist” in Haiti. It was only logical therefore that the United States as a “strong state” would intervene and take control of the country. The fundamental objective of the intervention was “securing public order and eradicating the deep-seated tendency to revolution.” Once this was accomplished, the United States had an obligation to “construct the material basis of civilization.” This in turn required the development of a modern capitalist economy and the corresponding “increase in demand through the refining or diversifying of wants.” The fact that the US occupiers had no reason to pay attention to the immediacy of domestic politics was, in Weatherly’s mind, a great advantage. As he put it, “One merit of a system of control managed by experts in an alien land is that it can be administered in the interest of untrammeled technical efficiency as distinguished from political expediency.”113 While Weatherly recognized that such technocratic development was undemocratic, he nonetheless sung its virtues for “tropical” countries. Not surprisingly, he argued that in Haiti, “it [was] impossible to apply idealistic principles, particularly when, along with political defects, there [was] so complete a lack of the material foundations necessary to efficient social organization.”114 In such circumstances, the construction of an elaborate material infrastructure and the development of a “civic spirit” had to precede freedom and democracy, because they were its very precondition. Fortunately for Haiti, Weatherly suggested, the occupation provided the “intelligent guidance from without” that could “accelerate the process of national growth and save much of the waste.”115 Weatherly’s “experiment in pragmatism” foreshadowed the theory of modernization and of “failed states” that justified Western interventionism during and after the Cold War era. The fact that some twenty years of US occupation failed to transform Haiti into a self-sustaining economy and a representative democracy indicates the obdurate limits and contradictions of any national project of development sponsored and imposed by imperial forces. It also warns us about the justifications, dangers, and vicissitudes of interventions in the current era of globalization. As Brenda Plummer states, when the United States departed Haiti in 1934, it “had neither changed nor reformed Haitian politics but inadvertently strengthened and assured the survival of many of its worst features.”116 The authoritarian habitus that French colonialism nurtured and the domestic class structure of an independent Haiti solidified had now been modernized by the US occupation and its centralizing and

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militaristic legacy. In the next chapter, I offer a brief analysis of how this modernized habitus reached its most extreme despotic version with the Duvalier regime, and how its “extremism” led to its eventual collapse and the ensuing and unending contemporary transition to democracy.117 NOTES 1. Hans Schmidt, The United States Occupation of Haiti, 1915–1934, with a new foreword by Stephen Solarz (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press), 1995, p. 7. 2. Ibid., pp. 8–9. Schmidt writes: Major Smedley D. Butler, first commandant of the American-sponsored Gendarmerie d’Haïti, had previously campaigned in the Philippines, China, Honduras, Nicaragua, Panama, and Mexico; and Colonel Littleton W. T. Waller, commander of the Marine Expeditionary Forces in Haiti in 1915, had commanded the marine landing in Cuba in 1906 and before that had achieved notoriety in connection with the Samar atrocities in the Philippines. Many American civilian administrators also came to Haiti with previous colonial experience; three of the four financial advisers, the most important civilian officials, had held similar posts in Peru, Persia, and Liberia, and the head of the agricultural-technical service had held a similar position in Indochina. (p. 8) If the Southern heritage and the imperial mind-set were dominant among the most prominent marines, there does not seem to be strong evidence showing a Southern preponderance among marines enlisted in the corps and serving in Haiti (see Schmidt, pp. 144–145). For instance, although General Waller and High Commissioner Russell were both Southerners, Commandant Butler was a Quaker born in Pennsylvania. The occupiers’ racism was all-pervasive; regional appurtenance had little effect on its intensity and viciousness. As Schmidt argues shrewdly, “Whether or not there was a disproportionately large number of Southern marines in Haiti, the fact that many observers felt that this was the case indicates that Southerners and Southern racial codes were conspicuous” (p. 145). 3. Ibid.; see also David Healy, Gunboat Diplomacy in the Wilson Era: The U.S. Navy in Haiti, 1915–1916 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1976), pp. 216–220. 4. Major Smedley Butler, as quoted in Healy, Gunboat Diplomacy in the Wilson Era, p. 219. 5. As quoted in Schmidt, The United States Occupation of Haiti, p. 79. 6. Major Smedley Butler, as quoted in Healy, Gunboat Diplomacy in the Wilson Era, p. 219. 7. Ibid.

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8. Ibid., p. 220. 9. As quoted in Schmidt, The United States Occupation of Haiti, p. 147. 10. Ibid., p. 146. 11. Ibid., p. 70. 12. Ibid., pp.145–146. 13. Ibid., p.146. 14. Ibid. 15. Ulysses Weatherly, “Haiti: An Experiment in Pragmatism,” American Journal of Sociology 32, no. 3 (November 1926): 358–359. 16. Brenda Gayle Plummer, Haiti and the United States (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1992), pp. 95–96. 17. Arthur C. Millspaugh, Haiti Under American Control 1915–1930 (Boston: World Peace Foundation, 1931), pp. 88–89. Lieutenant Colonel A. S. Williams’s testimony to Congress acknowledged the dire consequences of the corvée: The results of this exploitation of labor were two: First, it created in the minds of the peasants a dislike for the American occupation and its two instruments—the marines and the gendarmerie—and second, it imbued the native enlisted man with an entirely false conception of his relations with the civil population. As the corvée became more and more unpopular, more and more difficulty was experienced in obtaining men; and this difficulty caused the gendarmes to resort to methods which were often brutal but quite consistent with their training under Haitian officials. I soon realized that one of the great causes of American unpopularity among Haitians was the corvée. [Quoted in Millspaugh, Haiti Under American Control, p. 89, footnote 149] 18. Suzy Castor, L’Occupation Américaine d’Haïti (Port-au-Prince: Imprimerie Henri Deschamps, 1988), pp. 127–158; Roger Gaillard, Les Blancs Débarquent (1918–1919), vol. 6: Charlemagne Péralte Le Caco (Port-auPrince: Imprimerie Le Natal, 1982). 19. Millspaugh, Haiti Under American Control, p. 89. 20. As quoted in Gaillard, Les Blancs Débarquent (1918–1919), p. 201: Les promesses fallacieuses faites par les Yankees en débarquant sur notre sol, se réalisent depuis tantôt quatre ans par des vexations perpétuelles, des crimes inouïs, des assassinats, des vols et des actes de barbarie dont seuls dans le monde entier l’Américain a le secret. Nous venons aujourd’hui, à bout de patience, réclamer nos droits méconnus, bafoués par l’Américain sans scrupule qui, détruisant nos institutions, dépouille le peuple haïtien de toute ses ressources et se regorge de notre nom et de notre sang. . . . Aujourd’hui . . . nous réclamons la libération de notre territoire et les avantages reconnus par le droit international aux états libres et indépendants. 21. Schmidt, The United States Occupation of Haiti, pp. 82–83.

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22. As quoted in Healy, Gunboat Diplomacy in the Wilson Era, p. 182. 23. Millspaugh, Haiti Under American Control, p. 52. 24. Kethly Millet, Les Paysans Haïtiens et l’Occupation Américaine (1915–1930) (La Salle, Québec: Collectif Paroles, 1978), p. 102. 25. Ibid., pp. 137–139. 26. Castor, L’Occupation Américaine d’Haïti, pp. 157–158: La cause fondamentale de cet échec semble être de nature politique. Les paysans du Nord s’étaient lancé dans la lutte, mais les objectifs proprement révolutionnaires ne furent pas clairement formulés. On ne posa pas de revendications de caractère social et économique, comme la reforme agraire et la promotion du paysan. Il ne fait pas de doute que l’avant-garde des cacos avait comme objectif le pouvoir politique. . . . Cependant, il n’arriva pas à formuler des consignes qui auraient pu éveiller toutes les couches sociales du pays, pour assurer leur participation active au mouvement. Cela explique, dans une certaine mesure, la localisation de la guerre dans les régions centrale et septentrionale d’Haïti. Au lieu d’affronter plusieurs foyers de lutte ou un front d’envergure nationale, les forces d’occupation purent se concentrer et mener une action directe sans avoir à se disperser. Une de leurs premières mesures pour affronter la rébellion fut de supprimer le travail force dans le Nord pour diminuer le mécontentement populaire suscité par le régime de la corvée. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31.

Millspaugh, Haiti Under American Control, p. 151. Ibid., p. 154. Schmidt, The United States Occupation of Haiti, p. 179. Ibid., p. 181. Millspaugh, Haiti Under American Control, pp. 152–153, reports:

At the end of 1929 four American companies were leasing state lands: the Haitian-American Sugar Company about 630 acres, the Haitian Pineapple Company about 40 acres, the Haitian-American Development Corporation about 14,000 acres, and the Haitian Agricultural Corporation about 2,200 acres. There were also about 1,000 acres leased by a Haitian in association with an American. Up to 1930, agricultural land had been purchased or leased in Haiti by seven American corporations, which occupied a total of less than 50,000 acres, and of this total only about 13,000 acres had been purchased. Of these companies the Haitian-American Sugar Company had entered Haiti before the intervention, held no concessions, was assisted in no way by the American authorities in the acquisition of land; but it had acquired about 24,000 acres, almost one-half of the total controlled by Americans, and owned about three-fifths of the total owned by Americans. 32. David Nicholls, Haiti in Caribbean Context (London: Macmillan, 1985), p. 142.

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33. Schmidt, The United States Occupation of Haiti, p. 15, writes: Louis Borno, client-president during the eight-year period when the American uplift program was in full swing, was an avowed admirer of Mussolini and an advocate of complete American domination as the fastest way to modernize Haiti and reconstruct viable economic and efficient governmental institutions. Borno saw salvation for Haiti in American technological prowess and disciplined technical efficiency. As a self-styled nationalist, he had no sympathy for Haitian nationalists who opposed the occupation as offensive to national pride. Borno repeatedly denounced the Haitian nationalist opposition, which included most politically aware Haitians except a minority of collaborators, as traitors who were conspiring against the best interests of the Haitian masses. The masses, in turn, were deemed too ignorant to participate in political processes or to appreciate the benefits that the occupation was bringing them. François Blancpain, in his book Haïti et les États Unis, 1915–1934 (Paris: L’Harmattan, 1999), offers an informative history of Borno’s ascendancy and presidency, but he does so in a most flattering and uncritical hagiography. 34. Borno, as quoted in Millspaugh, Haiti Under American Control, pp. 109–110. 35. Blancpain, Haïti et les États Unis, pp. 226–227. 36. Millspaugh, Haiti Under American Control, pp. 106–107. 37. Schmidt, The United States Occupation of Haiti, pp. 86–88. 38. Emily Greene Balch, Occupied Haiti (New York: Writers Publishing, 1927), p. 131. 39. Michel Laguerre, The Military and Society in Haiti (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1993), p. 72. 40. Ibid., p. 74. 41. Butler, as quoted in Schmidt, The United States Occupation of Haiti, p. 89. 42. Russell, as quoted in Schmidt, The United States Occupation of Haiti, p. 125. 43. Ibid. 44. Mary A. Renda, Taking Haiti (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2001), p. 15. 45. Balch, Occupied Haiti, p. 129. 46. See Castor, L’Occupation Américaine d’Haïti, pp. 168–173; and Schmidt, The United States Occupation of Haiti, pp. 196–199. 47. Millspaugh, Haiti Under American Control, pp. 179–180. 48. Castor, L’Occupation Américaine d’Haïti, pp. 173–175; Schmidt, The United States Occupation of Haiti, pp. 199–200. 49. Millspaugh, Haiti Under American Control, p. 239. 50. Ibid., p. 240. 51. Ibid., p. 238. 52. Ibid., p. 232.

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53. Ibid., p. 241. 54. Ibid. 55. Ibid. 56. Ibid. 57. Schmidt, The United States Occupation of Haiti, pp. 207–214; Robert Spector, W. Cameron Forbes and the Hoover Commissions to Haiti (New York: University Press of America, 1985), pp. 39–156. The commission was composed of five white men: W. Cameron Forbes, Henry P. Fletcher, Elie Vezina, James Kerney, and W. A. White. A sixth member, Willis Abbott, participated neither in the commission’s visit to Haiti nor in the writing of the report. Hoover appointed Robert Russa Moton, a prominent black and the president of Tuskegee Institute, to head the Commission on Education, which came to be known as the Moton Commission. The commission condemned the Haitian government for failing to offer general public education. 58. Millspaugh, Haiti Under American Control, pp. 242–247. 59. Schmidt, The United States Occupation of Haiti, p. 210. 60. Millspaugh, Haiti Under American Control, p. 184. 61. The State Department gave an ultimatum to Borno, who was told that US authorities would not “afford him or his adherents any support or protection in a course of action contrary to the plan.” These authorities, added the State Department, would “take such steps as may prove necessary to have Eugene Roy installed as temporary President . . . and is prepared, therefore, to disregard any action of the Council of State which is in violation of the provisions of the plan.” As quoted in Schmidt, The United States Occupation of Haiti, p. 212. 62. As François Blancpain, Haïti et les États Unis, p. 326, writes, The election of Stenio Vincent was a model of political skill. Among the “patriots,” members of the opposition to Borno, within the group of moderates in the “Protreaty Party,” were those who recommended a progressive and negotiated withdrawal on the part of the occupiers. They opposed “fundamentalist nationalists,” including Jacques Roumain and Joseph Jolibois, who demanded a complete and immediate departure of the Americans. The 1930 elections had given the majority to the “fundamentalist nationalists,” and yet it was Vincent who was elected. The mulatto class, most prominent within the “Protreaty Party,” had understood that his incessant and excessive attacks against Borno risked making him lose power in favor of the “fundamentalist nationalists” who were recruited more readily from the black elite. The mulattoes succeeded, however, in winning over the number of votes necessary to elect Stenio Vincent. L’élection de Stenio Vincent fut un modèle d’habileté politique. Parmi les “patriotes,” membres de l’opposition à Borno, il figurait dans le groupe des modérés, dans le “Pro-treaty Party;” ceux qui préconisaient une désoccupation progressive et négociée. Ils s’opposaient aux “nationalistes intégraux,” aux Jacques Roumain, aux Joseph Jolibois, qui exigeaient un départ complet et immédiat des Américains.

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Les élections de 1930 avaient donné la majorité aux “nationalistes intégraux” et, néanmoins, ce fut Vincent qui fut élu. La classe mulâtre, prédominante au sein du “Pro-treaty Party,” venait de comprendre que ses attaques incessantes et excessives contre Borno risquaient de lui faire perdre le pouvoir au profit des “nationalistes intégraux” qui se recrutaient plus volontiers au sein de l’élite noire. Elle réussit cependant à rallier le nombre nécessaire de suffrages en faveur de Stenio Vincent. 63. Millspaugh, Haiti Under American Control, p. 187. 64. Ibid., p. 249. 65. As quoted in Schmidt, The United States Occupation of Haiti, p. 220. 66. Walter LaFeber, Inevitable Revolutions (New York: Norton, 1984), pp. 78–83; see also Schmidt, The United States Occupation of Haiti, pp. 5–14. 67. Blancpain, Haïti et les États Unis, pp. 328–329: “L’agitation croissante de l’esprit public par suite des activités subversives signalées à la charge de certains meneurs professionnels et les excès persistants et criminels d’une certaine presse.” 68. As quoted in Robert Debs Heinl and Nancy Gordon Heinl, Written in Blood: The Story of the Haitian People, 1492–1995, revised and expanded by Michael Heinl (Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 1996), p. 495. 69. As quoted in ibid. 70. In 1926, Weatherly (“Haiti: An Experiment in Pragmatism,” pp. 353–366), an American sociologist, advanced the proposition that Haiti was a weak and chaotic state and that the United States, as a civilized and more powerful nation, was right in deciding to occupy it. The United States, however, faced a monumental task in transforming Haiti into a peaceful, orderly, and developed society. Haiti’s problem was its African and Latin heritage, which contributed to a backward and irresponsible culture: At the beginning of the war of independence the population mass was predominantly African in both birth and culture type. . . . African customs, beliefs, and practices survived with little modification. Though at the time of emancipation most of the population had acquired a veneer of Christianity, the actual religion was, as it still largely remains, that of voodooism. Thus they had a religion and a priesthood of their own, a fact which has had a profound influence on their later development. It was with such a demotic equipment that the new nation began its career in 1804. . . . The background of her culture being French, it is not inaccurate to class Haiti with Latin-American countries. Like other Latin Americans, the Haitians have always been weak on the side of practical civic capacity. In public matters they lack the instinct of workmanship. Throughout their entire history individual interest and the urge of acquisition have prevailed over the sense of social service. The masses are so densely ignorant and politically so inert as hardly to count as factors in the public life at all, and there is almost no middle class. (pp. 358–363)

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71. As quoted in Schmidt, The United States Occupation of Haiti, p. 218. 72. Ibid., p. 193. 73. Ibid., p. 229. 74. As quoted in Schmidt, The United States Occupation of Haiti, p. 217. 75. Ibid. 76. Heinl and Heinl, Written in Blood, pp. 490–503. 77. Calixte explained Vincent’s strategy (as quoted in Laguerre, The Military and Society in Haiti, pp. 86–87): “The first step taken was to secure the control of arms and ammunition. . . . All shipments go directly from the ship to the palace basement, where [Vincent] is in complete control. The second move was to get rid of the commandant of the garde d’Haïti. The third step was to obtain the summary dismissal or retirement on half-pay status of a number of experienced and trained officers.” 78. Ibid., p. 87. 79. Heinl and Heinl, Written in Blood, p. 512. 80. Ibid., pp. 512–513; Claude Moïse, Constitutions et Luttes de Pouvoir en Haïti, vol. 2: 1915–1987: De l’Occupation Etrangère à la Dictature Macoute (Montreal: Éditions CIDIHCA, 1990), pp. 235–240. 81. Heinl and Heinl, Written in Blood, pp. 514–516. 82. Laguerre, The Military and Society in Haiti, p. 90. 83. Moïse, Constitutions et Luttes de Pouvoir en Haïti, vol. 2, p. 264 (my translation). 84. See Justin Chrysostome Dorsainvil, Vodou et Névrose (Port-auPrince: Imprimerie de La Presse, 1931); Jean Price-Mars, So Spoke the Uncle, translated by Magdaline W. Shannon (Washington, DC: Three Continents Press, 1983); Jean Price-Mars, De Saint Domingue à Haiti (Paris: Présence Africaine, 1959). 85. David Nicholls, From Dessalines to Duvalier (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1996), pp. 152–172; Magdaline W. Shannon, Jean Price-Mars, the Haitian Elite and the American Occupation, 1915–1935 (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1996). 86. As quoted in Nicholls, From Dessalines to Duvalier, p. 153. 87. Price-Mars, So Spoke the Uncle, pp. 104–107. 88. Gordon K. Lewis, Main Currents in Caribbean Thought (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1983), p. 329. 89. Louis Diaquoi, as quoted in Shannon, Jean Price-Mars, p. 71. 90. Louis Diaquoi, as quoted in Nicholls, From Dessalines to Duvalier, p. 169. 91. François Duvalier and Lorimer Denis, as quoted in Nicholls, From Dessalines to Duvalier, p. 170. 92. Nicholls, From Dessalines to Duvalier, pp. 167–168. 93. René Piquion, as quoted in Nicholls, From Dessalines to Duvalier, p. 172. 94. François Duvalier and Lorimer Denis, Le Problème des Classes à Travers l’Histoire d’Haïti, reprinted in François Duvalier, Oeuvres Essentielles,

