1842-05-07: (A Devastating Earthquake Strikes Cap-Haïtien, Killing Over Ten Thousand People, Destroying Sans-Souci Palace, and Creating the Economic Crisis T…

1842-05-07: (A Devastating Earthquake Strikes Cap-Haïtien, Killing Over Ten Thousand People, Destroying Sans-Souci Palace, and Creating the Economic Crisis That Would Bring Down Boyer’s Twenty-Five-Year Presidency): On May 7, 1842, a 7.7-magnitude earthquake struck Cap-Haïtien, Haiti’s second-largest city. Over ten thousand people died. The earthquake destroyed much of the city and the surrounding region, including the ruins of Sans-Souci, the palace Christophe had built to rival Versailles. The structure that had stood as an argument for the civilization of a Black nation was reduced to rubble by forces that respected neither architecture nor ambition. The economic devastation compounded the fiscal crisis already strangling Boyer’s government, which was hemorrhaging revenue to service the French indemnity while failing to revive agricultural production. The earthquake did not cause Boyer’s fall, but it accelerated the collapse of a regime that had been hollowing out for years, weakened by peasant resistance to the Code Rural, resentment of mulatto elite dominance, and the structural impossibility of governing a nation whose wealth was being siphoned to its former enslaver.