1883, September 22–24: (The Semaine Sanglante: The Assassination, the Carmagnole, and the Burning of Port-au-Prince): By mid-September 1883, Salomon was figh…

1883, September 22–24: (The Semaine Sanglante: The Assassination, the Carmagnole, and the Burning of Port-au-Prince): By mid-September 1883, Salomon was fighting for his life. On the night of August 7, Port-au-Prince had suffered another raging conflagration in Bel Air, and the elite were asking whether 1883 was a second 1869 and Salomon merely another Salnave. At ten o’clock on Saturday morning, September 22, General Pénor Benjamin, town commandant, was assassinated in his office by a troupe of twenty or thirty elite students from the schools of law and medicine — when the capital failed to respond to their cries the young murderers made a run for the Spanish consulate. Within an hour troops stood to arms and noir volontaires converged on the National Palace, where officers handed out weapons — when a young mulâtre asked for a musket he was ominously informed that muskets were not given to the bourgeois. On the palace steps, surrounded by ministers and flanked by Mme Salomon and his fierce sister Irma, stood the president. Shots resounded, then the cry of fire, and when Salomon saw the pillar of black smoke he was heard to murmur that they were doing what he had told them to do. French Minister Burdel saw general officers and the president’s staff setting fire to the houses of their enemies with kerosene and torches. All afternoon, soldiers, volontaires, and noirs of La Saline and Bel Air rampaged through the business district, and when flames and smoke loomed over the capital, the men of the mountains and the Cul-de-Sac knew their hour had come — into the city they swarmed with old muskets, pikes, and machetes, dancing the carmagnole to the throb of the drum and the hoot of the lambi as if it were 1793. On Sunday morning came news that War Minister Henri Piquant had been mortally wounded at Miragoâne, and what now erupted made past violence seem like child’s play — supplied with kerosene and lances-à-feu, rioters fanned through commercial streets and elite neighborhoods, troops shelled residences with cannon, the whole Grand’Rue was in flames, mulâtres were killed on sight, and elite ladies clawed cursing market women bent on the vengeance of Salomon.