1860-03-28: (Haiti Signs a Concordat With the Vatican, Restoring Relations With the Holy See Broken Since Dessalines Ordered the Killing of the White Populat…

1860-03-28: (Haiti Signs a Concordat With the Vatican, Restoring Relations With the Holy See Broken Since Dessalines Ordered the Killing of the White Population in 1804, a Diplomatic Achievement That Would Also Import European Religious Persecution of Vodou): On March 28, 1860, the Haitian government and the Vatican signed a concordat that restored formal relations between the Holy See and Haiti for the first time since the Revolution. The concordat was Geffrard’s crowning diplomatic achievement, the product of his conviction that international legitimacy required the embrace of European institutional Christianity. The agreement had immediate consequences: the Archdiocese of Port-au-Prince was created in 1861, and European priests and missionaries, the majority of them Breton French, flooded into the country. They brought with them schools and hospitals, which Haiti desperately needed, and a systematic campaign to eradicate Vodou, which they viewed as pagan superstition incompatible with Christian civilization. The anti-Vodou campaigns of 1896 and 1941 descended directly from the 1860 concordat. Haiti had gained a European institutional church. The price was a European institutional contempt for the spiritual traditions that had sustained the enslaved population through three centuries of bondage and had, at Bois Caïman, launched the Revolution itself.