1915 to 1918 · Haitianspan
Auguste Garoute was one of two men who refused to sign the protectorate
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Ghislaine Charlier was born in 1918, the year the Wilson administration dissolved the Haitian national assembly and rewrote the constitution, which put her among the occupation generation who knew no other Haiti. Her mother's parents took the invasion hard. Her grandmother Alice Garoute told and retold the story of her own influence: some months before the landings she wrote to Louis Borno, a friend from childhood then serving as minister of foreign affairs and justice and later president, pressing him to nominate her husband Auguste Garoute to the Tribunal de Cassation. Auguste was appointed, and within months was asked to sign the Haitian American treaty of 16 September 1915. He and a man remembered as Monsieur Cabeche were the only two who refused. Ghislaine sat nearby while her grandmother poured tea, read books, staged small plays and discussed with her friends how to get the foreigners out. Those women went on to organise antioccupation protests. In 1935 Alice Garoute and several of her guests founded the Ligue Féminine d'Action Sociale.
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