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Beaubrun Ardouin et Études sur l’histoire d’Haïti (1853) : pourquoi cet ouvrage est important

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  Beaubrun Ardouin and Études sur l’histoire d’Haïti (1853): Why This Book Matters By Patrick Prézeau Stephenson * (Le Français suit) When people try to understand the history of Haiti in the nineteenth century, one name appears again and again: Beaubrun Ardouin . He was one of the most important Haitian historians of his era, and his work, Études sur l’histoire d’Haïti suivies de la Vie du Général J.-M. Borgella (1853), remains a major source for anyone who wants to understand how Haitians interpreted their own revolution, their political struggles, and the early life of the nation. Beaubrun Ardouin was not just writing about the past as a distant observer. He belonged to the generation that lived close to the events that shaped independent Haiti. That matters. His history is valuable because it preserves details, personalities, and political debates that might otherwise have been lost. But that same closeness also means his writing must be read carefully. Like many hist...
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Les politiciens sont la crise : pourquoi l'élite haïtienne ne peut pas sauver un État qu'elle n'a jamais été conçue pour servir

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  The Politicians Are the Crisis: Why Haiti's Elite Cannot Save a State It Was Never Built to Serve A dialogue with Me Jonel Dilhomme, in light of the Appel du Lambi Manifesto By Patrick Prézeau Stephenson* (Le Français suit)   There is a quiet violence in the way we keep asking the wrong question about Haiti. The question we keep asking — and Me Jonel Dilhomme, in his recent essay, asks it with more rigor than most — is whether Haiti's political actors are ready to place the survival of the state above their rivalries. It is a generous question. It assumes the readiness is dormant rather than absent, that the will exists somewhere and merely awaits the right historical pressure, the right international nudge, the right citizen mobilization to surface. I want to suggest, with respect to Maître Dilhomme's careful diagnosis, that the question itself is the trap. We have been asking it, in one form or another, since 1806. We asked it after the fall of Duvalier. We...
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La Révolution Suspendue : la crise de l'écoute en Haïti et le plaidoyer pour un pouvoir polycentrique

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  The Arrested Revolution: Haiti's Crisis of Listening and the Case for Polycentric Power By Patrick Prézeau Stephenson (Le Français suit) Port-au-Prince has perfected a peculiar kind of deafness. It is not the deafness of distance — the capital is, after all, only a few hours by road from almost anywhere in the country that still has a passable road. It is the deafness of a state whose ear has been surgically detached from its body. When pine trees fall in the southeast, when barricades rise in Kap Ayisyen, when families in Wannament negotiate passage with men holding rifles older than the children they are trying to feed, the sound travels — but it travels into a chamber built to absorb it. Johnny Celestin, in his recent essay, names this condition with admirable economy: the connections are broken. No credible elections. No accountable taxation. No mechanism by which the cry of a citizen becomes the calculation of a minister. He is right. But I want to push his diagnosis f...
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