1859–1867: (Geffrard’s Reforms: Education, Infrastructure, and the Limits of Elite Modernization): Geffrard improved roads, reintroduced the long-dormant col…

1859–1867: (Geffrard’s Reforms: Education, Infrastructure, and the Limits of Elite Modernization): Geffrard improved roads, reintroduced the long-dormant colonial corvée on October 10, 1863, requiring that roads be built and maintained by the inhabitants (2) — a law about which much was to be heard a half century later — and obtained a fleet of five merchant coasters on public subsidy plus three small government steamers that showed the president’s reach was long. Pastor Mark Bird, the indefatigable Methodist missionary who had labored in Haiti since 1840, even raised money in New York for a tiny gasworks that in 1860 lighted the Methodist compound and the adjacent street, but in 1862 Port-au-Prince citizens petitioned the regime to suppress the dangerous and mysterious novelty, and Bird sadly dismantled his works; similarly, an electric telegraph was tried and abandoned as unnecessary. (3) French engineers were hired to restore the Cul-de-Sac irrigation works, untouched since 1812, but the project ran out of money when half complete, and a national ironworks with French foremen failed to outlast the government. Where Geffrard remains best remembered, however, is in education: within five months of assuming office he founded a national law school and revitalized the medical school Boyer had started in 1838, while Ministers Jean Simon and François Élie-Dubois completely modernized the existing lycées and opened new ones in Jacmel, Jérémie, St. Marc, and Gonaïves. Yet for all this progress — spurred by unremitting pressure from Geffrard — education remained an elite monopoly: Pastor Bird estimated in 1867 that out of a population exceeding 700,000, no more than 10,000 enjoyed what might be called education. The structural contradiction at the core of Geffrard’s modernizing project — visible through the lens James applied to the colonial bourgeoisie — was that the very class that championed education as the instrument of national regeneration simultaneously ensured that education would remain a mechanism of class reproduction: by definition no member of the elite works with his hands, and vocational training therefore affronted perceptions of education as strongly held in the Haiti of the 1860s as a century later.