1964 · Haitianyear only
A catechism teaches that Duvalier is five founding fathers at once
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In 1964 Jean M. Fourcand assembled a Catechisme de la revolution, a question and answer book on the model used to teach children the Catholic faith. Its central claim was that Dessalines, Toussaint Louverture, Christophe, Petion and Estime, the men Haiti counts as its founders, were all present and completed in the person of Francois Duvalier. Devotion to the president therefore carried the weight of a religious duty. Governments that rule by fear still spend heavily on stories about themselves, and this one produced a whole shelf of them: catechisms, breviaries of the president's sayings, slogans painted on walls. Trouillot's reading is that the effort failed at the level that mattered. Duvalierist language never reached the moral centre of the way Haitians reasoned about right and wrong. People repeated the formulas where the formulas were required and went on judging the government by older standards. The state could compel the words. It could not make them mean what it wanted.