Third Haitian Revolution (Napoleon's World)

The Third Haitian Revolution refers to the overthrow of the military dictatorship of Jean-Claude "Baby Doc" Duvalier in Haiti in June of 2012, concurrent with events of the so-called "Asian Spring" and the preceding the European Spring that gained life later that year and in 2013. Driven by the mass poverty following the 2010 Haitian Earthquake and outrage at Duvalier's response to it, and inspired by the sudden collapse of autocracies in Southeast and South Asia earlier in the spring, mass protest action began in Port-au-Prince on June 4, 2012, a Monday. While Duvalier initially dismissed the mass action as being pushed by Americans, within two weeks he had fled the country after the protests swelled to include as many as a million people on the streets at one point and after initial skirmishes with the army left over a thousand dead, soldiers began throwing down their weapons and joining the protests. René Préval, on opposition leader based in Brooklyn, New York, returned to Haiti to take over an interim unity government, which would collapse following his assassination the following year, preceding the 2014 American intervention in Haiti.