Hundreds of Vodou worshippers are killed at Soukri

In 1986 hundreds of Vodou worshippers were killed at Soukri, near Gonaives. Desir places the killing in a long line of attempts to stamp out the religion, and records the answer given by a practitioner named Herard Simon, who improvised a response inside a ceremony that was part prayer, part protest and part warning. Simon told the gathering that a revolution was under way and that every religion would have to take a position in it. The Catholics, he said, had shown they were not interested in Vodou, that they wanted to break it and to kill, and that more than a thousand of its priests had died across the country. He named Catholics, Protestants, Baptists and Adventists together as holding a single plan, to destroy a work that was giving them trouble, and answered that the religion had come out of Africa and would be left where it stood. The song was recorded by the scholar Marie-Jose Alcide Saint-Lot.

Michel records, on information from the Marine Corps, that Brigadier General Hermann Hanneken died aged ninety-three in California, where he had long been retired, and notes pointedly that he had for years absolutely refused to let the historian Roger Gaillard interview him. Michel places the death in the year of the hundredth anniversary of Peralte's birth and collects other coincidences of dates in history to frame it, including two American presidents dying on the fiftieth anniversary of the declaration they had both signed. He allows himself one question and no answer, wondering whether Hanneken saw his victim as he passed out of life. The dating carries a small internal problem, since Michel's own chronology of birthdays and the book's subtitle both point to 1885 rather than 1886. Michel gathers further coincidences, including a Swedish count killed on the anniversary of a royal flight and a Russian prince who died soon after helping film the killing he had committed. Where this account departs from the standard one: Michel dates Peralte's centenary to 1986 here, while his own birthday arithmetic and the book's subtitle place the birth in 1885.

At five in the morning on 7 February 1986 a single church bell began ringing in Port-au-Prince, and other sacristans climbed their towers and joined in. The message was that Jean-Claude Duvalier had gone. The city came out into the streets. Within hours the joy turned into a reckoning. Militiamen who had slept through the news put on their denim uniforms and walked into crowds that killed them, some with stones, some with a tyre filled with petrol and set alight, a killing Haitians named Pere Lebrun after the country's largest tyre importer. People carried green branches and the old blue and red flag, and painted those colours on their faces when they had no cloth. They walked on the pavement in front of the palace, which had been forbidden for a generation. A mob broke open Francois Duvalier's tomb and found it empty. The word for all of this was dechoukaj, a farmers' word meaning to uproot.

Jean-Claude Duvalier left Haiti before dawn on 7 February 1986 aboard a United States Air Force transport that carried him to France. He had been president since 1971 and his father since 1957, so the family had held the country for twenty nine years. The end took about four months. Gonaives had risen in November after soldiers shot schoolchildren, the demonstrations spread to the provincial towns, the schools emptied, the church had turned, and the business class that had done well out of the regime asked for a change. The Americans, who had underwritten the arrangement for a generation, organised the exit. The army command that had been preparing for it took power the same morning as a governing council under Henri Namphy. Crowds pulled down statues and broke into Fort Dimanche. What did not leave with Duvalier was the machinery: the militia, the officers, the men who had run the prisons, most of whom stayed in Haiti and were still there when the next government fell.