Henry Christophe, the first and last King of Haiti (with Marlene L. Daut)

Vulgar History Podcast

Henry Christophe, the first and last King of Haiti (with Marlene L. Daut)

January 8, 2025

Hello, and happy New Year and welcome to Vulgar History, a feminist women’s history comedy podcast, I’m your host Ann Foster. Today, we’re diving back into our season-long theme, which is How Do You Solve A Problem Like Marie Antoinette? in which we’ve been looking at the various revolutions of the long 18th century. We’ve talked about the American Revolution, we’ve talked about the French Revolution, we’re going to talk about the French Revolution more in upcoming episodes.

Today, we’re going to be talking about the Haitian Revolution, which was happening really in parallel with the French Revolution as well. The story we’re talking about today, it brings together so many of the things we’ve talked about in previous episodes this series. The very first episode of this season, we discussed Marie-Josèphe Angélique, the Canadian icon… I don’t know, she wasn’t Canadian, she would never have considered herself Canadian. The enslaved Portuguese woman who burned down most of Montreal. We talked about that. And just slave resistance, we’ve talked about in previous episodes as well; we talked about Ona Judge running away. And today, we’re talking about Haiti. And I mean, if I just try to talk off the top of my head about it, I’m going to mess something up. So, honestly, like, just to listen to this episode.

I have an incredible guest. It’s Marlene Daut, who has just written a new book about the person who we’re talking about. Her book is called The First and Last King of Haiti, and it’s the story of Henry Christophe. And yeah, it’s just just been published when you’re listening to this, it’s published in January of 2025. I really recommend this book, it was so helpful to me. She really holds the reader’s hand, step-by-step, explaining what precipitated the Haitian Revolution, what happened afterwards, who Henry Christophe was.

If that name is familiar to you, longtime listeners of this podcast might remember a year or two ago, we had author Vanessa Riley on talking about her book, Queen of Exiles, which is the story of Haiti’s queen, Marie-Louise, who was the wife of Henry Christophe. So, we’ve talked about Henry Christophe before in the context of that episode. I also recommend that novel, Queen of Exiles, by Vanessa Riley. It’s a novel, but also, there’s so much research in it, it really tells the story of her.

Anyway, I’m really excited for you all to hear this episode. It really ties together so much of what we talked about before and also, I think really has reverberations for what we’re living through right now. Pluto is an Aquarius, the new age of revolution is upon us in more extreme ways than I thought when I first decided to do this as the theme for the series. Anyway, please enjoy this extended conversation with Marlene Daut.

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Ann: So, we’re joined here today by Marlene Daut, the author of The First and Last King of Haiti: The Rise and Fall of Henry Christophe. Welcome, Marlene.

Marlene: Thanks so much for having me. I’m excited to talk to you today.

Ann: I’m so happy to be talking to you about this. I think I told you when we were first in touch, but this whole season on my podcast, I’ve been talking about the revolutions of the long 18th century. So, we’ve talked about the American Revolution, we’ve talked about the French Revolution a bit, but I absolutely wanted to include the Haitian Revolution, which was happening at the same time and has a lot of overlap. So, I was really excited that your book is coming out, talking about Henry Christophe. Can I ask just a first broad, general question, which is: When did you first learn about the Haitian Revolution? Do you remember?

Marlene: Oh, yeah! I’m Haitian American, my mother was born in Port-au-Prince. So, I feel like I always sort of knew about it, but I didn’t know about it, if that makes sense. I had never been taught the Haitian Revolution in school, for example.

When I went to college, I did my undergraduate degree at Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles. I had a French Guianese professor and so he was talking to me about Haiti, and it was clear to him that I didn’t really know anything really about the Haitian Revolution other than that it happened and the broad strokes. And he’s like, “You are Haitian, you need to know this history.” So, I’m thinking, “Okay, I’m going to go out and I’m going to learn about the Haitian Revolution.” And that’s what I did.

I started just reading and trying to understand the story, and that carried over to when I went into graduate school at the University of Notre Dame. I think I just checked out basically every book on Haiti because it just wasn’t part of the curriculum, the Haitian Revolution. I teach it now in my classroom and my students tell me still, even the Haitian American students, that they are not really getting this history in the classroom unless they live in certain places like Brooklyn or New York and Miami sometimes. But other than that, they really aren’t getting this.

Ann: Yeah. We’re going to talk all about it today and so all the podcast listeners are going to hear it and hopefully then go off and read your book too. But I just wanted to mention… So, recent events had me, I was posting on, I think, Threads just about— I’ve been researching revolutions and just what’s happening in the world right now. I’m just like, the parallels are just so apparent to me at the moment. And I mentioned, there’s so many revolutions in the 18th century and a few people commented… I think I was quoting from a book I read. And I said, “There were so many revolutions and none of them actually resulted in a regime change.” I was quoting from a book talking about a specific subset of them, but because it’s social media, I had to cut out some words. And then two or three people were like, “What about the Haitian Revolution? The Haitian Revolution.” [laughs] And I’m like, “Great point. That one worked.”

So, can you set the scene for everybody? I do want to say, in your book, I was telling you before we recorded, you really do such a good job of hand-holding the reader through what this history is, not assuming anybody knows any of it, which I found really helpful because I haven’t read widely on this topic so it really filled in some blanks for me. But can you first just talk about Haiti, what we now know as Haiti, how it— That there was Indigenous people and then colonizers came. What was the story of how it became the place that the Revolution took place?

Marlene: Yeah, absolutely. I mean, it’s so funny because you have to go back to really the pre-Columbus era to think about this land, this island, in the middle of the Caribbean Sea. But of course, there are people who live there when Columbus arrives in 1492 and they resist him, but the Spaniards have weapons, they have diseases, and they use deportations. So, they essentially decimate the native population. But at the same time, the Spanish crown has authorized the forcible transportation of captive Africans to the island for the purposes of slavery. So, it kind of becomes this slave colony of Spain. Of course, France and Great Britain also want colonies and they’re using enslaved labour as well and so, in 1697, the western third, the part that’s now Haiti, is taken over formally by the French and they renamed that part of the island Saint-Domingue.

So, you get the French colony of Saint-Domingue and they just ramp up the slave regime, the slave economy, if you will, between 1697 and 1791, when the Haitian Revolution breaks out. The French alone forcibly transport more than 900,000 captive Africans to the island, just alone. If we count the other world powers that also transported captive Africans to the island, that number reaches 1.3 million and that’s just on that western third. So, when I say it’s a slave colony, it literally is a slave colony. The enslaved vastly outnumber the French colonists, which are about 30,000 to 40,000, fluctuating. There are also free people of colour who are related in some way, both to the French colonists, white French colonists, and to enslaved Africans at some point in their history. But many of them also have plantations as well.

So, this is the kind of milieu in which the Haitian Revolution, kind of, blooms. You have this place that is filled with enslaved Africans who, again, outnumber the people keeping them in bondage, and those colonists are extremely cruel. So, when we read the testimonies of people like Baron de Vastey, but even French naturalists themselves, they comment on the high death rate, they comment on the cruelty of the colonists, they comment on how many enslaved people are constantly running away because of how cruel everything is. So, this is the world that births the Haitian Revolution because it is a slave colony, because of the cruelty that is there, because of the numbers that the enslaved Africans still have on their side despite the high death rate. So, at the moment the Revolution breaks out, I should say, there’s about 450,000 enslaved Africans still in the colony. But that’s much less than the ones transported there and then you have to think about the ones born there as well. So, even with that high death rate, you still have this enormous population striving for freedom.

Ann: And can you explain why this is such an in-demand place for the colonists? What the plantations were providing? Because it was… Well, just explain about the crops and stuff. It was such a fertile land. This was why they brought so many enslaved people over there to work the land because they were going to make money off of this, right?

