THE FIRST AND LAST KING OF HAITI

A biography of the iconic Black revolutionary that tries to separate caricature and idolatry from truth.

Daut, professor of French and African diaspora studies at Yale and author of Awakening the Ashes: An Intellectual History of the Haitian Revolution, reminds readers that Haiti was France’s most prized colony, an island territory of plantations that led the world in sugar, coffee, and cotton production. It was also an oppressive slave society. Inspired by the French Revolution, enslaved people rebelled in 1791. Although France abolished slavery in 1794, Haitian whites refused to go along and fought back viciously, and Napoleon failed disastrously in an effort to restore slavery in 1802. A minor figure when the rebellion began, Christophe prospered steadily under its leader, Toussaint L’Ouverture. Once independence was achieved in 1804, rebel leaders turned on each other. After plotters assassinated Haiti’s first emperor in 1806, Christophe declared himself king of northern Haiti, splitting the nation in two. Energetic if not widely beloved, he created a large system of nobility, built palaces, and instituted a feudal-style forced-labor system to revive the plantations. Ill and facing increasing opposition, he committed suicide in 1820. Daut’s research answers peripheral questions (Christophe was almost certainly born in Grenada), but it remains uncertain whether he was born enslaved, and there are frustratingly few details of his service with French forces in the American Revolution, possibly as a drummer boy. Christophe’s letters, reports, and proclamations, meanwhile, reveal few character flaws and a great deal of bombast.

Scholarly insights into a grandiose historical character who remains an enigma.