Victoire Jean-Baptiste of Milot appoints and dismisses ministers

Victoire Jean-Baptiste came from the Campeche holding at Milot and could not read. In October 1889, after beating Legitime, Florvil Hyppolite filled his household with people from his own region before going to Port-au-Prince in triumph, and the running of his kitchen and cellar fell to her. She moved to the capital, took a house at Morne-a-Tuf and then a place in the national palace itself, where she acted as something close to a first lady, to the fury of respectable opinion and the alarm of the French minister, who reported it to Paris. Refused payment by the public works minister Brenor Prophete for work claimed at the president’s second residence, she had him dismissed, and on 31 December 1894 she obtained the appointment of Tiresias Simon Sam as minister of war. Money was drawn from the treasury for her while the country’s finances were critical, and Hyppolite gave her estates in the North.