Marlene: Yes, French Saint-Domingue is the most lucrative colony in the world. And you think about it, it’s the size of Massachusetts, roughly. This small place has this outsized influence because of sugar, that’s the main crop. We also have coffee, cacao, indigo, there are other things that European markets want. And again, this is a fertile place with fertile soil to grow these crops and the Europeans have decided that this system of slavery, that’s going to be how labour is performed. That’s going to make up the labour regime, and they keep it going for hundreds of years until, of course, the Haitian Revolution breaks out, at least on the island of Saint-Domingue in August of 1791, and then things are going to grind to a halt because the enslaved, what do they do? They set fire to the sugarcane fields and to the sugar plantations in the Northern Plain, that’s what they do. So, even though the French news will say, “Oh, they’re killing their masters,” what they were actually doing in the early days of the Revolution was stopping the production of sugar in the colony. They were putting an end to the slave colony labour system and economic system.

Ann: In terms of burning it down, when I read that part in your book, I thought back to a while ago, I did an episode that was talking a bit about African slavery in Portugal. And this was in, like, the early 1700s, I think, the era that I was reading about. It was saying how Black slaves would set fire to the farm sometimes, on a smaller scale than what happened in Haiti, but to the point that they stopped letting Black slaves be in charge of overnight monitoring because it happened so often. So, the throughline that I’m seeing is just kind of like, “What resistance can we do?” I’ve been reading about other revolutions and what happened in Haiti, like, it’s very specific to that time and place and it’s also part of this larger story of slavery and resistance and this time there’s just so many people all at once. How did they organize?

Marlene: So, in August 1791, and I should point out that before that, enslaved people ran away, they also engaged in smaller revolts and rebellions. So, it’s not as if it was just all of a sudden. This is really a form of organized resistance that took planning. And the people who planned it, a man named Boukman Dutty, he also had some enslaved representatives from around the Northern Plain, they get together and they begin to talk about tactics. This is in mid-August 1791 and a spot in the Northern Plain called Morne Rouge. And they say, essentially, this is sometimes referred to as the Bois Caïman ceremony, but they say, you know, “We outnumber the planters, the enslavers, and the God of the white man calls him to commit crimes. But our God is a good God who wants us to have freedom and equality. So, let’s work together and let’s get that done.”

And in less than 10 days, the rebellion breaks out. There are some smaller ones around August 21st, but really, it’s the night passing from August 22nd to 23rd, that we can really see the enslavers on various plantations start to record what’s happening and say, “Oh, it’s travelling. It’s here, the rebels are here,” because that’s what the French colonists called the freedom fighters. They called them rebels and brigands and insurrectionists and terrorists and, you know, all these kinds of things to not have to recognize that actually, what they wanted was freedom, and that’s what they were trying to achieve.

Ann: So, this is 1791. So, the storming of the Bastille, 1789 in France. So, part of the connection, I think, is that in France there was this statement, I forget what it was called, but of like the rights of everybody, right? Which some people in Haiti interpreted to mean, like, they’re a French colony, so “Okay, great. So, we should all have rights too,” right? That was part of the connection?

Marlene: So, yes. In 1789, the French Revolutionaries issue The Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen and there are free men of colour from the colony in Paris at the time, and in France in general, and, you know, they’ve experienced colour prejudice back in the colony, because even though some of them were from major enslaving families that had lots of plantations for generations, the white French colonists are exhibiting prejudices against them and making all kinds of laws to say they can’t do this, or force them to be in the militia. It’s a place that’s just rife with inequality at so many different levels. And so, they go to France where they hope to kind of escape some of that. And the Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen happens and yes, those free men of colour mostly men say, “Oh, that means us too,” and they try to go back home to the colony to see what if the laws are going to change and if they can get the French to officially say that the free men of colour have the same rights, equal rights of representation, for example, with the white French colonists. The white French colonists are saying, “Absolutely not, we will never give them any concessions.”

So, it’s kind of in this milieu of these conversations that, of course, some enslaved people might have heard them. But I think it’s really clear when we look at what happened at the Morne-Rouge assembly, that they weren’t using the language of the Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen, they were using a more spiritual language, which I think speaks to what one historian, Daina Ramey Berry, calls their soul values. So, I think the free men of colour are definitely influenced by what’s happening in France, but the enslaved have their, kind of, own motor. There’s two separate things happening at the same time; a coming to consciousness about the level of prejudices and about what’s the best way to end slavery. They don’t always collide with each other, especially in that early period.

Ann: And what connection— I mean, we’re going to get to a direct connection in a bit, but with the American Revolution, what impact would that have on Haiti at the time? Because that was 1776, so 15 years earlier.

Marlene: Well, you know, and Henry Christophe fought in or participated, I should say in the American Revolutionary War at the Battle of Savannah, but so did other free men of colour. And this is October 1779. There are other free men of colour there who, you know, they’re fighting with the French, but on behalf of the American Patriots against Great Britain, and France and Great Britain are locked in this kind of perpetual war. It seems absolutely plausible that they learned revolutionary tactics, certainly, the tactics of war. They certainly learned how to fight over in the American Revolution.

I think that the abstraction of getting rid of kings and queens is really still that however, in the early days of the Revolution. We don’t hear much from the enslaved about, “Oh, we want to get rid of the king,” or “We want to not have any aristocracy.” I think this is too much of an abstraction for people in the colony. Even the free men of colour, they don’t really talk about that. So, the lessons that they learned from the American Revolution seem more, to me, probably tactically. Again, thinking about when you are not the dominant power, because of course, you know, what becomes the United States, the American colonists are fighting against one of the fiercest military powers in the world, Great Britain. So, I think absolutely that if you’re the underdog, the story of the American Revolution teaches them that doesn’t mean that you won’t be victorious in the end.

Ann: And what effect does the American Revolution have on other, like, on France and Spain being like, “Wait, could this happen to us too?” Like, it was a shocking thing to happen, to have a colony declare independence from their founders, effectively, and I would presume France and Spain were like, ”Oooh, wait a minute. We need, we need these lucrative plantations. We don’t want to lose it.”

Marlene: You know, what is so interesting about how the other world powers react to the American Revolution? I think that it would seem logical that they would say, “Oh, is one of our colonies going to revolt?” But they are so much at war with each other all the time that they are excited.

When you read French correspondence, and this is just specifically, you know, asking the French to come and help in that year, 1779, which is, of course, the year that I was interested in, because that’s when Henry Christophe was going. But the year before that and 1779, they’re like, “Come and help us. This will be your glory.” The Comte d’Estaing, when the American colonists, the generals on the American side reach out to him, they’re telling him, “You’re going to be, you’re going to be covered in glory. This is going to be a feather in your cap. Come and help us. You’ve already helped us in other campaigns,” in the sort of naval campaign because Comte d’Estaing was known for his kind of naval expertise. And so, they’re basically saying, “You’re going to be a hero.” The interesting thing about that is the French lose, the French and the American Patriots lose the Battle of Savannah. They lose the Battle of Savannah because they wait for too long to strike because they’re, you know, kind of doing a gentleman’s thing, oh, you know, “We have a ceasefire for this amount of time,” and during that time, Great Britain kind of, they reinforce their position and so they get the upper hand.

So again, the tactics that Christophe, I think, specifically learns from this is not to wait, because there’s a moment in the book when he’s fighting against the French, who want to bring back slavery, he gets a request, that kind of gentleman’s request like, “Oh, I will consider whether we’re going to surrender, but you have to give me this amount of time,” and he doesn’t wait. And the French say, “Oh, that was so barbaric that he wouldn’t wait,” when he already had been in this situation where his general waited, and he was wounded, Christophe was wounded himself in the American Revolution. So, he would know firsthand what not to do also.

Ann: I think this is a beautiful way to, sort of like, let’s wrap back and then work our way back to the Battle of Savannah through talking about Henry Christophe and where he was born and how… I do want to let everybody know he was 12 years old at that time when he was at that battle. He was not an adult man.

