Henry Christophe: The King of Haiti

Kelly Therese Pollock  0:00  
This is Unsung History, the podcast where we discuss people and events in American history that haven't always received a lot of attention. I'm your host, Kelly Therese Pollock. I'll start each episode with a brief introduction to the topic, and then talk to someone who knows a lot more than I do. Be sure to subscribe to Unsung History on your favorite podcasting app, so you never miss an episode, and please tell your friends, family, neighbors, colleagues, maybe even strangers to listen too. At the end of his life, Henry Christophe was the King of Haiti, the first, last, and only king that Haiti ever had. The beginning of his life was far more humble though, so humble, in fact, that there's no known documentation of it. According to the king's biographers, including Baron de Vastey, Christophe was born into slavery on October 6, 1767, on the island of Grenada, which was then a British territory about 850 miles southeast of the French colony of Saint Domingue, what would later become Haiti. It's possible that when the French captain, Compte D'Estaing seized Grenada briefly in 1779, he may have captured Christophe. After the siege of Grenada failed, D'Estaing's fleet sailed to Savannah, Georgia, where they joined the colonial navy in a planned assault against the British. Christophe, though just 11 or 12 years old at the time, was there, part of the Chasseurs-Volontaires de Saint Domingue, possibly as a drummer boy. He was injured in the brutal battle that the colonists lost, but he survived and returned, or possibly went for the first time, to Saint Domingue. Saint Domingue, the western third of Hispaniola Island, at the time, was the richest colonial possession in the world, with wildly successful coffee, indigo and sugar plantations, all run with brutally enforced slave labor. With an enslaved population that outnumbered the white population by more than 10 to one, the French masters lived in constant fear of rebellion, and they leaned heavily on physical violence to maintain order. The French Revolution and the French National Assembly's approval of the Declaration of the Rights of Man, which gave free people of color on Saint Domingue full rights as citizens that the white population did not want to recognize, further destabilized an already unstable colony. On August 22, 1791, slaves In the north of Saint Domingue launched an insurrection, which grew within one week to a rebel force, 15,000 strong. Three of the leaders of the rebellion were Toussaint L'ouverture, Jean- Jacques Dessalines and Henry Christophe. After years of fighting, in 1801, L'ouverture, after conquering the eastern portion of the island, appointed a constitutional assembly which drafted a new constitution for Saint Domingue, keeping it a colony of France, but naming L'ouverture Governor General for Life, with near absolute powers and the possibility of naming his own successor. In December of that year, though, Napoleon, who was now in charge in France, sent his own brother in law, General Charles Leclerc, along with Alexandre Petion, to retake control of the island. L'ouverture fought to an armistice in May, 1802. But the French captured him and imprisoned him in France anyway. He died there in miserable conditions on April 7, 1803. In the meantime, Dessalines and Christophe had continued to fight against the French, joined now by Petion and others. The French forces were weakened by a yellow fever epidemic, and by May of 1803, France was once again at war with Britain. With the defeat of the French on January 1, 1804, Jean-Jacques Dessalines proclaimed Haiti's independence from France. The new name, Haiti, was derived from the indigenous Arawak language, and meant Land of the Mountains. In September of 1804, Dessalines created the Empire of Haiti. His coronation ceremony, at which he took the name Jacques I, was held on October 6. Two years later, on October 17, 1806, Jacques I was assassinated. Upon his assassination, the country split. Alexandre Petion took control in the south, elected President of the Republic of Haiti. Henry Christophe led in the north, initially as President of the State of Haiti. In March of 1811, President Christophe became King Henry I, in the Kingdom of Haiti, by order of the Council of State. The elaborate coronation ceremony in June of that year was celebrated throughout the kingdom. Like other royalty throughout the world, King Henry I had a full royal court, that included dukes, barons, counts and knights, and he and his family, Queen Marie Louise, Prince Victor Henry, and Princesses Amethyste and Athenaire lived in San Souci Palace, after construction was completed in 1813. Christophe had married Marie Louise, a free Black woman during the early years of the revolution in July of 1793. Their first child, a son named Ferdinand, was born the following year. Wanting a great future for his son, Christophe had sent Ferdinand to be educated in Paris when he was just eight years old. However, with the Haitian defeat of the French and Declaration of Independence, the French retaliated against Christophe by expelling Ferdinand, who died on the streets of Paris. Thus in the hereditary monarchy of the Kingdom of Haiti, the presumptive heir to the throne was Prince Victor Henri, who was born on March 3, 1804. In 1818, President Alexandre Petion died. Two years earlier, he had been named President for Life of the Republic of Haiti, and had named Jean Pierre Boyer as his successor. Whatever hopes Christophe may have had of using Petion's death as a chance to take the south were quickly dashed. In August of 1820, Christophe suffered a stroke that left him partially paralyzed. At the same time, Boyer was working to expand his reach across the island, and some of the subjects of the Kingdom of Haiti were growing restless. On October 8, 1820, seeing that the end was in sight, King Henry I died by suicide. His son, Prince Victor Henry was bayoneted by revolutionaries 10 days later. Boyer reunited the two parts of Haiti as the Republic of Haiti, becoming president of the whole, a position he maintained until 1843. The lives of the queen and the princesses were spared and they escaped, first to England and then to Italy. Marie Louise died in Pisa in March of 1851, having outlived all of her children. Less than a year after his death, Christophe was already being mocked on the London stage in a comedy entitled, "Death of Christophe." In 1936, for production as part of the Federal Theater Project under the Works Project Administration, Director Orson Welles set an all Black Macbeth, not in Scotland, but in a fictional Caribbean island, meant to evoke a 19th century Haiti during the reign of Henry Christophe. The play sold out for 10 weeks in Harlem, and Welles told an interviewer a few years before his death, "By all odds, my great success in life was that play." Joining me in this episode is Dr. Marlene Daut, Professor of French and African Diaspora Studies at Yale University, and author of, "The First and Last King of Haiti: The Rise and Fall of Henry Christophe."

