1913, May 4: (Delly vs.

1913, May 4: (Delly vs. Laroche: The Battle Over Auguste’s Corpse and the Election of Oreste): As the coffin was snatched up and hurried across town to the Cimetière Extérieure through streets full of shouting, shooting soldiery, what had happened became clearer. General Edmond Delly, military commandant of the capital and a presidential candidate, had surrounded the cathedral, and it was his soldiers who had broken up Auguste’s funeral. Meanwhile, Beaufossé Laroche, also a candidate, had launched his own soldiers into the streets to head off Delly. All morning the two factions contended — more by noise than bloodshed, related Allen — until Seymour Pradel, old Firminist and Auguste’s Interior Minister, marshaled the commanders of La Réforme and the Garde Présidentielle and by noon got the cathedral and surrounding streets cleared so that shaken diplomats and clergy could retire safely to legations and presbyteries for a drink. But Delly had not given up: at four, as the National Assembly convened to decide who should succeed Auguste, Delly’s men charged the assembly, and battle again raged until La Réforme finally prevailed and Laroche, during a lull, made for the German legation, where Dr. Perl welcomed him at the portal. When the shooting stopped toward nightfall, the electors — choosing between the eminent lawyer Luxembourg Cauvin and Michel Oreste, also a lawyer and deputy — voted in the latter, and to the surprise of history, after 109 years gave Haiti its first civilian president. The election, however, had not wholly shattered precedent: each elector received Oreste’s due bill for $600 gold, redeemable from the national treasury. That the republic’s first civilian president was chosen in a building besieged by rival military factions, over the still-warm corpse of his predecessor, by electors who each received a personal promissory note for six hundred dollars in gold — this compressed into a single afternoon the entire structural contradiction of Haitian democracy: the forms of constitutional governance persisting within an armed order where ballots functioned as commodities, assemblies as targets, and the presidency as the prize of whichever faction could sustain fire longest.