Marlene: That’s why I say he “participated” because we think that he would have been either a drummer or he would have had some other kind of role because in the documents that created the structure for this core of free men of colour to fight in the American Revolutionary War, they were called Chasseurs-Volontaires, and in those documents, we see they say, “Oh, children of 12 years old,” boys, of course, “can be drummers or trumpeters.” So, that would have been sort of probably his formal role there but before that, because there’s also the question of how does one, a child so young get there? What happened that would create these circumstances?

Christophe was born on the island of Granada, which is in the southern Caribbean, and it was at that time in British hands under British control and the French had lost this island in the Seven Years War. So, it had been French before that, and that’s where Christophe was born. And when the Comte d’Estaing, that French general, is fighting with the British to try to get control of the island back, which is a part of the American Revolution that is less discussed, the kind of trading of pieces in this Caribbean Sea for the different world powers that are actually a part of striking against Great Britain. So, Comte d’Estaing leads that campaign, and the French are temporarily victorious, they get Granada back for a little, for some time. But when d’Estaing leaves, he takes captives and some of those captives are enslaved people. He ends up, eventually, in the vicinity of Saint-Domingue and he gets the Chasseurs-Volontaires, the other free men of colour, and they go on their way over to North America.

So, to me, this is the most logical way when I was tracing Comte d’Estaing’s whereabouts and all the ships, I see, “Oh, he could very easily have captured Christophe,” who would have been just a child again, 11 years old, actually, at that point, and taken him on this journey, or his men, really, d’Estaing’s men.

Ann: I do want to explain to the listeners as well that your book is like… I feel it’s partly like forensic detective work. Like, you said, I think in the afterword, you spent 10 years or something like that, just tracing to find what actually happened in this man’s life, because there’s so much myth and legend and assumption about it. So, a lot of the things in your book, you’re like, “Okay, this is what people say happened, but did it happen? And here’s maybe what it could have been.” Unless you’re very confident you say this is probably what happened, like you’re not saying like this is what the story was, but he was probably enslaved as a child. Is your determination, right?

Marlene: Yes. It’s what would make the most sense because Grenada was, again, also a slave colony, like Saint-Domingue and it really didn’t have a high population of free people of colour. It would have been very unlikely. In fact, I did look through the Grenadian National Archives to try to see how many free people of colour and they sometimes had lists of enslaved people, and I knew the region where he was from because of eyewitnesses so I knew a very small region. And, you know, there was just nothing there, which does not prove, you know, the hypothesis.

But I felt that it was important in the book to not decide, based on zero evidence, right? To really lay out the possibilities to invite the reader to come, kind of, behind the scenes and peek behind the scenes. Because I think the problem with a lot of the other Christophe biographies is that there were an array of possibilities and in the service of story, the historian or biographer says, “Well, I don’t want to stop my story to have to go in and explain that there’s different versions. So let me just pick one.” And, you know, being so familiar with the story myself now, I’m recognizing it in other people’s writings as well, those moments where I’m like, “Oh, but you know, there is an alternative version.” And I really felt like I wanted to trust my reader to be able to say, “This is important to know that a biographer… It’s not really healthy for the subject to just decide.”

So, I have started calling it “investigative historicism.” [laughs] I was reading a lot of investigative journalism books. I read the Gospel of Jesus’ Wife, I read the story about Henrietta Lacks, and I just thought “This is so fascinating,” because I was absorbed in it, in the different versions, in unreliable narrators. And I was absorbed by all the cast of characters that appear in books like that, that are deeply, deeply historical and their authors are deeply interested in the truth but also understand that the truth is elusive. Just when you think you have found it, somebody’s going to throw a wrench into the story and upset the whole thing. So, that’s why I say, “investigative historicism,” this is what this story called for to my mind.

Ann: I love to learn that that’s the term that you have. Because when I was reading it, I was just like, “This is like an investigation.” This book is like forensic historian work. I’m just picturing the same way somebody like investigating, you know, like, a true crime case or something, just going through all the facts. And part of what I understood from your book, and what you were just saying is that, like, a lot of the previous writings have been making these assumptions or sort of taking rumours as fact, and that started happening… We’ll tell the story. I don’t want to jump ahead, but like, almost as soon as he died, people were rewriting who he was and what he was like. So, like, you’re having to go back to before that to see like, “Well, what actually can we track down?” And actually, I have a question. He has a surname, and that’s not… Not all enslaved people have surnames. So, do you know how… What is your best guess as to how he became a person with a surname?

Marlene: It’s fascinating, actually, because was Christophe the name of his enslaver? You know? I mean, if we compare it to, for example, Toussaint Louverture. Toussaint Louverture had a surname, Toussaint de Bréda. But Toussaint Louverture uses that name, the famous revolutionary hero for those who maybe are less familiar with the story, but he uses that name when he becomes a free man, when he acquires his freedom. But then he starts using the moniker Toussaint Louverture later when he begins to lead the freedom struggle with what becomes the Haitian Revolution. So, did Christophe decide on that name at some other point? At what point?

So, in the book even, I talk about different people with that name, Henry Christophe. There’s another Henry Christophe in the colony who I actually traced his genealogy. He’s from the South really far, like his kids, his life, and so I knew it wasn’t my same Henry Christophe, but I found it fascinating that there were just a few people with that surname, Christophe. It was not a common name in the colony. For example, the number of Boyers, the Boyer family, of course, Jean-Pierre Boyer becomes president of Haiti later, and he’s Christophe’s rival, there were so many of them that I thought, “Oh, how do I disentangle all of them?” There were also a ton of Ogé. Vincent Ogé is an early revolutionary who fought in the American Revolution as well but then, you know, tried to lead a revolt to free men of colour in October 1790 and was executed for that.

So, I realized, “Wow, it’s actually kind of special that he has this last name that is not really one that we see very often.” And it allowed me, because of that, to follow his story more closely, because there were different moments in the book where I knew it was him because he was the only one who could read, and write, and who signed his signature that way. So, I knew it was him instead of, “Oh no! Is this one of the many, many family members or something with that name?”

Ann: So, in a way, that’s a blessing for you for your historical research. So, he is conscripted, basically. I don’t know if that’s… I mean, he’s grabbed and taken, 11 years old, and then he is involved in the Battle of Savannah age 12. He’s wounded; he’s shot, right, in the leg, I think.

Marlene: Yes. He’s shot in the leg, yes.

Ann: Yeah. And for, you know, that sort of wound in that era, the fact that he didn’t die, notable.

Marlene: Absolutely. Especially, in the Battle of Savannah, you know, it’s a French… The French, they document everything, so we have Comte d’Estaing’s account, we have also his aide-de-camp, O’Connor’s account, we have plenty of the soldiers. They kept, like, campaign journals to describe what was happening, sometimes by the hour and day. So, there’s a hospital outside of Savannah, where the French transport their wounded and it’s not well-equipped; anybody who goes to this hospital and has a serious wound dies, is basically going to die. Pulaski, so many of these, like, famous names from the American Revolution, I mean, they die because the wounds are just too severe.

So, the fact that he survives… And I also think that again, in thinking about things that changed him, when Christophe later, post-revolution, becomes General-in-Chief of the Haitian army under Haiti’s founder, Jean-Jacques Dessalines, he is incensed any time he learns that the military is not properly, you know, outfitting the hospitals, giving them the materials that they need and that veterans of the Revolution (in the years immediately following the Revolution), are not being properly taken care of. He will write angry letters commanding people and threatening to punish them that, “Why are you not delivering these things to the hospitals? These people deserve to be taken care of because they are only there for having thought for our independence.”

I wonder sometimes if the experience, again, you know, being wounded at this young age and not having the proper care, you know, did it affect him later, his body? Did he live with lifelong pain because of this? You know, we don’t know, he doesn’t necessarily mention that ever. But, you know, it’s something that makes you wonder when I see later how concerned he was with the hospitals, just the same way he’s super concerned with education stuff sort of all the way through, which makes me think that at some point, at that young age when he comes back to Saint-Domingue that somebody must have taken him under his under their tutelage because Christophe signs his signature and writes his name and writes letters not in the shaky hand of someone who just learned to write. When some of the free people of colour sign their names, it’s very shaky, as someone who doesn’t write often. Christophe has beautiful writing and a beautiful signature early on, which suggests to me that from a young age, he had learned to read and write somehow.

