October 1958 to 11 April 1959 · Haitianspan
Police seize Clement Jumelle's coffin on the way to the church
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After the July raid more than a hundred people were arrested, radio transmitters were confiscated, and the death penalty came back onto the statute book. Captain Jean Beauvoir hunted down Ducasse and Charles Jumelle and had them shot as they slept. Their bodies were carried outside, arranged for photographers, and given pistols to hold. Their brother Clement, who had been a candidate for the presidency, spent twenty one months in hiding while his kidneys failed. In early April 1959 he dragged himself into the Cuban embassy and died there on the eleventh. The next day the funeral procession turned up Avenue Charles Sumner with hundreds of mourners behind it. A police car cut in front of the hearse at the Rond Point and stopped it. Macoutes held the crowd back with submachine guns while Beauvoir's men beat mourners aside with clubs, took the coffin off its bier and threw it into a truck. They drove north to St Marc and buried him with Vodou rites in a shallow grave, without a priest. Jumelle had been a practising Catholic. Graham Greene put the scene into The Comedians.
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