1891–1929: (France, the Church, and the Occupation: The Breton Friars, the Service Technique Collision, and Minister Wiett’s Anti-Occupation Speeches): In 18…

1891–1929: (France, the Church, and the Occupation: The Breton Friars, the Service Technique Collision, and Minister Wiett’s Anti-Occupation Speeches): In 1891, French Minister Flesch had told the Quai d’Orsay that the secular clergy of Haiti were composed exclusively of French priests recruited in Brittany, every man imbued with warmest love of country and therefore strongly inclined to profess that the interests of France and of the Catholic Church were inseparable in the Black Republic — they labored without cease to imbue all classes with French instruction and education, with ideas and tastes that fostered sympathy for France and promoted the sale of French products and commercial enterprises. During the first decade of occupation, France pursued a waiting policy, but the Service Technique, whether so intended or not, became an American challenge to French and Catholic educational institutions, generating a head-on collision between the Breton priests who still ran Haiti’s schools and the practical men, largely Protestant, who worked for Dr. Freeman. The Service Technique cut square across the grain of French Catholic education and willy-nilly set out to supplant primary schools with American-style vocational training schools — the result, whose symptoms first appeared in 1927, was subterranean opposition by the Church to the American presence and all its works. American Brothers of Christian Instruction brought to Haiti to teach during this period were virtually ostracized and eventually sent home by French ecclesiastical superiors. By 1929 opposition became less subterranean: the Church’s support of the students and their strike was well known, intelligence reports reached Russell that the French legation had been suborning both priests and strikers, and a new French minister, Ferdinand Wiett, began making openly anti-occupation speeches to the Alliance Française. In the thoughtful verdict of British Minister Magowan, Brother Hyppolite, the little Breton friar who for twenty years had been walking up and down the mountains of Haiti, seemed to have routed Mr. Colvin with his batteries of experts in Buicks and his promise of prosperity on the Illinois model — if the Service Technique had been instructed by the same ideas as the Haitian Ministry of Education, the troubles of October–November 1929 and the subsequent revision by the United States of her policy would probably never have occurred.