1946, August 16: (The Election of Estimé: Submachine Guns in the Galleries, Two Ballots, and the Garde’s Finest Hour): Under the iron gaze of the Garde Prési…

1946, August 16: (The Election of Estimé: Submachine Guns in the Galleries, Two Ballots, and the Garde’s Finest Hour): Under the iron gaze of the Garde Présidentielle, the palace band, and all five of the Garde’s armored half-tracks arrayed across the street, the National Assembly convened in the Palais Législatif — galleries and Chamber conspicuously posted by Garde officers with submachine guns across their laps. No poems this time: only names inscribed on paper slips by senators and deputies. On the first ballot Estimé, a lower-middle-class Artibonite noir backed by Major Magloire and bankrolled by distiller Alfred Vieux, took the lead with 25 votes, trailed by Pierre-Louis with 8, Numa of the Parti Socialiste Populaire with 7, and Calixte with 6 — the remaining votes scattered among fifty-odd parties that had mushroomed into existence. After a recess for jockeying, the second ballot gave Estimé an even greater plurality of 32 against 14 for Numa and 10 for Pierre-Louis, whereupon he was declared the winner as officers brought submachine guns to the ready and closed ranks around the new president. The half-tracks coughed authoritatively, clanked to the head of the procession, and led the presidential sedan to the cathedral for a Te Deum while the crowds — Fignolist to a man — watched in silence from the sidewalks. At the palace, Lavaud, flanked by Levelt and Magloire at ramrod attention, returned executive power to a duly elected president. Estimé’s reply caught the significance precisely: at one and the same time you were the head which commanded and the arm which executed — it would have been easy enough to revert to dictatorship, but you made a promise and you kept it, giving an example of professionalism which would not be forgotten. It was, conceivably, the Garde’s finest hour — the military junta that had seized power in January surrendered it voluntarily in August, a constitutional transfer accomplished at gunpoint yet honored in substance, the Garde’s self-restraint standing as a rebuke to every predecessor and a fragile precedent for every successor.