Hi, Marlene, thanks so much for joining me today.

Dr. Marlene Daut  12:36  
Thanks so much for having me. 

Kelly Therese Pollock  12:38  
Yes. So I was really interested in learning this history, which was pretty new to me. I want to start by asking, you've written several other books. How did you decide to write this book and focus in on Henry Christophe?

Dr. Marlene Daut  12:54  
Yes. So I was always interested in the history of the Haitian Revolution, but I came at it from a kind of different angle, initially. In my first book, which was called, "Tropics of Haiti," I actually was studying the literary history of the revolution and how the literature of the revolution from the 18th and 19th centuries influenced how historians wrote about it and how the public thought about the revolution. But in my second book, I kind of elaborate on a figure who appears in that first book, Baron de Vastey. And I wrote a kind of intellectual or literary biography of him. It was called, "Baron de Vastey and the Origins of Black Atlantic Humanism." And I really walk us through each of his works which relates to the current book and my last book, because Baron de Vastey was the most prominent secretary and most prolific writer in the Kingdom of Haiti. And so in learning all about him, I necessarily learned all about King Henry Christophe, who also appears in my "Intellectual History of the Haitian Revolution: Awakening the Ashes" as the sort of a visionary for Black sovereignty in creating this free, modern Black Kingdom. But you know, in the course of coming across King Henry's story so many times, and from especially having kind of first been introduced to it really fully from the literary side, this person was demonized. This person was really stereotyped, and I was just very interested in what he was like, what the kingdom was actually like. How could this place that was the site of magnificent intellectual history, a magnificent opera, culture, ballet, a flourishing literature, be the place where a tyrant who eats babies reigns? Because that was the kind of that was literally what people said. And so I went about exploring it. I call it investigative historicism, because I actually approached it as a question, like, "Where did we get these stories? Are they true or not?" But that was actually secondary to like, "Where did these stories come from, and what do they mean for understanding this person's life?" 

