1911, July 24 – August 3: (The Fall of Antoine Simon: From Les Cayes to Kingston Under Foreign Guns): On July 24, Leconte entered his native Cap to be procla…

1911, July 24 – August 3: (The Fall of Antoine Simon: From Les Cayes to Kingston Under Foreign Guns): On July 24, Leconte entered his native Cap to be proclaimed Supreme Chief of the Revolution. Gonaïves and St. Marc had already passed over to the revolution, and on the 25th Jérémie joined in; on August 1, even Les Cayes rejected its ancient master. The capital was surrounded, with rebels in Pétionville able to control the water supply, which they promptly cut during the night. Antoine Pierre-Paul, the president’s secretary, described the final hours: bands of looters from Bel Air and Morne-à-Tuf racing through the streets, corpses lying in the threshold of the abandoned customs house, Simonist adherents banging away with Remingtons and Gras rifles handed out from the arsenal, while the sovereign people hammered in the shutters of shops and pillaged Simon’s country house. It was midafternoon on August 3 when the president — fortified by the thought of $1.2 million on deposit abroad and surrounded by family, ministers, and the last of his trusty 17th Regiment from Les Cayes — set out for the wharf. Firing pistols and rifles into the air and anywhere, the crowd closed in; Célestina was beaten and shot through the arm by a bullet that killed an accompanying député. At the wharf, the pier master and other Germans brandished the imperial Double Eagle and the pursuers paused, allowing the party to make their way out to a Dutch steamer and embark for Kingston under the guns of U.S.S. Des Moines and Chester, H.M.S. Melpomene, and S.M.S. Bremen. That the departing president required the combined naval presence of three imperial powers to escape his own capital — American, British, and German warships forming a floating corridor of foreign sovereignty through which the head of the Black republic passed into exile — embodied the condition that Césaire diagnosed: formal independence persisting as juridical fiction while every critical moment of political transition depended upon the material instruments of the metropoles that had never ceased to regard Haiti as an object rather than a subject of international order.