The First and Last King of Haiti: An Interview with Marlene L. Daut
In today’s post, Nathalie Frédéric Pierre, Assistant Professor of History at Howard University, interviews renowned historian Marlene L. Daut about her latest book. Dr. Daut is Professor of French, African American Studies, and History at Yale University. She is the author of The First and Last King of Haiti: The Rise and Fall of Henry Christophe (Knopf, January 2025); the award-winning Awakening the Ashes: An Intellectual History of the Haitian Revolution (UNC Press, 2023); Baron de Vastey and the Origins of Black Atlantic Humanism (Palgrave, 2017); and Tropics of Haiti: Race and the Literary History of the Haitian Revolution in the Atlantic World (Liverpool, 2015).
Nathalie Frédéric Pierre (NFP): In the past decade, your prodigious scholarship on the Haitian Revolution addressed the invisibility of Black sovereignty and has brought Haiti to the forefront of intellectual and public discourse. Your work masterfully engages both the historical literature and fictions of the Haitian Revolution while connecting with diverse audiences across academic, public, and digital spheres. How has this engagement influenced your intellectual trajectory (considering the significant initial push-back against this topic at all) and your approach to writing this book on Haiti’s revolutionary legacy?
Marlene L. Daut (MLD): As a literary and intellectual historian, I have spent a large part of my career focusing on how literary fictions (poetry, drama, novels, and short stories) affected the way that people living in the 18th and 19th centuries understood the Haitian Revolution (1791-1804). My newest book, a biography called The First and Last King of Haiti: The Rise and Fall of Henry Christophe (Knopf, January 2025) does not really represent divergence from this interest, even though it might seem that way.
On the face of it, the book offers a pretty standard cradle to grave biography. Yet something a little less traditional, in terms of biographical writing, is my engagement with and contributions to historiography. For example, in multiple sections, I take the reader behind the scenes to reveal and analyze conflicting historical accounts about Henry Christophe’s life; and whenever I determined that I should hold off judgment about a particular element, I tell the reader why that is the case. It felt very important to me when weighing different accounts to walk readers through my decisions, so to speak, even in this narrative history meant for a popular audience.
I also further elaborate on Christophe’s radical influence over Haitian revolutionary and post-revolutionary political ideas, a topic I took up in my previous book Awakening the Ashes: An Intellectual History of the Haitian Revolution. I detail how two of Christophe’s principal secretaries, Juste Chanlatte and Baron de Vastey, published various works under the state press created by Christophe to combat racist and stereotypical portrayals of Haiti and to spread anti-slavery, anti-racist, and anti-colonial ideals across the world.
While I do focus mostly on Christophe’s life from a historical standpoint, I do also take a look at the outset of the book of fictional representations of Christophe, which are legion and mostly reflect demonization of him—which I think would be a very interesting book project on its own! In fact, because so much of this book was about trying to see who Christophe was beyond the various myths that have been created about him, I start the book with a prologue that details the many, many attempts to portray Christophe’s life on the page and the stage from the nineteenth-century to the present.
My goal in first explaining the vast fictional corpus of representations of Christophe—one that includes the Cuban author Alejo Carpentier with his highly popular novel The Kingdom of this World (originally published in Spanish in 1949) — is to prepare readers who may have only encountered Christophe as a fictional character to understand that these invented portrayals have little to tell us about Christophe’s actual life. With this book, I want to encourage greater understanding of Christophe’s very real life and the entire world he tried to build around Black sovereignty. The tendency of novelists and playwrights to portray Christophe as an irredeemable monster and his downfall as ultimately inevitable has obscured the intricate personal and political events that led to his dramatic demise, rendering him one of the least understood heads of state in the Americas.
NFP: Christophe’s personal losses often paralleled Haiti’s political fractures. How do these personal-political intersections help us rethink traditional narratives of leadership in early postcolonial states?
MLD: Chapter six of the book opens by detailing Toussaint Louverture’s horrible death in a French prison, news of which we learn devastated Christophe.
