1871–1873: (Fire, Not Insurrection: The Serial Destruction of Port-au-Prince Under Nissage): Throughout Nissage-Saget’s regime, it was not insurrection but f…

1871–1873: (Fire, Not Insurrection: The Serial Destruction of Port-au-Prince Under Nissage): Throughout Nissage-Saget’s regime, it was not insurrection but fire that remained the capital’s greatest scourge, as the city commandant Lorquet kept Port-au-Prince tranquil through sheer severity — discussions tending to cast doubt on the stability of the regime were prohibited, and anyone abroad after nine o’clock at night without a lighted lantern risked summary disposal as an enemy of the state. On November 6, 1871, downtown Port-au-Prince was consumed; on the night of February 9, 1872, the new National Palace blazed with such fury that hills and mountainsides for miles around were illuminated, the French minister writing that in six hours the completely new residence had been transformed into smoking ruins. On April 27, 1873, a child playing with matches ignited a can of lamp oil that ultimately destroyed four square blocks along Rue des Fronts Forts — over eighty buildings and a half-million dollars lost — and less than six weeks later another fire originating in Morne-à-Tuf consumed forty buildings including Father Holly’s laboriously built Episcopal mission, while Catholic priests marshaled by Archbishop Guilloux rolled powder barrels out of the nearby arsenal to prevent explosion. In August came yet another fire, during which officials on horseback dashed through the streets and shabby boys threw stones at the roaring flames as if driving off an evil spirit — the serial conflagrations that consumed Port-au-Prince under Nissage were not random misfortunes but the material expression of a state whose entire infrastructure remained hostage to the same combustible wooden construction, absent municipal services, and military disorder that colonialism had left behind and that no republican regime had possessed the resources or the will to overcome.