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Marie Sainte Dédée Bazile (fl. 1806), aka Défilée and Défilée-La-Folle, is a figure of the Haitian Revolution. She is remembered for retrieving and burying the mutilated body of Emperor Jean-Jacques Dessalines after his assassination at Pont Larnage (now Pont Rouge) north of Port-au-Prince. –
Dédée Bazile was born near Cap-Français to enslaved parents and made a living serving as a sutler to the army of Dessalines. There are varying accounts of her madness but according to legend, Dédée Bazile either developed mental illness after she was raped by her master at age 18, or after some of her family members were killed in the defeat of Dessalines’s army by General Donatien Rochambeau.
On October 17, 1806, Emperor Dessalines was ambushed by his former comrades Alexandre Pétion, Jean-Pierre Boyer, André Rigaud, and Bruno Blanchet. He was fatally shot north of Port-au-Prince. His body was then brought into the city where it was stoned and mutilated by the crowds. Dédée Bazile, a fanatic admirer of Dessalines, gathered his remains in a sack and transported them to the Cimetière Intérieur to bury them.
Dédée Bazile died around 1816 and was buried in Port-au-Prince, but her grave has been lost. She was survived by her several children including her son Colonel Condol Bazile, officer of the constabulary under the Haitian president Faustin Soulouque. She is considered one of the four symbolic heroines of the independence of Haiti, alongside Sanité Bélair, Catherine Flon, and Cécile Fatiman
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