While the ensuing victory of the Haitian Revolution that led to the creation of the first slavery-free nation in the Americas suggests that Toussaint did not die in vain, since Haiti became free anyway, the story is actually more complicated. Dessalines and Christophe only reunited with the Black freedom-fighters (who later reconstituted themselves as the armée indigène) after the French had already sealed the terrible fate of Louverture. It was news of Louverture’s arrest, in fact, coupled with Napoléon Bonaparte’s July 1802 decree reestablishing slavery in the French empire, that taught the other revolutionary leaders that there could no longer be any meaningful negotiations with French officials. The righteous moment when Christophe switched back to the side of the Black freedom fighters in fall 1802 would be tempered, however, when news reached the island that Toussaint Louverture had died in April 1803 of starvation, pneumonia, and a stroke in the French prison. Louverture’s fate took a definite toll on Christophe’s psyche and forever made him an ardent hater of the French. In November 1803, Christophe became one of three men to sign Haiti’s preliminary declaration of independence from France. By January 1804, General Jean-Jacques Dessalines had triumphantly and officially proclaimed Haitian independence, with Christophe as one of the main signatories. One of the most famous lines from the 1804 Declaration of Independence reads, “anathema to the name of the French!”
Celebrating the triumphs of an independent Haiti, nevertheless, would soon be mitigated for Christophe by another death: that of his eldest child at the very hands of the Frenchmen he now despised. On July 15, 1793, Christophe had married a woman named Marie-Louise. They went on to have four children—François Ferdinand, Améthyste, Athénaïs, and Victor Henry. In 1802, like many important free men of color, especially those holding high rank in the French military, Christophe sent Ferdinand to be educated in France. Christophe never saw his son again. Years later, a friend of the family revealed that after the Black revolutionaries declared Haitian independence, the French shuttered Ferdinand’s school and sent the children of the revolutionaries who had defeated them to an orphanage. Ferdinand, this eyewitness reveals, was beaten and then died in 1805 in the streets of Paris. Christophe described France’s lack of care for the life of his son as the “darkest betrayal and the most infamous perfidy” of his life.
NFP: You discuss Christophe’s economic policies as both visionary and exploitative. How do we reconcile his labor reforms, which rejected slavery, with accusations that his policies mirrored colonial systems of coercion? Does this tension challenge romantic notions of revolution by revealing the harsh compromises and tough decisions required to sustain a fledgling state?
MLD: Christophe promised a free world without slavery to those living within the borders of his kingdom, and in many respects, he delivered it. The creation of this land of freedom in a sea of slavery did come at a price though. The question is whether the price was too high.
Christophe not only needed money to protect Haiti from the continuous threat of French invasion, but he needed a work force. Christophe therefore issued edicts for mandatory labor that required, for example, “all the idle people found in the towns and villages to be sent to the countryside to engage in the work of agriculture.” Christophe also issued an edict requiring the farmers to begin planting, in addition to coffee, sugar, and indigo (the kingdom’s main exports), “wheat and other grains, potatoes, and other vital means of subsistence.” Christophe said that the only way for Haitians to remain truly free was for them to not be beholden to foreign nations for everyday goods. We might say then that Christophe had a very keen, perhaps prescient, understanding of what food dependency would mean for Haiti.
Writing in the 1840s, however, the Haitian historian Thomas Madiou disagreed that the ends of black freedom justified the means of black feudalism. Madiou wrote that the laborers on these farms were never compensated, and that the farmers, because they had to pay such high taxes to the state, could only keep ¼ of their revenue. For Madiou, this was not even close to being the kind of freedom and equality promised by the Caribbean’s first and only modern king.
Madiou, of course, did not have the previous experience of ever having been enslaved, like Christophe, nor did he, like us living today, have two centuries of knowledge about foreign encroachments upon Haitian sovereignty, including the disastrous US Occupation of the country from 1915-1934, to temper his judgment of Christophe’s imperfectly executed dreams of a free, prosperous, and self-sufficient Haiti. In Christophe’s era, Haiti was the only example of a nation built by formerly enslaved Africans becoming free and independent. Still, the labor system Christophe instituted was undoubtedly harsh and exacting. What I hope emerges from my purposefully nuanced assessment of Christophe-era primary sources, is that understanding the world the king made means understanding that the world he lived in was one where Black freedom was not only constantly under threat, but hardly existent. Paradoxically, the end of the Christophean era led to a Haiti that was far less free than the one King Henry left behind, as his death opened the door for France to extort Haiti for millions.
NFP: Christophe’s establishment of a Haitian monarchy often invites comparisons to European despots. To what extent was this strategy a reclamation of power, and how does it challenge Eurocentric assumptions about governance and sovereignty?