Ann: Yeah. And so he’s somebody who, I mean, having this, everything you just said about being involved in the Battle of Savannah, like that just like as a young person, he sees the military, he sees his operation, and he also is someone who intrinsically, because lots of boys were there and they didn’t go on to become great generals, he had this within him somehow, you know? And so, I would just imagine that somebody saw in him, like, however he learned to read and write, like, “Oh, this is a remarkable person. This person stands out somehow,” because he does later and that that’s notable.

Marlene: Right, and pretty quickly too! I should also say, when he comes back to Saint-Domingue, he eventually starts working at this hotel called La Couronne, The Crown. This hotel is kind of like the crossroads of Cap-Français, which is the most important port city. So, that’s where he is and that’s where this hotel is. And everyone, so many people pass through there; foreigners pass through there, colonists who live elsewhere but have to come to Cap for business will stay at this hotel. So, I’m thinking all of the conversations that he would have heard, all of the, you know, when the French Revolution breaks out, does he hear about this? He’s working as a waiter there. When the Declaration of the Rights of Man, when all of this news gets there, how is he reacting to it? How is he absorbing it?

It seems really possible that he begins to distinguish himself in some manner through relationships with different people who might be coming through that hotel. Because already by 1793, so two years after the Revolution begins, we find him conversing with important French commissioners, like, writing them letters and saying, “I think you already know who I am.” So, he had been doing something that had gotten… That he believed would have made his name known and would have made the French commissioners aware of who he was already.

Ann: When he came back, was he still enslaved or not? Or what was that journey?

Marlene: Yeah. So, this is one of, again, those mysteries that I tried to unfold. You know, in the book, I talk about different things that happened to people who fought at the Battle of Savannah. So, for example, I mentioned that there’s a lot of mélange, or fugitivity of enslaved people. So, when they would be captured, they were put in a jail and the colony had jails all around, which is why I call it the carceral colony. It’s astonishing; even the tiniest little hamlet has a jail. And the purpose of this jail is to put enslaved people who had run away until their “masters,” can come and claim them. And when they would write the notices to say “We’ve captured this person, they say their name is this. This person claims they are free and had fought in the Battle of Savannah under the Comte d’Estaing.” So, a person is captured and says, “No, you’re wrongly capturing me. I got my freedom from fighting at the Battle of Savannah.”

So, when I started to see that, and then when I saw enslaved people who d’Estaing captured in Grenada up for auction in the colony of Saint-Domingue, after the siege of Grenada, which is how I think Christophe gets hooked up with that army, I started to think, “Oh, of all the different ways his freedom…” if in fact he were granted it, which is what should have happened for fighting in the American Revolutionary War, he should be granted his freedom. But when he came back, he was so young, how would he keep it? It would have been so hard unless he had somebody who really took him under his wing.

So, in the book, I talk about different possibilities of the person who probably took him under his wing. It’s probably a man named Petit-Mille. And I think this because Christophe takes care of this man and his whole family when he becomes king. When he has this uncommon trajectory, this man is older, he’s there, he’s being taken care of, and so are his children, they’re being given high-level positions in the administration. This is a name that other Christophe chroniclers and eyewitnesses had associated with Christophe. It’s just that, you know, people didn’t really investigate it because Petit-Mille, he never became famous. So, I tried to pull that thread and find that, find the link between them and I was able to see, “Oh, this is someone who’d be, who became important to Christophe later.” And so, it potentially was this person who maybe protected him in those early days back in the colony.

Ann: I’m going to be very superficial for a minute and just say that there is a portrait, I don’t know if there’s more than one portrait, but I’ve seen a portrait that was taken of Henry Christophe when he was king and he is, like, a handsome guy. I think he’s a big person, like, he’s tall and strapping, very good-looking. I feel like if he also had that, some sort of spark, some sort of charisma about him, when he’s like, “I think you remember me,” I feel like maybe that’s part of it too. He stands out maybe among the hotel staff.

Marlene: Absolutely. That’s actually what eyewitnesses, people who stayed in the hotel, who confirmed that he worked there, people who stayed in the hotel, they said, “Oh, it was obvious to us that he was the most… he was extremely important and very bright.” This became important later because when he begins to fight in the Haitian Revolution and fight with the freedom fighters and become important there, the British and the French say to watch out for him because he knows how to read and write, and he knows English and French. So, in your missives, “Be careful, because Henry Christophe is someone who would be able to transmit information.”

And then later, this is what is very interesting about all that as well, that after the Revolution in the post-emancipation period, when France wants to “restore the colony,” which means to take back over Haiti and bring back slavery, they say, “We’re going to have a problem in Henry Christophe, he’s going to be our biggest problem.” And throughout the 1810s, they keep saying, “Christophe is the big problem. The others, we could deal with them. He’s our problem.”

Ann: Yeah. And he’s also… I mean, we’ll get into it, but we just see through his military career that develops, like, he just finds his way to the top because people just trust him, people like him. He’s got this in terms of just like people I’ve read about in history, like he’s got this star quality, people are just drawn to him. You see that today, now, like if you… I don’t know, if he was around today, people would just be drawn to him. If he had a TikTok, you know, people just be like, “Oh my god, did you see what he just said?” Like, he’s just clearly so charismatic, but well-spoken, tall, handsome. Yeah, I don’t know. He’s got it all, really, in a situation where the opportunity was right that he was able to make use of his talents and that he was nurtured in this way, that he was able to get these opportunities. And that’s because… we’re going to get into it. The Haitian Revolution happens.

Actually, before we get into that, it’s at the hotel where he meets his wife, right?

Marlene: Well, we don’t know. So, that’s what some of the, I call them Christophe chroniclers. Because I feel like I’m in a conversation with all the people who were writing about him before and I love that they were writing about him because they gave me things to investigate again. So, we think, potentially, at this hotel because Christophe’s wife, Marie-Louise, who was quite a bit younger than him when they got married, but she’s from a prominent free Black family. They, the Coidavids (who I think is her stepfather, actually) he’s in the army as well, he’s in the militia, and he becomes a prominent Black officer in the revolutionary period. But even before that, I mean, he’s in the military. When I look to see… You know, we find his name on baptismal certificates for other prominent free Black families. This is a connected family. Did he go and stay at the hotel and he had his daughter with him? You know, there are questions that we still have about, you know, how they met. But it’s clear that, you know, somehow, they find their way to one another.

And in 1793, so two years after the Revolution begins, they get married. They have a child immediately in 1794, François-Ferdinand. And so, definitely, by that time, Christophe has free status, whether he got it many years before or recently acquired it in relationship to the Revolution, again, there’s still a question mark there. But definitely by 1793, by the summer, even before general emancipation, he gets married.

Ann: I think that’s interesting too, just in the context of thinking of the Revolution in general, as a very bizarre time period we’re all living in right now in the world, where it’s like, you know, there’s so much uncertainty, you don’t know what’s going to happen. And he’s a military guy, or he becomes a military guy and yet, he still had the hope for the future that he’s like, “I’m going to marry, I’m going to have a child.” Like, that speaks to the fact that he felt comfortable— Not comfortable enough but just, sort of like, even though this is happening, he’s like, “I still want to have a family.” And I think that’s, that’s interesting. Like other people didn’t make that choice.

Marlene: Yes, absolutely. He makes the choice to have a family and still to fight in the freedom struggle. During that time, so from 1793 to 1794, I should mention, he’s jailed twice. So, he’s very smart and has a lot of savvy, but it’s also clear that he sometimes makes mistakes. And we don’t know why he’s jailed that first time, he doesn’t say what he did.

