Vulgar History - Haitian Revolution： The First and Last King of Haiti

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00:00:13.500 your next move tomorrow. Hello and happy new year and welcome to Vulgar History, 0.93

00:00:28.760 feminist women's history, comedy podcast. I'm your host, Anne Foster. And today we're diving 0.99

00:00:34.900 back into our season-long theme, which is how do you solve a problem like Marie Antoinette,

00:00:39.800 in which we've been looking at the various revolutions of the long 18th century. We've

00:00:45.800 talked about the American Revolution. We've talked about the French Revolution. We're going to talk

00:00:50.520 about the French Revolution more in upcoming episodes. And today we're going to be talking

00:00:55.080 about the Haitian Revolution, which was happening really in parallel with the French Revolution as

00:01:01.680 well. The story we're talking about today, it brings together so many of the things we've

00:01:05.760 talked about in previous episodes this series. We're talking about the very first episode of

00:01:10.560 this season. We discussed Marie-Joseph Angelique, the Canadian icon. I don't know. She wasn't

00:01:17.840 Canadian. She would never have considered herself Canadian. The enslaved Portuguese woman who burned

00:01:22.500 down most of Montreal. We talked about that. And just slave resistance, we've talked about in

00:01:27.420 previous episodes as well. We talked about with Ona Judge running away. And today, we're talking

00:01:34.160 about Haiti. And I mean, if I just try to talk off the top of my head about it, I'm going to

00:01:39.380 mess something up. So honestly, like just listen to this episode, I have an incredible guest. It's

00:01:44.040 Marlena Doubt, who has just written a new book about the person who we're talking about.

00:01:49.240 her book is called the first and last king of haiti and it's the story of henry christophe

00:01:56.680 and yeah it's just just been published when you're listening to this it's published in

00:02:00.000 january of 2025 i really recommend this book it was so helpful to me to just sort of she really

00:02:06.560 holds the reader's hand step by step explaining the what precipitated the haitian revolution

00:02:13.000 what happened afterwards, who Henri Christophe was. And if that name is familiar to you,

00:02:19.120 longtime listeners of this podcast might remember a year or two ago, we had author Vanessa Riley on

00:02:24.020 talking about her book, Queen of Exiles, which is the story of Hades Queen Marie Louise, who was

00:02:29.980 the wife of Henri Christophe. So we've talked about Henri Christophe before in the context of

00:02:35.180 that episode. And I also recommend that novel, Queen of Exiles by Vanessa Riley. It's a novel,

00:02:42.100 but also there's so much research in it. It really tells the story of her. Anyway,

00:02:47.560 I'm really excited for you all to hear this episode. It really ties together so much of

00:02:51.920 what we talked about before. And also I think really has reverberations for what we're living

00:02:55.920 through right now. Pluto is an Aquarius, the new age of revolution is upon us in a more,

00:03:02.540 more extreme ways than I thought when I first decided to do this as the theme for the series.

00:03:08.080 Anyway, please enjoy this extended conversation with Marlena Debt.

00:03:17.820 So we're joined here today by Marlena Debt, the author of The First and Last King of Haiti,

00:03:23.880 The Rise and Fall of Henri Christophe. Welcome, Marlena.

00:03:28.840 Thanks so much for having me. I'm excited to talk to you today.

00:03:32.220 I'm so happy to be talking to you about this. So I think I told you when we were first in

00:03:37.760 touch. But this whole season on my podcast, I've been talking about just the revolutions

00:03:42.380 of the long 18th century. So we've talked about the American Revolution, we've talked about the

00:03:47.240 French Revolution a bit, but I absolutely wanted to include the Haitian Revolution,

00:03:51.520 which was happening at the same time, and has a lot of overlap. So I was really excited that

00:03:58.320 your book is coming out, talking about Henri Christophe. And can I ask like just a first

00:04:03.040 broad general question, which is when did you first learn about the Haitian revolution? Do you

00:04:08.940 remember? Oh yeah. I'm Haitian American. My mother was born in Port-au-Prince. So I feel like I always

