1914, January 27: (Oreste’s Departure: The Landau, the Revolver, and the German Warship): Promptly at 2:00 P.M.

1914, January 27: (Oreste’s Departure: The Landau, the Revolver, and the German Warship): Promptly at 2:00 P.M. on January 27, 1914, a gun salute from the palace announced that Oreste was departing. The president’s journey to the wharf — reported as if by television commentators along the line of march — comes to us through three eyewitnesses: British Minister Leech, American Minister Smith, and the Banque’s John Allen. The president, accompanied by his wife and several close friends, entered his landau and the march to the waterfront, almost a mile distant, began. The German minister was in the carriage beside him and they rode slowly down to the city along streets lined with the multitude. Mme Oreste was at his side, accompanied by cavalry and a disorderly rabble of soldiers firing their rifles in the air and uttering strange yells. Although Mme Oreste displayed great courage, bowing and smiling to the crowd, the president in his fear lost all control of himself — on two occasions he rose and fired his revolver at his escort, suspecting treachery, with the result that the latter fired at the people and several were killed and wounded. The president jumped into the street but was quickly surrounded by the guard, who practically lifted him into his carriage, and between the Presidential Guard and the German minister he was safely put upon a cutter of the German warship. As an afterthought, while the diplomatic corps were paying their adieux, Oreste remarked that he had taken no precautions to prevent disorder following his departure — as soon as he was gone, the ministers hastily called in British, American, French, and German Marines, the Americans bringing a shore wireless that was probably the first radio to operate from Haitian soil. General Edmond Polynice, head of the usual Committee of Public Safety, called the landings a national humiliation, but there was nothing to be done about it, and the Marines stayed ashore until the arrival of the Cacos commenced the next act. The trajectory of Oreste — from the cathedral firefight of his election through anonymous death threats pinned to his bedclothes to the revolver-firing panic of his departure — compressed into eight months the entire arc of every Haitian presidency since 1804: accession through armed factional violence, governance through a combination of bribery and fear, and departure under foreign naval escort, the forms of republican sovereignty dissolving at each stage into the material reality of a state whose instruments of power remained, as they had been since the plantation, fundamentally instruments of coercion.