But the second time when he gets jailed, he does say what he did, which was misrepresent his connection to one of the commissioners whom the French had sent to, kind of, calm things down in the colony, especially as relates to the free men of colour and their demands and their struggle with the white French colonists. What those commissioners do instead is recognize that they cannot stop the freedom struggle, the freedom movement. It’s impossible at this point, too many enslaved people are in rebellion. So, they declare general emancipation. And Christophe, we already see is working on their behalf, but he must have told someone that he was more connected to them than he was so he ends up detained and actually in the southern part of the colony, in Port-au-Prince, which had been renamed Port-Républicain because that’s what the French did in the revolutionary era, they tried to eliminate things that spoke of monarchy.

He writes this letter in December 1793 and it’s a kind of a sad letter. It’s like, “I’ve been detained here, and I want to go home,” and he doesn’t mention his wife, but she would have been pregnant at that time based on the birthday of his son and he was a newlywed. So, I just think, “Oh, this is someone who, you know, he wants to keep contributing, but also, he needs to go back home,” and he does get himself free. It’s astonishing because from December 1793 to December 1794, he becomes an extremely wealthy businessman. He’s got all these business ventures and he continues on in various posts in the military at the same time. Now eventually, those military positions are going to, kind of, lead him away from his business enterprises and he’ll just have various, kind of, associates take those on in his absence. So, he’s got different things happening; he’s got a wife, he ends up having three more children with her, and he’s got this business enterprise, he’s rising in the military. It’s really an uncommon trajectory, it really is.

Ann: Yeah, he’s a multi-hyphenate.

Can you explain how we got from the slaves rebelling, burning down plantations to having a defined and organized military structure? How did that come to be?

Marlene: Yes. So, the freedom struggle continues in earnest, right? So, fall 1791 into that, 1792, 1793 in June, I should say, there’s a huge fire. The enslaved set fire to the city of Cap-Français and it firms almost completely to the ground. And so, those commissioners I mentioned that France had sent, they are certain now that they must do something. Because the enslaved have de facto freed themselves so they make that official.

But in the meantime, Spain and England have invaded. If you think about this, Spain is already on the eastern two-thirds of the island because that’s the colony of Santo Domingo that’s in Spanish hands and there’s rampant slavery there as well. So, the world powers are fighting again, they’re trying to get this little piece of Earth that is French Saint-Domingue. So, in addition to needing to stop the freedom struggle, France also needs to fight England and Spain. So, when general emancipation occurs, the French are able to create a structure where now, the formerly enslaved Africans can become soldiers and they can become officers and so that’s what happens.

In Christophe’s case, in Toussaint Louverture’s case, in Jean Jacques Dessalines’s case, in so many of the cases of the free men of colour who were free already before general emancipation and the enslaved Africans become literal, official members of the French military and they’re the only reason that France hangs onto this colony. Because in 1795, the French and the Spanish strike a treaty called the Treaty of Basel, and that treaty forces Spain to cede the eastern two-thirds to France. So, now the whole island is under French hands, but they still have to fight the British. And Toussaint Louverture, and Christophe, and Dessalines are key to the eventual battle where France, technically, their Black French soldiers and generals and officers, is able to force England to retreat… I will put it that way because it’s kind of complicated, but they force them to retreat. The only reason is because of the Black military officers and having them on their side.

Ann: That’s just an interesting parallel. I did an episode a bit ago about Joseph Bologne, the Chevalier de Saint-Georges, and he had the all-Black regiment during the French Revolution. So, I’m just like, “Oh wow, there’s so many…” and then, oh, who is it? Dumas, Alexandre Dumas’ father, who was also in that regiment. So yeah, just like, the involvement, I don’t know. I’m just like, there’s so many Black soldiers fighting for France at this time!

Marlene: Yeah, absolutely. Even independently of that, right? Because the Chasseurs-Volontaires, some of those were free men of colour, some of them who were mixed race, but many of them were actually, you know, they were these free Black families because the colony had been in existence for so long and they fought in the French military. And it wasn’t an equal military. They did suffer prejudices there, but it’s a remarkable part of history to be exploring.

Ann: So, I mean, you explain this step, by step, by step in your book, but effectively, if we can leap forward to Haiti getting its independence. This is where I get sort of mixed up because it’s like, there’s a governor-general, then there’s an emperor, then there’s a king, but then there’s two kings. So, like, what’s the first person it’s— Oh, now I forget. Is it Toussaint Louverture is the first, like, person in charge of it?

Marlene: Well, yes. I mean, it is an extremely complicated history. So, in 1801, so before Haitian independence, Toussaint Louverture is governor-general of the colony, the whole island technically, per the constitution that he issues in 1801. This is what gets him in trouble, at least that’s the official account. The real account is the French want to bring back slavery because Napoleon Bonaparte has risen to power in France, and he never agreed with the abolition of slavery that the French were forced to concede. So, he wants to bring that back, but Toussaint Louverture is already kind of taking measures to pre-empt him so he issues this constitution, which Bonaparte says, “Oh, that’s de facto independence,” like you’ve done this thing that you’re not authorized to do. And in that constitution, it said slavery was forever abolished. So now, this is going to be a problem for France.

So, Bonaparte sends his brother-in-law, a general named Leclerc, to the island, initially with 30,000 troops to try to get rid of Louverture, that’s part of their mission, and then pave the way to reinstate slavery. Christophe is an obstacle for them but then he kind of changes sides briefly, and Toussaint Louverture ends up being arrested, deported, left to die a terrible death in a French prison.

Back in the colony, the freedom fighters who had even, you know, joined with France at certain points have now seen through, they know that France wants to bring back slavery. This is the period that we call the War of Independence, so late 1802 into 1803. And on January 1, 1804, the freedom fighters calling themselves the Armée Indigène, the Indigenous Army, are victorious. They declare independence and Jean-Jacques Dessalines, who is Christophe’s friend, becomes the new head of state and he gives himself the title initially, or takes the title, of governor-general. And this is obviously problematic because that’s the title that Toussaint Louverture had under French rule, and it speaks to, like, you’re not really sovereign power. And so, by the end of 1804, Dessalines, the military council says, “We want you to be the emperor,” he becomes emperor. So now, Haiti is an empire, technically and in 1805, they issue an imperial constitution.

Unfortunately, this is not a long-lived empire, for Dessalines anyway, and he is assassinated in October of 1806. And I think I mentioned Christophe was General-In-Chief of the whole Haitian army at this time so it was natural that he would kind of take the interim reigns. But the conspirators from the southern part of the colony, they say they want Christophe to take the permanent reigns, but they want to create a republic. And so, they create a constitution in December 1806 for the Republic of Haiti. They vote Christophe in as president but by this time, he doesn’t really trust them.

Ann: Well, they just assassinated Dessalines, right?

Marlene: Exactly! And he knows that. It’s one of those things that I thought was going to be more of a mystery than it was because people said that Christophe was involved, they had different people they would point to, the various chroniclers. But Pétion, in his correspondence, which I had the opportunity to see firsthand, doesn’t deny it. Now, the question of whether Christophe knew about the conspiracy, it seems not, not as it was unfolding, only later. And I think that that’s part of how he ends up turning on that idea of being president of this republic. They tell him, “To be president, you have to come to Port-au-Prince in the south to be sworn in.” So, like, are they luring him there? So, he’s got a question mark. “Should I go there? Would this be folly?” So, what he does instead is he takes a huge army. But Pétion, who is the person who’s orchestrated the conspiracy, has an army of his own and they oppose, they start fighting. This convinces Christophe that they were really going to kill him if he had shown up there, kind of with one or two, you know, military officers that decide to be “sworn in.” And this occasions a civil war, and Haiti is split in two.

Christophe initially becomes, wait for this title, the President and Generalissimo of the Forces of the Earth and Seas of the State of Haiti, in the north, and Pétion becomes president of the Republic of Haiti in the south. And so, this situation persists from 1807 to 1811. And then Christophe’s military council and Council of State, they nominate him to become king. So, people often say “He made himself king.” Every king sort of makes themself king because of course, you have to accept it. But it’s actually, technically, the Council of State said, we want you to become king. He accepts their nomination two days later. And on June 2, 1811, he’s crowned king. But again, in a divided Haiti, he’s now king and Pétion is still president in the Southern Republic. So, that’s why it’s so confusing because there are, they change, they’re experimenting with different forms of governance in this time period, all on this very small part of the Earth, you know?