MLD: On March 26, 1811, President Henry Christophe radically changed the trajectory of the revolution that made Haiti free when he announced his intention to become the King of Haiti. While governing monarchies are rare in our contemporary world, in the early nineteenth-century, such monarchies were the most common form of governance. The coronation took place on June 2, 1811. The royal family—the king, queen, prince, and two princesses—rode into their coronation in a church built for the occasion on magnificent carriages purchased from England. Styled as a mass, the proceedings were presided over by a white French Catholic Priest from Brittany named Father Corneille Brelle, who gave the whole mass in Latin after he placed the royal robes on Queen Marie Louise and King Henry. Brelle then presented a diamond-crusted scepter to Henry before finally setting the jeweled crowns on their heads. Henry’s oath contained the lines, “I swear to maintain the integrity of our land and the independence of the Kingdom; to never allow, under any pretext, the return of Slavery nor of any feudal system contrary to liberty and the exercise of the civil and political rights of the people of Haiti.”
As can be imagined, news of the coronation of Haiti’s first and only king immediately attracted the attention of media outlets from around the world. Such observers were less astonished by the fact of a king in the world than they were by the notion of a Black one in Haiti. While one racist detractor writing for the Niles Weekly Standard said Christophe was “aping royalty,” Caleb Cushing defended the king in the North American Review when he wrote, “A nation…which is tranquil within and threatened by nothing but ordinary dangers from abroad, can enjoy a free and republican government; but when a country has been plunged for two centuries in the lowest degradation… and when, although exalted to the rank of a nation, it has continued to be harassed by restless and able enemies,—in such a country, the firm hand of kingly power is needed.” So interested was the US public in the fact that there was a monarchy on one side of the island and a republic on the other, the edicts establishing the royal order of King Henry were immediately translated into English and printed in Philadelphia. Subsequently, many US American and British newspapers and magazines ran celebrity profiles of the Haitian king, often describing him in Herculean terms because of his uncommonly tall physical stature.
International observers also grew captivated by news of the completion of the Palace at Sans-Souci and the Citadelle Henry. The construction of the Citadelle Henry, completed in 1813, was designed to prevent foreign invasion of the island. It housed artillery, canons, and several tons of ammunition. The fortress was guarded by a highly skilled military force called the Royal Dahomets. Christophe assured the Haitian people that the imposing structure and his army of tens of thousands of men was necessary to ensure Haiti’s survival since the French were continuing to try to retake their former colony. Following Napoleon’s first exile on the island of Elba, the Treaty of Paris provided a fleeting sense of hope for the King of Haiti that the now restored Bourbon monarchy, with Louis XVIII as king, would finally recognize Haitian independence. But as I show in The First and Last King of Haiti, Haiti’s fight for freedom was about to get more, not less complicated.
NFP: The chapter on espionage made me think of the popularity of the genre in media. How do Christophe’s dealings with French agents reveal the stakes of Haitian independence with a global counter-revolutionary context?
MLD: During the first and second Bourbon restoration, a proliferation of ex-colonist writers from France, like Berquin-Duvallon and Drouin de Bercy, issued pamphlets urging the reconquest of Saint-Domingue. Some of them like Venault de Charmilly even offered to finance a formal mission to reconquer “Saint-Domingue.” Upon learning that the French king Louis XVIII was, in fact, interested in restoring “Saint-Domingue,” Baron de Vastey used a powerfully poetic language that would soon come to distinctly characterize the kingdom’s numerous condemnations of France’s continuous encroachments. “The colonial hydra troubles us once again,” Vastey wrote, “its roars have crossed the vast expanse of these seas and have reached us…it multiplies and transforms itself, taking on diverse appearances in order to defeat us.” The hydra would indeed arrive, but King Henry would soon cut off its head, only to see it grow back once again. On January 9, 1817, the Royal Gazette of Hayti documented the French king’s three different attempts to bring war to the Kingdom of Haiti, starting with three French spies who arrived in 1814 (the subject of chapter 13). Taken together, these exposés were meant to prove to the Haitian people and to the world that the French government desired and was blatantly attempting to re-conquer “Saint-Domingue” and bring back slavery.
The First and Last King of Haiti derives its story precisely from the central tensions of early Haiti’s attempt to exist in freedom in a world of slavery. King Henry’s laws adamantly forbade chattel slavery, outlawed colonialism, and created an economically robust, financially solvent black state, not dependent on the transatlantic slave trade. The painstakingly modern side of this story, however, remains that in seeking to create a country that might one day be as materially wealthy as England, Spain, or France, King Henry recreated some of the very unequal labor conditions that the Haitian revolutionaries had hoped to destroy along with chattel slavery.
Copyright © AAIHS. May not be reprinted without permission.