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.