The Haitian town of Jérémie is surrounded by some of the tallest mountains in the Caribbean. Located on the southwestern peninsula of the Grand’Anse region, Jérémie was historically a fortress for peasant rebels who opposed government troops in the nineteenth century. By the twentieth century, Jérémie would be viewed as a town of “mulatto elites.” Jean-Philippe Belleau’s Killing the Elites: Haiti, 1964 attempts to explain color division between “blacks” and “mulattos” in Jérémie, which culminated in a heart-wrenching massacre under the brutal twentieth-century dictatorship of Francois Duvalier.

Belleau investigates the massacre of wealthy mulatto families in Jérémie in 1964. In the Introduction and Chapter 1, Belleau tracks the origins of the massacre by recounting the episode that sparked the murderous event, which many have speculated to be ordered by the dictator Duvalier. Known as Jeune Haïti (Young Haiti), thirteen young Haitian men who lived in exile in the United States plotted to overthrow the Duvalier regime. Many individuals associated with Jeune Haïti were mulattos, though a few members of the group were black. They returned to the peninsula in August 1964 with the aim of launching a revolution that was reminiscent of the 1959 Cuban Revolution, a revolution that was largely successful because of peasant support across the Sierra Maestra Mountains. Jeune Haïti rebels attempted to follow the same Cuban blueprint, but such a scheme also had precedent in Haitian history, especially the 1843 and 1844 peasant-based revolutions. Chapter 1 breaks down how the Jeune Haïti’s rebellion collapsed and how government-sponsored forces gruesomely murdered the rebels’ families in retaliation. The murders occurred in tandem with the lifespan of the Jeune Haïti rebellion, ending in October 1964.

The style of Belleau’s book is similar to the writings of earlier journalists who have written the most on the Duvalier regime. Belleau cites many of these writers, such as Elizabeth Abbott, Anne Fuller, and Bernard Diedrich, in the footnotes. To produce their works, these authors have relied on informants, foreign observations of Haitian politics, and US diplomatic cables (though the more detailed State Department Central Decimal Files are largely excluded in Belleau’s Killing the Elites). What is common across these works on the Duvalier period, however, is a remarkable dearth of internal primary documents from Haiti, and Belleau’s book is no exception. Government records of the Duvalier regime exist in local archives in Jérémie as well as in the Archives Nationales d’Haïti and other repositories within the United States. But, taken collectively, the literature on the Duvalier regime remains heavily unbalanced in its perspective on this brutal period in Haitian history.

Chapters 2–4 of Belleau’s book examine nineteenth-century Haiti in order to uncover what the author sees as a lingering anti-elite attitude—one that has manifested itself in singling out Haitians of mixed-race descent for political execution. The author also contends that the twentieth-century ideology of noirisme, or “black-ism,” which Duvalier helped establish, had an “epistemic presence” in the nineteenth century. These arguments look at Haitian history anachronistically, imposing political realities of the twentieth century onto the nineteenth century. Belleau suggests, for example, that the terms “aristocracy” or “bourgeois” were synonymous with wealthy mulattos in the nineteenth century (p. 12). They were not. Nevertheless, the viewpoint that mulattos were the elite in the nineteenth century persists throughout the book. His approach, unfortunately, depicts Haitian political history as unchanging for almost two centuries. That said, chapters 7–11, do capture the politics of social intimacy in Jérémie, challenging the reader to understand the closeness between the victims of the massacre and their assailants.

The world of Jérémie is unique because of its geographical isolation. It has been a quasi-urban town, yet it remains a largely rural place, with farmers comprising many of its inhabitants even today. Jérémie was upgraded into an urban arrondissement only two years before the massacre, and its politics have been greatly influenced by nineteenth-century rural politics. Thus, Belleau is correct to include the nineteenth century in his analysis, but he focuses more on urban politics of the capital. For instance, he discusses tensions within the nineteenth-century central government, which generated conflict between bureaucrats in the capital of Port-au-Prince. Belleau observes that color politics involved “competition for such jobs” (pp. 81–84). He is right that many of the supposed “political” debates about color were actually public disputes between mixed-race and black bureaucrats competing for high civic posts in a Haitian government that was led by powerful military officers. But Belleau mistakes office politics within the government for national conflict in the nineteenth century. Belleau sees the wealthy mulattos as “urban” and in contradistinction to peasants, even as peasant politics dominated Jérémie. Practices of social intimacy later on, Belleau explains, transcended class divisions. But both parties belonged to the same political heritage of rural politics. Throughout the nineteenth century, they were one and the same, living in a provincial town where wealthy peasants, military officers, rural merchants, and municipal authorities resided and ruled the Grand’Anse region. That world was overturned in the twentieth century and sowed the seeds for internal elite tensions that erupted in the 1964 Jérémie massacre.