Home »

When the marines were first splashing ashore at Port-au-Prince in 1915, Paul Eugene Magloire had just turned eight years old. His birthplace was Quartier-Morin, a few miles southeast of Cap-Haitien. His father was Eugene Magloire, a peasant so energetic that he rose to be one of the many generals then running Haiti's army. The general was killed in a shooting accident in 1908, and the infant Paul was brought up by two brothers in Cap-Haitien. The Brothers of Christian Instruction gave him a Catholic education, stressing French and Latin, while in his family's fields he learned the peasant's ways and Creole tongue. Cap-Haitien, "Paris of the New World" under the French but since burned and sacked a dozen times, gave him a sense of past glory and present despair.

Magloire got a degree in arts and letters from the National School in Port-au-Prince and taught school for a year, but soon concluded that he could not live on a teacher's pay. He transferred his ambitions to the military, and graduated from a Marine-supervised gendarmerie training school. Soon Magloire's political education began.

During Magloire's reign, Haïti became a favorite tourist spot for US and European tourists. His anti-communist position also gained favorable reception from the US government. Notably, he used revenues from the sale of coffee to repair towns, build roads, public buildings, and a dam. He also oversaw the institution of women's suffrage. Magloire was very fond of having a vivid social life, staging a massive number of parties, social events, and ceremonies.

In 1954, brought an end to the period modernization when Hurricane Hazel ravaged Haïti and relief funds were stolen, Magloire's popularity fell. In 1956 there was a dispute about when his reign would end; he fled the country amid strikes and demonstrations and paved the way for the brutal dictatorship of the Duvalier family. When François Duvalier took the presidency, he stripped Magloire of his Haïtian citizenship.

In 1986, when Baby Doc Duvalier lost power, Magloire returned to Haïti from New York. Two years later he became an unofficial army advisor. He died in 2001.