Kelly Therese Pollock  15:06  
So I'd like to talk a little bit about sources, because we have such an interesting source material. So you're talking about sort of the end part of his life. The beginning part of his life, there's little documentation at all. And so you have to sort of sort through that, the mystery of, like, "Do we even know anything? And what do we know? Can we know anything about where he came from?" And then you've got what you're talking about there at that toward the end of his life, of different people, writing from different perspectives, trying to spin a different kind of story for different reasons. So can you talk through that like, how you go from the beginning of his life and the almost no documentation to this time when there's tons of documentation, because he's a king, and of course, there's lots of stuff to look at, but not knowing what sorts of things might be leading you in different directions?

Dr. Marlene Daut  15:58  
Yes, I mean, I was heavily influenced, especially in the first part of the book, by a Haitian historian and anthropologist named Michel-Rolph Trouillot's famous book, "Silencing the Past." There's a line in that book where he says, "What happened leaves traces." And I tried to keep that in mind, because so often when we're dealing with the life of someone who's been previously enslaved or a Black subject in this time period, right? Because Christophe was born in 1767, so even if he had been, you know, born with free status, the idea that there would be this voluminous documentation of his life compared to white French people, for example, is really, you know, would have been a rarity. But in thinking about how what happens leaves traces, I refused to accept that either we must sort of invent facts, which is what a lot of Christophe chroniclers did, or they took little snippets of, you know, information and hearsay, and they just decided to kind of run full stream with it. So I knew I didn't want to do that, but I also didn't want to do the opposite, which is just to say, "Oh, we can't know. Let me just move on and get to the part we know about." And so I went about investigating. Again, I just went into the store. I took what we knew, I took what was plausible. I took where we knew he had been, and I looked into it. And it's astonishing that when you really look deeply into the story, from the standpoint of again, that investigative historicism, you can get more than just tidbits. You can get whole parts of the story. And so that's what I did. I I was interested in his life on Grenada and what that would have been like. I was interested in his participation at the Battle of Savannah and what that would have been like. And then when he finds himself on the island of Saint Domingue, I wanted to explore that. And that was the place where I really found not just, oh, it could have been like this, but no, here are the places he went. Here are the people he knew and would have been around, because we know he was in this location. And and it was interesting, because when you bump that up against the end of his life, when there's like, so much documentation and so many different points of view, and now I have the opposite problem. I've got to disentangle what all these different people, some of whom are eyewitnesses, some of whom claim they got their testimony from eyewitnesses. Now I have to disentangle it all. And so in that way, I think it really was a project of just investigating as best I could and letting the reader know that there are different accounts, and trusting the reader to be able to say, "You can follow this story, but you have to know that every story has multiple sides, not just this one."

Kelly Therese Pollock  18:34  
Speaking of multiple sides, I just have to ask, this the Haitian Revolution is such a confusing history. Like, there are people going back and forth from one side to the other. There's, at one point, as you say in the book, there's a civil war within a civil war. Like, did you have a whiteboard to map it all out? I realize you've been studying this for a long time, but how do you keep all of these people straight as you're thinking about and writing about this very complicated history?

Dr. Marlene Daut  19:04  
 I mean, at one point, I had different kinds of documents that, so I had a timeline, because I need a timeline for just dates, people where they are. I also created family trees for various people, because there are also people who have these very complicated family histories. Christophe is one of them. His wife is another one, and then some of their associates. So I started to build family trees so so that I could also remember the names of the people. Because at one point in the book, I talk about how it's kind of like putting together a puzzle, and let's say it's a 1000 piece puzzle, but you know for sure, you're only, can only find seven to 800 of those pieces, but you still want to find as many of them as you can. So you know you're going to have missing pieces, right? But in order to make sense of it, you have to kind of know the shape and outline of the puzzle. So I really needed to keep that information organized in my head, so that when I would come across a name, that I knew that it was a name that I was tracking. So I also had a document with a list of people's names. And anytime I would go into the archives, I would say to myself, "Okay, if you come across this name," because you're going through so much material so quickly that it would be easy to not remember or to skirt over it. And so I started in documents I knew had something to do with Christophe. I would just add the names that were in that to the sheet. And then sometimes I could just search in my Dropbox, because I could have, I can't remember it all from memory. I wish I could. And I'm saying, "Oh, I'm so glad, you know, I'm so glad that I wrote that name down, so glad that I didn't take anything for granted that this wasn't a person who was part of the story, because I didn't know who was going to be, ultimately, a part of it and who was not going to be." 