00:04:18.560 sort of knew about it, but I didn't know about it, if that makes sense. I had never been taught the

00:04:23.940 Haitian revolution in school, for example. And when I went to college, I did my undergraduate

00:04:31.080 degree at Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles. I had a French Guines professor. And so

00:04:38.200 he was talking to me about Haiti. And it was clear to him that I didn't really know anything

00:04:43.780 really about the Haitian revolution other than that it happened and the broad strokes. And he's

00:04:49.120 like, you are Haitian. You need to know this history. So I'm thinking, okay, I'm going to go

00:04:54.040 out and I'm going to learn about the Haitian revolution. And that's what I did. I started

00:04:57.800 just reading and trying to understand the story and that carried over to when I went into graduate

00:05:04.380 school at the University of Notre Dame. I think I just checked out basically every book on Haiti

00:05:10.220 because it just wasn't part of the curriculum, the Haitian Revolution. And I teach it now in

00:05:15.220 my classroom and my students tell me still, even the Haitian American students, that they are not 0.68

00:05:21.220 really getting this history in the classroom unless they live in certain places like Brooklyn

00:05:26.100 or new york and miami sometimes but other than that they really aren't getting this yeah and

00:05:32.260 we're going to talk all about it today and so all the podcast listeners are going to hear it and

00:05:35.580 hopefully then go off and read your book too but i just wanted to mention so um recent events

00:05:41.900 had me i was posting on i think threads just about i've been researching revolutions and just

00:05:48.280 what's happening in the world right now i'm just like the parallels are just so apparent to me at

00:05:53.620 the moment. And I mentioned there's so many revolutions in the 18th century and a few people

00:05:57.360 commented. And I think I said, I was quoting from a book I read and I said, there's so many

00:06:02.200 revolutions and none of them actually resulted in a regime change. I was quoting from a book

00:06:10.860 talking about a specific subset of them, but because it's social media, I had to cut out some

00:06:14.660 words. And then two or three people were like, what about the Haitian revolution? The Haitian

00:06:18.760 Revolution. And I'm like, great point. That one worked. So can you set the scene for everybody? 1.00

00:06:28.580 And I do want to say in your book, I was telling you before we recorded, like you really

00:06:31.960 do such a good job of handholding the reader through what this history is, not assuming

00:06:38.580 anybody knows any of it and just kind of, which I found really helpful because I haven't read

00:06:45.120 widely on this topic. And so it really, uh, filled in some blanks for me, but can you first just

00:06:50.440 talk about like Haiti, what we now know as Haiti, what, how it, there was indigenous people and

00:06:58.180 then colonizers came like, what was the story of how it became the place that the revolution took

00:07:03.520 place? Yeah, absolutely. I mean, it's so funny because, you know, you have to go back to really

00:07:11.420 the pre-Columbus era, right, to think about this land, this island in the middle of the Caribbean

00:07:18.880 Sea. But of course, there are people who live there when Columbus arrives in 1492, and they

00:07:24.680 resist him. But the Spaniards have, you know, weapons, they have diseases, and they use 0.99

00:07:31.480 deportations. And, you know, so they essentially decimate the native population. But at the same 1.00

00:07:38.020 time, the Spanish crown has authorized the forcible transportation of captive Africans to the island

00:07:46.480 for the purposes of slavery. So it kind of becomes this slave colony of Spain. And of course, France

00:07:52.760 and Great Britain also want colonies and they're using enslaved labor as well. And so in 1697,

00:07:59.000 the Western Third, the part that's now Haiti, is taken over formally by the French. And they

00:08:05.440 renamed that part of the island Saint-Domingue. So you get the French colony of Saint-Domingue

00:08:09.840 and they just ramp up the slave regime, the slave economy, if you will, between 1697 and 1791

00:08:18.560 when the Haitian revolution breaks out. The French alone forcibly transport more than 900,000

00:08:24.960 captive Africans to the island, just alone. If we count the other world powers that also

00:08:30.640 transported captive Africans to the island, that number reaches 1.3 million. And so that's just on 0.76