Ann: Yeah. Well, just when I’m trying to sort of like get my bearings on a historical time period, especially with kings and stuff, you know, I go to the Wikipedia page and it always says like, “This person is a king and they’re preceded by…” and this one it’s like, “It’s preceded by this person as this, but also this person as this, and by themselves as this,” and it’s just like, what is the sequence of events here? But ultimately, we’re talking about Henry Christophe, he’s king now and he sets about building some amazing buildings that are currently UNESCO World Heritage sites. Can you talk about Sans-Souci and the other projects he did?

Marlene: So, Christophe’s famous palace is called Sans-Souci, which means ‘without worry’ in French. He also built a huge fortress called, in his era, the Citadelle Henry, today known as the Citadelle Laferrière. This fortress is widely hailed as the eighth wonder of the world. It’s the largest fortress in North America. It sits atop one of the highest mountain peaks in Haiti. To get there, you have to walk up, with a donkey usually, a winding 35-degree, dangerous angle. But when you get up there, you realize the magnificent feat that is this structure that peers all the way out to the ocean. It’s meant to protect the Haitian people.

Now, Christophe, as you know from reading the book, loves luxury, which I think he probably learned about in that very luxurious hotel where he saw people sell jewelry and tapestries and carriages. Oh, I tell a story in the book about— because Christophe loved carriages. He had more than a dozen of them that he ordered from England, special orders. But in the book, I tell the story of while he’s working at that hotel, a saddle maker auctions off a carriage in a kind of lottery, I should say and it’s this beautiful, magnificent carriage. So, I wonder, “Oh, okay, all the things he saw,” that taught him about, you know, how to set up a military because he has a huge military, how to reinforce it; this Citadelle has all these cannons, and they’re still there to this day, all of this ammunition, it’s vast like a city. And, you know, his different experiences in various forms of various colonies in various revolutions, in various, kind of, business environments, I think he brings all that to bear on what he does in commissioning these architects to make these magnificent structures and then bringing them to fruition. He has an architect and an engineer he’s known from the colonial era, they lived in the same building, a man named Faro, who becomes a part of the nobility, he designs the Citadelle. This is his friend, this is Christophe’s friend. And so, he knew people who had the knowledge to accomplish what he wanted them to accomplish.

The palace at Sans-Souci is also a kind of magical place just in thinking about what it was like in the kingdom. It still partially stands today. It was unfortunately crumbled, partially crumbled by a massive 8.1 magnitude earthquake in May 1842 but its, kind of, facade remains and you can by using, you know, the powers of imagination and space and being in that space, you can really feel that these were special things. And visitors who went in the era and even afterwards, after the earthquake, they were astonished, and they sat in awe of these structures. Difficult structures to be sure because you have to think, how do you build things like this? What type of labour force do you use to build things like this? But magnificent architectural feats.

Ann: Well, when I spoke with Vanessa Riley ages ago about her book, Queen of Exiles, about Henry’s wife, Marie-Louise, she was describing, because she, she writes a lot of, like, regency books, regency era, like said in England. And she was saying, like, imagining during his reign, like this beautiful palace, and you said he created a nobility. So, it was like, what people see, you know, in Bridgerton, the TV show, she was like, that was what it was. It was like Black people, like attending these beautiful balls of this beautiful palace and they had noble titles and everything. So, can you explain, sort of like, the—before it all goes wrong, spoiler—what this life was like of him as king living in this palace?

Marlene: It was truly, it was like out of the pages of a fairy tale in certain ways for certain people, because we will talk about the flip side of that, the understory, if you will. But for those who are nobles who are in the military and for foreigners coming to visit, this kingdom is a place of balls of parties, of magnificent culture being performed every day. Because Christophe loved the opera, he loved ballet; he had famous plays and operas, you know, he commissioned them to be performed at court for these parties. He also had writers writing their own original operas. So, a man named Juste Chanlatte, who becomes the Comte de Rosier in this aristocracy, and his wife, who’s a singer, he’s a songwriter, and he writes operas and plays, and those are performed at court. There’s ballerinas. One of Dessalines’ daughters, Célimène Dessalines, she’s a ballerina, and she dances as a child in one of these ceremonies. Foreigners who came to visit, they would be toasting the king in these, kind of, bombastic speeches and singing songs from their own country. You know, you have to think about how in the 18th and 19th centuries, that’s what people did at parties, right? I mean, they don’t have TV, they don’t have record players. They could talk to one another, and they also entertained each other with song and dance and that’s what they were doing at these balls that could last all night long.

They also, and that’s why I always say, if rivals Bridgerton and anything that you would see there, they had fireworks, and they would shoot them off into the sky. And the writers would describe how the night sky was illuminated with all of these lights of different colours, and what’s called the chiffre of the king and queen, which are their initials. So, they knew how to make the fireworks resemble initials. It’s amazing to me and I can see why so many foreigners, especially from Great Britain and England in particular, wanted to go to the kingdom of Haiti. And in fact, Christophe’s doctor, his main doctor at the time he dies, is Scottish. It’s a doctor named Duncan Stewart from Scotland. And his son’s school teacher, Prince Victor, who’s the heir to the throne. He has William Wilson, who’s from England as well. There are a lot of foreigners living… There’s the famous British, or I should say Connecticut-born abolitionist Prince Saunders, Black, free man of colour, and he lives there and helps Christophe set up schools.

So, there’s the military aspect of it, there’s a cultural aspect, but Christophe creates a school system, a national school system. In his correspondence with the famous British abolitionist William Wilberforce, Christophe talks about “This education should be for men and women.” And the only reason he’s never able to set up the female school system, because it’s the 19th century so they would not be in the class together with the boys, is he’s having trouble finding female schoolteachers because the idea in the era is also that female children need to be taught by women, not by men. And he has trouble, kind of, commissioning or really enticing women, finding women who want to come. But there’s no shortage of male schoolteachers who are willing to come from overseas to help with this school system. So, it’s pretty robust around the country.

Ann: So, I mean, we’re going to get into what’s helping support this, like, luxurious lifestyle that he’s living, but also is part of it, just that Haiti is still such… The plantation system, the crops and stuff, like, it’s a very wealthy place, still. So, he’s the king and he’s able to afford this because of the trade and things like that, right?

Marlene: Yeah, absolutely. So, while in the colonial era, the main export was sugar, now the main export is coffee and the greatest trading partner, you’ll notice the theme here of the Kingdom of Haiti, is Great Britain. So, they’re not formally recognizing Haitian independence, but they’re perfectly willing to trade with the country. So, imports and exports are going out. So, this is lucrative business for Great Britain as well. And King Henry, he toasts King George III of England all the time, like, he concedes of him as an ally.

What is really interesting is the United States is also a huge trading partner of the kingdom and Christophe will, as King Henry, will toast American presidents as well, never Jefferson, because Jefferson had instituted a trade embargo that had really… It started under Dessalines’s rule and it carried over until 1810, until it expired and wasn’t renewed. And this actually harms independent Haiti because they export coffee, and also cacao and indigo and sugar still, but they import many, many things and when the United States stops this, there’s still a little bit of an illegal trade going on, they have grain shortages, they have flour shortages, people die. They can’t get materials that they need. So, in those toasts, it’s never going to be Jefferson, but he will talk about other presidents, Madison, for example, and this is how they’re getting money.

And so, that’s also why it’s very important to play nice with those world powers because there’s so many foreigners living in the kingdom, they take the newspapers home so you can see in the US press and the British press excerpts translated into English from Haiti’s newspapers. So, there’s a performative aspect to it where they have to say, “Oh, we love the United States and we’re not going to criticize the fact that there’s still slavery happening there, we’re going to criticize France. We’re going to rail against slavery in our publications, but we’re going to focus on France.” And so, that’s what they do. They focus for the most part, in their criticisms, not on Great Britain where there’s still slavery in their colonies as well, but on France as their way around it to keep that trade going.

