1849, July–September: (The Cardboard Crown and the Empire of Faustin I): In July 1849, teledjòl spread a mysterious word that the Holy Virgin — or was it Mèt…

1849, July–September: (The Cardboard Crown and the Empire of Faustin I): In July 1849, teledjòl spread a mysterious word that the Holy Virgin — or was it Mètrès Ezili? — had appeared atop a certain palm tree on the Champ de Mars and signaled that God had anointed the president to become emperor of Haiti, an annunciation that circulated alike through army officers and zinglins until Port-au-Prince was awash in petitions demanding the Senate elevate Soulouque to a throne. (11) On August 26, after thus learning the will of the people, the entire Senate, mounted on horseback, proceeded as a body to the palace, where the president of the Senate produced a crown fashioned the night before from gilded cardboard, clapped it on Soulouque’s brow, and conducted the new emperor to an extemporized coronation mass — what Glissant might call the Caribbean’s characteristic gesture of creolized sovereignty, in which the borrowed forms of European monarchy were simultaneously inhabited and subverted by a people whose political imagination owed as much to Dahomey as to Versailles. Less than a month later, on September 20, a new constitution legitimized the proceedings: Faustin I and his progeny after him would rule the Empire of Haiti, with the emperor appointing the Senate and creating orders of nobility — 4 princes, 59 dukes, 2 marquises, 90 counts, 215 barons, and 30 chevaliers, altogether 400 titled persons in the first batch alone, dwarfing Christophe’s 77 nobles created over four years. The new nobility included some figures that European observers found absurd — Bobo, chief zinglin of the North and a man Boyer had jailed for atrocities, became “Monseigneur le Prince de Bobo,” while Voltaire Castor was dubbed “Comte de l’Île-à-Vache” — yet Faustin’s nobility, widely mocked abroad and mercilessly caricatured in France by Daumier’s contemporary Cham, represented the people he had to work with and the only ones he felt he could trust. Read through Wynter’s framework, the international ridicule directed at Soulouque’s court was itself a disciplinary mechanism of colonial modernity: the overrepresentation of European Man as the sole legitimate template for sovereign governance meant that any Black attempt to inhabit the forms of statehood — crowns, titles, ermine — was automatically reclassified as parody, a judgment that revealed far more about the epistemological violence of the observers than about the political intelligence of the observed.