A woman schooled in France opens Haiti's first mixed boarding school

Juliette Bussiere Laforest was born at Cap Francais in 1789 to free parents of some means. She went to France very young with a father who sat as a deputy for the North, spent much of her youth there acquiring an education, married Joseph Courtois and returned with him to Haiti in 1816. In 1818 the couple founded La Maison d'Education on the rue des Fronts-Forts, a day school and the first mixed boarding school in the country, where she took sole charge of the girls in music and literature. Four other institutions then admitted girls. The school closed in 1828 and the gap it left was not filled until 1850. From 1824 she worked on La Feuille du Commerce, the daily her husband founded, first beside him and then alone, and kept it appearing for forty two years. Its masthead read that arbitrary rule is impossible while free publication exists.

In 1818 two French medical writers, Fournier and Begim, published an attack on Felix Pascalis of New York. They called him a man who had never really been a doctor at all. Then they went further and named his connection in Saint-Domingue with the insurgent leader they called the pious Romain and with the camp at Trou Coffy, accusing him of presiding over the killing of white civilians and the mutilation of their bodies. Pascalis demanded two thousand dollars in damages. He also wrote to Jean Deveze in Paris, who had run the fever hospital at Bush Hill in Philadelphia in 1793, and obtained from him a signed declaration in February 1820 that his conduct during the Trou Coffy affair had deserved glory. To make his case he set down in 1821 a long memoir of what he had seen, the Anecdote historique. That document, written to save a medical reputation in Manhattan, is one of the fullest eyewitness accounts of any 1791 insurgency in the colony.

France abolished slavery in its colonies in February 1794 without ever stating plainly that the slave trade was over. Napoleon Bonaparte restored both in 1802 and 1803. The traffic then became a theoretical question, because once war with Britain resumed the French lost Martinique and Santo Domingo in 1809 and Guadeloupe in 1810, and the Royal Navy blockaded the French coast. At the Congress of Vienna in 1814 and 1815 the European powers declared their opposition to the trade while stopping short of prohibiting it. Bonaparte, briefly back in power during the Hundred Days, issued a decree of abolition in 1815 that had no effect on anything. The prohibition that finally held was a law of 15 April 1818, passed under the restored Bourbon monarchy. Even then several more years went by before agreements with Britain on searching suspect ships at sea gave that law any force in French waters.

Garcia V was king of the Kongo from 1803 to 1830 and wanted a priest for the same reason his predecessors had, to perform the coronation and bless his marriage and so confirm his authority. He waited eleven years. In 1814 Luigi-Maria d'Assisi, the Capuchin prefect at Loanda, managed to spend eight months in the country, baptised twenty five thousand people, heard five thousand confessions, and on 17 March crowned and married Garcia and Queen Isabella. There had been no priest at Sao Salvador for twenty years. The delighted king wrote to his brother the King of Portugal, as Afonso I had learned to do three centuries earlier, and suggested the Pope make Luigi-Maria a cardinal. Garcia had sent a nephew to be educated in Loanda in 1803 and a son in 1809, insisting he must have a priest in the family; that son, Dom Pedro, was ordained in 1824.