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vol. 1: Eléments d’une Doctrine, 3rd ed. (Port-au-Prince: Presses Nationales, 1968), pp. 307–367. 95. Ibid., p. 311: “En Haïti dès qu’on envisage les aspects du problème des classes on fait figure de pêcheur en eau trouble. C’est agiter ou aborder des questions malsaines susceptibles d’entraîner de graves conséquences. C’est en quelque sorte vouloir réveiller la vieille querelle des noirs et des jaunes.” 96. Ibid., p. 315. 97. Les Griots, “L’Essentiel de la Doctrine des Griots” (October– December 1938), reprinted in François Duvalier, Oeuvres Essentielles, vol. 1: Eléments d’une Doctrine, 3rd ed. (Port-au-Prince: Presses Nationales, 1968), p. 114: “détection méthodique des éléments bio-psychologiques de l’homme haïtien.” 98. Duvalier and Denis, Le Problème des Classes, p. 313: “[La] morale de classe a pour base des ressemblances d’ordre physique et psychique et surtout la somme des souffrances qui forment l’héritage commun des membres d’un même groupe. De ceci doivent naître des obligations entre eux dont la principale est la solidarité de classe.” 99. Ibid., p. 314. 100. Les Griots, “L’Essentiel de la Doctrine des Griots,” p. 114: “Le Problème Haïtien [est] avant tout un problème culturel. Et sa solution ne peut résider que dans une reforme intégrale de la mentalité haïtienne.” 101. Moïse, Constitutions et Luttes de Pouvoir en Haïti, vol. 2, p. 265. 102. Ibid., pp. 270–279; Heinl and Heinl, Written in Blood, p. 517. 103. Colbert Bonhomme, Révolution et Contre-Révolution en Haïti de 1946 à 1957 (Port-au-Prince: Éditions Fardin, 1984), writes (p. 22): “Estimé était soutenu surtout par un groupe imposant d’intellectuels, appartenant à la classe moyenne, cette classe moyenne qui est un réservoir d’intellectuels pleins de rêves et de talents.” 104. Moïse, Constitutions et Luttes de Pouvoir en Haïti, vol. 2, pp. 296–301. 105. Ibid., p. 298: “L’histoire politique haïtienne l’a bien montré, la déchéance d’un gouvernement commence avec l’opération ‘révision constitutionnelle’ lorsque celle-ci vise à amender la clause interdisant la réélection immédiate. En déclenchant ce mécanisme, le président sait qu’il court le risque d’affronter les prétendants des deux côtés de l’échiquier.” 106. Ibid., p. 299–301. 107. Ibid., p. 309. 108. Heinl and Heinl, Written in Blood, p. 530; my translation. 109. Moïse, Constitutions et Luttes de Pouvoir en Haïti, vol. 2, p. 321: “la recherche d’un consensus au sein des classes dirigeantes en vue d’une gestion tranquille de l’État.” 110. Ibid., p. 322: “L’histoire du gouvernement de Magloire, dans le domaine des libertés et des droits constitutionnels, pourrait tenir dans une longue chronique de la dictature. Une dictature plutôt molle, mais suffisamment répressive pour réduire le mouvement démocratique à un combat désespéré.”

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111. As quoted in Ibid., p. 325. 112. Weatherly, “Haiti,” pp. 353–366. 113. Ibid., p. 364. 114. Ibid., p. 363. 115. Ibid., p. 363. 116. Plummer, Haiti and the United States, p. 120. 117. See Robert Fatton Jr., Haiti’s Predatory Republic (Boulder: Lynne Rienner Publishers, 2002).

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THE COMING TO POWER of François Duvalier inaugurated a period of extremism; it accentuated the most despotic facets of the authoritarian habitus. It patrimonialized and centralized power beyond any past experiences, it systematized coercive repression as the method of governance, and it extended the scope of the state to spheres that had hitherto been impervious to its reach. Extremism, in this perspective, is the inordinate intensification of the latent tyrannical elements of the habitus. One is therefore tempted to agree with Michel-Rolph Trouillot’s depiction of the Duvalierist state as totalitarian; this, however, would be wrong.1 Trouillot argued that the Duvalierist dictatorship “was uncommon” because it had “broken through the culturally specific limits of authoritarianism.”2 It had done so in two fundamental ways: first, its unleashing of state violence was “limitless” and “generalized”;3 second, the power of the dictator was total, because he served as the “sole reference point or center.”4 According to Trouillot, these two critical phenomena crystallized between 1961 and 1965 and provoked an accumulation of political transformations that led to a qualitative change of state. Indeed, in his eyes, they caused “the remaking of the traditional authoritarian state into a totalitarian apparatus.”5 To make his point, Trouillot emphasizes that Duvalier’s presidency for life embodied an absolutist capacity to rule that annihilated the private space of citizens and the autonomy of all institutions. Duvalier achieved this destruction of civil and political society through his Tonton Makout militias, which became his personal instrument for his deployment of unlimited state violence. In fact, Trouillot contends 193

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that the makout, like all other institutions, became Duvalier’s sole patrimony. As a totalitarian ruler, Duvalier could not tolerate any intermediary form of power; he transmogrified himself into the nation, the state, and the government: “Every makout spoke in Duvalier’s name; every milisyen, or member of the civil militia, was a Duvalier.”6 Duvalier was thus omnipresent and omnipotent; he personified the totalitarian state par excellence. The problem with Trouillot’s totalitarian model is that it exaggerates the discontinuities with olden practices. In fact, the logic of the Duvalierist state stemmed from the authoritarian habitus and its specificity from its short-lived extremism. There was nothing radically new in Duvalier’s presidential absolutism and noirisme. Nor did he engineer a fundamental change in the basic configuration of class power. François Duvalier’s dictatorship innovated only insofar as it pushed the existing coercive elements of authoritarian habitus to their extreme conclusion. Reflecting a climate of terror, this extremism was not long-lasting; while it marked the mid-1960s, it diminished by the end of that decade, and, as I argue below, it ended with François Duvalier’s death in 1971. In addition, the Duvalierist regime lacked the mobilizing mass party, the all-encompassing ideology, as well as the advanced bureaucratic machinery to qualify as a totalitarian regime. More importantly, it generated neither a complete transformation of the mode of production nor a revolutionary political departure from the preexisting authoritarian habitus. In fact, continuity rather than rupture with the past characterized the Duvalierist state. Like his predecessors, Duvalier was a creature of the habitus, which inspired his political reflexes and method of governance. He came to power with noirisme as his governing project, but in the aftermath of the US-led centralization of political and military authority and in the period of the Cold War. In this sense, Duvalier had to adjust his political strategy to the reality that the military had a virtual veto over governmental affairs and that power was thoroughly concentrated in Port-au-Prince and no longer diffused among regional centers. Moreover, he had to take into account that the United States would not tolerate anything but a strong anticommunist Haiti. Thus, to carry his project and remain in the national palace for the longue durée, as a president for life, Duvalier had to undermine mulatto predominance, neutralize and emasculate the army, and gain US support or, at the very least, avoid its enmity. These tasks were mutually supportive, but they soon

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engulfed the country into a spiral of violence. The deconstruction of the military required the “liquidation” of top officers and the creation of the coercive and ultimately murderous counterinstitution of the Tonton Makout. The taming of mulatto supremacy led to massacres and a period of indiscriminate state-inspired intimidations and killings.7 Finally, anticommunism legitimated state violence, whose victims were all depicted as kamoken—dangerous enemies of the state. Duvalier, however, had some legitimacy based on his demagogic use of the ideology of noirisme as a form of black power. Noirisme resonated with the black middle classes and represented an easy and simplistic depiction of what was wrong with Haiti. In this vision, poverty was the result of mulatto exploitation and racism, which in turn blocked the ascendancy of the black middle classes themselves. However, as I argued in Chapter 4, noirisme was nothing but a cover that masked the rule of a self-serving black elite lording it over the poor majority. In fact, the Duvalier dictatorship failed to generate any improvement in Haiti’s economic or political life, and its tyrannical nature caused a massive exodus of Haitians to other shores. Duvalier’s despotism was not accidental; he used terroristic means to establish a relatively new modus vivendi between his state and the traditional dominant classes, which comprised the overwhelming majority of the mulattoes. While this modus vivendi did not annihilate the continued predominance of these classes, it diluted their monopolistic control of the economy. As Alex Dupuy correctly points out, The Duvalier government created or took over industries and sectors of the economy that directly challenged the dominant classes— such as the electricity, telephone, cement, flour, sugar, edible oil, and television companies owned and operated by the state, and for the sole benefit of the Duvalier family and the top echelons of the regime.8

Thus, the generalized unleashing of state violence served to redistribute some of the national assets to Duvalier and his cronies. It did not, however, change the mode of production, nor did it alter fundamental class alignments. Once the state set the new parameters of power, it soon moved to allay the fears of the dominant classes and mulattoes. This was particularly the case under Duvalier’s son, JeanClaude, who assumed the presidency for life when his father died in 1971. He promised an economic revolution and a political liberalization. In the mid-1970s, he launched a technocratic project—what he

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called Jean-Claudisme. Urged to “democratize” by the new US policy of “human rights,” unfolded in the first two years of the Carter administration, Duvalier stopped the worst excesses of the makouts, tolerated some dissent, and rehabilitated the army as an institution. In these conditions, the country experienced a short period of economic growth and hesitant liberalization. By the early 1980s, however, Jean-Claudisme exhausted itself; liberalization was abruptly terminated and repression became the rule again. The election of Ronald Reagan, whose “new cold war”9 strategy rewarded right-wing stability and order and shunned the dangers of uncontrollable liberalization, greatly facilitated the return to a “soft” version of macoutisme. State repression, however, fueled political uncertainties, which undermined an economy that was already suffering from massive corruption, state predation, and the limits and contradictions of the export-oriented model of assembly manufactures. Yet, the liberalization of the late 1970s had contributed to the emergence of an increasingly assertive civil society. Many nongovernmental organizations challenged the abuses of Duvalierism and began calling for social justice and human rights. Prominent among these organizations were peasant associations and the radical wing of the Catholic Church, known as Ti Legliz (little church). These groups articulated a devastating public critique of makoutisme inspired by the prophetic vision of liberation theology.10 For Ti Legliz and the vast majority of Haitians, real change demanded a massive social, political, and economic transformation, a revolution that would overturn almost three decades of Duvalierist domination. This growing dissent generated mass protests that eventually forced Jean-Claude Duvalier to flee the country on February 1986. The collapse of the Duvalier dictatorship nurtured hopes that the country would start a new history freed from its long legacy of despotism. A wave of national optimism and euphoria temporarily buried social and political conflicts. These conflicts, however, resurfaced into a series of confrontations between the army, which had inherited power from the dictator, and an assertive popular movement bent on both déchouké—uprooting—Duvalierists and installing a democratic regime. Ultimately, the military resorted to repression, violently aborting elections in 1987 and organizing farcical ones in 1988, only to seize power again in a coup a few months later. The army was, however, a profoundly divided institution; its internal struggles degenerated into a series of coups and countercoups.

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Under massive domestic and international pressure, the men in uniform were compelled to exit the national palace and facilitate the electoral return of civilians. Led by the charismatic and prophetic messianism of Father Jean-Bertrand Aristide, the huge majority of poor Haitians developed into Lavalas—the flood. Elected in a landslide, Aristide assumed the presidency on February 7, 1991; embodying the hopes and aspirations of the moun andeyo, Aristide became Lavalas. Embracing liberation theology and its “preferential option of the poor,” Aristide was bent on turning the world upside down.11 He exposed the gigantic class divide separating Haitians, preached that tout moun se moun—all human beings are human beings—and advocated extraparliamentary methods of popular rule. He soon discovered, however, that Haiti’s dominant class found this brand of politics to be thoroughly unacceptable. In September 1991, barely seven months after his presidential inauguration, Aristide was overthrown in a bloody coup and forced into exile. Incapable of imposing its legitimacy at home and abroad, the new military dictatorship of Raoul Cédras remained in power for three violent and repressive years.12 During this time, Aristide managed to sustain his domestic popularity and to mobilize international public opinion against the junta. After a series of failed negotiations between the exiled president and the “de facto” regime of Cédras, 20,000 US troops took over Haiti peacefully with the blessing of Aristide as well as the United Nations. The rationale of the Clinton administration to intervene directly and militarily into Haitian politics echoed—to some degree—the Wilsonian justifications for the earlier invasion of the country. Differences between these two historical decisions were of such significance, however, that they each constitute a qualitatively distinct phenomenon. While Clinton and his main advisers had a paternalistic attitude toward Haiti, which they apparently viewed as a “basket case,” they no longer entertained the unadulterated racism that guided US policy during the first occupation. It is true that the late twentieth century’s rhetoric of the “failed state” and the necessity to reestablish constitutional government was not unlike the claims of the earlier occupiers. But there were profound differences; this time, the United States was planning to restore to the presidency a truly legitimate figure who had not only represented the aspirations of the moun andeyo, but had also espoused an anti-imperial and indeed anti-American ideology. The

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United States, which had historically supported the traditional and reactionary Haitian dominant classes and their military allies,13 was now considering removing them from office and replacing them with Aristide, whom a member of the elite described to me as that “little communist nigger.” Ironically, the United States was going to do so after having collaborated with, and indeed backed, the military and paramilitary forces that overthrew Aristide. General Raoul Cédras, Lt. Col. Philippe Biamby, and many other key figures in the coup of 1991 were, after all, on the CIA payroll. Moreover, the CIA was involved in the creation of the violent and murderous organization Front pour l’Avancement et le Progrès Haïtien (FRAPH), which was supposed to constitute a political force counterbalancing the Aristide movement.14 Not surprisingly, a sense of utter disbelief seized the Haitian dominant classes and their praetorian guard; in their eyes, the idea of the United States landing its marines to restore to the presidency a deranged crypto-Marxist was simply unthinkable. Such disbelief was also pervasive in Washington. US authorities in and out of the Clinton administration had a difficult time understanding why the marines should intervene in Haiti where there was no discernable fundamental national interest.15 The killing of eighteen US Rangers in Mogadishu, Somalia, on October 3, 1993, had reinforced this sentiment. Washington policymakers were convinced that the loss of US lives in the pursuit of vague international objectives in situations of minor strategic significance was intolerable. Moreover, they were concerned that in the absence of a clear timetable for an “exit,” any intervention might well degenerate into “mission creep.” The fear was that a US takeover of Haiti might soon develop from a modest peacekeeping operation into a large, costly, and difficult mission of “nation building.” Haiti, with its extremely limited strategic and economic value, was simply not worth a major US military involvement. Thus, as Philippe Girard put it, “Everything militated against an intervention in Haiti itself.”16 And yet, the intervention occurred. Several reasons explain this apparent paradox. In the first place, the United States was losing credibility; it had failed miserably to dislodge the illegal de facto military regime, which was surviving severe sanctions and the constant warnings of “facing serious consequences” if it failed to accept the return of President Aristide. As the lone superpower, the United States could not tolerate such humiliation at the hands of a small and

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weak country like Haiti. It simply had to strike back and impose its hegemony in what US policymakers called their “backyard.” Thus, the decision to intervene enabled Clinton to assert decisive leadership and eradicate the “Somalian syndrome” that had temporarily immobilized US power.17 Moreover, given Haitian military capabilities and the unpopularity of the de facto government, the intervention was bound to be short, painless, and cheap. A second reason, related to the so-called new security issues of immigration and drugs, helps explain the intervention. Washington was fearful that the degradation of the Haitian situation would generate a flood of Haitian refugees fleeing political persecution and material deprivation and would increase the flow of drugs transiting in the island before reaching the United States itself. While the vast majority of “boat people” ended their sad journeys in different Caribbean islands and at the US military base in Guantánamo, they became a source of embarrassment for the Clinton presidency. As Girard points out, The administration’s refugee policy was not politically sustainable over the long run. It received criticism from international organizations that pointed out its illegality. The Black Caucus denounced it as racist. Still, polls showed that 73 percent of Americans thought that Haitians picked up by the Coast Guard should be sent back to their country. Constantly shifting between his pledges that he would accept political refugees and his decisions to the contrary, Clinton looked indecisive.18

Clinton faced a dilemma; he could not ignore American public opinion by welcoming thousands of Haitian boat people, nor could he ignore the increasing chorus of denunciations of his administration as racist. As Richard Feinberg put it, “The use of force was the only way to get out of the box. Clinton was trapped. Politically, he could not send the immigrants back, and he could not accept them either.”19 With the problem of the boat people, domestic and international politics intersect, because a third reason behind the military intervention was the transnationalization of the Haitian crisis. Indeed, President Aristide’s exile in the United States facilitated the mobilization of a powerful anti-Cédras constituency in Washington itself. Aristide managed a very successful lobbying of the Afro-American community—one of the president’s most important constituencies. The lobbying took the dramatic face of “politics as powerful spectacle” with

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the well-publicized hunger strike of TransAfrica’s director, Randall Robinson. In addition, it prompted the Congressional Black Caucus’s calls for military action and mass protests by Haitian Americans in Miami and New York. The capacity of Aristide to transnationalize his own agenda clearly helped transform Haiti into a critical national security issue for the United States. According to David Malone, Aristide and his advisers ambushed the White House through channels it could not afford to ignore with Congressional elections looming in November 1994. They managed to unite the Congressional Black Caucus, representing a bedrock component of Clinton’s electoral coalition, into vocal opposition to the US President’s Haiti policy. Much of the media and certain liberal constituencies, including some highly visible entertainment-industry figures, joined in. The last straw was Randall Robinson’s highly mediagenic hunger strike against the Administration’s Haitian refugee policy. In April and May 1994, the Administration reassessed its policy and, rising above inter-Agency disagreements, opted to restore Aristide before November (thereby, it was hoped, putting an end to the flow of refugees). Domestic political factors drove the reappraisal of policy, not concern over the credibility of the OAS and the UN. Had these domestic factors not emerged, it seems unlikely that Clinton would have mobilized the full range of diplomatic and military instruments he did to resolve the crisis.20

Thus, the mobilization of critical constituencies forming the base of Clinton’s popular support contributed to his eventual decision to take military action against Haiti’s ruling junta and launch what became known as Operation Uphold Democracy. This very notion of upholding democracy points to another important explanation for the military intervention. It signaled the profound change in global politics provoked by the end of the Cold War, the collapse of the communist alternative, and the ascendancy of liberal democratic values. The United States, in the absence of the Soviet Union, no longer felt compelled to support right-wing dictatorships. It could now embark on a policy promoting democratic change. There was therefore some room for idealism. As Clinton argued, “The United Nations was unanimous in supporting the ouster of Cédras. . . . [Aristide] had been elected overwhelmingly, and Cédras and his crew were killing innocent people. We could at least stop that.”21 It appeared, then, that democracy was triumphant and that indeed a novel configuration of world politics had brought “the end of history.”22