00:08:37.600 that Western third. So when I say it's a slave colony, it literally is a slave colony. The 0.91

00:08:44.040 enslaved vastly outnumber the French colonists, which are about 30 to 40,000 fluctuating. There

00:08:50.400 are also free people of color who are related in some way, both to the French colonists,

00:08:57.700 white French colonists and to enslaved Africans at some point in their history, but many of them

00:09:04.360 also have plantations as well. So this is the kind of milieu in which the Haitian revolution

00:09:11.300 kind of blooms, that you have this place that is filled with enslaved Africans who again outnumber 0.85

00:09:20.640 the people keeping them in bondage. And those colonists are extremely cruel. So when we read 0.91

00:09:28.140 the testimonies of people like Berne de Vatay, but even French naturalists themselves, they comment

00:09:35.140 on the high death rate. They comment on the cruelty of the colonists. They comment on how

00:09:40.680 many enslaved people are constantly running away because of how cruel everything is.

00:09:46.500 And 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.

00:10:01.020 So at the moment the revolution breaks out, I should say, there's about 450,000 enslaved Africans still in the colony. 0.75

00:10:08.680 But that's much less than the transported there, the ones transported there.

00:10:12.820 And then you have to think about the ones born there as well.

00:10:15.500 So even with that high death rate, you still have this enormous population striving for freedom.

00:10:23.080 And can you explain about why this is such an in-demand place for the colonizers?

00:10:28.320 What was the plantations were providing?

00:10:31.640 Because it was, well, just explain about the crops and stuff.

00:10:36.120 Like it was such a fertile land. 0.90

00:10:37.540 Like this is why it 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? 0.98

00:10:43.200 Yes, it's the most, Saint-Domingue, French Saint-Domingue is the most lucrative colony 0.93

00:10:48.800 in the world. And you think about it, it's the size of Massachusetts roughly, right? Like this

00:10:54.220 small place has this outsized influence because of sugar. That's the main crop. We also have coffee,

00:11:03.740 cacao, indigo. There are other things that European markets want. And again, this is

00:11:09.680 a fertile place with fertile soil to grow these crops. And the Europeans have decided that this

00:11:16.880 system of slavery is going to be, that's going to be how labor is performed. That's going to make 0.91

00:11:23.900 up the labor regime and they keep it going for hundreds of years until, of course, the Asian 0.61

00:11:29.540 Revolution breaks out, at least on the island of Saint-Domingue in August of 1791. And then things

00:11:35.840 are going to grind to a halt because the enslaved, what do they do? They set fire to the sugar cane 0.57

00:11:42.520 fields and to the sugar plantations in the Northern Plain. That's what they do. So even though the 0.56

00:11:48.620 French news will say, oh, they're killing their masters, what they were actually doing in the

00:11:53.440 early days of the revolution was stopping the production of sugar in the colony. They were

00:11:59.940 putting an end to the kind of slave colony of labor system and economic system.

00:12:08.040 And in terms of burning it down, when I read that part in your book, I thought back to

00:12:11.820 a while ago, I did an episode that was talking a bit about African slavery in Portugal. And this

00:12:18.420 was in like the early 1700s, I think, what the year that I was reading about, and it was saying

00:12:24.320 how like black slaves would would set fire to to the farm sometimes like on a smaller scale than

00:12:31.260 what happened in Haiti but to the point that they stopped letting black slaves be in charge of 0.88

00:12:35.540 overnight monitoring because it happened so often so I just the the through line that I'm seeing is 0.56

00:12:41.160 just kind of like what resistance can we do and it's just kind of like people so it's not like

00:12:46.500 I've been reading about other revolutions like what happened in Haiti like it's very specific

00:12:50.440 to that time and place. And it's also part of this larger story of slavery and resistance.

00:12:58.540 And so, and this time there's just so many people all at once. And how did they organize?

