From 1941 the Roman Catholic clergy in Haiti, most of them French, ran a national campaign to make parishioners renounce Vodou. Participants were called rejete, rejectors, and the campaign asked each of them to swear an oath renouncing Satan and all his works, with Vodou understood as falling under that description. The government of Elie Lescot instructed civil and military authorities to support it.
In practice that meant raids. Temples were entered, drums, pots, flags and altar objects were carried out and burned, sacred trees were felled, and practitioners were arrested. The legal basis was a Haitian penal law of 1935 against pratiques superstitieuses, which had itself replaced the machinery of repression built during the United States occupation of 1915 to 1934. The state had been criminalising this material for a long time before the Church made a campaign of it.
The campaign fell hardest on the rural poor, for whom the temple was also the meeting house and the mutual aid society, and it sharpened the division between a French-speaking urban elite and a Creole-speaking countryside. By 1942 the reaction against it was strong enough to force a retreat, though prosecutions continued in a sporadic way for years.
The most durable result was the opposite of what was intended. The ethnologist Jacques Roumain attacked the campaign in print and founded the Bureau d'Ethnologie in Port-au-Prince, whose business was to collect and protect exactly the objects the campaign was burning.