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For instance, in June 1991, the Organization of American States adopted the so-called Santiago Declaration, which guaranteed that the organization would respond decisively to any undemocratic seizure of power in any member state. This inevitably put Haiti onto the international agenda and set the stage for Security Council Resolution 940—the unprecedented UN endorsement of military intervention to remove an unconstitutional government and replace it with the regime that it had previously overthrown. Haiti seemed to have embodied the concept of an “emerging right to democratic governance,”23 superceding old beliefs in the inviolability of national sovereignty. The international climate conspired against Haitian coup makers and facilitated the US-led restoration of Aristide’s presidency. Laennec Hurbon, a leading Haitian intellectual, wrote that the intervention heralded a “new age” in international relations—an age in which the “Kantian idea of a human universal has begun to emerge as a concrete reality in the geopolitical sphere.”24 Hurbon contended that rather than being the vehicle of imperial authoritarian repression, military force had become the agent of democratic liberation. If this were not the case, asked Hurbon, how could American lives have been put at risk “solely in order to assist a people in danger and to restore democracy to a country that has no such tradition[?]”25 While it is true that Operation Uphold Democracy would have been impossible without the ascendancy of liberal-democratic aspirations, it had profound limitations that Hurbon’s exceedingly naïve Kantian elation failed to capture. The intervention did restore Aristide to power, but it inevitably transformed him from an anticapitalist prophet into a président déplumé, who no longer had the capacity to push forward whatever radical social project he may have favored. It is true that Aristide had little choice, but by accepting the necessity of the US intervention, he undermined his nationalist credentials and surrendered his fate to the exercise of US power.26 To that extent, the US-led “new world order” favored democracy, but it was a democracy with severe limitations that constrained and enfeebled the possibility of radical and popular transformations; such a democracy, as William Robinson has argued, is a “polyarchy,” or a “low-intensity democracy.”27 He contends that the United States is now promoting its version of “democracy” as a way to relieve pressure from subordinate groups for more fundamental political, social and economic change. The impulse to “promote

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democracy” is the rearrangement of political systems in the peripheral and semi-peripheral zones of the “world system” so as to secure the underlying objective of maintaining essentially undemocratic societies inserted into an unjust international system. The promotion of “low-intensity” is aimed not only at mitigating the social and political tensions produced by elite-based and undemocratic status-quos, but also at suppressing popular and mass aspirations for more thoroughgoing democratization of social life in the twenty-first-century international order. Polyarchy is a structural feature of the emergent global society.28

Thus, the US decision to launch Operation Uphold Democracy responded to several factors. Of such factors, the reestablishment of US credibility as the sole superpower seems to have had the most determinant impact. The other major reasons alluded to above facilitated and legitimated the intervention. The key, however, was that Haiti provided to the Clinton administration an irresistible opportunity to unleash a triumphant display of strength against a brutal regime that was neither capable nor willing to resist.29 By renewing its determination to use force, the United States restored its credibility while simultaneously proclaiming its willingness to defend and protect human rights and democracy. With Operation Uphold Democracy, the United States could portray itself as a benevolent imperial power: its armed intervention and the high moral principles of international law were mutually supportive.30 While Aristide had determined that massive US military assistance was the only way he could regain his presidency, his decision had profound consequences for his rule. His image as the principled advocate of liberation theology, the prophet of anticapitalism, and the nationalist leader was inevitably compromised, if not altogether battered. Constrained by the overwhelming US presence and by the demands of international financial institutions, he began collaborating with former enemies to implement policies that he had previously rejected. He abandoned the priesthood to become a Machiavellian “prince,” maneuvering unsuccessfully to prolong his presidency for three more years. In February 1996, bowing to external pressures, Aristide relinquished the reins of government to his former prime minister, René Préval. However reluctantly he may have done so, Aristide engineered the country’s first peaceful electoral transition of power. The rituals of democracy were taking root in spite of manifest shortcomings and flaws.

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Democracy, however, is much more than the rituals of regular elections and the peaceful transfer of office; it is also, among other things, popular accountability, economic justice, and political equality. Inevitably, therefore, democracy, if it is to be meaningful, raises the thorny issues of class power and how such power can restrain or expand its limits. As I have argued in the preceding chapters, Haiti has historically suffered from the predatory rule of a privileged minority that has consistently marginalized and exploited the majority. These patterns of marginalization and exploitation have generated an authoritarian habitus that has in turn reinforced these very patterns. The collapse of the Duvalier regime and the turbulent rise of Lavalas and Aristide generated an incomplete rupture with the past. While the masses erupted on the political stage and finally claimed their full rights as citizens, they have been unable—so far—to translate these rights into a coherent program of social and economic emancipation. This failure stemmed not only from the ruling classes’ intransigent defense of their privileges, but also from the incapacity or unwillingness of the Lavalas movement and Aristide to implant viable institutional structures of popular representation. In fact, the authoritarian habitus reasserted itself within Lavalas; the messianism and “one-manism” of past practices came to embody Aristide’s presidential monarchism and absolute control of his Fanmi Lavalas party. He left no autonomous political space to his followers; Lavalas was Aristide, and Aristide was Lavalas. Finally, he emasculated, intimidated, and stifled his unpopular and divided opposition. The authoritarian habitus was, however, operating under distinct conditions and in a different historical conjuncture. It was simultaneously reinforced and weakened at both the international and domestic levels by the US promotion of “low-intensity democracy” on the one hand, and by domestic class struggles on the other. The promotion of low-intensity democracy, based on the implementation of the neoliberal “Washington consensus” policies and on the political empowerment of a “moderating center,” blocked any radical restructuring of Haitian society. In fact, as Dupuy argues, Haiti was “placed under the trusteeship of the international regulatory and aid organizations.”31 The pre-coup social-democratic strategy of the first Aristide administration had to be abandoned; the new plan for development was rooted in the belief that the state had to be eviscerated to perform only those “enabling” functions favoring market forces. State corporations were to be privatized, and the old Jean-Claudiste model

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of an economy based on low-wage and assembly manufacturing for export was to be restored. The Haitian economy, which “ranked at the top of the I.M.F.’s index of trade openness,” was to become even more open, with inevitable catastrophic consequences. As Tina Rosenberg points out, “Free trade is a religion, and with religion comes hypocrisy. Rich nations press other countries to open their agricultural markets. At the urging of the I.M.F. and Washington, Haiti slashed its tariffs on rice in 1995. Prices paid to rice farmers fell by 25 percent, which has devastated Haiti’s rural poor.”32 Low-intensity democracy was therefore marginalizing further the moun andeyo and consolidating the authoritarian habitus. At least initially, the strong neoliberal “medicine” allegedly required to cure problems of underdevelopment was bound to aggravate social conditions. This was the price that had to be paid to “rationalize” the economy and integrate it fully into the world system. In short, the authoritarian habitus was now legitimated with the ideology of the “free market”; poverty and exclusion became consequences of what international financial institutions imposed as hard but necessary policies to extricate Haiti’s economy from backwardness. In this new configuration, the imposition of austerity in an environment already besieged by utter scarcity was a mere “technical” decision rather than a political choice determined by the ideology of the market. Thus, low-intensity democracy forced on Haiti an economic strategy that had profoundly antidemocratic effects. As Dupuy explains, [This] strategy broke decisively with the social democratic, basicneeds-oriented Lavalas Project in several respects. . . . [It] did not begin by conceptualizing the centrality of the peasantry within the Haitian economy, and it rejected the logic of the majority perspective developed by the project. Hence, the strategy did not start from the premise that a reconstructed, equal, just, and democratic Haiti must give priority to the interests, needs, and participation of the peasantry and the rural and urban informal, handicraft, and small industrial sectors. As such, the strategy avoided the issues of land reform and the promotion of peasant organizations, peasant cooperatives, and small- and medium-size agro-industrial enterprises. It emphasized trade liberalization, except for a few products . . . whose subsidies would be phased out over several years.33

While the promotion of low-intensity democracy, which is bound like Siamese twins to the neoliberal strategy, was inherently exclusionary of the majority, it generated other political effects that paradoxically

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undermined the authoritarian habitus. By restoring Aristide’s presidency through Operation Uphold Democracy, the United States sought to indicate that electoral processes mattered and that military coups could no longer be the preferred means to block the ascendancy of left-wing populist regimes. At worst, if coups were necessary, they could not be legitimated for the longue durée; the rule of the guns had to give way to electoral politics, however hollow and fraudulent such politics might be. Elections were therefore central to the promotion of low-intensity democracy. This in turn generated a qualitative shift in the political behavior of the marginalized masses. No longer silent, they exercised their right to vote to elect those candidates who actually opposed the very neoliberal strategy associated with the promotion of low-intensity democracy. To that extent, the authoritarian habitus was shaken by the mobilization of the masses who were no longer willing to put up with being the victims of predatory rule. They used the electoral process to voice their expectations for fundamental change, a change that was hardly compatible, however, with low-intensity democracy. The promotion of low-intensity democracy seeks to fulfill two critical and often mutually contradictory objectives: the creation of a formal and ceremonial democratic system on the one hand, and the peaceful and continued exclusion and marginalization of popular classes, on the other. The problem is that once formal and ceremonial democratic structures are instituted, they take a life of their own; people come to take them seriously. These structures generate hope for an effective and meaningful democracy, which can only be satisfied by a radical rupture with the despotic past. In these circumstances, exclusion and marginalization are difficult to sustain; subordinate classes demand and expect drastic transformations, they are in a constant state of mobilization, and they are no longer afraid of exercising their full rights as citizens. Thus, if the formal and ceremonial aspects of democracy are to survive, rulers must either become real democrats or hide their authoritarian habitus by mystifying the public into believing that they are what they are not. The third alternative is obviously a complete breakdown of democracy and the reemergence of the full-fledged authoritarian habitus. These three scenarios materialized in the post–Operation Uphold Democracy. As I argue below, in spite of departing the presidency at the end of his mandate, Aristide continued to exercise enormous power on his successor, René Préval. In that sense, the constitutional

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rules of the game had little to do with political realities; the elected president was not the real president. This only confirmed the old Haitian saying “tout sa ou wè, sé pa sa”—everything you see is an illusion. Mystification was also pervasive when Aristide was reelected president in 2000. He claimed to be a democrat and a “man of the people,” but he soon ran the country like a messiah and barely tolerated dissent as his government became embroiled in corrupt and authoritarian practices. At the same time, his opposition had the illusion of representing the majority of Haitians when, in fact, it was always a self-aggrandizing and divided clique of politicians with limited popular support. Moreover, there was little to indicate that the opposition had better democratic credentials than Aristide himself. Again, political mystification was the name of the game. But mystification had its dangers; it engendered cynicism and opportunism, as well as violence and civil strife. When armed elements challenged Aristide, he no longer had the unreserved popular support he once enjoyed; his supporters simply did not fight for his survival. Abandoned by his own constituency at home and virulently opposed by the Bush administration, which had never fully accepted his presidency, Aristide was compelled into a second exile. He left the country in a state of chaos and with a resurgent authoritarian habitus. Before analyzing this period of history, it is important to return briefly to the period following the peaceful transfer of office from Aristide to Préval. Préval’s presidency was marred by internal power struggles within Lavalas, culminating in a major split between Aristide and his erstwhile supporters. In addition, it symbolized the politics of doublure—meaning that the constitutionally elected officeholders were not in fact ruling the country. Indeed, secluded in his private residence in Tabarre, Aristide maintained his hegemonic presence; he was the power behind Préval’s throne. The result was permanent crisis and political paralysis. The country suffered from a descending spiral of poverty and an increasing level of criminal activity. Public corruption resurfaced even though Préval never seemed to have taken part in it. Always in Aristide’s shadows, and confronting the opposition of both the foes of Lavalas, regrouped mainly in the Organisation du Peuple en Lutte (OPL), and the dominant classes, Préval had little autonomy to carry on his own political and economic project. On the one hand, the OPL, which controlled parliament and had become virulently anti-Lavalas, blocked the ratification of several of Préval’s nominees for the position of prime

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minister and virtually immobilized the governmental machine. On the other hand, major landowners, as well as a lack of resources, thwarted Préval’s attempts at implementing a land reform favoring the mass of the peasantry. Moreover, from Tabarre, Aristide orchestrated a campaign of intimidation against the Préval administration, which was bent on enforcing the privatization plans that Aristide himself had approved in 1994.34 Préval was thus besieged from all sides and accomplished little. Nonetheless, not only did he manage to finish his term and engineer Haiti’s first peaceful transfer of power to an elected successor, but he also demonstrated an unusual and indeed exceptional sense of humility for a Haitian politician. He never sought to expand his mandate and had neither the messianism nor the repressive temperament of virtually all his predecessors. If François Duvalier’s system was extremism, Préval’s was the soft version of the authoritarian habitus. In fact, under Préval, the state was losing its coercive capacity; the national police was crumbling and private armed gangs began to crystallize. The center could hardly hold. Moreover, the press remained vocal, and when it was intimidated, it was not because of governmental censorship but rather because of obscure private forces that sponsored violence, as in the tragic assassination of Jean Dominique. This did not imply that authoritarianism had vanished during Préval’s presidency, but rather that the state was no longer monopolizing the coercive apparatus. In the process, insecurity began to show its ugly face, and the government gradually lost its capacity to govern effectively. The leviathan was tamed but at a cost. Thus, the weakening of centralized control and the inevitable lessening of governmental repression marked Préval’s rule. This is not to say that Préval was a committed democrat who had miraculously escaped from the powerful impact of the authoritarian habitus; in fact, he was a man of contradictory tendencies. While he had no aspirations regarding a life presidency, he famously claimed that Lavalas “pran pouwa, e li pran’l net” (Lavalas has taken power, and has taken it forever).35 And while he knew that Aristide was paralyzing and ultimately undermining his presidency, he never voiced his opposition to, or his exasperation with, the leader of Tabarre.36 Finally, he did little to stop the development of Aristide’s Chimères. Not surprisingly, Préval’s close friend and adviser, the well-known journalist Jean Dominique, warned him that he was too weak in his dealings with Aristide and that he gave too much. The point is that

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Préval had yet to develop his own constituency and that Aristide was bent on preventing him from doing so. The man from Tabarre saw Préval as his creation and as a mere président de passage, to be manipulated for his own political designs. Michèle Montas, Dominique’s wife, is reported to have said that Préval was “supposed to do things for Aristide, and for Aristide’s own popularity.” Aristide, she argued, “never wanted Préval to be a recognizable name in any way.”37 Thus, Préval was to a large degree a prisoner of Aristide’s entourage and Fanmi Lavalas party.38 It was only years later, when Préval decided to run again for the presidency in 2006, that he freed himself from his marassa39 and offered veiled and oblique criticisms of Aristide. Préval’s failure to assert himself and gain sufficient independent political space during his first presidency was costly. The country stagnated, and the euphoria of 1991 as well as the dreams rekindled by Aristide’s return in 1994 gradually faded away, giving rise to popular apathy and cynicism. A series of elections filled with gross irregularities kept alive democratic rituals but undermined the victors’ legitimacy. Such was the case of the controversial 2000 parliamentary elections, won overwhelmingly by Aristide’s Fanmi Lavalas party. Supported by the United States and France, the opposition, organized as the Convergence Démocratique and the Groupe des 184, refused to recognize the legality of these ballots and contributed to the second fall of Lavalas and its leader. Many observers on the left have argued that Aristide’s second fall was the result of US imperialism and had little to do with his own policy failures and the country’s domestic class structure.40 While this argument has plausibility, it is ultimately flawed; it minimizes Haitian agency and exaggerates the omnipotence of US hegemony. There is no doubt that the Bush administration had little sympathy for Aristide. While it reluctantly acknowledged his legitimacy as president of Haiti, it opposed him for ideological reasons and starved his regime of badly needed foreign assistance. Formulated and exercised by two ultraconservatives, Roger Noriega and Otto Reich,41 Washington’s policy was bent on empowering Aristide’s adversaries. The United States encouraged and financed the development of the opposition, regrouped in Convergence Démocratique and the Groupe des 184. Moreover, while it may not have directly supported the rise of the armed insurgency, Washington clearly knew that unsavory elements of the disbanded Haitian army were training in the Dominican Republic with the objective of violently overthrowing

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Aristide.42 And yet, it did nothing to stop them. In fact, the United States simply abandoned Aristide even though he had agreed to the terms of a compromise engineered by the Caribbean Community (CARICOM)—a compromise that the opposition rejected. Instead of compelling the opposition to accept the compromise, which would have emasculated Aristide’s powers and generated a government of national unity, the White House ominously issued a “Statement on Haiti” that “called into question [Aristide’s] fitness to continue to govern.” The statement contended that the “long-simmering crisis [was] largely of Mr. Aristide’s making.” In addition, the White House condemned Aristide for failing “to adhere to democratic principles” and for contributing “to the deep polarization and violent unrest” that gripped Haiti. Finally, it urged him “to examine his position carefully, to accept responsibility, and to act in the best interests of the people of Haiti.”43 In short, once the armed insurgency began and chaos engulfed the country, the Bush administration seized the opportunity to force Aristide’s exit. Aristide, was, as it were, “made an offer he could not refuse”; he had the option of remaining in power and facing probable death, or resigning and going into exile to stay alive. He chose the latter, knowing that under the Bush administration’s pressures his own private security, which was provided by the US firm Steele Foundation,44 was being withdrawn. The imperial United States, however, was neither the sole nor necessarily the determining cause of Aristide’s fall. The fall would have been very unlikely had it not been for an armed insurgency and Aristide’s own policies. The insurgency, paradoxically, was partly rooted in Aristide’s very methods of governance. Aristide did little to transform the inherited authoritarian tradition. He armed young unemployed thugs, the Chimères, to intimidate the opposition; he sought to govern alone as a messiah; and he resisted for too long making meaningful concessions. While voicing a radical rhetoric, he followed the neoliberal scriptures of structural adjustment. For instance, in collaboration with the Dominican government, he opened a major free trade zone near the town of Ouanaminthe. To do so, he had to compel large numbers of peasants of the region to abandon their land. Amy Bracken reported that “40 proprietors and several hundred farmers . . . were driven from a total of 230,000 square meters of land on the Maribahoux plain, the second most fertile stretch of land in Haiti.” The free trade zone consisted “of 13 factories, all owned by the Dominican apparel maker Grupo M, and all to produce goods for

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American brands, such as Levis and Hanes.”45 This is the very type of economic project that Aristide had previously condemned as a form of modern slavery because it relies on cheap wage labor; now he celebrated and embraced it. In addition, his regime was incapable of resisting the temptations of corruption in spite of its promise of “peace of mind and peace in the belly.” Finally, many Lavalas high cadres contributed to the perverse persistence of the “narcostate” inherited from the military dictatorship. Benefiting from, and intimately involved in the drug trade, they were indicted and found guilty in the United States after Aristide’s fall.46 Corruption had thus reached the summit of the Lavalas administration; the search for easy money became the leitmotif of a decaying regime. Not surprisingly, Aristide lost the unconditional popular support he once enjoyed, and some of his own Chimères turned against him. With the assassination of Amiot Metayer, leader of the Gonaïves Chimères, the “Cannibal Army,” Aristide lost control of his armed lumpen-militia. Led by Metayer’s brother Butteur, the “Cannibals” joined forces with former soldiers and death squad leaders of the disbanded army to wage the insurgency that eventually compelled Aristide to flee into exile. This new alliance between erstwhile Lavalasians and enemies of Aristide pointed to the mercenary character of Haitian politics. La politique du ventre turned yesterday’s friend into today’s enemy and generalized uncertainty into tomorrow’s critical reality. In fact, for mere pittances, lumpen-militias could be organized. As Amy Wilentz explains, [The] lumpen are traditionally fickle. At moments of great historical change they may support you for your ideas, for your words. But many among them can be bought. In times of plenty they are loyal, but when was the last time Haiti had experienced a time of plenty? And in times of penury their support can be and often is purchased by the highest bidder—and for very little. For a dollar they’ll demonstrate. For twenty, maybe less, they’ll torture, they’ll burn, they’ll kill, they’ll assassinate.47