Kelly Therese Pollock  20:45  
So I'm wondering if you could talk a little bit about the the kinds of qualities about Christophe that that helped him rise so quickly and so spectacularly, you know, from being presumably enslaved at the beginning of his life to being a king, the first and only king of Haiti, at the end of his life. And throughout his story, time and time again, there are people looking to him as like, "We need you to lead now." Or, you know, people looking to him as like he's the guy we need to get on our side, or he's the guy we need to somehow find a way to neutralize. So he's not, you know, our enemy any longer. So what are are the qualities about him that that make him so powerful and make him able to rise to this position?

Dr. Marlene Daut  21:39  
Yeah, it's a great question, because it's really an uncommon trajectory, any way you look at it, right? So he participates in the American Revolutionary War. So he sees battles. He's a part of them. He's a young child. He's 11 and 12 by the time that that conflict ends, and he watches a losing battle with a lot of casualties, and he also is wounded. So he's learned something from the battlefield. When he gets to Saint Domingue, at one point, he works at this hotel called La Couronne, The Crown. And there, onlookers say he heard conversations about the French Revolution, when that breaks out, that when the French are trying to figure out what to do once the Haitian Revolution breaks out in August, 1791, he's there and hearing these conversations and learning from that, which is also important, because, you know, by all accounts, he could read and write from a young age, and he knew English, French, and of course, you know San Domingue Creole, an earlier version of what is now Haitian Creole. So I think also being multilingual helped him, because, you know, when he rose to positions of authority,  the opposition would say, "Watch out for Christophe, because he can read and write English and he he can understand what you're saying," whereas maybe some of the other Black generals could not. So I think those things helped him. And then I think his experience being a businessman and negotiating different expectations in the sort of post emancipation but free independence period where France is still in control, but the Haitian revolutionaries, the freedom fighters, have forced them to formally abolish slavery, which is what allows Christophe to, you know, get to this high position in the army. But you're absolutely right. You know, his opponents and his allies all say comment on his remarkable intellect, on the fact that he understands military combat, on the fact that he's a strategic thinker, and they want to either get him out of the picture because of that, or they they think we need to have him on our side.

Kelly Therese Pollock  23:40  
When Christophe does get into power, there are you mentioned he was demonized, but there are actual good things that he accomplishes. You also mentioned he was visionary. Could you talk about the educational system that he is able to put in place, which is really remarkable for its time?

Dr. Marlene Daut  24:02  
Yes, certainly. And this is also this educational system is something that is kind of a long standing project of his, because in the colonial era, when he's a high ranking French officer, he actually institutes a kind of makeshift education system on one of the plantations where he's living and is a farmer, and he's very interested in his son's education. He has an older son, his first child with his wife, Marie-Louise, who becomes the queen. His name is Francois-Ferdinand, and he actually sends this child to Paris to be educated at one point, which a lot of free Black men did, especially high ranking elite men. And tragically, this child dies because, after Christophe joins with the Armee Indigene, who are going to overthrow the French and declare independence, the French retaliate, and they throw his son into an orphanage where he ends up in the streets and dies this horrific death. And I do wonder, you know, he, he may have felt like he sacrificed everything for his son's education, but he doesn't stop believing in it, even under Dessalines, who had become an emperor and Christophe, or in the post independence period, Christophe, becomes, General in Chief, of the whole  Haitian army under Dessalines and he really is interested in an education system there as well. So I feel that it's only natural that once Christophe became king, he really set his eyes on creating an education system for the whole country, all of Northern Haiti. So he starts out in the capital, and then he, you know, sets up a system where he's recruiting school teachers from Great Britain to come and to teach the children of Haiti. And he also wants to set up schools for girls, because at that time, girls would only be taught by female teachers. And Christophe dies before he's able to recruit enough female school teachers to come. But this was his vision for the country, was education for all.

