Alexandre Sabès Pétion

Alexandre Sabès Pétion

Alexandre Sabès Pétion (born April 2, 1770 in Port-au-Prince , Haiti ; † March 29, 1818 ibid) was a Haitian politician and from 1806 until his death President of the Republic of Haiti.

Life

Pétion was born in Port-au-Prince to a black mother and a French father. In 1788 he went to France and was trained there at the Military Academy in Paris . In 1798 he returned to Haiti and participated in the expulsion of the British from Haiti. When it subsequently to tensions between the black and mulatto came population of Haiti, supported Pétion, himself a mulatto who mulattische party. He joined General André Rigaud and Jean-Pierre Boyer and in 1799 took part in a rebellion against Toussaint L'Ouverture , the War of Knives . The revolt that began in June 1799, however, proved to be unsuccessful and the insurgents had to retreat to the strategically important port city of Jacmel in southern Haiti in November of the same year . Pétion led the city's defense but could not prevent it from falling in March 1800, which marked the end of the rebellion. Together with other leaders of the Mulatto faction, Pétion went into exile in France after the end of the uprising.

In February 1802, Pétion, Boyer and Rigaud landed back in Haiti in the wake of a 12,000-strong French army under the command of Charles Leclerc , whose aim was the deposition of Toussaint. After the end of Toussaint's rule and his deportation to France, however, new disputes soon broke out between the French and the inhabitants of Haiti. Pétion joined the nationalist forces striving for independence for Haiti and supported General Jean-Jacques Dessalines , who had faced him at the time in the battle for Jacmel. On October 17th, Dessaline's armed forces finally captured Port-au-Prince and on January 1st, 1804, Haiti's independence was proclaimed. Dessalines was made ruler for life and crowned himself Emperor of Haiti on October 6, 1804.

When Dessalines was assassinated on October 17, 1806, Pétion led a group striving for democratic reforms and thus came into conflict with Henri Christophe , who succeeded Dessalines as the authoritarian ruler of Haiti. Christophe turned down the post of democratic president offered as a compromise solution . Haiti was once again split into two camps and the old conflict between blacks and mulattos revived. The fighting that broke out did not lead to a decision, so that finally a peace agreement was reached in 1810, in which Haiti was split into two parts. While Christophe proclaimed himself king and as such ruled the northern part of Haiti , Pétion ruled the south of Haiti as President of the Republic of Haiti, to which he had been elected in 1806. In this function, Pétion soon found the restrictions imposed on him by the elected Senate annoying and dissolved it in 1818 after he had been appointed president for life in 1816.

During his reign, Pétion moved in many large plantation estates and had the land distributed to his followers and the peasantry, which earned him the nickname Papa Bon-Kè ("Good-hearted Papa"). However, this measure in particular led to a severe setback for the economy of his country, as the majority of the new landowners only cultivated for their own use. In 1815 he granted Simón Bolívar asylum and later provided him with material support.

On March 29, 1818, Pétion died of yellow fever . His successor was Jean-Pierre Boyer , who should succeed in reunifying the two parts of Haiti as early as 1820.

literature

• Caryn Cossé Bell: Revolution, Romanticism, and the Afro-Creole Protest Tradition in Louisiana, 1718-1868 . LSU Press, 2004, ISBN 0-8071-3026-5 .
• CLR James : The Black Jacobins. Toussant L'Ouverture and the independence revolution in Haiti. Berlin 1984
• Erwin Rüsch: The Revolution of Saint Domingue ( Overseas History. Volume 5). Hamburg 1930
• Franz Sundstral: From the black republic. The Negro uprising on Santo Domingo or the history of the origins of the state of Haiti. Leipzig 1903

Web links

Commons : Alexandre Pétion  - Collection of images, videos and audio files

• Alexandre Sabès called Pétion in the English-language Wiki The Louverture Project (TLP)

predecessor	Office	successor
-	President of Haiti 1806-1818	Jean-Pierre Boyer