Conceptualizing the Duvalier Dictatorship

Abstract

Les racines historiques de l'Etat Duvalierien. Michel-Rolph Trouillot (Port-au-Prince: Henri Deschamps, 1987). Several attempts have been made to conceptualize the Duvalier dictatorship, which ruled Haiti from 1957 to 1986. Some have seen it as a particularly brutal prebendary state that symbolizes the inability of Haitians to govern themselves (Rotberg, 1971). Others characterized it as a creole or underdeveloped variant of fascism (Hurbon, 1979; Manigat, 1964; Pierre-Charles, 1973; Roc, 1969). And still others see it as a continuation of the type of regime Haiti has known since its independence that expresses the internecine conflicts between the black and mulatto elites (Nicholls, 1979), or as the rise to political power of the black petty bourgeoisie in alliance with the traditional bourgeoisie (Hector, 1972). To this list must now be added the book by MichelRolph Trouillot, Les racines historiques de l'tat Duvalierien (1987). Trouillot incorporates many of the salient themes advanced by some of the authors cited above (among others), but reformulates them into a series of original hypotheses on the Duvalierist State.' The book contains eight chapters, the first five serving as prolegomena to the analysis of the Duvalierist State proper. Essentially, Trouillot wants to show that while the Duvalierist State shares certain fundamental characteristics with all previous Haitian governments, and, like them, served the interests of the holders of state power rather than those of the nation, it differs qualitatively from all the preceding governments. In contrast to the previous regimes, which Trouillot characterizes as authoritarian, the Duvalierist State is categorized as totalitarian because of its systematization of the use of physical violence and the concentration of all powers in the hands of the chief executive.