1949, July – 1950, May 10: (The Fall of Estimé: The Senate Holdout, the Mob That Sacked the Senate, Estimé’s Applause for Hooliganism, and the Three Booms fr…

1949, July – 1950, May 10: (The Fall of Estimé: The Senate Holdout, the Mob That Sacked the Senate, Estimé’s Applause for Hooliganism, and the Three Booms from Fort National): July 1949 saw the inevitable preliminary: a proposed constitutional revision to erase 1952 as the end of Estimé’s term and delete the prohibition against presidential self-succession. During November 1949, at PSP incitation, a general strike centered on the university extended throughout a wide range of parties including the Fignolists — Estimé suppressed seven newspapers and the parties concerned, Fignolé gaining the Argentine embassy by a hair’s breadth, and proclaimed general censorship. When the legislative Chambers convened on April 18, 1950, the Senate by a thirteen-man majority balked at the constitutional revisions that an Estimé-packed Lower House had passed, and during sixteen days of mounting tension the senators would not be budged. Then the dam burst: crying Vive Estimé, Vive la ré-élection, a mob formed in the Marché Vallière and roared down onto the Senate, manhandling fleeing members, wrecking the premises, burning archives and portraits — even that of Charles Sumner — and parading fragments of furniture through the streets. That night by radio and next day in Le Moniteur, Estimé applauded his supporters’ hooliganism, calling their eloquent attitude that morning without precedent in Haitian history and bearing witness to their political maturity and direct participation in the affairs of state. The elite — notably including the newly rich noir elite Estimé had fostered — shuddered as the mob surged past shuttered shops and sacked the homes of recusant senators. On May 9 Estimé called in the principal officers for a declaration of fealty; all professed loyalty. Meanwhile, led by the pitiless Lucien Chauvet, other mobs began to paint the walls and shout À bas Estimé, Vive la Révolution. At 9:00 A.M. on Wednesday, May 10, the general staff — Lavaud, Levelt, and Magloire, who had emerged as the strongman among notional equals, together with Marcaisse Prosper the stuttering chief of police — waited on the president with a proclamation announcing his resignation. One hour later, on the stroke of ten, Fort National boomed its salute and Port-au-Prince learned that the junta which had steered the republic through Lescot’s fall was again at the helm. The fall of Estimé — a president deposed not for the traditional reason of military ambition but because he had unleashed a mob against the legislature in pursuit of self-succession, then found the same military that had voluntarily surrendered power four years earlier unwilling to tolerate the destruction of the constitutional order it had restored — marked the moment at which the Garde’s self-assigned role shifted from reluctant caretaker to permanent arbiter: having twice intervened and twice returned power to civilians, the officer corps now understood that it possessed a veto over the political process itself, a discovery whose consequences would unfold with gathering force over the next seven years.