Kelly Therese Pollock  25:59  
He's also interested in land redistribution in really kind of progressive ways. So could you talk some about the land redistribution, what he's hoping to accomplish, and where that goes? 

Dr. Marlene Daut  26:13  
Yes. So when he was General in Chief of the Haitian army under Dessalines, the project of what they called redistributing the land of our former oppressors, the white French colonists who had enslaved them, had begun. They had started to think about, Well, if we're primarily agricultural society, and we need to export things, is so that we can import things, well, how is this labor going to be performed? Who's going to oversee it?" And so they create this system where different members, usually high ranking members of the military, can get hold of these plantations, can be assigned to these plantations, and then laborers, farmers could come and work the land, and this is how the country would get revenue. And so this continues under Christophe, but really accelerates. And even though, during the colonial era, the main crop is, of course, sugar, now it's coffee by a wide margin. And Haiti's greatest trading partner, the Kingdom of Haiti, is Great Britain. And United States is in there. Denmark is in there, Russia. They're trading with the world powers. And it becomes this very lucrative system. But of course, the flip side of that is maybe all good and well, if you're the you know person overseeing the plantation who's making a lot of money from it, but if you're one of the laborers on the plantation, and you've got quotas to meet, maybe not so much. So it's definitely not chattel slavery, and all the onlookers comment on this visionary labor system because it relied on free labor at a time when enslaved labor was ascendant in the Americas, but at the same time, we can look at that labor system now and and say, "Hmm, you know, this is really harsh, long working hours." And could also, you could also be signed assigned labor as a form of punishment if you had committed a crime or you didn't pay your taxes, or all kinds of things that to us now will seem less than progressive, obviously.

Kelly Therese Pollock  28:12  
So the Kingdom of Haiti, we should mention, is not all of what we now think of as Haiti, because at the time that the that he is King of the Kingdom of Haiti, there's a civil war going on. Mentioned that this is complicated history. So what is happening here? And this is at after you mentioned Dessalines was the emperor, after Dessalines is assassinated in a coup, essentially. And that's at the beginning of the the Civil War and the the break into two. Could you talk a little bit about that? And this, the civil war lasts for the entirety of the time that that Christophe is in charge, first as president and then as king.

Dr. Marlene Daut  28:55  
Yeah. I mean, it is enormously complex, right? Because you have Haiti divided into the north and the south. But you also, at one point saw the French on the eastern side of the island, that's now the Dominican Republic. Then you have Spain over there, right? So you have essentially three forms of governance on the island all at the same time. And how this happens is Dessalines is assassinated on October 17, 1806, and he is assassinated by members of the southern military, led by a man named Alexandre Petion, who had been a freedom fighter and a general during the days of the Haitian Revolution, had been in the Armee Indigene, which is what the liberating army of Haiti called itself. And he got together with some other disgruntled senators from the south, and they orchestrated this coup d'etat that ends in the assassination of the emperor. But they know that Christophe has great influence over the Haitian people and the military in particular, so they tap him to be Dessalines' successor in an interim manner. And at first Christophe agrees to this, but then he really starts to think about. It. And he starts to think, naturally,"If they got rid of the emperor, you know, what will they do to me? Are they trying to trick me? What's going to happen?" And so he flees to the north, and he sets up his own state in the north of Haiti by 1807, and he takes the very modest title, I always say, of President and Generalissimo of the Forces of the Earth and Seas of the State of Haiti. And Petion, meanwhile, takes the title of President of the Republic of Haiti. So now you have the State of Haiti in the north, the Republic of Haiti in the south. And this occasions that civil war. And so even when Christophe's counselors of state say, you know, we wanted to take the title of king in 1811 and he does so, and he's crowned on June 2, 1811. The civil war doesn't stop. In fact, it continues on, as you mentioned, throughout the entire time of Christophe's reign, and even after Petion dies in March, 1818, his successor, a man named Jean Pierre Boyer, keeps the civil war going and accelerates it. And in fact, that acceleration is in some ways related to Christophe's eventual demise and the end of his reign. 

