1848, April 16: (The Massacre of the Mulâtres at the Palais National): One week after the cabinet purge, at three in the afternoon on the next Sunday, the si…

1848, April 16: (The Massacre of the Mulâtres at the Palais National): One week after the cabinet purge, at three in the afternoon on the next Sunday, the signal gun boomed from Fort National, and as the national guards milled in the streets and the Presidential Guard formed in the palace yard, the leading men — generals, senators, ministers, deputies, some noirs but mostly mulâtres — converged on the palace to discover what was afoot. Imperious as ever, Céligny Ardouin strode up to the president to demand an explanation; Soulouque grimly accused him of being the soul of “the mulâtres’ conspiracy” and ordered Bellegarde to arrest him — as Ardouin was marched off, someone tried to snatch his epaulets, there was a scuffle, two shots rang out, and as if on signal the gates of the palace clanged shut while the Presidential Guard faced inward and commenced firing from preloaded muskets into the crowd of elite politicians and merchants. Screaming with pain and panic, people hid behind corpses, scuttled for cover, cowered at the feet of soldiers, or tried to scale the iron fence while other soldiers shot or bayoneted them — within the palace, Cérisier-Lauriston, deputy and former Haitian minister to Paris, lay in a pool of blood with his skull sabered in half, while Ardouin escaped with multiple wounds and was dragged off bleeding to prison. What the European diplomatic corps witnessed that afternoon — the British consul Ussher was conversing with Soulouque when the first volley crashed in the courtyard, and was told not to worry because “the government was merely settling accounts with some conspirators” — was the violent inversion of a colonial racial hierarchy that the mulâtre elite had maintained since Pétion’s republic, a hierarchy in which proximity to whiteness conferred the right to govern and distance from it consigned one to the governed. The next day the firing squads went to work: doctors who had treated the wounded were hunted down, the elegant professors of the Lycée Pétion who would speak only French were targeted, and wives and mothers who reached the palace gates to retrieve the bodies of their men were turned away while corpses swelled in plain view behind the fence until the 18th, when soldiers heaved the dead onto tumbrels and dumped them in a common ditch.