1843-02-13: (Boyer Overthrown After Twenty-Five Years in Power, the Longest Presidency in Haitian History, Toppled by Charles Rivière-Hérard in the Wake of E…

1843-02-13: (Boyer Overthrown After Twenty-Five Years in Power, the Longest Presidency in Haitian History, Toppled by Charles Rivière-Hérard in the Wake of Economic Collapse, Peasant Discontent, and a Devastating Earthquake): On February 13, 1843, Charles Rivière-Hérard overthrew Jean Pierre Boyer, ending the longest presidency in Haitian history. Boyer had reunited Haiti in 1820, conquered the Dominican Republic in 1822, negotiated the catastrophic indemnity with France in 1825, and imposed the Code Rural in 1826. He had governed for twenty-five years, and in the end every one of his major policies had weakened the nation he claimed to serve. The economy was crippled by debt. The peasantry was alienated by forced labor laws. The mulatto elite that had sustained him had fractured. And the 1842 earthquake had devastated the north. Boyer fled to Jamaica and then to France, where he died in exile on July 9, 1850. Rivière-Hérard declared himself president in April 1843. In December 1843, the National Assembly enacted a new constitution that abolished the presidency for life, the first formal acknowledgment that the concentrated executive power inherited from the Revolution had become an instrument of tyranny rather than liberation.