1879, July 17: (The Departure of Boisrond-Canal: Eighteen Revolts in Three Years): Not exactly overthrown but rather pushed aside by his own class, Boisrond-…

1879, July 17: (The Departure of Boisrond-Canal: Eighteen Revolts in Three Years): Not exactly overthrown but rather pushed aside by his own class, Boisrond-Canal did the only thing he could — with a year of his term remaining, after at least eighteen separate uprisings in three years against the most moderate regime since the days of Pétion, he stood down. On July 17, 1879, at six in the evening, accompanied by his family and military suite, the luckless president walked from the National Palace to the quay, where boats awaited to take them aboard a French steamer for St. Thomas. People cheered him all the way — there was a sense he had done the best he could — and he raised his hat and bowed left and right, while the Nationalists made ready for the return of Salomon. Boisrond’s departure — cheered to the quay by the very populace whose factions had made governance impossible — embodied the paradox that Glissant might recognize as the Caribbean’s characteristic gesture of opacity: the surface warmth of the farewell concealing the structural impossibility of constitutional rule in a polity where the instruments of power had never been divorced from the instruments of violence, where every president remained prisoner of the same unresolved tensions between color, region, and class that the plantation had bequeathed to the republic.