1915, July 29: (No Halfway Measures: France Blesses the Occupation and the Elite Admit Responsibility): On the morning of July 29, soon after van Orden’s Mar…

1915, July 29: (No Halfway Measures: France Blesses the Occupation and the Elite Admit Responsibility): On the morning of July 29, soon after van Orden’s Marines had eaten their first breakfast in Haiti, Jules Jusserand, France’s masterly ambassador in Washington, sent Laboulaye his first secretary down Sixteenth Street to the State Department to convey a message: it was urgently desired the United States take energetic action in Haiti, that if she did France would look with approval on her action and be willing to support her in every way provided that a just recognition of French claims was made — he added, however, that were the action not energetic but composed of halfway measures, France would not look upon it with such approval. No halfway measures — Wilson himself had spoken of a long program. While the blan considered what ought to be done, those most immediately concerned voiced their own reactions. Only four months earlier, in April, Liberal leader Auguste Bonamy had sounded a final call to repentance: we are at the brink of an abyss, we cannot afford another single dereliction, the country is slipping through our hands. As Beale Davis had reported, the better element of the natives and all foreigners in Haiti were in favor of American intervention — this belief was shared by most public men and the enlightened patriots of Haiti, also by the most prominent politicians, who however, although readily stating their preference in private, were loath to admit it officially — in a word, they favored intervention provided they were not instrumental in or responsible for bringing it about. The structural paradox that Davis identified — an elite that privately welcomed the occupation it publicly deplored — would define the politics of the next nineteen years: the same class that had failed to govern Haiti now positioned itself as the guardian of the sovereignty it had forfeited, while the occupying power that had arrived to impose order would discover that the order it imposed could never acquire legitimacy precisely because it had been imposed.