The point then is that Aristide no longer had the resources to obtain the unquestioned obedience of his Chimères; his charisma no longer sufficed to manage successfully the contradictions generated by a system of governance based increasingly on the bullying threats of a divided and poorly organized lumpen-militia. Having the support of neither a centralized nor a loyal coercive force, Aristide was left

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begging for some foreign military assistance that never arrived. In fact, the United States and France, and to a lesser degree Canada, not only prevented such support from materializing but also gave the final push that led to his departure from power. Besieged by the harsh material realities of a devastated economy, his own demons, a reactionary elite, and an increasingly hostile international community, Jean-Bertrand Aristide was incapable of seizing the historic opportunity of creating a mass movement that might have begun to equalize life chances48 among Haitians. That the armed insurgents, former members of the disbanded and despised military, found little popular resistance in their march to power, symbolized Aristide’s ultimate failure. The triumph of the guns proved once again that the old Creole proverb “Konstitisyon se papye, bayonet se fe” (a constitution is made of paper, but bayonets are made of steel) defined Haitian politics. While Lavalas had its Chimères, its foes had their own paramilitary groups. Disbanded by Aristide in 1994, the army went underground without a clear chain of command only to resurface with the anti-Aristide insurgency. The army, however, had no monopoly over the use of violence. Different political and private forces formed a number of armed gangs over which they had uncertain control. Former makouts who had joined the Cédras junta’s brutal attachés reemerged to form the new death squads and criminal Zinglendos bands. Narcotrafficants established their own violent syndicates. Thus, while violence remained the traditional means by which the dominant classes acquired and kept political power, it became a decentralized source of illicit wealth accumulation for a small segment of the urban lumpen-poor. Those without access to weapons, particularly in the cities, were the marginalized victims of a society that had descended into a Hobbesian spiral of criminality. As Dupuy emphasizes, there are two distinct kinds of violent crimes: those committed by the state and its armed forces and the economic elite against the impoverished majority to preserve the status quo, and those committed by elements from the subordinate classes, usually from the most marginalized among the poor, condemned to live in wretched conditions in some of the most densely populated and squalid ghettos in the world, and for whom violence and criminality are a source of income, whether as hired guns for those in power or seeking power, or those with powerful connections involved in drug trafficking or contraband.49

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The departure of Aristide did not change this grim violent reality. In fact, the complete disintegration of central authority accompanying Aristide’s fall generated a hellish environment. It is in these conditions of social breakdown that the “international community” decided to deploy a US-led multinational force of more than 3,000 peacekeepers. While the force imposed a relative measure of order in the country and propped up the weak interim government of President Alexandre and Prime Minister Latortue, it failed to disarm the Chimères and the insurgents, leaving that task to a United Nations military contingent, the UN Stabilization Mission in Haiti (MINUSTAH). On June 1, 2004, MINUSTAH replaced the US-led troops and reestablished a semblance of stability, but it remained an understaffed and feeble peacekeeping force that had neither the will nor the capacity to unleash an effective policy of disarmament. While MINUSTAH challenged hesitantly the hegemonic presence of the disbanded Haitian army in a few localities, it used significantly more repressive means to curb the power of the Chimères in Cité Soleil. In reality, however, neither the Chimères nor the insurgents of the old military had given up their weapons. MINUSTAH feared that any serious disarmament effort was bound to cause bloodshed and that it lacked the mandate and resources to do it effectively. As General Augusto Heleno Ribeiro, former commander of MINUSTAH, explained, “I command a peacekeeping force, not an occupation force . . . we are not there to carry out violence.” Thus, Haiti’s armed groups had not been emasculated, let alone compelled into submission. “To do this,” Brazil’s foreign minister, Celso Amorim, stated bluntly, “would require a force of 100,000 men prepared to seek and kill in large numbers.” And he concluded, “This is not our role, nor do we want it.”50 Under these conditions it is not surprising that central authority was balkanized and that a climate of generalized insecurity became endemic. Whereas the Chimères and other gangs controlled Port-auPrince’s major slums, the rural areas and some of the larger provincial cities, like Gonaïves, were to a large degree in the hands of the former military. This proliferation of armed groups at the pay of multiple and opposing interests exacerbated social and political polarization. The ruling classes were claiming that Aristide continued to finance certain Chimères to destabilize the interim regime from exile.51 In turn, in their efforts to “clean up” the slums of Lavalas followers, wealthy businessmen apparently sponsored the insurgents of the disbanded army and “bought” gangs that had been previously affiliated with

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Aristide.52 While all of these allegations were difficult to substantiate and verify, it was clear that the extreme poverty besieging a large pool of young urban dwellers created a class of lumpen-criminals prepared to sell their services to the highest bidder. In the process, violence became indiscriminate, and political alliances reflected nothing but mercenary affairs. Unless all forces are disarmed and a new, competent, and neutral police is created, Haiti will inevitably continue to hover over the abyss. Peace and stability, however, cannot be bought by reestablishing the military. The Haitian army is unnecessary; the country faces neither external enemies nor external threats. Reconstructing this army would imply wasting scarce resources on an institution that has always repressed the powerless, violated constitutional norms, and bolstered the predatory rule of a kleptocratic elite. The reappearance of the military would be an invitation to reactionary rule, coups, and repression. While nationalistic sentiments in some quarters may lead to calls to reestablish the army, it is more likely that such calls are self-interested and ultimately express fears of any type of popular power. It was clear, however, that by virtue of the decisive role they played in forcing Aristide into exile, the armed insurgents of the disbanded military enjoyed a privileged relationship with the interim government. In fact, the interim regime, which claimed to represent a government of national unity, systematically marginalized Lavalas; not a single supporter of Aristide was included in the Latortue cabinet. Moreover, in an effort to gain elite support and restore stability, the interim regime embraced the insurgents. The prime minister himself hailed them as “freedom fighters” even though they were known human rights violators and convicted criminals. Mollifying the insurgents went beyond mere rhetorical praise; the interim government started giving to some 6,000 members of the demobilized army financial compensation amounting to ten years of back pay at an estimated cost of $29 million.53 Moreover, in 2004, in a farcical trial, Louis-Jodel Chamblain, a key figure in the insurgency and in the disbanded army, was acquitted of Antoine Izméry’s murder. Finally, in the slums of Port-au-Prince, the killings of Aristide’s followers by groups of soldiers of the disbanded army went unpunished. In fact, the interim government systematically harassed, repressed, and jailed many key figures of Lavalas, such as former prime minister Yvon Neptune and Father Gérard Jean-Juste. Such displays of lawlessness demonstrated that abuses and assassinations of Lavalas supporters

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were tolerated and even exonerated under the interim regime. As Gerardo Ducos, who led an observation mission for Amnesty International, observed, “Aristide’s backers have suffered the brunt of human rights violations since the change in government.”54 Not surprisingly, in the face of governmental and UN passivity, the armed insurgents behaved with impunity in many areas of the country. This empowered ultraconservative forces and greatly undermined the possibility of national reconciliation. Impunity therefore enhanced the likelihood that a future crisis might create another critical juncture favorable to the return to power of the most reactionary elements of society, the reestablishment of the army, and the reappearance of ugly realities of the past dressed in new garb. However, anti-Lavalas forces did not have a monopoly over undemocratic and violent behavior; the Chimères—the gangs of the urban, unemployed, and frustrated lumpen-proletariat—continued to call for Aristide’s return and fomented a climate of insecurity. Launching what the interim government called Operation Baghdad, they engaged in fratricidal killings and the murdering of members of the small, corrupt, and ineffective Haitian police. Through a series of kidnappings and indiscriminate acts of brutality, they effectively instilled a pervasive sense of fear and insecurity among Port-au-Prince’s poor and wealthy. This climate of anarchy produced a generalized feeling that the country was drifting into a profound crisis of governability, which in turn greatly undermined confidence in both Latortue and MINUSTAH. The unpopularity of the Latortue administration was accentuated by its incapacity to curb the gargantuan appetite of the grands mangeurs and rationalize Haiti’s integration into a more productive niche of the international economy. Transparency International ranked Haiti as one of the most corrupt regimes in the world. While international financial institutions promised an infusion of foreign aid of over 1 billion dollars, Haiti saw little of it. Moreover, even if it had been fully disbursed, this foreign assistance was unlikely to generate the patterns of equitable development that could have begun to transform Haiti into a democratic society. Under Latortue, things were falling apart to such an extent that few doubted that a new hellish cycle of violence and repression would set in if the peacekeepers suddenly exited the country. The fear of such a bloody future and the horrors of a series of major natural catastrophes that left in their wake over 5,000 victims and some

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300,000 homeless in the Gonaïves area generated a systemic psychosis. The wrath of the gods was compounded by the aggravation of economic conditions. The destitute majority, confined to an already miserable material existence, was falling deeper into absolute poverty under the weight of a collapsing economy and an inflationary spiral. Not surprisingly, while the interim authorities claimed to be nonpartisan, independent, and competent, they were always on shaky ground. They were unable to stem the wave of violent anarchy plaguing the country and the collapse of the economy. Deriving their power from foreign forces, they barely extended their rule beyond the limits of Port-au-Prince. In fact, the ascendancy of Latortue to the position of prime minister reflected the growing significance of the transnationalization of the Haitian community and of the diaspora. The diaspora increased dramatically its capacity to affect Haiti’s politics, because it became both a critical financial provider and a modern disseminator of information for the people back home. Indeed, the diaspora, through its North American media outlets, spread news and rumors that help shape homeland politics. What Haitians call teledyol—the diffusion of unconfirmed and invented news—is not merely the legacy of living under dictatorial censorship, but also the fabrication of information to influence reality itself. Such teledyol is practiced not only in the homeland; it is exported to the diaspora where it takes new forms through the modern technologies of the Internet. In a boomerang effect, the diaspora is now becoming the digital hub disseminating back home an electronic teledyol reflecting its ever increasing power. The diaspora’s influence is not limited to the dissemination of information; it extends to the financial sphere because of its critical remittances to the homeland. Not surprisingly, the growing economic power of the diaspora has been accompanied by a concomitant rise in its political influence. It is an influence that comes also from the role that some diasporic figures, like Latortue, play in their new environment and in international organizations. The diaspora is a strategic “reserve army of talent” for the homeland that can be used to serve foreign as well as national interests. In many cases, diasporic cadres are “parachuted” into their mother country to fulfill “special assignments” on behalf of major powers and international financial institutions. They become police chiefs, cabinet members, prime ministers, and even presidents. Haiti offers an interesting case in point whereby the homeland politician, Aristide, turned

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into a diasporan private individual, and the diasporan private individual Latortue turned into a homeland politician.55 Michel Laguerre explains Latortue’s journey to the prime ministership: [He] had recently been a talk-show host in Florida, which gave him a podium to criticize the Aristide administration. Through the show, he developed an attentive audience and was able to deliver his anti-Aristide message directly in his televised commentaries and indirectly by means of the guests he invited. . . . This was a political maneuver, to position himself strategically in the eventual collapse of the administration, that served him well. The television show provided him with a political basis of support, a laboratory where he could try out his political ideas on people, and a community in which he could make his presence and interests known to the homeland. . . . From February 2003 to February 2004, his politics evolved from the goal of serving as prime minister with an independent agenda under President Aristide to advocating the departure of Aristide as the only viable solution to the political stalemate and the success of his future administration.56

This transnational version of local politics is, however, deeply implanted in imperial soil. Had it not been for the hegemonic influence of the United States and, to a lesser degree, France and Canada, the diasporan Latortue would have remained a diasporan.57 To that extent, while diasporic politics has its own rhythm and logic, and while Latortue positioned himself brilliantly to become prime minister, the autonomy of both was still very limited by the realities of global power. As François Pierre-Louis points out, “Transnational practices . . . reflect the decision of countries such as the United States to integrate further the developing states, the ‘periphery states,’ into their economy.”58 Not surprisingly, only a strategic diasporan capable of operating within imperial circles such as Latortue could hope to exploit his position to become an important political actor in his homeland. The transnationalization of politics had a price, however; Latortue came to be increasingly perceived as an agent at the service of the United States and the United Nations rather than the people of Haiti. Ultimately, his interim government lacked the material resources and the popular mandate to govern effectively. It failed to set in motion any credible program that might have ended the endemic corruption that plagued Haitian institutions. Thus, the Latortue administration enjoyed little legitimacy and confronted a sense among all sectors of society that it was incompetent,

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petulant, and indecisive. In fact, Latortue became quite unpopular; even the insurgents of the disbanded Haitian army, whom he had cajoled and praised for overthrowing Aristide, turned against him and demanded his departure. Remissainthe Ravix, their self-proclaimed chief, denounced Latortue as a traitor and claimed that his government was illegal.59 Thus, in spite of espousing the armed insurgents as freedom fighters and marginalizing and repressing the Lavalas movement, Latortue’s government managed to alienate most of Aristide’s opponents. Perceived by both the dominant classes and the popular sectors as incapable of stopping the wave of insecurity engulfing the country, especially Port-au-Prince, the MINUSTAH-Latortue regime lost whatever popularity it may have had. Gang violence and kidnappings on the one hand, and political harassment and killings of Aristide’s partisans on the other, became widespread and terrified the population. This climate of violence, coupled with a weak and incompetent electoral commission, led to four postponements of general elections, the first round of which was finally held in February 2006. While the environment was hardly conducive to free and fair elections, Haitian voters managed to make them so. In spite of major logistical problems and reports of fraud, René Préval was elected president with an overwhelming victory. Receiving more than 51 percent of the vote in a field of thirty-three candidates, Préval distanced his closest rival by forty points. It is true that a controversial method of counting the so-called blank vote was devised to allow Préval to obtain the absolute majority and thus avoid a second round. It is also true that this controversial method was engineered only after the fear of generalized chaos materialized when Préval’s supporters waged huge popular protests demanding the outright victory of their leader. The fact remains, however, that allegations of fraud amid the discovery of thousands of burned ballots favoring Préval made it impossible to deny him his victory. Although Préval assumed the presidency without a parliamentary majority, he will probably benefit in the short term from the goodwill of the legislature. However, this goodwill will not last long unless some demonstrable changes occur. Without such changes, he may soon get embroiled in a major political conflict. Moreover, the social polarization that existed at the time of Aristide’s departure has not abated. The deep divide between the urban poor and peasantry, who voted massively for Préval, and the traditional elites has certainly not

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disappeared. The two main opponents of Préval, Leslie Manigat and Charles Baker, have hardly accepted their defeat; they are likely to wage an unrelenting fight against the new president. Claiming that Préval’s victory was an “electoral coup,” and that he was nothing but a stooge of Aristide, they feared that his election would reestablish a new form of Lavalasian power. Préval, however, had distanced himself from both Aristide and Lavalas. He created his own party, Lespaw, the Creole word for “hope,” to demonstrate that he was no longer beholden to Lavalas and his exiled leader. In fact, Préval deliberately refused to talk about Aristide. He and his advisers repeated cryptically that the constitution allowed the deposed president to return to the country from South Africa, but that if he chose to do so, he might face the fate of former Peru strongman Alberto Fujimori, who was arrested in Chile when he sought to reenter Peru to become a presidential candidate.60 In spite of his apparent divorce from Aristide, Préval obtained the bulk of the Lavalas vote. Moreover, Aristide’s call for a popular boycott of the elections was ignored because participation in the polls was high, reaching more than 60 percent of registered voters. During the campaign, Préval promised little but insisted on a politics of national reconciliation, which he hoped would restore social peace to the country. Once elected, Préval managed to simultaneously please both elite sectors that had previously demonized him, and popular forces that had hitherto championed Lavalas. If sustained over the longue durée, this unusual capacity to draw support from contradictory interests and conflicting classes may well give Préval’s presidency a chance to break with the turbulent and authoritarian past. His administration, however, will confront massive political, economic, ecological, and security problems that may engender another systemic breakdown. In addition, Préval will contend with the disbanded army forces that expect monetary compensation for retirement funds that had been stolen during the dictatorship of General Cédras in the early 1990s. The danger is that being armed, they could strike violently against the new regime if their demands are not satisfied. Préval does not merely have problems with the agents of the old opposition to Aristide; he is also facing the quandary of what to do with Aristide himself. Should he allow him to end his exile and return to Haiti immediately? If he does, he may please a large popular constituency, but he may lose US support and whatever goodwill he may enjoy among

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the Haitian elite. Conversely, a decision to postpone indefinitely Aristide’s return may well contribute to the reactivation of the Chimères in the urban slums of Port-au-Prince. It is no exaggeration to say that every single decision that Préval makes will pose a serious dilemma for the continued viability, let alone success, of his government. Thus, while Préval’s presidency has a chance to break with the past, it will confront such massive and acute problems that it may not be able to avert new and major crises. The potential for another “regime change” will continue to hang like the sword of Damocles over Haiti’s future. These grim conditions have led some to advocate an international protectorate that would take control of Haiti for at least a decade. Fearing that the country was imploding, Gabriel Marcella of the US Army War College prepared a briefing paper for US military commanders on security challenges in Latin America, advocating that Haiti be considered for protectorate status. Arguing that Haiti was “on the verge of an outward explosion of boat people and an inward immolation of gang-on-gang violence,’’ Marcella recommended that it come “under a Brazilian-led regional coalition, if one can be created that is willing to support a 10-year restoration initiative.’’ 61 Riordan Roett, director of Latin American Studies at the School of Advanced International Studies in Washington, was more forceful, contending that there was no other option but a protectorate lest Haiti collapse utterly. As he put it, “The only way we’re going to make progress in Haiti is to establish a good old fashioned trusteeship.” And he added that Haiti needed “a multilateral force with a 25-year mandate to rebuild the country year by year. Everything has been destroyed. It’s a failed state, a failed nation.”62 It is true that Haiti is confronting a systemic crisis and that since the 1990s the international community has intervened directly in its domestic governance; but the proposition of putting Haiti under an international trusteeship is not altogether fathomable. It is difficult to conceive the massive military and financial commitment that such a trusteeship would entail, given the country’s little strategic significance and lack of critical natural resources. Moreover, if past experience is any guide, Haitians would soon grow disenchanted with a foreign occupation and come to develop open and hidden forms of resistance to it. As I argued in the previous chapter, the first US occupation of the country, from 1915 to 1934, had few positive accomplishments and left a bitter taste among all Haitians. It created a centralized army that