Kelly Therese Pollock  31:06  
So I want to get there in a minute. But first, I want to talk about why the switch from president, this grand president title, though it is, to king. And you know, it seems perhaps, from our day and age, like, why would you want to go back to being in a kingdom? That seems like a weird thing. Wouldn't you want to be in a republic? But from the perspective of the early 19th century, perhaps, and the way things are going, and there's had states changing all over the place, governments rising and falling, and including France, who they're still at war with this whole time, is in the government's changing constantly. You know, perhaps it's not quite as clear cut a decision as it might be for us. So what? What's going on there? Why do they change from being a state to a kingdom and change his title to king?

Dr. Marlene Daut  32:00  
Well, of course, as with everything in this time period, it's complicated, but the first thing I would say is, you know, it's a world of kings. It's a world of monarchs that they live in. The only two modern republics right in the west, so to speak, are France, which has been, you know, the republic is overthrown by Napoleon, who becomes emperor, and then you have the United States. And in both France and the United States, there's slavery. So there's not the idea that a republic is necessarily a kind of freer form of governance. It's safer for Black people and for Black sovereignty than a monarchy would be. And so also, many of the African born on the island had come from places where there were monarchs or there were kings and great leaders of this manner. So you have that. You have the indigenous history of the island, which they're highly influenced by, and they call them caciques, but they're chiefs or leaders or queens in the pre Columbus period. So they have historical antecedents. And in fact, the counselors of state, they actually know that maybe people will have some questions. So they put out some documents, and they say, we've studied forms of governance all around the world, and we find that monarchies, you find the most free people across the world in a monarchy. And so that's kind of their practical reason that they give for wanting Christophe to become king. And he says, you know, he behaves kind of like, "Of course, I will accept this. I'm humbled by this," and you know that he does it reluctantly because, but it's really what the people want. But something else has happened to complicate this story in this time period between when he went from being president and generalissimo to king, and that is the return of one of Toussaint L'ouverture of the revolutionary days. You know, infamous rivals, a man named Andre Rigaud. He's also from the south. He'd fought with Petion, but he was Petion's superior in the French army. And he returns to the island after having been detained, first imprisoned and detained in France for many, many years since the Revolutionary era, and he suddenly returns. And the people of the north, led by Christophe and his minister, are convinced that Napoleon has sent him there to pave the way to reinstate slavery, to get rid of Petion, and that he's on this mission. And they're strengthened in this belief by the fact that, in fact, a civil war within a civil war does break out between Rigaud and Petion, and for a very short time, Rigaud, if you can believe this, rules over a separate entity seated in Les Cayes, his home city, at this within the Republic. There is also another problem there. There's another man who has declared sovereignty over a small region of the southern peninsula, and his name is Gauman, and he's related to Rigaud, but partial to Christophe, so what the Christophean ministers say is, "In order to prevent someone from just coming in and trying to overthrow us, we need the firm hand of kingly power, whether that's France or whether it's internal conflict."

Kelly Therese Pollock  33:24  
This story is so great. All right, so then let's get back to the end of Christophe's life, and the end, obviously, of the kingdom then. So it sort of happens all at once, in a way. Boyer, as you mentioned, is intensifying the civil war, and at the same time, Christophe has a stroke. He's unable to sort of fight back physically. He's unable to run away because he's partially paralyzed, and then his own people start turning on him, start essentially defecting to the south. What? What is happening? Why? Why does this sort of happen all at once? Or it feels like all at once, per you know, perhaps things are sort of looming all along.

