Soulouque's Empire (1849–1859)

Faustin Soulouque, elected president in 1847, declared himself Emperor Faustin I on August 26, 1849, establishing the Second Haitian Empire. His reign combined noiriste ideology — asserting the primacy of the Black majority against the mulatto elite — with authoritarian repression through a secret police and a violent massacre of mulatto politicians in 1848. Soulouque made two failed military campaigns to reconquer the Dominican Republic (1849, 1855–56). Haitian intellectuals and foreign observers derided his empire as a grotesque parody of Dessalines and Napoleon; later scholars have read it as an assertion of Black sovereignty and noirisme avant la lettre. He was overthrown in January 1859 by General Fabre Geffrard.