Haitian Vodou is now recognized as a religion, but that was not the case for a long time. During the colonial period, authorities perceived it as a dangerous form of witchcraft. After the European clergy had fled during the Revolution, Haiti was left for decades without religious guidance and its Catholic priesthood consisted in characters of dubious morals, who allowed Vodou and Catholic practices to mingle unopposed (Métraux, 1953). The first governments of independent Haiti, which had made Catholicism the nation's official religion, more or less tolerated Vodou but did not have a much higher opinion of it (Hurbon, 2005).

Until the 1920-1930s, many if not most of (European-educated) Haitian elites were in fact extremely dismissive of Vodou, and more generally of the African roots of the Haitian population. They had internalised European prejudices about Africa, thought as a place of fanaticism, fieriness and wild appetites. Those elites shared the European (and notably French) belief in the civilizing mission of Europe. They saw Vodou as a barbaric practice that was an obstacle to progress and civilization, and they were uncomfortable with the fact that it was practiced by a large part of the population. The most tolerant recognized the importance of Vodou, though they described it as a simple form of amusement with music, dancing, and food, that was unfortunately tainted with alcoholism, hysteria, and the blood of animal sacrifice (Nicholls, 1996).

Foreign observers had fewer reservations about Vodou. Since the Haitian Revolution, the European and American press had not spared its criticism, and often mockery, of the newly independent country, with its funny-looking dignitaries and their funny-sounding aristocracy. The often turbulent Haiti offered an easy target. For those in Europe and America who wanted to keep slavery legal, and for the proponents of African colonisation later in the century, Haiti's troubles were the proof that Black people were unable to govern themselves. The continuing existence of the "barbaric" Vodou, that linked the former slaves to Africa, supported this idea.

In 1797, French slave-owner Moreau de Saint-Méry had published an extensive description of Saint-Domingue that included several pages about the Vaudoux, describing its African origin and its ceremonies. He warned about the "kind of magnetism" of the Vodou dances, a power so strong that even White people who had spied on the ceremonies had been compelled to dance and had to pay the "Vodou Queen" to be freed of their torment. Vodou, said Saint-Méry, was dangerous, and it could be "turned into a more terrible weapon" because its priests "knew everything and could do everything". He recognized that Vodou was no just a dance or just witchcraft. Also, he did not claim that Vodou followers indulged in cannibalism and human sacrifices. He only mentioned the use of goat blood and, like other people after him, seemed more concerned by the sex orgies ending the ceremonies!

In the late 1840s, the rise to power of Faustin Soulouque, first as a President, then as an Emperor, gave Vodou a little more visibility. In 1850, the French newspaper La Presse reported rather matter-of-factly the Vodou ceremony organized by Emperor Faustin in his hometown of Petit-Goâve for the rest of the souls of his parents. A French warship was there, with foreign consuls on board, and it participated in the ceremony by firing its cannons, "which singularly flattered the vanity of the Blacks and may have helped to smooth out some of the difficulties that had been pending for a few days" (the relations between Soulouque and foreign powers were often rocky). A rooster, a sheep, and a goat were paraded during the day, and the three animals were sacrificed at midnight. Soulouque drank some of their blood and a vase containing the blood was buried, completing the ritual. La Presse concluded:

This poor country of Haiti is making great strides towards savagery. How can we be surprised when we see the Head of State reviving, supporting and practising himself the religious ceremonies of the Congo and Guinea, which his predecessors had so much difficulty in destroying!

Gustave d'Alaux - often considered to have been the pen name of French consul in Port-au-Prince Maxime Raybaud - left a long and detailed chronicle of Soulouque's regime. He quotes Saint-Méry as a source for the description of the ceremonies, but otherwise mentions Vodou only in its social and political aspects in the first half of the century after independence. Of the Vodou during the Pétion presidency, d'Alaux writes:

Vodou, a sort of religious and dancing freemasonry, introduced into Santo Domingo by the Aradas negroes, and greatly feared by the planters, grouped [the farm workers] into guilds which gradually took the place of the rural police, ruining or enriching as they saw fit the landowners whom they disgraced or protected.