Ann: Well, I’m just thinking about the performative aspect too, like, the fact that to be taken seriously as a kingdom, you’d want to have a palace, you’d want to have the fireworks shows and the beautiful balls and stuff like, and he knew to be taken seriously, he needed to, like, be at the same level as what England was doing and things like that. So, on the one hand, he does love carriages, and he loves luxury and stuff. But on the other hand, he kind of knew this is how he would have to present himself to be taken seriously.

Marlene: Absolutely. Because all leadership is performative. You have to do the things that a leader— Even a president, you know how in the United States, there’s so much talk about what Michelle Obama, for example, was wearing when she met the Queen, right? In order to be taken seriously, you can’t show your arms or something like that, right? Or what colour tie should a presidential candidate or a president wear? What kind of suit should they have on? Are they allowed to wear, like, a khaki-coloured suit? Right? That there are trappings, the trappings of leadership. Christophe knows this very, very well and he is determined, he’s going to do what— He commissions his portrait too because that’s what leaders do, you commission your portrait. And in so doing, he left this enormous cultural heritage for Haiti, for his country, that this is a difficult rule as all rules of kings are. You know, France is having a revolution against exactly what Christophe is doing, right? This display of opulence amid what? The people who are in the fields every day, you know, planting and digging and carrying things and refining things and making all of this opulence happen.

So, it’s this performance for the world powers. But you also have to think about the people of Haiti see this as well. And it would be natural to compare one’s life circumstances to his. Whereas the European kings had for centuries, convinced their populace that this was a divine right given from God, Christophe doesn’t have that rhetoric to use, he doesn’t have that rhetoric to use. He does say “God wants it this way,” like divine providence, but it’s not the divine right of kings, which is different. But this is destiny because only things that God would want to happen will happen, right? So, there is a providential nature to it, but he doesn’t have that hereditary, like “This is the normal natural order of things that you just have to accept.” The only thing that the European kings and queens had on their side was that centuries of training, brain training, that you have no choice but to accept this.

And I think that goes back to one of your earlier questions about the American Revolution, but I think it’s truer perhaps of the French Revolution in terms of how the world powers react. Like, “Oh, if they say that their king doesn’t have a right to be king, and they behead him, will our populace do that?” And remember, the English had been through it in the English Civil War, like, they knew that regicide could happen, they knew that a civil war could bring the monarchy down. So, that’s the other reason I think that these powers, you know, really want to try to stop everything that’s happening in Saint-Domingue but also keep France from completely going full tilt away from monarchy. And this struggle is going to continue for them into the 19th century as well, for the allied world powers, so to speak, that we think of now, which were anything but in this era.

Ann: Yeah, it’s such a unique situation, like, what he’s living through. He went from being enslaved to being the army, to being a general, and now he’s the king. And he was part of this revolution of like, of the slaves, like of trying to be like, “Fuck this. We are taking ownership of all this.” And then they did and it’s like, “Wait a minute,” but because there’s so many people working these fields, like you were saying, so he’s not, they’re not technically slaves. Can you explain about, what is it? Corvée? Is that the word?

Marlene: Yes. So, I was really interested in, again, with that investigative question. So many people after Christophe’s death said he reinstated slavery, or he brought a form of pseudo-slavery, or he used forced labour. So, I went into this, yes, knowing a lot about this story already because of my previous research, but I went into it, like, I need to understand what this labour system was, and I need to see what it was. And so, it’s clearly not chattel slavery, nobody’s being bought or sold. Forced labour is not slavery, also. It is not free labour. And there were forms of unfree labour that were not slavery all around the world at the time, right? And corvée is one of them. And that’s the word that Christophe uses in the era of Dessalines, as well when he’s General-in-Chief of the Army, and the word that he uses for the kingdom.

I think this is really important because if you were to look up corvée in the dictionary, you see, oh, this is forced labour, right? But the way they use it and explain it is that the corvée is labour in lieu of taxes. So, everyone has to pay taxes in Dessalines’s empire and in Christophe’s state and then in kingdom, and if they can’t—Because they have outlawed idleness. It’s literally a law, you’re not allowed to be idle. You must be productive. That’s the language that they use. And so, if you are not, you can be sent up for the corvée, which usually, because of the massive amount of labour and hands needed, was to work up at the Citadelle. And failing that, they put you in prison. If you went into prison, which was at the Citadelle, the main prison, usually never came out.

So, there’s this kind of undercurrent to what, when we think about freedom… I think that most people define freedom as, you know, “I can do whatever I want.” But of course, that isn’t actually how freedom works. Like, you’re free from slavery, but you’re not free to do whatever you want. And no one in the world who lives in a state, a nation, is free to do whatever they want. We have all kinds of laws, right? And so, their laws say, “You have to work and be productive and everyone has to contribute.” Again, if you are not doing that, you’re going to be signed up for hard labour. And the way to contribute was you would work on the former plantations, they still didn’t use that word, habitation in French, because it wasn’t solely associated with slavery, the way that plantation is now. So, you could do that voluntarily, or you could be sent up to work at the palace or up at the citadel. Failing that, if you absconded or ran away and they caught you, you’re going to prison.

Ann: So, bring this all together. He was the king for how many years?

Marlene: So, he was the king from 1811 to 1820.

Ann: Okay. And then what happened?

Marlene: Well, I mean, as you might imagine again, the people he’s presiding over… He has several problems. First, they remember slavery; the majority of the population has previously been enslaved. And so, anything that is going to be super harsh or reminds them of former punishments, for example, whipping, or that mass incarceration I talked about that happened from fugitivity in the colony, and that Christophe also incarcerates people for not doing what they’re supposed to be doing in his mind, all of these things, how could it not remind people who have already fought for their freedom that, “Hmm, is this really what freedom is? Is this really the form of freedom that we want?” So, he has this problem that does lead to revolts and rebellions sometimes that he then has to squash with his military, he has to tell his military to go and harm the Haitian people.

And then remember, they’re in the civil war with the Southern Republic. So, whereas the Haitian army had, you know, under the Armée Indigène was fighting foreign invaders who want to enslave them. Now, they’re fighting and killing each other. And you have to walk a fine line, right? As king, you can’t celebrate how many victories you get over the Republic. So, every time he wins a battle in these various battles across this long time span of 13 years of civil war, with the Republic, he has to mourn it also. “We mourn that our brothers were led into treason against us by Pétion.” We have to blame somebody. Pétion led them into this treason because there are people like Juste Chanlatte, the Comte de Rosier, that great writer from the kingdom again, who have their family members who live in the Southern Republic. His brothers live there! So, they’re walking this constantly fine line.

And then in August of 1820, Christophe is at a church in Limonade to celebrate two things: his wife’s feast day and the Assumption which happened to fall on the same day that year, and he suffers a stroke. It’s very clear that, even though Dr. Stewart is able to revive him, he’s paralyzed. So now, he’s convalescing there for a while. And in that period of convalescence, the wheels begin to turn in the military against him, the wheels begin to turn in the aristocracy against him. If you think about it from the point of view of those who end up leading this kind of conspiracy, they’re thinking, “Oh, what’s going to happen after he goes?” The kingdom that loves to publicize their parties and everything is astonishingly quiet. They do not have freedom of the press, right? It’s a state-run press, it is an arm of the government. It is for the information that they want the people to have, and they wouldn’t want to sew worry and unrest, but they also don’t say, “Oh, the king’s fine,” they say nothing as far as we know. They say nothing. So, in that information vacuum, what are the people talking about in the streets? What are the rumours that are swirling?

