Haiti State Against Nation Analysis

The Duvalier regime has been the subject of numerous debates and discussions in the academic sphere. However, many of these discussions focused on this regime as the cause of the multiple crises that affected Haiti during the twentieth century. Considering this, Michel-Rolph Trouillot explores the origins and development of the Duvalierist regime, addressing the importance of the historical context in which this regime developed to understand the factors that made it possible in his book “Haiti: State against Nation: Origins and Legacy of Duvalierism”.
In order to do this, Trouillot uses state and nation as differentiated categories and establish their particularities throughout the book, by relating them to the division between the urban
Because of it, the author also focuses in issues like the economic division of the Haitian society, the differences between classes and the prevalence of race as a category of differentiation between Haitians.
The book initiates with an evaluation of the situation of the country prior to the installment of Duvalierism, to argue that there was already an economic and social crisis in Haiti, in where the division between the urban elites and the rural peasantry was evident. The addressing of the previous situation of the country was useful to the author as it allowed to uncover the supposed economic prosperity due to the production and exportation of goods that only benefited the upper classes and maintained the profound economic inequalities in the
Moreover, when analyzing the permanence of the regime, the author argues that Duvalierism survived due to what he identifies as the formalization of the crisis , which was used by Duvalier to provide the regime and the ideology behind it autonomy to endure, regardless of who was in charge of the state. Duvalier's strategy was to penetrate not only in all spheres of government, but also in the State as a whole, intervening in civil society institutions to extend the regime to the nation as a whole.
Trouillot also addresses the importance of race and the prevalence of racism in what is commonly understood as a racially homogeneous society, by analyzing the impact that skin color had in the structuring of societies and the ways in which power was distributed, privileging gens de coleur in comparison to blacks . Concerning this, the author makes an important contribution as he challenged the traditional understanding of race issues and Haiti, bringing topics as colorism to the discussion about the construction of social, economic and political hierarchies in the country