Leslie Manigat obituary

Leslie Manigat, who has died aged 83, was Haiti's first modern-minded president. He tried to break the vicious circle of class-based violence and dictatorship that had held Haiti prisoner for nearly two centuries, but instead was broken by it himself. A social scientist and historian, the energetic and fiercely ambitious Manigat governed for only 133 days before he was overthrown in June 1988 by a drunken general who had earlier allowed him to win a fraudulent election.

Born into a middle-class family from northern Haiti, Manigat studied in Paris and his first job was in the foreign ministry under the dictator François "Papa Doc" Duvalier, whose "noiriste" and nationalist views he shared. But he fell out with the tyrant, who accused him of organising a student strike and briefly threw him in jail. He left the country in 1963 to teach at universities in the US, France, Trinidad and Venezuela, and campaign tirelessly against the dictatorship. Duvalier sentenced him to death in his absence.

The generals who took over when the Duvalier family fled in 1986 were forced to hold what were to be the country's first free elections, but they staged an election-day massacre and annulled the vote, in which Manigat was a candidate. Though he had fought the dictatorship for a quarter of a century, he was desperate for power, and cut a deal with the army and their Duvalierist allies, who saw him as a respectable frontman to redeem them after the massacre. They proclaimed him president after a rigged election in January 1988 in which turnout was around 5%.

His excuse was that the army was "an inescapable fact of life" and had to be negotiated with. He was right, but his opportunism in the wake of the killings provoked universal revulsion, making his rule impossible. He never managed to gain the upper hand over Duvalierist death-squads and the army's violence and demands. The US had also suspended all aid after the killings.

Yet he was not interested in stealing public money and genuinely wanted to promote democracy. This meant challenging his military patrons. He made a tactical alliance with a powerful druglord colonel and then, on 19 June, dared to sack the army chief, General Henri Namphy, and other key officers.

But rebellious soldiers came for the over-confident Manigat as he celebrated his supposed victory at a champagne party and bundled the portly president on to a plane into exile. He left calling himself "the last and only hope for democracy". Namphy announced his takeover in a drunken post-midnight TV appearance.

Manigat's chief legacy was his unprecedented division of the army, which led to the country's first democratic elections two years later. He was also the first of a trio of presidents (Manigat the admired intellectual, a judge, Ertha Pascal-Trouillot, and a Catholic priest, Jean-Bertrand Aristide) who gave some Haitians confidence that they could have respectable leaders instead of the thugs who had gone before them.

He wanted to engage with the country's poor. But he and his wife, Mirlande, a former student of his, had spent decades abroad and were judged arrogant and out of touch with the informal ways of Haitian society, where, for instance, an ill-paid soldier or bodyguard would expect and receive small personal favours from the president.

Anger at Manigat for his 1988 election betrayal faded with the years and after the couple returned to Haiti, he scored 12% at the 2006 presidential election and she 32% at the last one in 2011.

His wife and five of his seven daughters survive him.