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undermined and indeed aborted democratic development; it left a legacy of shallow and farcical electoral practices; it reinforced executive power and the utter hegemony of Port-au-Prince; and it accentuated the country’s economic and political dependence. In short, the occupation failed to implant the seeds of self-sustaining development and of more accountable and equitable governance. Similarly, the second and shorter US occupation that restored Aristide to power in the mid-1990s failed to promote the institutional transformations required for establishing a functioning democracy. While it was welcomed by the vast majority of Haitians and had little of the open and ugly racism of the first occupation, it demonstrated that the United States had no interest in long-term commitments. In fact, once they entered Haiti, the occupiers sought the most immediate “exit” strategy possible. Moreover, there is good reason to believe that it was because of its very brevity that the second occupation was supported, or at least tolerated, by Haitians. That the major powers have little interest in a long-term trusteeship was again demonstrated by the most recent US and French military intervention following Aristide’s forced departure from office in 2004. While the two powers played a significant role in undermining and ousting Aristide, they quickly exited the country and left it under the control of a small and disorganized MINUSTAH contingent that seemed accountable to no one. Moreover, they selected a new prime minister, Latortue, who had neither the domestic constituency nor the financial means to govern effectively. Parachuted into his new position from abroad and lacking legitimacy, Latortue soon lost whatever popularity he may have had. The international community had thus created a political system that was unaccountable to the local population and had no capacity to stop, let alone reverse, Haiti’s crisis. After two years in power, the Latortue-MINUSTAH regime had accomplished little but a poorly organized election that was saved only because of the determination of Haitian voters. To that extent, a long-term trusteeship for Haiti is extremely unlikely; and if it were to happen, there is no reason to believe that it would unleash economic development, establish democratic rule, and promote social justice. If the foreign community is really interested in improving conditions in Haiti, it should enter into a long-lasting partnership with the new Préval administration, with alleviating poverty as the main objective. At the moment, however, the record of international financial institutions bodes poorly for such an outcome. What Haiti needs is the construction of a legitimate state capable of

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reconciling the contradictory interests of conflicting social actors. Such a construction requires in turn new and effective institutions and the expansion of state capacity; unfortunately, this huge task is not a process that springs from midair, nor is it the product of administrative will. In fact, the construction of a legitimate state mirrors the configuration of class power and the time horizon of rulers—that is, it reflects how such rulers value the future, given their present strategic situation and calculations. The more secure their political positions, the more likely they will invest in long-term projects. In short, the creation of effective institutional structures is dependent on the rulers’ capacity to go beyond their immediate, narrow, corporate interests. Only then can the rationalization of politics occur, and only then can progress be “routinized.” Such routinization has consistently been undermined by the proliferation of political parties, which number well over 100, that have no popular backing and are mere expressions of the power of a “big man.” Mass parties representing and articulating the interests of large constituencies and having a national reach are virtually nonexistent. Instead of organized and structured mass parties, there is “one-manism” rooted in clientelistic and personalistic criteria. In fact, it may well be more appropriate to describe the vast majority of Haitian parties as “groupuscules.” A groupuscule is, in the words of Kern Delince, an “ad hoc social grouping, which specializes in the accomplishment of a specific and temporary objective.”63 It has no meaningful long-term program and is a mere vehicle to acquire power. Indeed, Haitian rulers have historically shown an inability to take the longterm view because of material constraints, international pressures, and domestic zero-sum game circumstances. It remains to be seen whether the new Préval administration will mark a rupture with this historical incapacity. While the abiding chasm between rulers and ruled, wealthy and poor, and the persistent pattern of destructive foreign interference have been momentarily eclipsed by Préval’s victory, there is no guarantee that they will not soon come to the fore and abruptly reopen a period of acute crisis. The current situation therefore invites pessimism. Yet, the Haitian masses have always struggled against all odds. They have created a fragile popular civil society comprising networks of gwoupmans— groups of peasants and workers bent on defending their long ignored interests. These gwoupmans have limited resources, but they offer a glimpse of what a democratic and more equitable Haiti might look like. They use and reinvent old practices and combine them with

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more “modern” democratic norms to build means of support and survival to defy the harsh poverty and squalor they confront on a daily basis. As Jennie Smith explains, It is not a break from traditional habits and objectives that should be credited with the GP movement’s impressive growth and tenacity, so much as the tendency of these groups to selectively combine long-standing traditions of rural community organization with concerns promoted by contemporary development and democratization initiatives.64

Implanted in the deep culture of Haiti, these gwoupmans embody the basis of a homegrown version of democracy. This is not to idealize their practices, since they too suffer from organizational limitations and the weight of archaic hierarchies of gender and age, but rather to point out that they are a potential alternative to chart a new course of development. To be truly effective, however, they need the sustained support of a state committed to eradicate the daily squalor facing most Haitians. Given the current balance of forces and the continued power of the affluent minority and international financial organizations, such a convergence of interest remains seriously questionable. For instance, it will be fascinating to follow the United States’ reaction to President Préval’s decision to develop close relations with two countries demonized by the Bush administration: Fidel Castro’s Cuba and Hugo Chavez’s Venezuela. Will Washington flex its muscles and threaten to retaliate against Préval’s foreign policy, or will it accept the simple reality that Haiti needs Cuba’s health assistance as well as Venezuela’s subsidized petroleum? If past precedents are any guide, President Préval will have to navigate turbulent waters to convince the US government that Haitian friendship with Cuba and Venezuela does not imply hostility to the United States. Domestically, will the virulently anti-Lavalas elite forces continue to assume that Préval is Aristide’s marassa—twin brother—and thus a dangerous populist who deserves nothing but their determined opposition? The future remains clouded in uncertainty. It is possible, however, to imagine that having been on the brink of a civil war and facing a descent into hell, some key segments of the Haitian political class will finally realize that they should accept the logic of democracy. They may finally come to respect the verdict of the ballot box and understand that they can no longer tolerate the appalling inequalities between the destitute majority and the affluent minority. Perhaps then Préval’s election will signal that the more progressive

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sectors of society are taking power and that they will have a chance to push forward a modicum of social reforms with the support of Haiti’s international partners. If this occurs, a new beginning may be in the making and democracy may have a chance. The history of the country and of foreign entanglements in Haiti warns us, however, that material constraints and entrenched class interests weigh heavily against this happy denouement. At the moment, with the coming to power of the new Préval administration and its message of peaceful coexistence between opposing social forces, there is a glimmer of hope that Haiti may chart a more sustainable political future. The year 2004, which was supposed to celebrate Haiti’s bicentennial, inaugurated instead a sequence of civil violence and foreign intrusion and intervention, culminating in another occupation that failed to stem the country’s continuing and deepening crisis. History seemed to repeat itself; it is as if, in 2006, the country was experiencing another 1934 and confronting the vicissitudes of a long and humiliating period of forced international infantilization. While there are beguiling resemblances between these two eras, they are ultimately deceiving. In fact, the current situation is fundamentally different from the one inherited from the first US occupation. Haiti in the 1930s had a centralized state with political authority, an army with a monopoly over coercive power, and a popular sector effectively marginalized and silenced by the dominant classes and their loyal praetorian guard. The supremacy of these dominant classes was basically safe, challenged only by the emergence of the black middle classes seeking a place in the existing system of privilege, status, and wealth. Moreover, when threatened from below, these classes could always count on the armed forces to reestablish order and stability. To that extent, the authoritarian habitus shaped political behavior and expectations and contributed to the rise of Duvalier’s extremism. However, as I argued earlier, extremism had its own contradictions that brought its eventual collapse. The breakdown of dictatorial rule signaled the exhaustion of the authoritarian habitus as a legitimating ideological system. Unlike the period following the first US occupation, the post-Duvalier era marked a popular prise de conscience that empowered the subordinate classes. These classes, through their systematic attempts at déchoukaj and their determination to prove that tout moun se moun, declared that they were no longer prepared to be the victims of an unjust social order. Subordinate classes had erupted onto the political stage and demanded their rights as citizens. Mobilized through a fragile but

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extensive network of peasant, neighborhood, and religious associations, they fought for both the establishment of a more democratic system and its restoration when it collapsed. This upsurge of popular power prevented officeholders from justifying their rule by appealing to antidemocratic values even when they governed in patently tyrannical ways. For instance, the Cédras dictatorship rationalized the brutal coup d’état that brought it to power by claiming that it was engineered to save the constitution and democracy itself. Paradoxically, the unintended consequence of the military coup and the subsequent restoration of the Aristide presidency was the dissolution of a critical institutional pillar of the authoritarian habitus, the Haitian armed forces. While this undermined the dominant classes’ capacity to exercise their coercive veto over any government, it created nonetheless a vacuum of state power that came to be filled by multiple paramilitary groups that had uncertain, murky, and ever changing chains of command. The effects of the army’s dissolution were therefore contradictory; on the one hand, they debilitated the authoritarianism of the dominant classes, but on the other hand, they failed to generate the construction of democratic institutions. In fact, the official disappearance of the army was not matched by a corresponding pattern of disarmament; former soldiers simply went underground with their weapons only to resurface as dangerous criminal insurgents. In the meantime, particularly during Aristide’s second political term, the Lavalas administration armed its own Chimères to both counter these insurgents and intimidate the opposition. The multiplication of armed groups ended up emasculating the state to the point of obliterating virtually all its institutions. The question then is whether the old reflexes of the authoritarian habitus will reemerge in the current conjuncture, or whether the total collapse of the state will become an opportunity to rebuild basic institutions, decentralize power, alleviate poverty, and bridge the chasm between the dominant classes and the moun andeyo. If the Préval administration seizes this opportunity, it may have a chance to tame the authoritarian habitus that has haunted Haiti since its inception more than 200 years ago.

NOTES 1. Michel-Rolph Trouillot, Haiti: State Against Nation (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1990).

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2. Ibid., p. 165. 3. Ibid., p. 169–170. 4. Ibid., p. 171. 5. Ibid., p. 163. 6. Ibid., p. 171. 7. From 1962 to 1965, terror became governmental policy; some 50,000 people died during Duvalier’s rule. While the vast majority of the dead were black, mulattoes were especially targeted because of their color and privileges. The Jérémie massacre of 1963 turned the town into a killing field of mulatto families. Between 200 and 300 mulattoes became the victims of indiscriminate makout violence. See Robert Debs Heinl and Nancy Gordon Heinl, Written in Blood: The Story of the Haitian People, 1492– 1995, revised and expanded by Michael Heinl (Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 1996), pp. 593–607. 8. Alex Dupuy, “Conceptualizing the Duvalier Dictatorship,” Latin American Perspectives 15, no. 4 (Fall 1988): 112. 9. Mahmood Mamdani, Good Muslim, Bad Muslim (New York: Three Leaves Press, 2005), pp. 63–118; William I. Robinson, Promoting Polyarchy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), pp. 74–83. 10. Robert Fatton Jr., Haiti’s Predatory Republic (Boulder: Lynne Rienner Publishers, 2002), pp. 58–70. 11. See Jean-Bertrand Aristide, In the Parish of the Poor (New York: Orbis Books, 1991); and Aristide, Tout Moun Se Moun, Tout Homme est un Homme (Paris: Seuil, 1992). 12. Alex Dupuy, Haiti in the New World Order (Boulder: Westview Press, 1997), pp. 137–166. 13. Ian Martin, “Haiti: Mangled Multilateralism,” Foreign Policy, no. 95 (Summer 1994): 86. 14. A most obvious example of CIA support for the military, and opposition to Aristide, is Brian Latell’s 1992 memorandum—“Impressions of Haiti”—to the agency’s former director Robert Gates. Declaring that “the Haitian regime barely resembles Latin American dictatorships I have known,” Latell, the CIA’s senior analyst for Latin America, went on to contend that he “saw no evidence of oppressive rule” during his July 1992 visit to Port-au-Prince. In fact, Latell described the coup leader and army chief, Raoul Cédras, as “a conscientious military leader who genuinely wishes to minimize his role in politics, professionalize the armed services, and develop a separate and competent civilian police force.” At the same time, Latell portrayed Aristide as an erratic, even demented, individual bent on fomenting mob violence against his opponents. Latell’s view of the situation closely resembled that of the Haitian military and privileged classes who favored “an elite-dominated leadership to stabilize Haiti and begin a process of economic development.” As quoted in Kate Doyle, “Hollow Diplomacy in Haiti,” World Policy Journal 11, no. 1 (Spring 1994): p. 52; see also New York Times, November 1, 1993, pp. A1–A8. The CIA was also involved in the creation of the violent paramilitary organization Front for the Advancement and Progress of Haiti (FRAPH). In the eyes of the CIA, FRAPH would constitute a political front that “could

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balance the Aristide movement [and do] intelligence against it.” For a comprehensive report on the linkage between the CIA and FRAPH, see Allan Nairn, “Our Man in FRAPH,” The Nation 259, no. 13 (October 24, 1994): 458–461; and Nairn, “He’s Our S.O.B.,” The Nation 259, no. 14 (October 31, 1994), pp. 481–482. The ambiguities of US foreign policy toward Haiti are well summarized in Jane Regan, “A.I.D.ing U.S. Interests in Haiti,” Covert Action, no. 51 (Winter 1994–1995): 7, 13, 56, 58. See also, Nicolas Jallot and Laurent Lesage, Haiti: Dix Ans d’Histoire Secrète (Paris: Éditions du Félin, 1995). 15. As President Clinton himself acknowledged (My Life [New York: Vintage Books, 2005], p. 616): It was time to throw [Cédras] out, but public opinion and congressional sentiment were strongly against it. Though the Congressional Black Caucus, Senator Harkin, and Senator Chris Dodd supported me, the Republicans were solidly opposed, and most Democrats, including George Mitchell, thought I was just taking them out onto another precipice without public support or congressional authorization. There was even division within the administration. Al Gore, Warren Christopher, Bill Gray, Tony Lake, and Sandy Berger were for it. Bill Perry and the Pentagon were not, but they had been working on an invasion plan in case I ordered them to proceed. Not surprisingly, Clinton thought a military strike against the “de-factos” might well “ruin everything he had worked all his life to build.” He is reported to have confided to historian Taylor Branch (“Clinton Without Apologies,” Esquire, September 1996, p. 110) that his closest friends in the U.S. Senate advised him in person that his contemplated military intervention was worse than misguided or foolish; it was insane. As if it weren’t bad enough to send Democratic candidates against the GOP Contract with America on weak political standing and a freshly failed health-reform crusade, now, they said, six weeks before the election, Clinton wanted to invade a country that nobody in America cared about. “They were furious!” said Clinton. “They said no political leader in his right mind would consider it for a second.” The Haiti venture violated the whole political canon on leadership and support for choosing which battles to fight. In the event of minor trouble, he could count on no more than eight Senate votes against censure, they warned, and with major casualties there would be talk of impeachment. [Moreover, President Clinton acknowledged] that public fervor for him to do something about Haiti evaporated as soon as the refugees stopped washing ashore. “I had racism working for me,” he fumed, “but now it’s working against me.” 16. Philippe R. Girard, Clinton in Haiti: The 1994 Invasion of Haiti (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004), p. 6.

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17. On May 13, 1994, Richard Haass, who served on the National Security Council in the Bush administration, joined former Democratic congressman Stephen Solarz and published an influential editorial in the Washington Post calling for a US-led intervention in Haiti. They argued (as quoted in Roland I. Perusse, Haitian Democracy Restored: 1991–1995 [New York: University Press of America, 1995], pp. 88–89): “U.S. policy toward Haiti is not working. As a consequence, both Haitian democracy and American credibility are on the line. . . . Defeating the small, lightly armed and poorly trained Haitian military would not be hard. If Desert Storm took six weeks, ‘Caribbean Hurricane’ would take six hours.” Similarly, David Malone, Decision-Making in the UN Security Council: The Case of Haiti (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), p. 162, argues: “Military intervention in Haiti derived in part from a need by the Clinton administration to demonstrate domestically that the USA retained the will and capacity to act decisively on the international level, in the wake of the USA’s withdrawal from Somalia and at a time when the USA was frustrated over the nature of the UN’s involvement in the Former Yugoslavia.” See also Girard, Clinton in Haiti, pp. 37–49. 18. Girard, Clinton in Haiti, p. 60. 19. As quoted in ibid. 20. Malone, Decision-Making in the UN Security Council, pp. 115–116. 21. Clinton, My Life, pp. 616–617. 22. Francis Fukuyama, The End of History and the Last Man (New York: Free Press, 1992). 23. Thomas Franck, “The Emerging Right to Democratic Governance,” American Journal of International Law 86 (1992): 46–91, argues (p. 50): We are witnessing a sea change in international law, as a result of which the legitimacy of each government someday will be measured definitively by international rules and processes. We are not quite there, but we can see the outlines of this new world in which citizens of each state will look to international law and organisation to guarantee their democratic entitlement. 24. Laennec Hurbon, “The Hope for Democracy,” New York Review of Books, November 3, 1994, p. 38. 25. Ibid. 26. In a letter to UN Secretary-General Boutros Boutros-Ghali, Aristide ultimately acquiesced to a US-led military intervention by calling for “swift and determined action” to restore him to power. The letter supported UN Resolution 940, which authorized “the use of all necessary means” to topple the military junta. See AP@clarinet, July 29, 1994. 27. William Robinson, Promoting Polyarchy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996). 28. Ibid., p. 6. 29. While Clinton wanted a forceful display of military power and resolve, he did not want the risk of US casualties nor did he want innocent Haitians killed during the intervention. Moreover, he wanted the United

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States to be seen as a liberating army and not as an imperial occupying force. Therefore, although President Clinton secretly set the invasion for the night of September 18, 1994, he sent a delegation to Haiti on September 17, headed by former president Jimmy Carter in a last-ditch effort to stave off armed conflict. The delegation comprised two other major figures of US politics: Senator Sam Nunn and General Colin Powell. After long hours of tense negotiations with the coup leaders, the delegation reached the so-called Port-au-Prince Agreement, which averted the US invasion while allowing US forces to enter Haiti peacefully. It is clear that this agreement was a consequence of the use of force rather than the outcome of a diplomatic triumph. The Haitian military rulers acquiesced to step down from power only when they learned during the last moments of their negotiations with the Carter mission that the invasion was under way, as US warplanes were actually in the air. The junta leaders would never have signed on to the agreement had they faced only the rather gentle and understanding Carter. See, Clinton, My Life, pp. 616–619. 30. Malone, Decision-Making in the UN Security Council, p. 180. 31. Dupuy, Haiti in the New World Order, p. 150. 32. Tina Rosenberg, “Globalization,” New York Times, August 18, 2002, sec. 6, p. 28. 33. Dupuy, Haiti in the New World Order, pp. 148–149. 34. Michael Deibert, Notes from the Last Testament (New York: Seven Stories Press, 2005), pp. 84–98. 35. Laennec Hurbon, “La Dé-Symbolisation du Pouvoir et Ses Effets Meurtriers,” Chemins Critiques 5, no. 1 (January 2001): 66–68. 36. Deibert, Notes from the Last Testament, pp. 68–74. 37. Ibid., p. 68. 38. Jean-Claude Jean and Marc Maesschalck, Transition Politique en Haiti (Paris: L’Harmattan, 1999), p. 110. 39. The Creole word marassa means twin brothers; Aristide and Préval were so close at one point that Haitians started calling them marassa. 40. Noam Chomsky, Paul Farmer, and Amy Goodman, Getting Haiti Right This Time (Monroe, ME: Common Courage Press, 2004). 41. Ibid., pp. 25–33. 42. Ibid., pp. 47–57. 43. The White House, “Statement on Haiti,” February 28, 2004, available at www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2004/02/20040228-2.html. 44. Aristide’s own private security was provided by the Steele Foundation, which sees itself as “the world-class provider of security, safety and enterprise risk management solutions.” (This quotation is taken from the Steele Foundation’s Web page: www.steelefoundation.com/index.php.) The foundation is closely associated with the US government and provides, among other things, training for US army units going to Iraq and Afghanistan. The fact that Aristide depended for his own protection on paid foreign agents based in the United States is one of the ironies and contradictions of a president who claimed to embody the ideals of Charlemagne Péralte, the leader of the Haitian resistance to the first US occupation. 45. Amy Bracken, “Rich Man, Poor Man: The New Assembly Factory Near Ouanaminthe,” Labour News Network, October 29, 2003, www.hartfordhwp.com/archives/43a/450.html.