00:13:07.240 So in August, 1791, and I should point out that before that, enslaved people ran away,

00:13:15.580 they also engaged in smaller revolts and rebellions. So it's not as if it was just all

00:13:20.680 of a sudden. This is really a form of organized resistance that took planning. And the people who

00:13:28.620 planned it, a man named Boukman Duddy, he also had some enslaved representatives from around 0.64

00:13:36.660 the Northern Plain. They get together and they begin to talk about tactics. And so this is in

00:13:43.960 mid-August 1791 in a spot in the Northern Plain called Mont Rouge. And they say, essentially,

00:13:51.180 this is sometimes referred to as the Bois Caillemont ceremony, but they say, you know,

00:13:55.600 we outnumber the planters, the enslavers. And, you know, the God of the white man calls him to

00:14:02.580 commit crimes. But our God is a good God who wants us to have freedom and equality. So let's work

00:14:10.300 together and let's get that done. And in less than 10 days, the rebellion breaks out. There are

00:14:18.200 some smaller ones around August 21st, but really it's the night passing from August 22nd to 23rd

00:14:24.000 that we can really see the enslavers on various plantations start to record what's happening and

00:14:29.560 say, oh, it's traveling. It's here. The rebels are here because that's what the French colonists

00:14:37.420 called the freedom fighters. They called them rebels and brigands and insurrectionists and

00:14:40.980 terrorists and all of these kinds of things to not have to recognize that actually what they

00:14:46.780 wanted was freedom. And that's what they were trying to achieve. And so this is 1791. So

00:14:52.740 storming of the best deal, 1789 in France. So part of the connection, I think, is that in France,

00:14:59.560 there was this statement, I forget what it was called, but like of like the rights of everybody,

00:15:03.180 Right. And so which like some people in Haiti interpreted to mean like they're a French colony.

00:15:09.300 So like, OK, so great. So we should all have rights, too. Right. That was part of the connection.

00:15:14.240 So in yes, 1789, the French revolutionaries issue the Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen.

00:15:21.660 And there are free men of color from the colony in Paris at the time and and in France in general.

00:15:29.060 And, you know, they've experienced color 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.

00:15:52.280 There, there's, it's a place that's just rife with inequality at so many different levels.

00:15:57.760 And so they go to France where they hope to kind of escape some of that and the declaration

00:16:02.980 of the rights of man and citizen happens.

00:16:05.040 And yes, those free men of color, mostly men say, oh, that means us too.

00:16:11.280 And they try to go back home to the colony to see if the laws are going to change and

00:16:17.740 if they can get the French to officially say that the free men of color have the same rights,

00:16:25.200 equal rights of representation, for example, with the white French colonists. The white French 0.82

00:16:29.860 colonists are saying, absolutely not. We will never give them any concessions. And so it's kind 1.00

00:16:35.260 of in this milieu of these conversations that, of course, some enslaved people might have heard them.

00:16:40.880 But I think it's really clear when we look at what happened at the Mourn Rouge assembly,

00:16:45.840 that they weren't using the language

00:16:48.040 of the Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen.

00:16:50.380 They were using a more spiritual language,

00:16:52.620 which I think speaks to what one historian,

00:16:55.540 Dana-Ray McBerry, calls their soul values.

00:16:58.000 So I think the free men of color

00:17:00.180 are definitely influenced by what's happening in France,

00:17:02.580 but the enslaved have their kind of own motor.

00:17:05.200 There's two separate things happening at the same time,

00:17:09.400 a coming to consciousness about the level of prejudices

00:17:12.660 and about what's the best way to end slavery.

00:17:15.000 And they don't always collide with each other in that, especially in that early period.

00:17:20.680 And what connection, I mean, we're going to get to a direct connection in a bit, but with

00:17:24.520 the American Revolution, what impact would that have on Haiti at the time?

00:17:28.640 Because that was 1776, so 15 years earlier.

00:17:34.200 Well, you know, and Henri Christophe fought in, or participated, I should say, in the

00:17:38.760 American Revolutionary War at the Battle of Savannah, but so did other free men of color.

00:17:43.460 And this is October 1779. There are other free men of color 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.

00:17:59.180 And 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.

00:18:20.080 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.

00:18:31.980 I think this is too much of an abstraction for people in the colony.

00:18:35.600 And even the free men of color, they don't really talk about that.

