1956, December – 1957: (They Have Gone Mad: Six Years of Kermesse Dissipated, Five Governments in Six Months, and Manigat’s Bas-Empire Competition): The day …

1956, December – 1957: (They Have Gone Mad: Six Years of Kermesse Dissipated, Five Governments in Six Months, and Manigat’s Bas-Empire Competition): The day Magloire left, work stopped on the new Port-au-Prince abattoir — not by decree, but in the mysterious way things stop, run down, die, or vanish in Haiti. For years after, the rusting gaunt frame reproached successor governments which would neither touch a predecessor’s project nor even move the building materials from the curb where they had been stacked in 1956. All the stability, development, modernization, prosperity, panache, and pleasure — six years of kermesse, burst out one indignant critic — that had been Magloire’s were suddenly dissipated, with no more trace than Soulouque’s orders of nobility. What was to follow for nine kaleidoscopic months was a dizzying succession of provisional regimes signifying in themselves absolutely nothing — within six months alone, five governments rose and fell while Haiti, in Leslie Manigat’s words, exhausted all the forms of transitory government that had been used throughout the nineteenth century: provisional constitutional presidency, provisional revolutionary presidency, collegial government, provisional military government, and the unavoidable Constituent Assembly in a kind of bas-empire competition. Unlike the gouvernements éphémères from 1911 to 1915 which participated in deep struggles over control of the country, the truly ephemeral governments of 1957 represented surface phenomena while the real contests went on below. Three or at most four serious candidates — Déjoie, Jumelle, Duvalier, and Fignolé — battled for the succession, while the army, which would ordinarily have settled matters, was itself split into factions.