By the second half of the century, most French writers did not yet consider Vodou to be more than a bizarre "freemasonry", part religion, part witchcraft, part association or social club, whose spectacular ceremonies ended up in group sex. It was barbaric, like all things African, but not fundamentally evil. One exception was Paul Dhormoys (Louis-Eugène Lambert), a French official who had been sent by Raybaud to the Dominican Republic. In a memoir written in 1859, Dhormoys describes a child sacrifice as it had been told to him by an officer of the French Navy on their way to the Caribbean. In the story, narrated like a gothic or fantastique horror story, the Navy officer and a priest travel at night to a forest to spy on a Vodou ceremony (Dhormoys, 1859).

As graceful and full of a plaintive charm as those tunes of such sweet melody are usually found in all the West Indies, so wild was this one: it evoked thoughts of murder and blood. We were listening to this terrifying melody, when a flash of lightning, preceding a frightful explosion of thunder, illuminated the scene for a few seconds. At our feet we saw a large circle of about forty people turning and holding hands. In the middle was a small child, which I think I can still see, a black goat and two or three other animals which I did not have time to distinguish. All fell back into darkness; the singing continued for a while, and then there was a deep silence.

Fifteen minutes later, torches are lit up and the officer can no longer see the child. The goat and a chicken are sacrificed and the men and women engage in activities that "would make our sailor blush". The following day, the narrator comes upon a gathering of people on a beach at the mouth of the river, and he is told that "two corpses and the arm of a child" have been found on the sand. Interestingly, Dhormoys was one of the few writers to see Soulouque in a favourable light. Six year later, he published a new book of memoirs that contained the above story, and, noting that his readers had accused him of making up "such atrocities", added an annex reprinted from the legal daily La Gazette des Tribunaux, which dealt with the story that would change people's opinion of Vodou in France and elsewhere: the Affaire de Bizoton, also called the Affaire de Tante Jeanne.

In December 1863, in Bizoton, a little town west of Port-au-Prince, sister and brother Jeanne and Congo Pellé were commanded by a "Vodou god" to commit a human sacrifice. They kidnapped their niece, the little Claircine, held her prisoner for four days, strangled her, cut her head, and, with other Vodou practitioners, they ate her body in a cannibal feast. Another little girl has been captured and kept for the same grisly fate when the police, alerted by Claircine's mother, came and arrested everyone. The official gazette Le Moniteur Haïtien and other Haitian newspapers dedicated long articles that included descriptions of the crime, reports of the trial, and opinion pieces. Eight people who had participated in the crime were put on a high-profile trial, and they were executed by a firing squad in February 1864, under the acclamations of the crowd. In the Moniteur, journalist A. Monfleury wrote:

Destroy the cult, it is said, and you will destroy anthropophagy, which is its consequence. But a cult can only be destroyed by another cult. Man, whoever he may be, savage or civilised, needs a belief, a religion; and it was through the Christian religion that the cult of Vodou had to be attacked and extirpated. If the evil has continued to this day, it is because it has never been attacked in its principle. And by whom? For this, zealous missionaries were needed, men animated by the pure spirit of the Gospel; a regular, well-chosen clergy was needed, in short, true priests; how many were there? How many are there still in the country?

The context was now less tolerant of Vodou. President Geffrard, who had ousted the Vodou-following Soulouque in 1859, had signed a new concordat with the Vatican in 1860. The trial was an opportunity to demonstrate that Haiti was now willing to enforce the true catholic faith. In the following years, a new clergy brought from France, notably from Britanny, took over the reins of Haitian catholicism, and dedicated itself to eradicate Vodou, considered as an "African blemish" and a devil cult. Several anti-witchcraft campaigns were launched, the latest in 1939-1942 (Métraux, 1953; Hurbon, 2005, Corten, 2014).

The Bizoton crime received a large publicity in Haiti and beyond. The trial was reported immediately in French newspapers, notably in The Gazette des Tribunaux, which reprinted excerpts of the trial on 2 and 3 April 1864. The Republican (and anticlerical) journal L'Opinion Nationale even concluded in an article titled "Religious anthrophophagy" (Bonneau, 1964):

There is only one infallible way to defeat voodoo, only one sovereign remedy, and that is the development of public education.

-> Part 2