00:18:40.300 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.

00:18:59.400 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.

00:19:09.360 And what effect does the American Revolution have on France and Spain being like, wait, could this happen to us too? 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, ooh, wait a minute, we need these lucrative plantations. We don't want to lose it.

00:19:32.400 Well, in terms of the American, you know what is so interesting about how the other world powers react to the American revolution is, 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.

00:19:49.940 Because 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 Henri Christophe was going.

00:20:03.680 But the year before that, in 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 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.

00:20:31.320 And so they're basically saying, you're going to be a hero. And the interesting thing about that is the French lose the French of the American patriots lose the Battle of Savannah. So and they lose the Battle of Savannah because they wait for too long to strike.

00:20:48.440 because they're, you know, kind of doing a gentleman's say,

00:20:51.400 oh, you know, we have a ceasefire for this amount of time.

00:20:53.860 And during that time, Great Britain kind of,

00:20:56.080 they reinforce their position.

00:20:59.720 And so they get the upper hand.

00:21:01.900 And so again, the tactics that Christophe, I think,

00:21:04.960 specifically learns from this is not to wait

00:21:06.840 because there's a moment in the book where

00:21:08.880 when he's fighting against the French

00:21:10.780 who want to bring back slavery,

00:21:13.220 he gets a request, that kind of gentleman's request,

00:21:15.720 like, oh, I will consider whether we're going

00:21:18.080 to surrender, but you have to give me this amount of time and he doesn't wait. And the French say, 0.79

00:21:21.780 oh, that was so barbaric that he wouldn't wait. But he already had been in a situation

00:21:27.100 where his general waited and he was wounded. Christophe was wounded himself

00:21:32.440 in the American Revolution. So he would know firsthand what not to do also.

00:21:38.300 I think this is a beautiful way to sort of like, let's wrap back and then work our way back to the

00:21:43.940 about Savannah through talking about Henri Christophe and where he was born and how I do

00:21:49.020 want to let everybody know he was 12 years old at that time when he was at that battle. He was not

00:21:52.820 an adult man. That's why I say he participated because we think that he would have been either

00:22:00.520 a drummer or he would have had some other kind of role because in the documents that created

00:22:08.020 the structure for this core of free men of color to fight in the American Revolutionary War,

00:22:13.540 They were called chasseurs volontaires.

00:22:15.880 And in those documents, we see, they say, oh, children of 12 years old boys, of course, can be drummers or trumpeters.

00:22:24.020 And so that would have been sort of probably his formal role there.

00:22:28.480 But before that, because there's also the question of how does one, a child so young, get there?

00:22:35.340 What happened that would create these circumstances?

00:22:38.100 And Christophe was born on the island of Granada, which is in the southern Caribbean.

00:22:43.540 And it was at that time in British hands, under British control.

00:22:49.400 And the French had lost this island in the Seven Years' War.

00:22:55.220 So it had been French before that.

00:22:57.540 And that's where Christophe is born.

00:22:59.560 And when the Comte d'Estaing, that French general, is fighting with the British to try to get control of the island back,

00:23:09.360 which is a part of the American Revolution that is less discussed, the kind of trading of pieces

00:23:15.980 in the Caribbean Sea for the different world powers that are actually a part of striking

00:23:21.720 against Great Britain. So Comte d'Estaing leads that campaign, and the French are temporarily

00:23:27.480 victorious. They get Granada back for a little, for some time. But when D'Estaing leaves, 0.67

00:23:33.940 he takes captives, and some of those captives are enslaved people. And he ends up eventually

00:23:41.140 in the vicinity of Saint-Domingue, and he gets the chasseur volontaire, the other free men of color, 0.77

00:23:48.540 and they go on their way over to North America. So to me, this is the most logical way. 0.84

00:23:56.380 When I was tracing Comte Vistain's whereabouts and all the ships, I see, oh, he could have very

00:24:02.580 easily and you know have captured Christophe who would have been just a child again 11 years old

00:24:09.560 actually at that point and taken him you know on this journey or his men really the distance men

00:24:16.740 I do want to explain to the listeners as well that your book is like I feel it's part it's

00:24:23.440 partly like forensic detective work like you're going like you said I think in the after it's

00:24:28.840 you spent 10 years or something like that,

00:24:30.840 just like tracing to find what actually happened in this man's life,

00:24:36.340 because there's so much myth and legend and assumption about it.

