1908-12-02: (Alexis Overthrown by François Antoine-Simon, the Twentieth President Removed by Force Since Independence, the Republic Now So Accustomed to Mili…
1908-12-02: (Alexis Overthrown by François Antoine-Simon, the Twentieth President Removed by Force Since Independence, the Republic Now So Accustomed to Military Coups That They Had Become the Only Recognized Method of Political Succession): On December 2, 1908, François Antoine-Simon overthrew Pierre Nord Alexis, who went into exile in Jamaica, where he died on May 1, 1910. The coup was the latest in an unbroken sequence of armed power transfers that had defined Haitian politics since Dessalines’s assassination in 1806. Antoine-Simon’s presidency lasted until 1911, when Cincinnatus Leconte, the great-grandson of Dessalines himself, gathered a military force and overthrew him. The revolutionary dynasties were now fighting among themselves, the descendants of the men who had liberated the nation competing for control of a state that none of them could stabilize.