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46. Deibert, Notes from the Last Testament, pp. 314–317, 428–429. The United States revoked visa permits of several top officials in the Aristide regime for drug trafficking. Deibert reports (p. 314): The list included Aristide’s chimere liaison in the [Police Nationale d’Haïti (PNH)] Hermione Leonard, Leonard’s husband Rudy Therassan (head of the PNH’s Brigade d’Intervention Rapide unit), director of the Administration Penitentiaire Nationale Clifford Larose, Aristide’s Security Chief Oriel Jean, director of the National Palace motor pool Anthony Nazaire and Nawoon Marcellus. One of the defining legacies of his administration, the cocaine trade had exploded in Haiti under Aristide, and its trail led directly to the National Palace. A former friend of Aristide’s and now a convicted drug trafficker, Beaudoin “Jacques” Kétant, accused Aristide of direct involvement in the drug trade. He declared to the court: “He [Aristide] controlled the drug trade in Haiti. He turned the country into a narco-country. It’s a one-man show. You either pay [Aristide] or you die” (Steven Dudley, “Drug Allegation Gave US Leverage on Aristide,” Boston Globe, March 1, 2004). See also Lydia Polgreen and Tim Weiner, “Drug Traffickers Find Haiti a Hospitable Port of Call,” New York Times, May 16, 2004. 47. Amy Wilentz, The Rainy Season (New York: Touchstone, 1989), p. 128. 48. See Ralf Dahrendorf, Life Chances (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1979). Dahrendorf (p. 30) defines life chances as “opportunities for individual growth, for the realization of talents, wishes, and hopes, and these opportunities are provided by social conditions.” Haitians have vastly unequal life chances, and the regime of Aristide, despite its rhetoric, did little to alleviate these inequalities. 49. Alex Dupuy, “The Prophet and Power,” unpublished manuscript, 2006, p. 343. 50. “Brazil Rejects US Call for Haiti Crackdown,” Reuters, December 12, 2004. 51. “Haïti: Un Pays à la Dérive,” L’Humanité, March 5, 2005. According to L’Humanité, Aristide has a fortune of 800 million dollars with which he continues to pay his Chimères and a large group of international lobbyists. 52. Irwin P. Stotzky and Thomas M. Griffin, “Haiti Human Rights Investigation: November 11–21, 2004,” Center For the Study of Human Rights, University of Miami School of Law, January 2005. According to this report, Thomas Robinson, alias “Labanye,” a notorious gang leader in the neighborhood of Boston in Cité Soleil, “receives financial, firearms, and political support from wealthy businessman and politico Andy Apaid and businessman Reginald Boulos. Cité Soleil witnesses and police officers reported that Apaid’s support of Labanye keeps the police from arresting him” (p. 5). 53. Haiti Support Group, “Interim Government Paves Way for Return of the Military,” press release, August 20, 2004; Joseph Guyler Delva, “Haiti Rebel Leader Vows to Launch a Guerrilla War,” Reuters, December 18, 2004; Amy Bracken, “Haiti-Former Soldiers,” Associated Press, December 31, 2004.

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54. Reed Lindsay, “Police Terror Sweeps Across Haiti,” The Observer, October 31, 2004. 55. Michel Laguerre, “Homeland Political Crisis, the Virtual Diasporic Public Sphere, and Diasporic Politics,” Journal of Latin American Anthropology 10, no. 1 (April 2005): 206. 56. Ibid., pp. 210–211. 57. As Laguerre points out (ibid., p. 213), “Without the U.S. embassy preparing the way, the choice of a diasporan as prime minister probably would not have happened. Thus, we can see that it is not only the Haitian political class that accepts the Diaspora as part and parcel of the political process, but also foreign embassies such as those of France and the United States.” 58. François Pierre-Louis, Haitians in New York City: Transnationalism and Hometown Associations (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2006), p. 14. 59. Michael Kamber, “A Troubled Haiti Struggles to Gain Its Political Balance,” New York Times, January 2, 2005. 60. Gaëtane de Lansalut, “Aristide Veut Rentrer au Pays,” RFI Actualité, February 22, 2006, available at www.rfi.fr/actufr/articles/074/article_ 42031.asp. 61. As quoted in Pablo Bachelet, “Should the UN Run Haiti? Some See Little Alternative,” Miami Herald, December 12, 2004 (see www.saisjhu.edu/pubaffairs/SAISarticles04/Roett_TMH_121204.pdf). See also Don Bohning, “An International Protectorate Could Bring Stability to Haiti,” Miami Herald, November 23, 2004. 62. As quoted in Bachelet, “Should the UN Run Haiti?” 63. As quoted in Alex Dupuy, “1986–1990: The Struggle for a Democratic Alternative,” unpublished manuscript, 1995, p. 14. 64. Jenny M. Smith, When the Hands Are Many (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2001), p. 174.

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Conclusion

AFTER TWO CENTURIES of travail, the authoritarian habitus has led Haiti to a catastrophic impasse and near the abyss of civil war. Paradoxically, the fear of a descent into hell and a war of all against all may provoke now a common call for a new and more democratic dispensation. Facing imminent disaster, Haitians may finally understand that a better future requires the demise of the old habitus and the adoption of a more inclusive social pact. This possibility of reform, which stems from the threat of impending catastrophe, is also linked to the collapse of the economy. In other words, Haiti’s material foundations are in such a state of disintegration that the need to construct a new economy may well become an opportunity to create new class alliances and introduce a more accountable and representative political system. The current constellation of forces reflects a shrinking coalition of winners; few constituencies are benefiting from the systemic crisis besieging Haiti. The traditional and business elites are clearly not optimizing their gains in a situation of infrastructural decay, generalized insecurity, and nonexistent foreign investments. The small middle class is fighting for its own survival as it faces dwindling job opportunities, diminishing incomes, and the devastating impact of inflation. The urban poor and the peasantry are plunging into deeper misery in degrading conditions of squalor and violence. In short, while the major social classes are experiencing unevenly the consequences of Haiti’s economic collapse, they have little to gain by preserving the status quo. They are all suffering from a psychosis of fear caused by the specter of living in a truly Hobbesian world. Except for 231

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small but powerful groups connected to the drug trade, money laundering, and other types of criminal activities, most Haitians have now an interest in establishing social peace and building a new economy that would be more responsive to their basic needs. The question is whether this interest can outweigh the conflicts and tensions dividing dominant and subordinate classes as well as urban and rural constituencies. Will dominant classes prefer to keep their existing privileges, albeit in conditions of distress, instead of taking the risks of uncertain changes? For instance, would they accept a comprehensive strategy of rural development and reconstruction that might, by stopping the exodus from the countryside, alleviate poor living conditions, food shortages, and poverty in the city? In short, what makes the dominant classes better off: bearing the vicissitudes of intensified class polarization, or supporting the costs of giving existential alternatives to peasants and residents of the urban slums? Moreover, are dominant classes prepared to endure further social disintegration—and the country’s potential implosion—rather than embrace a program of economic reconstruction and embark on a democratic path? In more general terms, can the moral, political, and material chasm separating the privileged minority from the destitute majority be bridged? Can the former accept the latter as full citizens endowed with equal rights? Can the possessing class stop viewing the marginalized poor as nothing but homo sacer?1 Can a purposeful rupture with the authoritarian habitus and past economic policies reduce ingrained class hatred? Thus, are Haitians capable of genuine coexistence to extricate themselves from a situation of utter social disarray, moral decay, and political decomposition? It seems clear that an affirmative response to these interrogations requires the development of a new political economy that generates both growth and equity. This implies, however, fundamental reforms; and the question is whether the dominant classes are prepared to tolerate them. Thus, while the current crisis benefits few, the introduction of reforms, let alone radical change, is likely to find some resistance from the dominant classes. Such resistance stems from their fears that change brings uncertainties that might seriously undermine their privileged positions in the economy and society. For dominant classes, change is acceptable only when they can obtain a reasonable guarantee that it will not upset existing arrangements of property rights and power. They may, however, put up with a reduction of their supremacy

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provided that it entails nothing more than enlarging their own class membership. Moreover, in conditions of violence and decay, dominant classes may contemplate making important concessions in exchange for social peace. But in all of these instances, they take risks with limited and imperfect information; their long-term interests respond to a political calculus that is full of uncertainties, which explains their hesitation and reluctance at embracing social change. The fear of losing control over the process of reforms gives them pause; but even if they were to espouse reforms and recognize the need to embark on building a new and more equitable economy, there is no guarantee that this would automatically engender a democratic order freed from the old authoritarian habitus. It is true that the material structures that had given rise to the habitus are now decaying and in utter disrepair, but the habitus has an autonomy of its own that allows it to outlive the causative conditions of its origins. Thus, regardless of economic transformations, the authoritarian habitus is likely to weigh like a nightmare on political behavior for some time to come. In short, the chain of causation is not unilateral; the political system may lag behind emerging material realities and in turn affect these very realities. The legacy of the past may well continue to mold political reflexes and imprison actors into the old despotic cage from which they cannot easily escape. Thus, while the creation of a new economy is necessary to displace the authoritarian habitus, it will not unleash this transformation at once, let alone immediately implant an emancipatory habitus. In fact, the history of the authoritarian habitus in Haiti, which first crystallized with slavery and the regimented and brutal plantation system established by French colonialism, shows that the habitus can survive under different modes of production and class alignments. Neither the rupture with colonialism and the revolutionary emancipation from slavery, nor the decline of the plantation economy and the rise of an independent peasantry has uprooted the habitus. While its intensity has varied through the ages, its syndrome has been a constant characteristic of Haitian politics. The habitus tends to “extremism,” as under François Duvalier’s regime, when new and previously excluded groups seek full membership in the dominant classes. This “extremism” occurs because dominant classes generally oppose any expansion of their size, because they believe that it might decrease payoffs at the top and introduce political uncertainties that could weaken their rule. Moreover, imbued with the sense that they

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have an exclusive and innate right to power, privilege, and wealth, dominant classes see new claimants as “uppity” parvenus that do not belong in their moral community. Thus, they resist their ascendancy and continuously seek to “put them in their place.” Not surprisingly, dominant classes and new claimants fight ferociously against each other for control of high office, which both are bent on monopolizing for the longue durée. When claimants acquire political power, they use it to intimidate, harass, and kill potential challengers whether they are truly representative of antisystemic forces or form part of a coalition supporting the status quo. This “extremism” stems from the zero-sum game that characterizes Haitian politics: one is either in or out of power—there is little room for any other alternative. What is striking about this type of extremism is that the violence it unleashes tends to be indiscriminate; it kills randomly even if the moun andeyo are disproportionately its victims. The concept of kamoken (vile opponent) that Duvalier developed encompassed everyone and anyone; depending on whom Duvalier depicted as the “enemy,” it could imply being a communist, a mulatto, a liberal, a military officer, or a bourgeois. Duvalier’s extremism differed therefore from the more recent forms of state repression. For instance, under Cédras’s military dictatorship, violence was specifically class violence. It targeted the poor and their political and civil organizations; the specter of state-sponsored brutal death came to haunt daily life in the urban slums. In many ways, this extremism resembled French colonialism in the sense that the state was the exclusive agent of a small minority bent on violently keeping power and lording it over the vast majority. In fact, the military dictatorship of the early 1990s was a form of “internal colonialism”—local rulers using the bayonet to compel their own people to live in silence and in self-enclosed zones of squalor, as if they were an alien and inferior specie. That same degree of alienation between rulers and ruled marked the two decades of the first US occupation of the country. The presence of US troops on Haitian soil provoked, however, a limited rapprochement between the masses and those elites who had refused to collaborate with the US client government of Dartiguenave and Borno. The racism of the occupiers fueled national resentment as well as violent and hidden forms of resistance. To break down this resistance, the occupiers created an army that became the decisive power behind or on the presidential throne. While François Duvalier “domesticated” the

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army during his reign, it regained its dominant role in the aftermath of Jean-Claude Duvalier’s fall. In spite of Aristide’s decision to disband the army as an institution in 1994, its shadowy remnants have continued to influence Haitian politics. Thus, the fundamental legacy of the US occupation was a coercive force that strengthened the authoritarian habitus and centralized power in Port-au-Prince’s military barracks. The dissolution of the army, however, led to the “paramilitarization” of the country as conflicting constituencies created their own brutal force de frappe to defend their interests. Aristide’s Chimères, the disbanded army’s “insurgents,” and the gangster’s Zinglendos came to fill the vacuum left by the absence of the state’s monopoly of coercive power. Far from taming the authoritarian habitus, the decentralization of violence and the proliferation of private, undisciplined, and mercenary armed gangs generated multiple sovereignties of unaccountable despotic chiefdoms. The authoritarian habitus was therefore reproduced in each of these chiefdoms, which function as parallel and indeed alternative forms of power to the state itself. Reclaiming its vital place will therefore become the primary mission of the state; how to reconcile this mission without appealing to a centralizing authoritarian habitus will be extremely difficult. Thus, the authoritarian habitus has been an all-pervasive phenomenon of Haitian history; but the fact that it has transcended time, economic changes, and individual rulers does not imply that it is an inevitable and permanent element of the country’s politics. If the argument of this book is correct, the persisting influence of the habitus reflects the heavy formative legacy of the plantation system and the subsequent incapacity of Haiti’s ruling classes to construct a productive economy. In reality, since its inception, the Republic has never freed itself from the inherited predatory character of its state; whatever changes rulers may have effected, they have always maintained the exploitation and marginalization of the moun andeyo as the basic structure of the political economy. Not surprisingly, the authoritarian habitus has flourished in this environment as well as on the rare occasions when contestations and protests from below challenged the powers that be. In these instances, the habitus took on a specifically class character of violent and unmitigated repression of the popular sectors. The inclusion of the moun andeyo into the moral and political community of citizens is a precondition for the taming of the authoritarian

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habitus and its eventual replacement by a democratic dispensation. Such an inclusion, however, faces both the resistance of dominant classes and manifold institutional difficulties. Moreover, as I have argued, the habitus has an autonomy of its own; it embodies practices and reflexes that have ingrained themselves in the body politic for generations. The past simply persists beyond its official demise and influences the present. As Marx put it in The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, Men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please; they do not make it under circumstances chosen by themselves, but under circumstances directly found, given and transmitted from the past. The tradition of all the dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brain of the living. And just when they seem engaged in revolutionising themselves and things, in creating something entirely new, precisely in such epochs of revolutionary crisis they anxiously conjure up the spirits of the past to their service and borrow from them names, battle slogans and costumes in order to present the new scene of world history in this time honoured disguise and this borrowed language.2

Thus, Haiti has entered a period of transition in which the debris of the old still blocks the road to the new. Ugly and brutal detours have been taken and may still be taken, but the authoritarian habitus has reached a point of exhaustion; Haitians are no longer prepared to live in a society where everything remains the same as it once was. And yet, caged by material structures that have bounded them to a dictatorial set of routines and customs for more than two centuries, they will find it extremely hard to cross from the past into the future.

NOTES 1. Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998). 2. Karl Marx, “The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte,” in The Marx-Engels Reader, edited by Robert C. Tucker (New York: W. W. Norton, 1972), p. 437.

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Acaau, Louis Jean-Jacques, 105 Adams, John, 133 Affranchis, 45–46, 48, 69n13, 99 Africa, 16–21; African origins of slaves, 4–5; and ethnological movement, 176–179; and guerrilla warfare, 30; and hierarchical ethic, 60–62; problems with “African” explanations of culture, 18–23; and sense of equality, 62 Agamben, Giorgio, 113 Agriculture. See Peasants; Plantation system; Subsistence agriculture Alexandre, Boniface, 212 Alexis, Nord, 154n40 Amorim, Celso, 212 Anciens libres, 98 Apaid, Andy, 128n124, 229n52 Ardouin, Beaubrun, 123n66 Aristide, Jean-Bertrand: and Chimères, 209, 210; and corruption, 96, 210; coup of 1991, 108, 197, 224; dissolution of the army, 211, 224, 235; and drug trade, 229n46; and elections of 2006, 218; and Latortue, 216; messianic tendencies, 13, 102, 209; and neoliberalism, 209–210; and Préval, 202, 205–208, 218–219; private security from US firm, 209, 228n44; rise to power, 197; second exile, 206, 209; split with Lavalas, 206; and urban gangs, 127n122,

211; US abandonment of, 209–211; and US military intervention of 1994, 4, 115, 197–202, 205, 220; wealth of, 128n123. See also Lavalas movement Army. See Haitian army; Militarization of Haitian society Attachés, 108, 211 Authoritarian habitus, viii, 1–3, 65– 66, 106, 114; and African “ecumene,” 61–62; and Aristide, 209; and charter of 1801, 3, 88–89; and colonial society, 43–53; and current crisis, 233–234; and Duvalier, 182, 193–194; and elimination of rivals, 112–113; and emancipation habitus, 16; and end of first US occupation, 171–172; exhaustion of system, 223–224, 236; and French imperial despotism, 61; and hierarchical ethic, 60–62; and horrific conditions of slavery, 58–60; and Lavalas, 203; and “low-intensity democracy,” 203–205; material basis of, 95, 231, 233; and militarization, 56–58; and neoliberalism, 204; overview of origins, 29; and plantation economy, 62–66, 90–91; and predatory rule, 110; and presidential monarchism, 84, 86; problems with cultural paradigms, 16–18, 43; problems with Trouillot’s totalitarian model,

255

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194–195; and social divisions, 44–50, 67, 114; and struggle for independence, 51–53; and struggles of the peasants and urban poor, 106; and violence of revolution, 60. See also Dominant class; Political power struggles; Presidential monarchism; Rulers; specific rulers Bailly-Blanchard, Arthur, 150 Baker, Charles, 218 Balch, E. G., 166, 168 Banque Nationale d’Haïti, 142–144, 155n58, 174 Barthélémy, Gérard, 43, 50 Batraville, Benoît, 162 Bayard, J. B., 101 Bayart, Jean François, 119n39 Belair, Charles, 112 Bellegarde-Smith, Patrick, 35n25 Benda, Mary, 167 Bennett, Michelle, 96 Berlin, Ira, 19 Biamby, Philippe, 198 Biassou, Georges, 49, 52 Birth of African-American Culture, The (Mintz and Price), 23 Black cultural nationalism, 176–181 Black population of Haiti. See Bossales; Noirisme; Noiriste movement; Slaves; Social divisions Blancpain, François, 31n1, 65–66, 106, 188n62 Blondel, Georges, 138 Bobo, Rosalvo, 146–147, 151n3, 156n78, 161 Bohning, Don, 7 Bois Caïman, 21–22, 35n28, 35n32, 48–49, 69n25 Bonapartism, 84–86, 181 Borgella, Bernard, 88 Borno, Louis, 144, 149; distain for Haitians, 164; and Forbes Commission, 170–171; and Marchaterre massacre, 169; rule as la dictature bicéphale, 165; Schmidt on, 187n33; unpopularity of, 168; US ultimatum to, 188n61 Bossales, 19, 49–51, 53, 59, 64