Dr. Marlene Daut  36:00  
Yeah. Yeah. So after Petion died in March, 1818, Christophe, you know, he has this vision that he's going to reunite the north and the south, and he issues these calls of amnesty. He tries to extend an olive branch to the southern kind of elites, military elites and government officials. And they basically laugh at him. They send him back missives that are like, we can't believe that you would, you know, make such a crazy overture to us. We would never, ever do that. We they insult him. And he realizes that it's not ever going to happen, I think, right? And so in his mind, he's thinking, "We're going to co-exist with this republic now, which is actually remarkable that he gets to that place because he hadn't been there for the entire time previous to this. But Boyer does not share this opinion at all. First of all, he wants to get rid of Gauman, that man who's hiding in the Mamelles Mountains. And he does, and once he's victorious, doing something that Petion couldn't do and tried to do, and he controls the entire southern peninsula now. He says to his troops, we have more to do. We're going to overtake that kingdom in the north. And they call Christophe the Dictator of the North, the Tyrant of the North. So they're really ramping up their propaganda machine, just like the northerners are doing in terms of how they talk about the southerners. And then, you know, several coincidences do kind of happen, or what look like coincidences, but they create openings. Christophe has his stroke in August, 1820. He's partially paralyzed at first, and some of his own nobles begin to conspire against him during this time. If you think about it from their point of view, they're thinking, "What's going to happen after the king goes? Who's going to be king?" They've got Christophe's remaining son, Prince Victor Henry, who's heir to the throne, but he's just a teenager, and he's pretty popular in the kingdom, but you know, not if you're trying to be the one in power. And when Christophe starts to get better, as fall wears on, it is conspirators, instead of stopping the conspiracy, they actually kind of extend it. And some, some of the military join with them from Saint-Marc, which is, you know, further south. And by the time Christophe gets wind of this in the first days of October, it's pretty extensive. The march of that southern army that has been collecting northern troops to be on their side, they're marching to the north. They've they've breached Cap-Henry because Christophe, of course, renames the city of Cap-Haitien, which had been Cap-Francais. He renames it after himself. And every time Christophe sends more troops to stop the advance of these invaders from the Republic, they end up defecting and joining, in large part, and now so for the first time, in the streets of Cap, can be heard, eyewitnesses say you hear Viva la Republique. And this is kind of unheard of. This could get you executed or sent for labor or to prison instead of your Viva la Roi, Long Live the King, Long Live the Queen, Long Live the Republic. And Christophe sends one last group of troops to stop them the day before he commits suicide. And when they defect also, he tells his doctor, Dr. Stewart, who had really cared for him since the stroke he had in that church in Limonade. He says, "I know what I have to do," and he shoots himself in the heart. He doesn't want to be assassinated like Dessalines, and he doesn't want his body to be desecrated after his death, like Dessalines' reportedly was after his assassination. 

Kelly Therese Pollock  39:31  
So, I feel like we have painted Christophe as a fairly sympathetic figure. I was telling the story to my 10 year old, and I, you know, got to, got to that point, and he's like, "Oh, but I really liked the king." And I was like, "Okay, well, maybe perhaps went a little too far in painting him as a sympathetic figure." So perhaps worth pointing out that he was maybe not all good. He's complicated, right? Like, like all people.

Dr. Marlene Daut  39:59  
Absolutely, in fact, one of the eyewitnesses who's there during these final days is a man named William Wilson, and he's pretty young, but he's the prince's the prince's teacher. And he leaves like multiple accounts of what happened. And in one of them, he says, "You know what Christophe's problem was? He talks about the good things and the bad things." He says he was a philosopher. He set up these beautiful systems, and they would have been wonderful and great in theory, but he never put them into practice. To him, they were they were words on a page. They were the structure and model of this great, free, Black, sovereign kingdom that would be self defending, that would be prosperous, that would create education and wealth for all. But that that's not really what happened, because the king is a bit paranoid. So if he gets a rumor that somebody is conspiring against him, it's basically you're going to execution. He shoots first and then asks questions later. And then, of course, that labor system, which, again, if you're the one benefiting from it, you probably see no problem with it, but if you're subjected to it, and it's not really what you want to do, because the king outlawed idleness, so it wasn't the case that you could just walk around and hang out and be okay being under the sun and not having a house. So that wasn't allowed. You had to contribute, was the idea. And so yeah, it's not, definitely not all roses. And we know, you know, after the fact, we we take some of the accounts with a grain of salt, but there are credible accounts from people who lived in the kingdom, and they say, you know, "I lost family members. I remember the people who were sent up to the Citadel, to the prison, and never came out," because if you went to that prison, you most likely you weren't, you know, going to get parole. You're eventually going to either die there or be executed.

