1910–1912: (A New Man Had Emerged: Leconte’s Astonishing Reforms): Save perhaps Soulouque, no president of Haiti ever confounded more predictions than Cincin…

1910–1912: (A New Man Had Emerged: Leconte’s Astonishing Reforms): Save perhaps Soulouque, no president of Haiti ever confounded more predictions than Cincinnatus Leconte — it was as if, marveled Dantès Bellegarde, a new man had emerged. On August 26, Furniss reported that the president’s newly appointed collectors of customs were without exception men who had the reputation for honesty and fair dealing. Leconte told Furniss he intended to leave the details of business to the heads of the different departments — if he did this, Furniss noted, it would be the first time the Haitian government had ever lived up to its constitution. Another first was a round of eminent judicial appointments in a system of courts that from earliest times had been a byword for venality, ignorance, and gross partiality. In Tertullien Guilbaud, new Minister of Education, Leconte brought to office one of Haiti’s most distinguished men of letters and the law — Furniss wrote admiringly that Guilbaud represented the best type of his countrymen, giving the impression of a retiring, polite, unassuming gentleman, a sound scholar, an upright citizen, and an unassuming patriot. Guilbaud reactivated a corps of school inspectors, raised the pay of teachers who were getting less money than jailers, revived the perennial project of a central vocational school, and set about resuscitating moribund rural schools which, according to the historian Edner Brutus, mainly served to support a class of illiterate sinecurists — political placemen, concubines, godchildren, and bastards of deputies, senators, and generals. Simultaneously shrinking the army and trying to improve it, Leconte rehabilitated the few officers whom the old French military mission had trained, organized a new formation styled La Réforme housed in imposing new barracks built in 1912 and named for the president’s great ancestor, and gave the army its first rifle range. The structural paradox of Leconte’s reforms — visible through the lens James applied to every modernizing leader in the colonial world — was that genuine institutional transformation required dismantling the very patronage networks through which political power was constituted: every honest customs collector displaced a corrupt one whose family, faction, and regional allies now had reason to conspire, and every teacher whose salary was raised reduced the surplus available for the military officers whose loyalty alone kept the president alive.