Haiti’s last appeals to history – then and now
L’Edito du Rezo
On 2 January 1986, Haiti’s president Jean-Claude Duvalier addressed the nation for the Jour des Aïeux. It would be one of his final public speeches. Barely five weeks later, he fled the country. Read today, the address sounds less like a programme for governance than a valedictory attempt to anchor a collapsing regime in the authority of the past. Four decades on, the echoes of that moment remain unsettlingly familiar.
Duvalier’s rhetoric was almost entirely historical and moral. The ancestors of 1804 were invoked repeatedly, not as agents of rupture and emancipation, but as guardians of order and continuity. Their sacrifice was framed as a call to discipline, patience and obedience. What stood out was not what the speech contained, but what it omitted: no acknowledgment of mass protests, no recognition of political responsibility, no concrete commitments. History was asked to do the work that institutions no longer could.
Responsibility was subtly shifted away from the state. Social unrest was portrayed as a moral failing rather than a political crisis, with citizens urged to preserve stability and protect Haiti’s image abroad. This inversion—where order precedes rights, and obedience substitutes accountability—revealed a power that no longer governed through consent or law, but through exhortation. Memory became a tool of containment, not a resource for renewal.
In the closing passages, Duvalier turned to youth and “future generations”, warning that history would judge present conduct. It was a familiar authoritarian move: transforming history into a tribunal to silence dissent in the present. By January 1986, however, the gap between solemn language and lived reality was too wide to bridge. The appeal to the ancestors failed to resonate with a population demanding change, not remembrance.
Seen in retrospect, the Jour des Aïeux speech functioned as a political epilogue. Duvalier still spoke in the name of Haiti’s founding myth, but the myth no longer conferred legitimacy. When he left on 7 February 1986, it became clear that history—invoked so insistently in his final weeks—had already moved on without him.
Yet on 1 January 2026, as Haiti marked the 222nd anniversary of independence, the same script resurfaced. At the official ceremony, Laurent Saint-Cyr, head of the Transitional Presidential Council, delivered a speech steeped in sacrifice, unity and historical responsibility. Dessalines and the heroes of 1804 were again summoned; dialogue, serenity and patience were again prescribed; credible elections were again promised once security conditions allowed.
The dissonance, once more, was stark. Haiti today is gripped by pervasive insecurity; armed groups control large swathes of territory; state authority remains hollow. As in 1986, appeals to history mask a deficit of legitimacy, while power concentrates without an electoral mandate. Independence—born of radical rupture—is repurposed as an argument for restraint and compliance.
Haiti’s tragedy is not a shortage of symbols or speeches. It is the persistence of a political reflex that reaches for the ancestors when institutions fail, and demands patience when accountability is absent. Forty years ago, Duvalier’s final appeal to history could not save his regime. Repeating the same language today risks obscuring a harder truth: without security, legitimacy and responsibility, elections remain a promise deferred—and history, however often invoked, continues to pass judgement on the present.