Kelly Therese Pollock  41:43  
So then, to finish out this story, Boyer becomes president of all of Haiti, and unfortunately, what he then does is make a deal with the French that has very, very long lasting, to today, implications. Could you talk some about what, what happened there? 

Dr. Marlene Daut  42:04  
Yes, so very quickly, Boyer does, accomplishes what he wants to after Christophe's suicide. He, well, first of all, he has the prince is executed, I should say, under his watch. Boyer denies that he's given this order. Everyone who was a Christophe loyalist is also executed. Their bodies are thrown into a ditch. The queen and her two daughters are taken to the city of Port-au-Prince. They eventually leave and go to England, and then they live in exile in Italy, and that's where they die. And but Boyer is not just content to reunite the north and the south. He also wants to reunite the eastern side of the island. So by 1822, the whole island is the Republic of Haiti. Now you might think that was also enough, but no, he wants something that Christophe couldn't accomplish, Petion couldn't accomplish. He wants formal recognition of Haitian sovereignty from the world powers, which he knows cannot happen unless he starts with France. Now, France under at this time when he's when Boyer strikes, this disastrous indemnity is under the rule of Charles X, and he's open to this indemnity, which, in fact, Petion had first proposed to Charles X's brother, Louis XVIII, the restored Bourbon monarch after Napoleon is overthrown. And Charles X comes up with this amount that is way beyond what either Petion or Boyer had imagined. It's 150 million francs. He arrives on the island of not the king, but his ministers and his  his main diplomat the Baron de Mackau in July, 1825, and the idea is sign or else. The idea is sign or else. And Boyer signs. He signs this disastrous indemnity. And in fact, Haiti makes the first two payments, but then defaults. And so in 1838, Charles X's cousin, Louis Philippe was become king, sends another delegation with 12 warships, all these cannons. The first delegation in 1825 had 14 warships, hundreds and hundreds of cannons. And the idea, again, is sign or else. And Boyer signs, and he also agrees to take out these exorbitant loans from French banks. And this really, really destroys the Haitian economy, and it forces him to or, or causes him to occasion even more harsh and draconian measures to make the money. So after the 1825 indemnity Boyer had instituted what's called the rural code, which essentially transforms many Haitian citizens, almost all of them in the countryside, into laborers, if they're not in the elite or in the military. So now Black freedom is indebted to white colonial powers once more, and this situation persists through the entire 19th century and into the early 20th century. 

Kelly Therese Pollock  44:47  
All right. Well, I would like to encourage listeners to read your book. It's an incredible read. If anyone likes Game of Thrones or anything like that. I mean, this is this story has it all. It's got spies. It's got civil war within a civil war, it's got everything. So please tell listeners how they can get a copy of your book.

Dr. Marlene Daut  45:05  
Yes, so, "The First and Last King of Haiti" is out now, and you can order the book from wherever books are sold online. And also you could find the book in Barnes and Noble and plenty of indie bookstores. So I always say, choose your favorite indie bookstore, or just go to bookshop.org, which supports indie bookstores.

Kelly Therese Pollock  45:26  
Marlene, thank you so much for speaking with me. 

Dr. Marlene Daut  45:29  
Thank you so much for having me. 

Teddy  45:44  
Thanks for listening to Unsung History. Please subscribe to Unsung History on your favorite podcasting app. You can find the sources used for this episode and a full episode transcript @UnsungHistorypodcast.com. To the best of our knowledge, all audio and images used by Unsung History are in the public domain or are used with permission. You can find us on Twitter or Instagram @Unsung__History, or on Facebook @UnsungHistorypodcast. To contact us with questions, corrections, praise, or episode suggestions, please email Kelly@UnsungHistorypodcast.com. If you enjoyed this podcast, please rate, review, and tell everyone you know. Bye!

Transcribed by https://otter.ai