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Le Prix du sang: La résistance du people haïtien à la tyrannie. Tome 1: François Duvalier (1957-1971). By Bernard Diederich (translated by Jean-Claude Bajeux). Port-au-Prince: Henri Deschamps, 2005. ISBN 99935-2-913-3. 414 pages. $28.00 cloth.
Reviewed by Jean-Germain Gros, University of Missouri-St. Louis
Bernard Diederich 's Le Prix du sang (or The Price of Blood) is a literary trilogy of Haitian history from 1956 to 2004. Diederich is a longtime student of Haiti. He was director of the weekly newspaper Haiti-Sun, before he was expelled by François (Papa Doc) Duvalier in 1963. He co-wrote (with Al Burt) Papa Doc: The Truth About Haiti Today and the Tontons Macoutes in 1969, and, until his retirement, was Time's Caribbean bureau chief in Miami. This is a review of Tome 1 of Diederich's trilogy, which covers the period 1957-1971, the François Duvalier dictatorship.
Le Prix du sang is a narrative of the most salient moments of the elder Duvalier's regime. It contains a series of vignettes, beginning with one that took place five years after Jean-Claude Duvalier's fall from power. Chapter one describes a procession of Haitians, who, on February 8, 1986, descended upon what used to be Fort Dimanche to remember their loved ones who had perished in the notorious prison on the outskirts of Port-au-Prince. Diederich's choice of venue for the opening chapter is entirely appropriate. At Fort Dimanche, there were a number of people who were either killed or tortured (in many cases both) on its insalubrious premises, and it was emblematic of what the Duvalier regime was all about: a blood-thirsty tyranny bent on eliminating enemies, real or imagined, in order to keep the Duvaliers in power.
In other words, "Duvalierism" was the relentless pursuit of converting state power into power for the Duvalier family. In the construction of this macabre project of neo-patrimonialism, all institutions of Haitian society, including those of civil society, which would ordinarily be spared because they are, technically speaking, outside of the state, became fair game. In the subsequent chapters Diederich does a very good job, once again through vignettes or short stories, at demonstrating how François Duvalier went about co-opting (as well as corrupting) Haitian institutions for political gains. In the remainder of this review, rather than dissecting...