Boukman. See Dutty, Boukman Boulos, Reginald, 128n124, 229n52 Bourdieu, Pierre, 2, 14 Boyer, Jean-Pierre: and agrarian authoritarianism, 65, 91–92; indemnity payment to France, 56; and Monroe Doctrine, 140; Péan on, 122n65; and presidential monarchism, 89 Bracken, Amy, 209–210 Branch, Taylor, 226n15 Brown, Gordon, 134, 137, 152n7 Brown, Jonathan, 14 Bryan, William Jennings, 142, 155n54 Bullet, Jeannot, 49 Bush, George W., 15, 208–209, 222 Butler, Smedley, 150, 167, 184n2 Cacos, 106, 161–163 Cagoulards, 126n113 Calixte, Démosthène, 174–175, 190n77 Callaloo phenomenon, 22–24 Cannibal Army, 109, 210 Caperton, William B., 147, 149, 161, 162 Caporalisme agraire, 90 Carnaval of 1997, 119n40 Carter, Jimmy, 228n29 Castor, Suzy, 162–163 Castor, Voltaire, 108 Catholic Church, 196 Caudillismo, culture of, 84 Cédras, Raoul: and attachés, 108, 211; and the CIA, 198; class violence under, 234; and corruption, 95; and coup of 1991, 108, 197, 224; and justifications for US intervention, 200 Chamblain, Louis-Jodel, 213 Chancy, Captain, 122n63 Charles, Etzer, 98–99, 110, 111 Charter of 1801, 3, 88–89, 101 Chavannes, Jean-Baptiste, 48 Child-rearing practices, 28–29 Chimères: Aristide’s loss of control over, 210; and climate of anarchy, 214; and international peacekeeping forces, 212; manipulation

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of term, 113–114; origins of, 108–109, 209; and Préval, 207 Christophe, King Henry: and agrarian authoritarianism, 65, 90; and landownership, 77n92; and paternalism, 101; and presidential monarchism, 89; and Toussaint, 112 CIA, 198, 225n14 Civic culture, 10 Clague, Christopher, 28–29 Clarke, Thomas, 174 Class divisions, 7; class conflicts, 113–114; and “compromise equilibrium,” 83; “consensual aspect of political control,” 82; and corruption, 111; and current crisis, 231– 234; and “low-intensity democracy,” 205; and noiriste movement, 179–180; and politique du ventre, 106–107; and presidential monarchism, 82–84, 105–106, 110–111; and US military intervention of 1994, 198, 205. See also Dominant class; Peasants; Politique du ventre (politics of the belly); Slaves; Social divisions; Subordinate classes Clinton, Bill, 197–201; justifications for military intervention of 1994, 198–200, 202, 226n15, 227n29; Operation Uphold Democracy, 200–205; refugee policy, 199–200 Cocomacacs, 104 Code Noir, 58 Code Rural of 1826, 91–92, 118n34 Cole, Eli K., 160 Colonialism, 4, 43–53; demographics, 33n17; and French National Assembly decree of 1790, 46–47; and French Revolution, 44–47; race relations in colonial society, 45–48, 69n13, 69n19; slave insurrections as “unthinkable,” 24–25; slave participation in armies of whites and affranchis, 48; social divisions, 44–50, 69n19; and US-French relations, 132–134; white perceptions of slaves, 24–26, 37n49 Comité Révolutionnaire du Port-auPrince, 156n71

257

Commandeurs, 49, 51, 52, 70n26 Communism, 175 Constitution of 1801. See Charter of 1801 Constitution of 1805, 96, 101, 135 Constitutional review, 180 Convergence Démocratique, 208 Copeland, Natasha, 33n14 Corruption, 6, 214; and Aristide, 96, 210; and authoritarian habitus, 95; and Cédras, 95; and Dessalines, 93, 121n57; limits on, 96; and people’s desire for wealth and position, 111; and Pétion, 93, 95; political rationality of, 94–95; and politics of color, 98–100; and presidential monarchism, 83–85, 87, 93–96; privatization of politique du ventre, 110; and Toussaint, 94. See also Politique du ventre (politics of the belly) Corvée system, 161–163, 185n17 Coups: coup of 1946, 175–176; coup of 1950, 181; coup of 1991, 108, 197, 224; coups and countercoups following collapse of Duvalier dictatorship, 196–197 Creole language, 23–24 Creoles: demographics of slave populations, 20; division of colonial society, 53; division of postcolonial society, 64; as slave elites, 49–51 Creolization of slave communities, 19, 23–24 Cuba, 141, 222 Cultivateurs portionnaires, 65, 66 Culture. See Haitian culture Currency, 143–144 Dahomay, Jacky, 81 Dahrendorf, Ralf, 32n5, 229n48 Daniels, Josephus, 149, 162 Dartiguenave, Philippe Sudre, 147–149, 164 Davis, Robert Beale, 147, 148 de Léaumont, Comte, 25 Debien, Gabriel, 40n74, 49–50 Declaration of the Rights of Man, 44–45

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Deforestation, 7 Deibert, Michael, 229n46 Delince, Kern, 221 Democracy: contradictions of, 205; and development sequence theory, 27; and legacy of US occupation (1915–1943), 173–174; “lowintensity democracy,” 201–205; and political mystification, 205–206; and politics of doublure, 206; and rationalization of coup of 1991, 224; and US military intervention of 1994, 200–205 Denis, Lorimer, 177, 179–180 Denizé, Pierre, 100 Depestre, René, 122n59 Despotism. See Authoritarian habitus; Presidential monarchism; Rulers Dessalines, Jean-Jacques: absolute power of, 32n2; and agrarian authoritarianism, 65, 97, 103, 122n58; attitude toward dissent, 13; constitution of 1805, 96, 101, 135; and corruption, 93, 121n57; death of, 96, 122n59; extermination of white colonists, 24; and Jefferson, 134; and landownership, 77n92; messianic tendencies, 13; and militarization, 56–57, 89–90; and mulattoes, 97–98; and paternalism, 101; and presidential monarchism, 89, 96–98; and Toussaint, 112, 122n63 Development, theories of, 27. See also Underdevelopment Diambois, Félix, 102 Diaquoi, Louis, 177 Diaspora, 215–216, 230n57 La dictature bicéphale, 164, 168 Dominant class (ruling and possessing classes), 106, 235; appeals to nationalistic and racist sentiment, 178–179; class conflicts, 113–114; and corruption, 93–96; and current crisis, 232–234; division between repressive state and rural masses, 67, 106, 234; early postcolonial society, 81–84; failure to build an integral state,

6–7, 82–83; initial collaboration with US occupation, 164; internecine struggles, 112; parasitic nature of, 83–84; patronage systems, 93–96; personal wealth gained through conquest of state offices, 93–94; predatory nature of, ix, 6, 110, 203; and presidential monarchism, 83–84; urban-rural split, 92; violence of, 112–114 Dominique, Jean, 100, 207 Dorsainvil, Justin Chrysostome, 176–177 Drug trade, 210, 211, 229n46, 232 Dubois, Laurent, 3, 27–28, 41n79, 46 Dupuy, Alex, 32n2, 97, 195, 203, 204, 211 Dutty, Boukman, 21, 22, 49, 50 Duvalier, François (”Papa Doc”), 96; and authoritarian habitus, 193–194; deconstruction of the army, 194– 195, 234–235; elimination of rivals, 111–112, 195, 234; extreme authoritarianism and brutality of regime, 107–108, 110–111, 193– 195, 225n7; messianic tendencies, 13, 102, 103; and noirisme, 99, 194, 195; and noiriste movement, 177, 179–180; and paternalism, 102; and politics of color, 99–100; and politique du ventre, 107–108; popularity with the subordinate classes, 107; problems with Trouillot’s totalitarian model, 194–195; rise to power, 182; social base of violence under, 107; and Tontons Makouts, 107–108, 126n113, 193–194 Duvalier, Jean-Claude: collapse of dictatorship, 96, 196; JeanClaudisme project, 196, 203; rise to power, 195; and wedding to Michelle Bennett, 96 Ecological catastrophe, 7 Economy, 65–66; absence of productive capitalism, 104–105; antidemocratic effects of economic strategies tied to “low-intensity

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democracy,” 204; and Banque Nationale d’Haïti, 142–144, 174; and current crisis, 231, 233; early rulers’ attempts to reestablish plantation economy, 5, 63–67, 78n101, 91–92, 103; economic collapse following independence, 57–58, 74n67, 136; and German intervention, 138; and Great Britain, 138; and Great Depression of 1929, 168; and Hurricane Hazel, 182; and neoliberalism, 204; paradoxes of plantation system economic imperatives, 62–66; profitability of smallholder vs. large estate production, 77n91; rise of small peasant production, 66–67, 103–104; US embargo following revolution, 135–136, 152n15; and US imperialism, 143–144; and US military intervention of 1994, 204; and US occupation, 174. See also Plantation system Education, 167 Elections: elections of 2000, 208; elections of 2006, 217–218; and legacy of US occupation (1915– 1943), 173; and US military intervention of 1994, 205 Éphémères governments, 132, 182 Estimé, Dumarsais, 180–181 Ethnological movement, 176–179 European universalism, 10 “Failed state” paradigm, 197, 219 Familialisme asservissant, 101 Fanmi Lavalas party, 203, 208. See also Lavalas movement Farnham, Roger, 155n58 Fatiman, Cécile, 35n32 Feinberg, Richard, 199 Fick, Carolyn, 35n32, 45, 63, 67, 71n39, 75n80 Fignolé, Daniel, 180 Firmin, Antenor, 154n40 Food shortages, 119n39, 120n40 Forbes, Cameron, 170 Forbes Commission, 169–171, 188n57

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Fouchard, Jean, 36n35, 40n72, 40n74, 70n25, 70n29, 71n44 Fourcand, Jacques, 107 France: and Bonapartism, 85; emancipation announcement of 1793, 55; French attempts to reconquer Haiti, 54–55; recognition of Haitian independence, 56, 138; US-French relations, 132–134. See also Colonialism Franck, Thomas, 227n23 FRAPH. See Front pour l’Avancement et le Progrès Haïtien Free people of color: demographics, 33n17; and French revolutionary ideas, 45–47; and plantation system, 45–46; quarrel between whites and mulattoes as impetus for Haitian Revolution, 48; race relations in colonial society, 45–48. See also Affranchis; Mulattoes Free trade zone, 209–210 French National Assemby decree of 1790, 46–47 French Revolution, 44–47 Front pour l’Avancement et le Progrès Haïtien (FRAPH), 198, 225n14 Fugitive political conduct, 66, 67, 76n90 Fujimori, Alberto, 218 Fukuyama, Francis, 8 Gaillard, Roger, 132 Gallatin, Albert, 152n15 Garde d’Haïti, 174–175, 190n77 Gates, Robert, 225n14 Geffrard, Fabre, 154n44 Geggus, David, 20, 22, 30, 37n43, 64–65 Gelbard, Robert, 39n70 Gendarmerie: and corvée system during US occupation, 161; and Forbes Commission, 170; and US occupation, 167, 168; and US withdrawal, 174–175. See also Garde d’Haïti Genovese, Eugene, 104 Gens de couleur, 45, 47, 53. See also Free people of color; Mulattoes

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Germany, 138–140, 153n36, 154n40 Girard, Philippe, 198, 199 Gonaïves, 212, 215 Gramsci, Antonio, 9, 82–83 Grands blancs, 44, 47, 69n13 Grands mangeurs, 93–94, 119n40, 214 Great Britain, 137–138 Great Depression of 1929, 168 Griffin, Thomas M., 128n124 Griots, 177–181 Groupe des 184, 208 Groupuscule, 221 Grummon, Stuart, 160 Guantánamo Bay, 141, 199 Guerrier, Philippe, 123n66 Guerrilla warfare, 30, 161–163. See also Militarization of Haitian society Gwoupmans, 221–222 Haass, Richard, 227n17 Habitus, vii, 14–16. See also Authoritarian habitus Haiti, postcolonial period: and charter of 1801, 88–89; early rulers’ attempts to reestablish plantation economy, 5, 63–67, 78n101, 90–91, 103, 122n58; economic collapse, 57–58, 74n67, 136; expatriate industry of damage claims, 139, 153n36; German intervention, 138–140, 153n36, 154n40; ruling class, 81–84; US embargo, 135– 136; US-Haiti relations, 132–147, 152n7. See also Militarization of Haitian society; Presidential monarchism; specific rulers Haiti, post-1945 era, 179–180; coups and countercoups following collapse of Duvalier dictatorship, 196–197; current crisis, 231–236; Hurricane Hazel, 182; noirisme and noiriste movement, 176–181, 195; social divisions, 176–181, 195; transnationalization of politics, 215–216. See also UN Stabilization Mission in Haiti; US military intervention of 1994; specific rulers

Haiti, US occupation of. See US military intervention of 1994; US occupation of Haiti (1915–1943) Haitian army, 127n122; centralization of, 164–166, 194, 235; deconstruction under Duvalier, 194–195, 234–235; disbanded by Aristide, 211, 224, 235; lack of necessity for, 213; and proliferation of armed gangs, 212–213. See also Militarization of Haitian society Haitian culture: creolization, 23–24; culture of caudillismo, 84; evolution of, 22–23; hierarchical ethic, 60–62; problems with “African” explanations of culture, 18–23; problems with child-rearing arguments, 28–29; problems with modernization and development theories, 27–28; and slavery, 22– 24, 36n36; US perceptions of, 189n70; and violence of revolution, 59–60. See also Class divisions; Haitian identity; Militarization of Haitian society; Politique du ventre (politics of the belly); Social divisions Haitian identity: Haitian solidarity and the US occupation, 164; name origin, 24, 37n43; and noirisme, 176–179; and revolution, 20; and slave communities, 19; and white supremacist world order, 24 Haitian independence: economic collapse, 57–58, 74n67; French attempts to reconquer Haiti, 54–55; French recognition of, 56; and Great Britain, 137; and indemnity payment to France, 56; international rejection of, 24, 53–56, 72n52, 137–138; militarization as a result of external threats, 56–58; US recognition of, 73n60, 136; USHaiti relations, 134–136 Haitian National Police (HNP), 114 Haitian People, The (Leyburn), 56–57 Haitian population: diaspora, 215– 216, 230n57; disenchantment with

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rulers, 103; division between repressive state and rural masses, 63, 67, 234; origins of “fugitive political conduct,” 66, 67, 76n90; refugees, 199–200. See also Bossales; Class divisions; Creoles; Dominant class; Free people of color; Haitian culture; Haitian identity; Moun andeyo; Mulattoes; Noiriste movement; Peasants; Slaves; Social divisions; Urban poor; White population of Haiti Haitian Revolution, viii; “betrayals” during struggle for independence, 51–53; Bois Caïman, 21–22, 35n28, 35n32, 48–49, 69n25; coexistence of authoritarian and emancipation habitus, 16; and death of Ogé and Chavannes, 48; destruction of plantation infrastructure, 51, 52, 60; ethnicity of founding fathers, 37n43; extermination of white colonists, 24; and identity, 20; language of, 23–24; and marronnage, 41n79; Métral on causes of, 38n49; and militarization of society, 90; mortality rate, 57–58; and race relations in colonial society, 47–48; Trouillot on causes of, 40n76; and US fears of slave revolts, 135, 152n17; and US-French relations, 134–135; and violence of slave system, 59–60; and Vodou religion, 21–22 Hall, Peter, 15 Hamilton, Alexander, 88, 137 Handal, Stanley, 128n137 Harrison, Lawrence E., 12n24, 16–17 Heads of state. See Rulers Heinl, Nancy, 175 Heinl, Robert, 175 Hierarchical ethic, 60–62 Hodges, Wallace, 28 Homo sacer, 113, 232 Hoover, Herbert, 169–170 Hurbon, Laennec, 201 Hurricane Hazel, 182 Identity. See Haitian identity

261

Indemnity payment to France, 56 Inglehart, Ronald, 27 Inkeles, Alex, 26 Interim government of Alexandre and Latortue, 212–216 International governance, problems with, 7–8, 219–221. See also UN Stabilization Mission in Haiti; US military intervention of 1994; US occupation of Haiti (1915–1943) Izméry, Antoine, 213 Jackson, James, 135 James, C. L. R., xiii, 47, 48, 60, 69n19, 114–115 Jan-l pase, l-pase saying, 108, 109 Janvier, Louis-Joseph, 97 Jay Treaty, 133 Jean-Claudisme project, 196, 203 Jean-François (leader of slave insurrection), 22, 49, 52 Jean-Juste, Gérard, 213 Jefferson, Thomas, 134–137 Jérémie massacre, 225n7 Jolibois, Joseph, 188n62 Kamoken, 195, 234 Kétant, Beaudoin “Jacques,” 229n46 Kikongo language, 23–24 Kilick, Hammerton, 154n40 Kopytoff, Igor, 61, 62 “Labanye” (Thomas Robinson), 128n124, 229n52 LaCerte, Robert K., 77n92 Laguerre, Michel, 166, 216, 230n57 Landownership, 77n92, 104, 105, 125n94 Language, 23–24 Lansing, Robert, 145, 147–148 Lapointe, J.-B., 45 Laroche, Léon, 139 Latell, Brian, 225n14 Latortue, Gérard, 109, 212–217 Lavalas movement: and attachés, 108; and authoritarian habitus, 203; and Chimères, 108–109, 113–114; and corruption, 96, 210; and elections of 2000, 208; and messianic

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tendencies, 102–103, 203; origins of, 197; and politics of color, 100; and Préval, 218; repression under interim government, 213; split with Aristide, 206; and warring gangs in urban areas, 127n122 Lear, Tobias, 136 Leclerc, Charles Victor Emmanuel, 54, 134 Lescot, Elie, 175 Lese grennen, 91 Lewis, Gordon K., 177 Leyburn, James, 56–57, 67, 89–90, 92 Liberal internationalism, 141 Liberation theology, 196–197 Life chances, Dahrendorf on, 32n5, 229n48 Lincoln, Abraham, 136 Longue durée, viii, 2, 172, 181, 194 Louis XIV, 58 Louisiana Purchase, 134 Louverture, Toussaint, 22; and agrarian authoritarianism, 63, 64, 65, 78n101, 90–91; background of, 71n44; Blancpain on, 31n1; charter of 1801, 3, 88–89, 101; and corruption, 94; and disintegration of large estates, 66; and hierarchical ethic, 61–62; and insurrection of 1791, 52; internecine struggles, 112, 128n129; and landownership, 77n92; messianic tendencies, 13; Moïse on, 76n90; and paternalism, 101; Pluchon on, 17–18, 61–62; and presidential monarchism, 88–89; and Vodou religion, 22 Lovejoy, Paul, 23 Lüders, Emil, 139 Lundhal, Mats, 77n91 Madiou, Thomas, 95, 105 Magloire, Paul, 180–182 Maguire, Robert, 40n72 Makouts. See Tontons Makouts Malnutrition. See Food shortages Malone, David, 200, 227n17 Manifest Destiny, 115 Manigat, Leslie, 141–142, 218

