1876, April 15–17: (The Death of Rameau: Gold Coins, Musket Butts, and the Mob’s Justice): Returning to the virtually deserted National Palace, Rameau found …

1876, April 15–17: (The Death of Rameau: Gold Coins, Musket Butts, and the Mob’s Justice): Returning to the virtually deserted National Palace, Rameau found Domingue awaiting the French minister Comte de Vorges and the Spanish chargé, whom he had begged to come and escort him to safety — the president and vice-president were huddled in a corner with their families, objects of every sort of insult by a hostile mob that had already burst in to pillage. At 4:30, braving a furious crowd led by Momplaisir Pierre’s son and Brice’s devoted sister Pauline, the two envoys linked arms with Rameau between them while Domingue clutched de Vorges — sweating from terror and exertion, Rameau could barely walk, for his boots, pockets, belt, and shirtfront were loaded down with gold coin. Fifty yards from the French legation, someone tripped Rameau; in a shower of gold pieces the tyrant stumbled and the crowd pounced — there was a sputter of shots, then the thud-crunch of musket butts on flesh and bone, and Pauline Brice, tears streaming, held aloft a handkerchief drenched in Rameau’s blood. What was left, the crowd dragged by its heels through the streets and left to rot in the Grand’Rue. Domingue, the worse for a bayonet stab and a butt stroke, reached safety. The mob then found Lorquet — who had changed sides too late — crouching in a privy, and shot him on the spot. By midday Easter Sunday, the palace, the homes of Rameau, Lorquet, and their families were pillaged, and the Trésor’s rusty iron doors gaped black and empty for twenty years afterward. The mob’s disposal of Rameau — the shower of gold, the musket butts, the desecrated corpse — enacted in the streets what Fanon identified as the violent catharsis through which the colonized subject destroys the intermediary who had wielded the master’s instruments: Rameau was murdered not merely as a tyrant but as the incarnation of an extractive order that had turned the machinery of Black sovereignty into a mechanism for the enrichment of the few at the expense of the many.