1960: (Repression Will Be Total: The Raid on Bellegarde’s Library, Dr.

1960: (Repression Will Be Total: The Raid on Bellegarde’s Library, Dr. Villard’s Savage Beating, and the Whole Conscious Population Minus One Citizen): Within a year, at the start of 1960, the doors of Dantès Bellegarde’s modest, book-lined home in downtown Port-au-Prince were slammed open. Doyen of living Haitian historians, embodiment over the decades of enlightenment, patriotic nationalism, and intellectual lighthouse of the elite, this upright, courtly mulâtre septuagenarian found himself facing the muzzle of a Sten gun. Backed against the wall by the noir intruders whose identity or authority he had no need to ask, Bellegarde saw fellow Haitians systematically rip through his papers, overturn his books, yank his telephone from the wall, and then with a final cuff or two, trampling the mess of papers and dismembered books, the TTMs stalked out — not a word had been spoken. Dr. Élie Villard, the good physician Estimé’s men had forced from the Hôpital Général in 1946, was subjected to a savage beating that cut his head open, broke his nose, and marked his kindly face with hideous scars for the rest of his life — what his crime had been, neither he nor anyone else knew. Niccolò Machiavelli could have provided an explanation: the most efficacious cruelties are those practiced at the outset of a reign to assure the security of a new prince. And François Duvalier was indeed a new prince — but he would hold power only as long as he could keep his opponents divided and humbled, and in the definition of ethnologist Rémy Bastien, his opposition would include the whole conscious population minus one citizen: the president.