‘The First and Last King of Haiti: The Rise and Fall of Henry Christophe’
By Marlene L. Daut
Knopf, 644 Pages

Henry Christophe (1767-1820) not only had himself proclaimed king of Haiti, he also created an aristocratic class loyal to him, one that he hoped would stabilize a factionalized nation perpetually threatened by France under Napoleonic and Bourbon rule, which sought to regain control of its colony and restore slavery.

Christophe was a brilliant soldier, trained by the French. His murky early history seems to have included fighting in the American Revolution. He faithfully served the French before joining Toussaint Louverture, whose rebellion brought an end to slavery. Christophe then turned against Louverture, temporarily siding with the French before once again opposing them and establishing his rule in the north of Haiti while other rebels founded a republic in the south.

Marlene Daut begins her biography dealing with the legends of Christophe as monster, the very epitome of the crazed Black man, savagely disposing of opponents and pursuing a merciless autocratic rule. His rise and fall became the inspiration of novels and plays, including Eugene O’Neill’s “The Emperor Jones.”

Ms. Daut does not deny that Christophe could be brutal, but she shows how he won the admiration of British abolitionists for his reforms, including progressive labor laws, building Haiti’s infrastructure, and educating the populace — all of which came virtually to nought after a rebellion that resulted in Christophe’s suicide.

Christophe had rebuffed efforts to return Haiti to French rule and demands to indemnify slave owners for their property losses. Ms. Daut condemns subsequent Haitian leaders for agreeing to indemnification, which resulted in ruinous debt. She also rejects arguments that France could have conquered the colony and that indemnification was the price of Haitian independence.

France’s genocide in Haiti, including plans to depopulate the island and replace it with a new generation of slaves — trying by terror to win the war against the rebels — is a history of atrocity that, she shows, France’s leaders have never acknowledged or sought to redress.

Ms. Daut’s biography puts Christophe’s actions — some noble, some despicable — in historical context, graphically showing a history of duplicity and depredation that made it difficult for any Haitian leader to trust his own people, including those in power who schemed to overthrow one leader after another. 

Even after a long and careful inquiry into Christophe’s life and career, Ms. Daut cannot explain his motivations. Why, for example, did he turn to monarchy — the very system that had become odious to so many Haitians? Why did he concoct a nobility with its emphasis on hierarchy and privilege, a system that seemed inimical to the Haitian revolution and anathema in a New World setting?

A proper and circumspect biographer, Ms Daut does not try to fathom Christophe’s psychology, yet in this case his penchant for the royal way cries out for some kind of analysis. Christophe, for all his military prowess and political guile, could not unite Haiti. Making himself a king meant the republic in the south could never trust or respect his frequently announced noble intentions.

So what drove Christophe to adopt such counterproductive behavior? It would seem from an extrapolation of the evidence that the biographer has carefully assembled that Christophe, for all his opposition to the French, could not imagine a world without monarchical rule. He had done well in the French army, he had sent his son to be educated in France, he was a man of some cultivation, so that culturally, he remained French — no matter how much he opposed that country’s tyranny.

Christophe never succeeded in getting other countries to officially recognize Haiti as a sovereign nation. His aristocratic pretensions made him and his family the subject of mockery even by William Wordsworth, who published an 1803 tribute to Toussaint Louverture: “Thou hast great allies. … And love, and man’s unconquerable mind.”

Ms. Daut condemns the “brazen and overt racism” of Wordsworth’s poem ridiculing Christophe’s wife, a “sable princess … ebon bright” who is urged to “Lay thy diadem apart/ Pomp has been a sad deceiver.” It is all of that, but it is also an unfortunately expressed effort to say that Christophe, his family and supporters, had made a travesty of their noble dream of freedom by turning it into a bogus Bridgerton parody of the royal way.  

Mr. Rollyson is the author of the forthcoming “Making the American Presidency: How Biographers Shape History.”