Germaine Le Sueur, 3rd Duchess of Valverde

Her Excellency The Duchess of Valverde CI FAI
The Duchess of Valverde in 1825
7th Chancellor of Haiti
In office 19 September 1823 – 3 March 1831
Monarch	Jacques I
Preceded by	The Duke of Port-de-Paix
Succeeded by	The Duke of Port-de-Paix
Personal details
Born	Germaine Le Sueur (1794-12-28)28 December 1794 Jérémie, Saint-Domingue
Died	11 May 1877(1877-05-11) (aged 82) Pétion-Ville, Ouest, Haiti
Resting place	Sainte Anne Church, Port-au-Prince
Political party	Supremacist
Spouse(s)	TBD
Alma mater	Imperial Academy of Arts
Religion	Roman Catholicism

Germaine Le Sueur, 3rd Duchess of Valverde, CI, FAI (28 December 1794 – 11 May 1877), was a Haitian politician, aristocrat, and socialite who served as the seventh Chancellor of Haiti from 1823 to 1831. The youngest person to have ever become Chancellor at that time, as well as the first female to hold the office, Le Sueur was one of the favorites of Emperor Jacques I of Haiti, quickly rising to power and attaining the powerful office for herself by the age of thirty. Le Sueur was born in 1792 to one of the powerful gens de colour families based out of the cities of Jérémie in the French colony of Saint-Domingue. Her family specialized in the production of coffee in southern Saint-Domingue, and possessed many lands in the Spanish colony of Santo Domingo as well, through a series of complex treaties her father, Marcel Le Sueur, negotiated on behalf of several gens de colour merchants back in Jérémie. During the Haitian Revolution, Le Sueur's family sided with the slaves, financing their war efforts and smuggling goods to the colony to sustain the freed slave armies of Toussaint Louverture.

Following the war's conclusion in 1804, Jacques I, then Jean-Jacques Dessalines, created her father the 1st Duke of Valverde, a strange honor given that at the time of Haiti's independence that year, the region of Valverde remained within the Spanish colony of Santo Domingo. Dessalines had bestowed the honor on Le Sueur's father with the goal of attaining legitimacy to the Spanish half of Hispaniola through her father's possession of land in that area, and thus wished to use Marcel Le Sueur's new aristocratic title as a means of pursuing that goal. Regardless, Le Sueur's family rose quickly in the new imperial court of Jacques I, with her father being appointed a member of the Imperial Council of Haiti as Farmers-General. When Marcel died in 1809, his title passed on to Germaine's older brother, Simon Le Sueur, who enrolled her into the newly established Imperial Academy of Arts in Port-au-Prince, where she would be tutored in mathematics and philosophy. Taking full advantage of her freedom, Germaine pursued numerous men in positions of power to enhance the status of her family, with her brother's tacit approval.

See also

• List of Chancellors of Haiti