1880: (The French Military Mission and the Pariah Army): A three-officer French military mission — the first such to come to Haiti — arrived in 1880, and at …

1880: (The French Military Mission and the Pariah Army): A three-officer French military mission — the first such to come to Haiti — arrived in 1880, and at their recommendation on October 6 the president reorganized the armed forces to a paper strength of 16,000, assigned to thirty-four infantry and four artillery regiments, with arsenals at the capital, Cap, Cayes, Jérémie, Gonaïves, St. Marc, and Jacmel, and — most important — an 1,800-man Presidential Guard modeled on Geffrard’s Tirailleurs, the only mounted troops in the country. The military mission left its mark in uniforms and equipment, including the dread Belgian and French mitrailleuses — machine guns — now prudently sited to cover approaches and passages of the National Palace, and for the first time a trickle of elite young men received appointments to St. Cyr, Saumur, and the École Polytechnique. Only thirteen years earlier, St. John had reported the army’s grade distribution as 6,500 general officers and staff, 7,000 other officers, and 6,500 enlisted men — the proverbial phrase ran that any Haitian who was not a two-star general was at least a private. Anténor Firmin wrote mordantly that military service was a penalty inflicted only on the rural peasantry — the son of an elite family expatriated himself to evade service and boasted of it in a Paris salon — while the soldiers, illiterate and ignorant of drill, comprised the pariahs of Haiti’s demi-barbarism, neither quartered nor clothed nor cared for like human beings, lucky to receive rations one day out of three while laboring without pay on jobs for the officers and their cronies. When a Haitian wearing epaulets declared himself a soldier, Firmin observed, it only meant he was ready to commit the most horrible crimes when ordered by a superior. The structural reality that Firmin anatomized — a peasant conscript army serving an officer class that existed to seize rather than defend, trained not to fight but to loot — represented the military legacy of the plantation transposed into republican form, in which the same extraction of Black labor that had enriched the colonial master now enriched the noir and mulâtre officer caste who had inherited his function.