1907, April 14: (The Soft-Spoken Noir Who Attained the Palace: François Duvalier’s Origins, the Tin-Roofed Lycée Pétion, and Je Suis le Drapeau Haïtien): The…

1907, April 14: (The Soft-Spoken Noir Who Attained the Palace: François Duvalier’s Origins, the Tin-Roofed Lycée Pétion, and Je Suis le Drapeau Haïtien): The soft-spoken, slight — five feet six, 150 pounds — noir physician-ethnologist who had just attained the National Palace was the son of a Port-au-Prince juge de paix. Born in the capital on April 14, 1907, during Tonton Nord’s last years, François Duvalier had first attended the tin-roofed Lycée Pétion in Bel Air. The epigraph he chose for his regime — Je suis le Drapeau Haïtien, un et indivisible, the Haitian flag and I are one and indivisible — announced at the threshold of his presidency the identification of person with nation that would define the next fourteen years: a claim that went beyond the L’État c’est moi of Louis XIV or the L’État c’est Vincent of Sténio Vincent, because Duvalier was not merely asserting control over the state but claiming identity with the symbol of the state, the flag itself — the emblem that Dessalines had created by tearing the white from the French tricolor, the banner that had flown at Vertières and been raised over the Champ de Mars at every independence celebration since 1804, now declared inseparable from the person of a country doctor from Bel Air, so that to oppose Duvalier was not merely to oppose a president but to desecrate the flag, and to desecrate the flag was to betray the revolution, and to betray the revolution was to forfeit one’s claim to be Haitian — a syllogism whose logical terminus was that every Haitian who resisted Duvalier had ceased to exist as a citizen and could therefore be treated as what the regime would shortly begin to call them: apatrides, stateless persons, enemies of the nation they had been defined out of.