Manuel, Robert, 100 Marcella, Gabriel, 219 Marchaterre massacre, 169 Maroon communities. See Marronnage Marronnage, 2, 5, 29–30; causes of, 40n74, 40n76; defined, 40n72; and early postcolonial period, 66, 104; and Haitian Revolution, 41n79; and social divisions, 49 Marx, Karl, 82, 84–85, 115, 236 Matthewson, Tim, 136, 140 Maximilien, General, 108 Mbembe, Achille, 59–60 McClelland, David C., 26 McDonald, James P., 142 Menos, Solon, 144 Messianic tendencies of rulers, viii, 2, 13, 172, 209; and Lavalas movement, 102–103, 203; and presidential monarchism, 83, 87, 102 Metayer, Amiot “Cubain,” 109, 210 Metayer, Butteur, 109, 210 Métral, Antoine, 38n49 Middle Passage, 22 Midy, Franklin, 101, 124n75 Militarization of Haitian society, 66, 212, 217; centralization of the army, 164–166, 194, 235; and coercive labor practices in plantation system, 63–66, 90–91; consequences of, 56; and coup of 1946, 175–176; coups and countercoups following collapse of Duvalier dictatorship, 196–197; deconstruction of the army, 194– 195, 211, 234–235; and Dessalines, 89–90; and Duvalier, 107–108, 126n113, 193–195; and elections, 173; guerrilla resistance to US occupation, 161–163; and Latortue, 213–214; and MINUSTAH’s failure to disarm armed groups, 212; peasant insurrections of the 1800s, 105–106, 126n103, 126n104; peasants enlisted in private militias, 131–132; private militias of rulers, 86–87, 89, 107–109, 126n113, 193–194, 210; proliferation of

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armed gangs, 127n122, 207, 211, 212, 217, 235; as result of international hostility, 56–58; and US occupation, 164–168. See also Attachés; Chimères; Garde d’Haïti; Gendarmerie; Tontons Makouts Millet, Kethly, 150n1 Millspaugh, Arthur, 161, 163, 164, 186n31 Mintz, Sidney, 23, 105, 125n94 MINUSTAH. See UN Stabilization Mission in Haiti Modernization theory, 26–28, 183 Mogadishu, Somalia, 198, 199 Moïse, Claude, 76n90, 89, 101–102, 180, 181 Môle St. Nicholas, 141, 154n44 Monroe Doctrine, 140, 145 Montas, Michèle, 208 Moral, Paul, 66, 121n58 Moton, Robert Russa, 188n57 Moton Commission, 188n57 Moun andeyo, 59, 113; and Aristide, 102, 197; exclusion of, viii; exploited by ruling class, ix, 235; and “low-intensity democracy,” 204, 205; need for inclusion in moral and community of citizens, 235–236; peasants as, 105, 106. See also Peasants; Subordinate classes; Urban poor Moun Ginen, 64, 78n94 Moyse, General, 112, 128n134 Mulâtrisme, 99 Mulattoes: and Boyer, 122n65; decline of power in post-1945 era, 176; and Dessalines, 97–98; and Duvalier, 194–195, 225n7; and French revolutionary ideas, 45–46; and noirisme, 99–100; and noiriste movement, 178; and Pétion, 104; race relations in colonial society, 45–48, 69n19; refusal to enlist support of slaves, 47–48; and Vincent, 188n62 Munro, Dana G., 171, 174 “n Achievement” concept, 26 Napoleon Bonaparte, 54–55, 134–135

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Neoliberalism, 204, 205, 209–210 Neptune, Yvon, 213 Nicholls, David, 45–46, 98, 153n36, 164, 178 Noir, Pierre, 108 Noirisme, 99–100, 176–181, 194, 195 Noiriste movement, 99, 108, 177–181 Noriega, Roger, 208 Nouveaux libres, 99, 123n70 Nunn, Sam, 228n29 Ogé, Vincent, 45, 48 Operation Baghdad, 214 Operation Uphold Democracy, 200–205 OPL. See Organisation du Peuple en Lutte Organisation du Peuple en Lutte (OPL), 206–207 Ott, Thomas, 47 “Papa Doc.” See Duvalier, François Paternalism, 100–102, 124n75, 166–167 Patrimonialism, 62–63, 84–85 Patronage systems, 93–96, 104, 131 Peacekeeping force. See UN Stabilization Mission in Haiti Péan, Leslie, 90, 93, 99, 108, 122n65 Peasants, 108; antidemocratic effects of economic strategies tied to “lowintensity democracy,” 204; and Aristide, 209–210; and Code Rural of 1826, 91–92, 118n34; corvée system during US occupation, 161– 163, 185n17; current conditions, 231–232; division between repressive state and rural masses, 63, 67, 91–92; as excluded outsiders, viii, 126n101; exploited by political entrepreneurs, 131–132, 150n1; insurrections of the 1800s, 105– 106, 108, 126n103, 126n104; lack of incentives for peasant production, 105; and landownership, 104, 105; and Marchaterre massacre, 169; pauperization of, 104; pejorative terms for, 126n101; resistance to coercive labor

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practices, 67, 91–92, 103–105, 122n58, 161–163; rise of small peasant production, 66–67, 103–104; rural surveillance system under US occupation, 166–167; serfdom following independence, 57, 65, 66, 78n101, 90–91, 128n134; and subsistence agriculture, 5, 66–67, 92–93, 104. See also Moun andeyo; Subordinate classes Péralte, Charlemagne, 161–162 Personality cults of rulers, 87, 221 Pétion, Alexandre: and agrarian authoritarianism, 65; and corruption, 93, 95; and Dessalines’s daughter, 98, 122n63; and landownership, 77n92; and paternalism, 101–102; and presidential monarchism, 89 Petits blancs, 44, 47, 69n13 Phillips, William, 145 Pierre-Louis, François, 216 Piquets, 105–106, 108, 126n103, 126n104 Piquion, René, 179 Plantation system, 122n58; coercive labor practices following independence, 57, 63–67, 90–91, 103–105, 122n58, 161–163; and conflict between Toussaint and Moyse, 128n134; destruction of plantation infrastructure, 51, 52, 60, 71n39; disintegration of large estates, 66; early rulers’ attempts to reestablish, 5, 63–67, 78n101, 90–91, 103, 122n58; and free people of color, 45–46; heterogeneous slave populations, 20; and militarization, 57, 65; paradoxes of plantation system economic imperatives, 62–66; profitability of smallholder vs. large estate production, 77n91; and slave insurrection of 1791, 51, 52; social hierarchies, 49–50; and US occupation, 163–164, 186n31 Pluchon, Pierre, 17–18, 55, 59, 61–62, 94 “Plucking the chicken without making it cry,” 93 Plummer, Brenda Gayle, 135, 138, 139, 183

Police. See Garde d’Haïti; Gendarmerie; Militarization of Haitian society Political culture, 10; distinguished from habitus, 14–16 Political parties, 208, 221 Political power struggles: appeals to nationalistic and racist sentiment, 87, 98–99, 178–179; and current crisis, 234; deconstruction of the army, 194–195, 234–235; elimination of rivals, 112–113, 195, 234; exploitation of peasants by political entrepreneurs, 131–132, 150n1; and mercenary character of Haitian politics, 109, 210; and patronclient relationships, 131; and plantation system, 128n134; private militias of rulers, 86–87, 89, 107– 109, 126n113, 193–194, 210; roots of violence, 60; as zero-sum game, viii, 7, 93–94, 114, 178. See also Coups; Politique du ventre (politics of the belly); Presidential monarchism; Rulers Politique du ventre (politics of the belly), 5–6, 93–96, 119n39; and appeals to nationalistic and racist sentiment, 99; and Aristide, 109; and class divisions, 106–107; and Duvalier, 107–108; and elimination of rivals, 112–113; and mercenary character of Haitian politics, 210; privatization of, 110 Polyarchy, 201–202 Port-au-Prince: and centralization of military power, 164–166, 194, 235; climate of anarchy, 214, 217; gang violence, 212, 217; killings of Aristide’s followers, 213 Port-au-Prince Agreement, 228n29 Poverty, 7; and child-rearing, 29; and climate of anarchy, 215; and neoliberalism, 204; pauperization of peasant class, 104; and rise of lumpen-criminal class, 213, 214 Powell, Colin, 228n29 Powell, W. F., 141 Predatory rule, 6, 56, 60, 235. See also Political power struggles; Politique du ventre (politics of the belly)

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Presidential monarchism, 13, 81–130; and absence of integral state, 83; appeals to nationalistic and racist sentiment, 87, 98–99; and authoritarian habitus, 84, 86; and Bonapartism, 84–86; characteristics of presidential monarchs, 83–84; and class divisions, 82–84; components of syndrome, 86–87; and constitution of 1801, 88–89; and constraints on rulers, 85–86; and corruption, 83–85, 87, 93–96; and culture of caudillismo, 84; early postcolonial period, 88–89; and end of first US occupation, 171–172; mercenary character of loyalty to rulers, 109; and messianic tendencies, 83, 87, 102–103; and paternalism, 100–102; and patrimonialism/ sultanism, 84–85; personality cults, 87; private militias, 86–87, 89, 107–109, 126n113, 210; purges, 111–113; and ruling class, 83–84, 106; threats to position, 111–113; and US occupation, 164–165. See also Rulers Préval, René, x; and Aristide, 202, 205–208, 218–219; challenges facing, 218–221; and Chimères, 207; and elections of 2006, 217– 218; lack of autonomy, 206–207; and politics of color, 100; and politics of doublure, 206; and predatory class interests, 110; relationships with Cuba and Venezuela, 222; rise to power, 202; weakening of central control, 207, 212 Price, Richard, 23, 24 Price-Mars, Jean, 176–178 Protestant ethic, 26 Purges, political, 111–113 Race as political tool, 87, 98–100. See also Noirisme; Noiriste movement Racism: and Jeffersonian America, 134–135, 137; race relations in colonial society, 45–48, 69n13, 69n19; skin pigmentation, 47,

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69n19, 98; and US occupation, 145, 150, 152n7, 159–161, 164, 173, 184n2 Railroad concessions, 142, 155n54 Raimond, François, 45 Raimond, Julien, 45 Ravix, Remissainthe, 217 Reagan, Ronald, 15, 196 Refugees, 199–200 Regan, Jane, 226n15 Reich, Otto, 208 Reybaud, Maxime, 105 Ribeiro, Augusto Heleno, 212 Road building. See Corvée system Robinson, Randall, 200 Robinson, Thomas (“Labanye”), 128n124, 229n52 Robinson, William, 201–202 Rochambeau, Vicomte de, 54–55 Roett, Riordan, 219 Roosevelt, Franklin D., 171–172 Roosevelt, Theodore, 144–145 Rosenberg, Tina, 204 Rotberg, Robert, 28–29 Roumain, Jacques, 188n62 Roy, Eugene, 171 Rulers, viii; attempts to reestablish plantation system, 5, 63–67, 78n101, 90–91, 103, 122n58; failure to relinquish office voluntarily, viii, 110; historical and structural constraints on, ix–x, xiii, 4, 7, 85–86, 114–115, 221, 236; mercenary character of loyalty to, 109; private militias, 86–87, 89, 107–109, 126n113, 210; threats to position, 111–113. See also Authoritarian habitus; Corruption; Messianic tendencies of rulers; Personality cults of rulers; Political power struggles; Politique du ventre (politics of the belly); Predatory rule; Presidential monarchism; specific rulers Ruling class. See Dominant class Russell, John H., Jr., 161, 164, 167, 168, 170, 171, 174 Saint-Venant, Barré, 25 Sala-Molins, Louis, 58

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Salnave, Silvain, 153n36, 154n44 Sam, Simon, 139, 140 Sam, Vilbrun Guillaume, 132, 144, 146, 151n3 Sannon, Pauleus, 148–149 Sansaricq, Antoine, 148 Santiago Declaration, 201 Schatzberg, Michael, 15 Schmidt, Hans, 159, 184n2, 187n33 Scott, James, 82, 92 Serfdom, 57, 65, 66, 78n101, 90–91, 128n134 Similien, 108 Skin pigmentation, 47, 69n19, 98. See also Racism Slave insurrections, 50–52; “betrayals” during struggle for independence, 51–53; destruction of plantation infrastructure, 71n39; leaders of, 49; as “unthinkable” in colonial society, 24–25; and US-French relations, 133. See also Bois Caïman Slaves: “betrayals” during struggle for independence, 51–53; Bossales, 19, 49–51; commandeurs, 49, 51, 52, 70n26; creolization of, 19, 23–24, 49–51; culture, 22–24, 36n36; demographics, 18–19, 20, 33n17; diverse African origins, 34n18; emancipation under charter of 1801, 3; French emancipation announcement of 1793, 55; hierarchical ethic, 4–5; horrific conditions of slavery, 58–60, 75n80; mortality rate, 34n19, 59; and paternalism, 124n75; problems with “African” explanations of culture, 18–23; race relations in colonial society, 45–48, 69n19; rejected as allies by mulattoes, 47–48; slave elites, 20, 49–51; social divisions, 19–20, 49–51; in the United States, 133, 136; and Vodou religion, 18, 21; white perceptions of, 24–26, 37n49. See also Bois Caïman; Haitian Revolution; Marronnage; Nouveaux libres; Slave insurrections

Smith, David, 26 Smith, Jennie, 222 Smith, Madison R., 143 Social divisions: division between repressive state and rural masses, 67, 91–92, 234; division of colonial society, 44–50, 53, 69n19; division of labor following revolution, 64; division of postcolonial society, 81–84, 98–99; division of slave community, 19–20, 49–51; and Duvalier, 195; and militarization, 56, 90; and post-1945 era, 176– 181; and struggle for independence, 53. See also Class divisions Soil erosion, 7 Solarz, Stephen, 227n17 Somalia, 198, 199 Sonthonax, Léger Félicité, 55, 64 Soulouque, Faustin-Élie, 108 Steele Foundation, 209, 228n44 Stimson, Henry, 171, 173 Stinchombe, Arthur, 53, 84 Stotzky, Irwin P., 128n124 Subordinate classes: and “compromise equilibrium,” 83; and criminality, 211; and exhaustion of authoritarian system, 223–224; need for inclusion in moral and community of citizens, 235–236; and presidential monarchism, 82–83, 105–106. See also Moun andeyo; Peasants; Serfdom; Slaves; Urban poor Subsistence agriculture, 5, 66–67, 104 Sultanism, 84–85 Taxation, 64, 104, 169 Teledyol, 215 Théodore, Davilmar, 144 Thiele, August, 139 Thornton, John, 23, 30, 36n36, 60, 64 Ti Legliz, 196 Tilly, Charles, 108 Tolstoi, Leo, xiii Tonnerre, Boisrond, 95 Tontons Makouts, 107–108, 126n113, 193–194 Toussaint. See Louverture, Toussaint

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“Toussaint’s Clause,” 133–134 Transnationalization of Haitian politics, 215–216 Treaty of 1778, 133 Treaty of 1915, 161 Trouillot, Michel-Rolph, 29, 40n76, 72n52, 107–108, 193–194 UN Security Council Resolution 940, 201, 227n26 UN Stabilization Mission in Haiti (MINUSTAH), 212, 214, 220. See also Latortue, Gérard Underdevelopment: common theories of, 26; and habitus vs. political culture concepts, 14–16; and “lowintensity democracy,” 204; paradoxes of plantation system economic imperatives, 63–64 United States: abandonment of Aristide, 209–211; and Banque Nationale d’Haïti, 142–144, 155n58, 174; CIA support for the military, 198, 225n14; and Duvalier, 194; embargo following revolution, 135–136, 152n15; fears of export of revolution, 135, 152n17; and Latortue, 216; Monroe Doctrine, 140, 145; perceptions of Haitians, 159–162, 167; railroad concessions, 142, 155n54; recognition of Haitian independence, 73n60, 136; slavery, 133, 136. See also US military intervention of 1994; US occupation of Haiti (1915–1943) Urban poor: armed gangs, 127n122, 207, 211, 212, 217, 235; and Cédras, 234; climate of anarchy, 214; current conditions, 231–232; and manipulation of chiméres term, 113–114; marginalization of, 113; and rise of lumpen-criminal class, 213, 214. See also Subordinate classes US military intervention of 1994, 197–205; and Aristide, 4, 115, 197–202, 205, 220; and economy, 204; justifications for, 198–202, 226n15, 227n17, 227n29; and “low-intensity democracy,”

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201–204; UN Resolution 940, 201, 227n26 US occupation of Haiti (1915–1943), 4, 115, 132, 155n58; agricultural concessions, 186n31; and Borno, 164–165; constitution, 149–150; corvée system, 161–163, 185n17; as la dictature bicéphale, 164, 168; and economy, 174; effects of, 173– 174, 182–184, 219–220, 234–235; as “experiment in pragmatism,” 182–183; Forbes Commission, 169–171, 188n57; guerrilla resistance to, 161–163; and Haitian identity, 164; and imperial foreign policy, 140–146; initial collaboration with traditional elites, 164; intensification of nationalist resistance to, 169; justifications for, 144–145, 147, 189n70; legalization of, 148–149, 161; Marchaterre massacre, 169; martial law, 167– 168; and militarization, 164–168; and noiriste movement, 177–181; objectives of, 147–148; and plantation system, 163–164; policies, 166–168; prelude to, 145–146; and presidential monarchism, 164–165; and racism, 145, 150, 152n7, 159– 161, 164, 173, 184n2; selection of president, 146–147; US-Haiti relations prior to occupation, 132–147; withdrawal, 169–172 US occupation of Haiti (1994–1996), 4, 115 Venezuela, 222 Villate, Jean-Louis, 45 Vincent, Sténio, 171–172, 190n77; Blancpain on, 188n62; and Calixte, 174–175; and economy, 174; messianic tendencies, 172 Vodou religion, 17; Bois Caïman, 21–22, 35n32, 69n25; evolution of, 21; and Haitian Revolution, 21–22; and noirisme, 176, 178 Volè volé volè saying, 95 Volontaires de la Sécurité Nationale. See Tontons Makouts

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INDEX

von Schwerin, Count, 139 Waller, Littleton, 159, 160, 184n2 Wallerstein, Immanuel, 10–11 Washington, George, 133 Weatherly, Ulysses, 182–183, 189n70 Weber, Max, 26, 84–85 Welzel, Christian, 27 White population of Haiti: colonial social divisions, 44, 47; and insurrection of 1791, 51–53; race relations in colonial society, 45–48, 69n13

White supremacist world order, 4, 24, 53–55, 72n52 Whitman, Daniel, 39n70 Wilentz, Amy, 210 Wilson, Woodrow, 145, 148 Zero-sum game, politics as, viii, 7; and class divisions, 114; and current crisis, 234; and Magloire’s coup of 1950, 181; and noiriste movement, 178; and presidential monarchism, 93–94; and violence of revolution, 60 Zinglendos armed bands, 211 Zinglins, 108

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About the Book

THOUGH FOUNDED in the wake of a revolution that embodied its slave population’s quest for freedom and equality, Haiti has endured a history marked by an unending pattern of repressive dictatorial regimes. Exploring that history, Robert Fatton offers a rigorous explanation of how and why the legacy of colonialism, the struggle against slavery, and the intersection of the domestic and world economies have contributed to both material scarcity in the country and the entrenchment of authoritarian rule. Fatton illuminates the culture of authoritarianism that, coupled with conditions of extreme underdevelopment, continues to undermine Haiti’s recent struggle to establish a meaningful democracy. While offering some hope for the emergence of a more accountable political system, he underscores the profound difficulties of freeing Haitian society from the structural legacy of its long history of despotism. Robert Fatton Jr. is Julia A. Cooper Professor of Government and Foreign Affairs at the University of Virginia. His numerous publications include Haiti’s Predatory Republic: The Unending Transition to Democracy.

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