But then Christophe starts to get better as fall comes into play, fall 1820 arrives, but it’s too late. The conspiracy is too far advanced and the military in a city called Saint-Marc ends up rebelling against him and joining the Southern Republic, at that moment led by Jean-Pierre Boyer, Pétion died in March 1818 after a sudden illness. And they begin to strike against him. All the nobles turn against him, led by the Duc de la Marmelade, Richard, and by the time Christophe really begins to take this seriously, it’s too far advanced. The perpetrators, if you will, from his perspective, have entered Cap Henri—it was Cap Français under the French, he renamed it Cap Henri after himself, this beautiful port city—and on the night of October 8, 1820, Christophe takes his life. He realizes he’s sunk. Every time he sends troops to stop the advance of the Southern troops, they join them. And so, instead of “Vive le roi!” in the streets, William Wilson, his son’s teacher, says, you hear “Vive la République!” something that is absolutely unheard of before this moment to say that, in the kingdom.

Ann: So, it’s like so many other stories of leadership and history. Dependant on him, like I’ve talked about, you’ve talked about, he was this remarkable, smart, brilliant, charismatic, handsome person. But in his absence… It was dependent on him. And once he was removed because of his illness, just there wasn’t anything else there. It was him. It was so based on this cult of personality or whatever you want to call it. And if he had died at that point, the heir was his young teenage son, which we also see so often in history. It’s like, oh, that’s where adult men can come in because a young boy can hardly… I don’t know. And then I’m just thinking, like, taking his own life, that reminds me of that would happen so often in Roman history; that was seen as the noble thing to do. This story, it just reminds me of so many ways of so many other kings of so many other places.

Marlene: Yeah. And I think this is also where that experience of knowing French history would have worked against Christophe as well because he has this teenage son who he’s already been positioning to take the reigns of power one day. And his son travels all around the country and talks to troops and talks to the people and talks to the farmers, and in the newspapers of the kingdom, they talk about, “Oh, he’s the worthy heir”.

So, the men who have conspired against Christophe understand this. And they know that young kings, that has existed, they know that Christophe’s son has this education and has been prepared for this, for a moment, for however it would come about. And so, they execute his son shortly after Christophe’s suicide, they execute Prince Victor, they execute all the Christophe loyalists, so that’s Baron de Vastey, who was Christophe’s secretary and who didn’t turn against him. They execute his older son.

Christophe has, as far as we know, three sons. He has a son named Eugène, who we think is the son from a previous relationship so he’s not the heir because he’s not Marie-Louise’s son. And then François-Ferdinand, who was the first child he had with Marie-Louise before she was queen, but he died in France. Christophe had sent him to France to be educated and when Christophe joined the Amée Indigène, the French retaliated and threw his son into an orphanage and then allowed him to die at this terrible death in the streets of Paris. So, Prince Victor is the heir to the throne, and Richard and the other nobles, who oversee these executions, they say, “He pleads for his life,” Prince Victor does. He says, “I didn’t do anything except be the son of this man,” and they’re like, “That’s enough. And you’re done.” And they literally throw his body in a ditch, they just leave it there.

Ann: I just want to let the listeners know if I haven’t heard my episode I did with Vanessa Riley, if you want to know what happens to Henry’s wife and daughters, that’s what we talk about. So, maybe I’ll put a link to that in the show notes for this if people want to get the sequel to this story.

But Henry, do we know where he’s buried? Where is he buried?

Marlene: After he commits suicide, he shoots himself in the heart, his wife and children carry him up to the Citadelle in the night because he shoots himself— There’s different accounts. There’s lots of foreigners and they write different accounts. Between 7:30 PM and 10:30 PM, they take his body up there because they don’t want it to be kind of maimed or desecrated. And so, they take it up to the Citadelle, they bury it in a courtyard, and the story is that they pour lime over it. And today, at the Citadelle, there is a plaque commemorating the death of Christophe there. So, that’s what happens. And yes, his wife and daughters, they survive all of this, but they are forced to leave their home, forced down to live in the Southern Republic, in the city of Port-au-Prince, initially.

Ann: And so, I mean, again… We’ve had such a good discussion, and your book has so many details. This is just a high-level summary of his life. But my question for you, just sort of, as a final question: How is he remembered today and how complex is that memory?

Marlene: Oh, my goodness. He’s remembered in so many different ways because there are those who, really, now, after the fact, can see the visionary leadership, what he wanted to do, which was build a sovereign, free, Black state in the middle of all of these other slave colonies, surrounded by world powers with militaries that he could only dream of, right? The United States, he’s got Great Britain, he’s got France, Russia. I mean, this is the world he lives in. I think that there are plenty of people who see this. But then there are also people who say, you know, we cannot forget, fail to remember this forced labour system, this corvée, the harsh treatments that he needed out to people who did not fall in line, that these are difficult symbols to think of just in a, sort of, straightforward way as magnificent as they might be.

So, playwrights and novelists and comic book writers around the world have been fascinated with this story. I talk in the book about… I opened the prologue this way, which in some ways, I wrote the prologue last, I had a completely different prologue before. But I thought, “Oh, people need to understand that I am standing on the shoulders of the chroniclers of his life,” but also how fascinated people have historically been with his life. Today, his story and his name is not a household name. But there was a time in which this person for a Black writer, like in the era of the Harlem Renaissance, this was one of the most fascinating people you could write about, hope to portray on stage, that you could associate with… Like, Derek Walcott and Aimé Césaire later even! Derek Walcott is a Nobel Prize-winning author and his first works were about the Haitian Revolution and Henry Christophe in particular, his first plays.

People wanted to figure out who this person was and could be. And to me, that called for a reassessment. That’s why I said, “Oh yes, lots of people have written about Christophe, but we need to reassess. I want to understand who this person is” It’s better to understand. We don’t need to know all the answers. We can never know all the answers because even if we had pages and pages of diary from him, that would be his perspective. And I do give his perspective whenever possible, but we do need to understand because that’s the way we get out of the conundrums of the past; we try to understand each other on a human level. And so, that’s what I tried to do in the book.

Ann: Well, and that’s what you accomplished, I would say. Thank you so much for joining us today. This was… I really, really, really wanted to have a discussion of the Haitian Revolution on my podcast this season. And when your book came out, I’m like, “This is this is perfect if she’ll agree to be on the show,” because I mean, yeah, you’re the person to talk to, clearly. And I really… The way that it marries so many of the themes of things we’ve been talking about, the American Revolution, the French Revolution, just slave resistance, this story has everything and it’s so little known. So, thank you so much for sharing it.

Marlene: Yes, well, thank you. And this was, you know, it’s really my pleasure to be here.

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So again, the title of the book, Marlene’s book is The First and Last King of Haiti: The Rise and Fall of Henry Christophe. This book is available! You can buy it from wherever you get your books from. She’s also on tour, giving talks and things about this book so you can keep up with her. I’ll put a link in the notes just to how you can keep up with what Marlene is up to, where she’s going to be popping up giving talks and things. And yeah, I really recommend this book. If you are someone who, like me, didn’t know a lot, or much at all, about the Haitian Revolution, she really explains things in such an understandable, approachable way. It’s a book where it’s not an academic book, it’s really written for the casual reader, and I appreciate that because that means more people hopefully will be able to read and learn about this history.

Next week on Vulgar History, we’re going to be talking about more Black history, more history about the connection between enslaved Black people in the Caribbean and the United Kingdom. And that’s what I’ll say about that. But next week, we’re going to be following this trajectory a little bit more.

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Yeah, next week we’re talking more Black history, history of the connections between the Caribbean and England and the United Kingdom in this, like, 18th century time period we continue to live through. You know what? It’s like, is it unprecedented times or is it precedent at times? Is it truly just the age of revolution 2.0? Pluto and Aquarius would say, yes, it is. Anyway, what I know for sure is I’ll be back here next week with a new episode for you. Until then, keep your pants on and your tits out.

Vulgar History is hosted, written, and researched by Ann Foster, that’s me! The editor is Cristina Lumague. Theme music is by the Severn Duo. The Vulgar History show image is by Deborah Wong. Transcripts are written by Aveline Malek. Find transcripts of recent episodes at VulgarHistory.com.

References:

Order a copy of Marlene’s book, The First and Last King of Haiti: The Rise and Fall of Henry Christophe.

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