1 Gourde - Faustin I Essai

Faustin Soulouque — formerly a general who had survived the 1791 slave revolt as a child — declared himself Emperor Faustin I in 1849 after initially being installed as president by an elite that believed he was too dim to resist manipulation. He proved them wrong almost immediately. This essai, produced in 1853, belongs to the imperial coinage program he undertook to legitimize a reign that Paris and Washington refused to recognize, modeled self-consciously on Napoleonic precedent.

Pattern issues from his reign are genuinely scarce; Soulouque was deposed in 1859 and fled to Jamaica, leaving his imperial monetary ambitions largely unrealized in circulation.