1859, January 23: (Geffrard Takes Power: The Griffe President and the Hope of Reform): Fabre-Nicolas Geffrard took his oath of office on January 23, 1859, ha…

1859, January 23: (Geffrard Takes Power: The Griffe President and the Hope of Reform): Fabre-Nicolas Geffrard took his oath of office on January 23, 1859, having become president by acclamation — a formal election never occurred to anyone — and British Consul Henry Byron reported to Admiral Stewart that “our revolution has passed over without bloodshed” and, what was more extraordinary still in Haiti, without any revival of those scenes of violence and butchery to which the passions and prejudices of party and colour had on all former occasions given rise. Like his predecessor, Geffrard was a Southerner from Anse-à-Veau and a soldier, but there the resemblance ended: educated, elite, the posthumous issue of one of the fondateurs, he enjoyed a special advantage as the son of a mulâtre father and a darker mother — neither black nor jaune but what Haitians call griffe — and therefore, within the taxonomy of Haitian colorism, seemingly immune to the racism that gnaws at the nation’s political life. (1) A former Praslinite and thus by bent a reformer, Geffrard immediately set to work: on July 18, 1859, he reinstated the 1846 constitution (itself only lightly retouched from the 1816 model) complete with presidency for life, cut the army in half from 30,000 to 15,000, and formed his own Presidential Guard — the Tirailleurs, 3,000 strong, trained under his personal eye with advice from European advisers, the first such to be brought to Haiti. Read through Glissant’s concept of creolized identity, Geffrard’s griffe status reveals the insufficiency of the binary noir/mulâtre framework that structured Haitian political consciousness: his very body transgressed the colonial chromatic categories that both sides deployed as instruments of power, suggesting the possibility — however briefly — of a politics that might operate outside the epistemological prison of colorism that the plantation system had bequeathed.