Island Royalty

The First and Last King of Haiti: The Rise and Fall of Henry Christophe by Marlene L. Daut; Knopf, 656 pp., $40

Forty years ago, most white Americans had no idea that, hard on the heels of the American and French revolutions, an enslaved population on a Caribbean island had claimed its freedom by force of arms and founded a new Black nation called Haiti. Today, Haitian revolutionary studies is an overcrowded field. Researchers have combed through acres of hard-to-find and often drastically disorganized archives, not only in Haiti and France but also in other European and Caribbean countries, and made their contents a lot more orderly and accessible than they used to be. Still, reconstructing the profile of even a fairly well-known individual from the revolutionary period can be something like deducing a whole dinosaur from a couple of toenails and teeth—a problem that confronts Marlene Daut in the writing of her exhaustive and sometime exhausting biography of Henry Christophe, the onetime king of Haiti.

Daut’s book is as much historiography as biography. Early on, she makes the point that practically all contemporaneous accounts of the Haitian Revolution were written as propaganda, either pro or con, and so cannot be trusted for their facts—although there has been an immense propagation, and sometimes mythologization, of ostensible facts from such sources. It’s difficult, then, for Daut to get a sharp focus on the early life of her subject. Was Christophe born on Grenada or Saint Kitts? How did he first arrive in then French Saint Domingue, today’s Haiti? Is it certain that he attended the 1779 Battle of Savannah as part of a French expedition that included a good number of people of color who went on to play significant parts in the Haitian Revolution? If so, what was his role? That he spent some prerevolutionary years employed at the Hôtel de la Couronne in Cap Français (today Haiti’s second city, Cap Haïtien) is sure, but was he enslaved or free at that time, and was he a butler or a cook or both? Where accounts conflict (i.e., everywhere), Daut’s approach is to report them all, often without committing to any—a tactic that avoids embracing an error but does not serve the development of a clear story line. We are often told that Christophe might have seen or done this or that, and if his observation or participation often remains speculative, Daut deftly surrounds her subject’s somewhat nebulous figure with a plethora of incontrovertible facts that recent research (much of it her own) has certified.

During the revolutionary period (1791–1804), Christophe emerged as a public figure, solid enough to cast a shadow. He became one of the few trusted commanders serving the first military and political leader of the revolution, Toussaint Louverture, participating in or leading many campaigns, including a bloody civil war that erupted in 1799, thanks to a power struggle between Louverture, whose power base was in the north of Haiti, and the southern commander, André Rigaud.

In this and other conflicts, Christophe was an important instrument in Louverture’s consolidation of power, which brought the whole island of Hispaniola under revolutionary control and created a sort of de facto independence. When Napoleon sent 30,000 of his seasoned troops to suppress what he considered a rebellion, Christophe, then commandant of Cap Français, followed Louverture’s orders and burned the city to the ground to hinder the French landing.

Then, after months of ferocious fighting, Christophe switched sides to the French, along with most of the other revolutionary commanders, a volte face that forced Louverture to come to terms with the French. After Louverture’s arrest and deportation, when it became clear that Napoleon’s semisecret program was to restore slavery after all, Christophe and others resumed the fight and, under the primary leadership of Jean-Jacques Dessalines, drove the French into the sea.

Dessalines declared the independence of Haiti and ruled as emperor until he was assassinated in 1806, in a renewal of conflict between the mostly Black African north of the country and the south, with its mostly mixed-blood leaders, Alexandre Pétion rising to dominance among them. Christophe’s military campaign to reassert control of the southern region stopped just short of Port-au-Prince. In the aftermath of that essentially drawn battle, his forces fought off attempts to invade the north—the most serious on the northwestern peninsula, in and around Môle Saint Nicolas. Thereafter, Christophe’s regime settled into a period of stability, and in 1811, he was declared king of Haiti, an event that included an extraordinarily opulent coronation and the creation of a royal court peopled by a new-founded nobility with hundreds of members.

Rhetorically, Christophe’s kingdom extended over the entire island, although in fact he controlled only the northern region. Pétion and his allies were laying groundwork for a republic of Haiti headquartered in Port-au-Prince, and there was still a small but stubborn French military presence in the eastern half of Hispaniola, today’s Dominican Republic. Despite this limitation, some foreign powers, particularly Britain, were pleased to treat King Christophe as head of the Haitian state, and his kingdom had prosperous trade relations with the United States and several European countries. The French, under a restored Bourbon monarchy, sent emissaries to both Christophe’s kingdom and Pétion’s nascent republic, improbably proposing the restoration of the “colony” in its prerevolutionary condition, not excepting slavery, to France. Christophe would hear none of it and drove the messengers out of his kingdom. In the south, the reception was more temperate and eventually led to the promise to pay France 150 million francs as indemnity for the loss of its property (both material and human)—a debt that contributed to crippling Haiti economically up into the present.

Uneasy lies the head that wears the crown! The very real threat from France, combined with many other stressors, doubtless contributed to the stroke Christophe suffered in the summer of 1820, not long after the death of Pétion. The new president of the southern republic, Jean-Pierre Boyer, was known to be planning a fresh incursion into Christophe’s domain. In September, a military insurrection in the kingdom’s southernmost stronghold, Saint Marc, ended with that town turned over to the republic. The troops Christophe sent to reverse that situation defected to the republic as well; soon the rebellion against the king (now called tyrant) had spread to the outskirts of the northern capital. “I well know what I must do,” Christophe told his doctor, before fatally shooting himself on October 8.

Daut treats Christophe’s suicide and its denouement, which includes the swift murder of his two surviving sons, in the style of Greek tragedy, except that Christophe is not seen to have a tragic flaw. Rather, her attitude toward the Haitian king runs close to that of his contemporary eulogist and member of his court, the Baron de Vastey, whom she quotes copiously throughout. But the speedy defection of almost all of Christophe’s adherents to the republic in the south suggests that a lot of people were unhappy about something in his regime—most likely the intractable problem of how to restore the productivity of the plantations without treating ostensibly free Haitian laborers with a severity barely distinguishable from slavery. That factor also contributed to the fall of Louverture and later Dessalines; Daut has little to say on the matter, although she gives limitless detail of Christophe’s wealth and its trappings, which forced plantation labor had produced.

Daut’s book is not a good introduction to the Haitian Revolution. She offers a wealth of fresh detail, but other recent works (e.g., Avengers of the New World, by Laurent Dubois; The Haitian Revolution: A Documentary History, by David Geggus; and A Concise History of the Haitian Revolution, by Jeremy D. Popkin) provide more comprehensive accounts of everything that happened on the island between 1791 and 1804. As a narrative of the rise and fall of Henry Christophe, however, Daut’s First and Last King of Haiti (largely uncritical though it may be) will likely stand as the definitive work for a long time to come.

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