Duvalier falls ill and Barbot runs Haiti for several weeks

Duvalier fell seriously ill in May 1959 and was unable to govern for several weeks. Clement Barbot ran the country in his place. Barbot had organised the tonton macoutes and commanded their loyalty personally, and he used them through those weeks to hold down political rivals and keep order in the capital. Nothing in the constitution described what he was doing. There was no office to hold, no vice presidency, no council. The state simply passed to whoever controlled the militia, which is an accurate description of what the Haitian state had become in eighteen months. Barbot handed it back when Duvalier recovered, and that turned out to be the more consequential fact. A president who has seen a subordinate govern in his name does not forget it. Barbot was arrested in July 1960 and taken to Fort Dimanche, and he was killed after his release. The episode is the clearest evidence that the regime's centre of gravity had already moved out of the palace and into the militia.

The world of 1945 was a different place. Indian nationalist advances suggested an empire in retreat and encouraged movements on both sides of the Sahara. Japan, during the war, had beaten European powers across Southeast Asia and taken Singapore from the British with startling ease, showing that a non-European state could humble them, though Japanese conduct toward occupied populations destroyed any standing it had as a liberator. The United States mattered most. Franklin Roosevelt disliked European empire and pressed for a decolonisation timetable. After his death that priority slid down the American agenda as the Cold War took over. Washington's concern became keeping poor countries out of communist hands, and European empire could be recast as protection for peoples thought vulnerable to it. The United States went on preaching against colonialism while supplying military aid to Portugal's fascist government fighting Marxist guerrillas in Angola and Mozambique. The Soviet Union declared itself anti-colonial by nature and from the 1960s offered African movements diplomatic backing and weapons.

Maurice Dartigue had been Haiti's minister of education, agriculture and labour. President Elie Lescot was overthrown in 1946, Dartigue went into exile in the United States and settled in New York that same year. He began a career at the United Nations, first as a senior education specialist in the trusteeship department, then from 1956 at UNESCO, where he supervised the Major Latin American Project. He was made chief of the Africa Division in 1962. From that desk he hired hundreds of Haitians as professional and technical experts for newly independent African states, Benin, Cameroon, Ghana and Nigeria among them, and he ran teacher training programmes on the continent until he retired in 1971. His papers hold letters from Haitians looking for work outside Haiti and correspondence with presidents Paul Magloire and Francois Duvalier about sending Haitian professionals to Africa. A man pushed out of his own government spent the next quarter century arranging the departure of others.

Having survived an attempt to take the barracks, Duvalier raised the Militia of Volunteers for National Security in 1958. Nobody used that name. Tonton Macoute is Uncle Knapsack, the figure from Haitian storytelling who carries disobedient children away in a sack, and the militia was known by it from the start. Recruits came from the poorest and least schooled black families in the countryside, and eventually there were more than twenty five thousand of them. They wore paramilitary dress and dark glasses at any hour. They carried pistols and preferred machetes, a weapon that reminded Haitians of the massacre of their people on the Dominican border in 1937. Anything done in the president's service was pardoned before it happened. Victims were left in public as notices. The macoutes encouraged the belief that they were Vodou demons, so that political fear and spiritual fear arrived together. Their strength came to match the army's, and for three decades they kept the Duvalier family safe from the generals. Soulouque had done the same thing with his zinglins a century earlier.