1859-01-15: (Soulouque Abdicates After Fabre Geffrard’s Revolution, the Emperor Who Had Terrified the Mulatto Elite Brought Down by a Black General He Had El…

1859-01-15: (Soulouque Abdicates After Fabre Geffrard’s Revolution, the Emperor Who Had Terrified the Mulatto Elite Brought Down by a Black General He Had Elevated to the Nobility as the Duke of Tabara): On January 15, 1859, Emperor Faustin I abdicated. His fall was engineered by Fabre Geffrard, a Black army general whom Soulouque himself had elevated to the nobility as the Duke of Tabara. In December 1858, Geffrard had launched a revolution in northern Haiti that defeated forces loyal to Soulouque. The emperor’s downfall was driven by the cumulative weight of his failures: four unsuccessful invasions of the Dominican Republic, the loss of Navassa to the United States, growing economic distress, and the alienation of every faction in Haitian society that was not personally loyal to his person. Soulouque fled into exile in British Jamaica, since France refused him asylum. He was eventually allowed to return to Haiti, where he died on August 6, 1867, in Petit-Goâve, the town where he had been born into slavery eighty-five years earlier. His reign had demonstrated that Black political power, when exercised autocratically and without institutional foundations, could be as destructive as the mulatto elite dominance it had replaced.