1852, April 18: (The Golden Crown and the Voodoo State): Faustin’s investiture by acclamation and the cardboard crown would hardly do except for the moment, …

1852, April 18: (The Golden Crown and the Voodoo State): Faustin’s investiture by acclamation and the cardboard crown would hardly do except for the moment, and a sumptuous coronation was elaborately planned — but arrangements dragged because Pope Pius IX was unwilling to provide a bishop until matters between Haiti and the Vatican were resolved, and because the French merchants who supplied the thrones, crowns (50,000 francs for Faustin’s alone), scepter, and ermine robes inconveniently demanded cash. On April 18, 1852, following the exact ritual of Napoleon I’s coronation, Faustin I and Adélina, his empress, mounted the altar in a pavilion erected west of the Champ de Mars, were anointed with holy oil by the Abbé Cessens — whose oil was, as père Cabon acidly revealed, ordinary Marseilles salad oil — and donned crowns, this time of real gold. (13) Meanwhile, the spiritual architecture of the regime operated on an entirely different epistemological plane: on the very day Soulouque became president, he had balked at the presidential priedieu, which teledjòl explained was cursed by a bòkò in the service of Boyer, and a wanga buried in the palace grounds had numbered his term to thirteen months — a threat possibly defused by his own bòkò, General Bellegarde, who owed his rapid promotion to ghostly rather than military powers. The regime openly practiced and encouraged Voodoo, installing suitable spiritual advisers in the palace household, including Acaau’s onetime chaplain Frère Joseph as oungan in residence — and it was surely no idle boast when a manbo of these times proclaimed: “If I were to beat the sacred drums and march through the city, not one from the Emperor downward but would humbly follow me.” What the European diplomatic corps could not comprehend — trapped as they were within what Césaire called the suffocating universalism of Western reason — was that Soulouque’s simultaneous practice of Catholicism and Voodoo was not contradiction but synthesis, a creolized spiritual sovereignty in which the rites of Rome and old Dahomey coexisted as complementary technologies of power within a single Black cosmological framework.