1970, November 18 – December 1970: (The Succession Prepared: Armed Forces Day at Vertières, Duvalier’s Stroke, Constant Replaced by Raymond, the Promise of a…

1970, November 18 – December 1970: (The Succession Prepared: Armed Forces Day at Vertières, Duvalier’s Stroke, Constant Replaced by Raymond, the Promise of a Young Leader, and Le Nouveau Monde’s Hint): On Armed Forces Day, November 18, 1970 — the 167th anniversary of Vertières — the president conducted the usual review, delivered a typically Delphic and diffuse speech in the mixed French and Creole reserved for such occasions, and pinned decorations to the tunics of the faithful, including General Constant, now eight years in servile command. The exertion was too heavy. Next day Duvalier spoke of dizziness and intolerable headache; he had trouble standing, and his speech, never clear in conversation, seemed to have acquired a slur. Now he knew with certainty, as he had in 1962, that certain preparations must be undertaken. The first to learn of the president’s resolves was General Constant: early in December, the well-upholstered noir chief of staff was abruptly replaced by Duvalier’s trusted godson, Claude Raymond. On Ancestors’ Day there was a short speech — when the time came, Duvalier told a silent audience, he would step aside for youth and he promised Haiti a young Leader. Next day, Le Nouveau Monde observed that a Duvalier might one day succeed a Duvalier, and this should alarm no one. The succession choreography — the stroke concealed, the loyal but expendable general discarded, the godson installed, the hint planted in the government newspaper — replicated the pattern of every Haitian dynastic transfer since Christophe named his son Ferdinand: the attempt to convert revolutionary legitimacy into hereditary right, to transform a presidency won by violence and sustained by terror into a patrimony that could be bequeathed like a plantation, the republic becoming at last what Duvalier’s own constitution had proclaimed it — the world’s first hereditary republic.