1908, December – 1911: (Délégué Simon: The Peasant President, the Voodoo Goat, and the Den of Thieves): On December 5, blinking at his own success, Antoine S…

1908, December – 1911: (Délégué Simon: The Peasant President, the Voodoo Goat, and the Den of Thieves): On December 5, blinking at his own success, Antoine Simon entered Port-au-Prince and was proclaimed chef du pouvoir exécutif. On December 20, the Senate — prudently ringed with soldiers — cast 117 votes unanimously for Simon. François Antoine Simon, who had begun his career as a peasant chef-section outside Les Cayes, was the grand old man of the South as Nord had been of the North, but with the difference that his rule as délégué militaire had been kindly and in the fashion of Christophe he employed his soldiery in cultivating the fine old plantations he had amassed. Furniss reported him a man of simple taste, good ideas, and fairly good judgment, but surrounded by a net of officials whose only thought was to get their pockets full as quickly as possible. In Cayes his illiteracy and inability to speak little but Creole had posed no handicaps, but in Port-au-Prince these limitations caused the elite to mock him — Creole homilies delivered while the president reflectively picked his nose before Sunday audiences furnished ammunition for their spiteful wits. Simon had one other bond with the people: he was a fervent devotee of Voodoo, and Furniss reported that while he was military governor in the South, he had gone so far as to have a mass said by the Bishop of Aux Cayes over a white goat that had long figured as an emblem of his faith — the goat died and was brought with great pomp to the cathedral in a closed coffin, and the Bishop, not suspecting the contents, said the mass, afterward issuing orders that no funeral masses would be said unless the corpse was first exposed to the priest. Simon’s appointments initially offered encouragement — the accomplished Joseph Jérémie as War Minister, Dr. Edmond Héraux at Foreign Affairs — but the regime soon descended into financial oddity: a warship purchased from Italy for $26,000 and rechristened Antoine Simon cost the government nearly $56,000 in various deals, arrived incapable of getting underway with deteriorated powder that was stored in the palace basement arsenal, and was sold eleven months later to a Dutch ship-breaker for $20,000. Finance Minister Pouget confided to Furniss that though he knew there were thieves in the administration, he did not know he would enter a den of thieves — and when asked why a government commission in Europe had omitted Wall Street from its itinerary, Pouget laughed and explained it was nothing but a pleasure jaunt, with the members spending their time in Paris on the Boulevards, at the Moulin Rouge, and like places dear to most Haitians. Read through the decolonial lens, the regime of Délégué Simon — the peasant president mocked by the elite for his Creole and his Voodoo, surrounded by thieves who pillaged the treasury while foreign bankers and naval powers circled the republic — represented the final iteration of the structural impossibility that had defined Haitian governance since 1804: the state as an instrument of extraction inherited from the plantation, operated now by a succession of military strongmen whose legitimacy derived not from popular mandate but from the capacity to seize the capital, while the peasant majority whose labor sustained the entire edifice remained, as Furniss observed, friendly and peaceable, wishing only to till their soil — the very population that the revolution of 1804 had been fought to liberate.