00:24:39.720 So a lot of the things in your book, you're like, okay,

00:24:41.780 this is what people say happened, but did it happen?

00:24:44.900 And here's maybe what it could have been.

00:24:48.180 So you, I think, and so you really sort of,

00:24:51.860 unless you're very confident, you say, this is probably what happened.

00:24:54.560 Like, you're not saying like, this is what the story was,

00:24:56.380 but he was probably enslaved as a child, is your determination, right?

00:25:00.780 Yes. It's what would make the most sense because Granada was, again, also a slave colony like

00:25:10.080 Saint-Domingue, and it really didn't have a high population of free people of color. 0.70

00:25:15.980 And it would have been very unlikely. And in fact, I did look through the Grenadian National

00:25:22.000 archives to try to see how many free people of color. And they sometimes had lists of enslaved

00:25:27.880 people. And I knew the region where he was from because of eyewitnesses. So I knew a very kind of

00:25:32.900 small region. And, you know, there was just, there was nothing there, which does not prove,

00:25:38.920 you know, the hypothesis, but I felt that it was important in the book to not decide based on

00:25:47.700 zero evidence, right? To really lay out the possibilities, to invite the reader to come

00:25:55.400 kind of behind the scenes and peek behind the scenes. Because I think the problem with a lot

00:26:00.460 of the other Christoph biographies is that there were an array of possibilities. And in the service

00:26:07.800 of story, the historian or biographer says, well, I don't want to stop my story to have to go in

00:26:14.140 and explain that there's different versions. So let me just pick one. And being so familiar

00:26:19.320 with the story myself now, I'm recognizing it in other people's writings as well. Those moments

00:26:25.080 where I'm like, oh, but there is an alternative version. And I really felt like I wanted to trust

00:26:31.820 my reader to be able to say, this is important to know that a biographer, it's not really healthy

00:26:39.560 for the subject to just decide. And so I have started calling it investigative historicism.

00:26:46.760 I was reading a lot of investigative journalism books. I read the Gospel of Jesus's Wife. I read

00:26:54.040 the story about Henrietta Lacks. And I just thought, this is so fascinating because I was

00:27:01.000 absorbed in it, in the different versions, in unreliable narrators. I was absorbed by all the

00:27:07.640 kind of cast of characters that appear in books like that, that are deeply, deeply historical

00:27:13.060 and deeply, their authors are deeply interested in the truth, but also understand that the truth

00:27:19.980 is elusive. And just when you think you have found it, somebody is going to throw a wrench

00:27:24.780 into the story and upset the whole thing. So that's why I say investigative historicism.

00:27:30.060 This is what this story called for to my mind. I'm glad. I love to learn that that's the term

00:27:35.840 that you have. Because when I was reading it, I was just like, this is like, this is like an

00:27:40.120 investigation. This book is like forensic historian work. Just like, I'm just picturing

00:27:46.180 the same way as somebody like investigating, you know, like a true crime case or something,

00:27:50.000 just like going through all the facts. And part of the, what I understood from your book,

00:27:54.400 and what you were just saying is that like a lot of the previous writings have been making

00:27:57.880 these assumptions or sort of taking rumors as fact. And that started happening. We'll tell

00:28:04.780 the story i don't want to jump ahead but like almost as soon as he died people were rewriting

00:28:08.100 who he was and what he was like so like you're having to go back to before that to see like well

00:28:14.280 what actually can we track down and actually i have a question that he has a surname and that's

00:28:19.900 not not all enslaved people have surnames so do you know how what is your best guess as to how he

00:28:26.780 became a person with a surname it's fascinating actually because um was christoph the name of

00:28:33.700 his enslaver. If we compare it to, for example, Toussaint Louverture. Toussaint Louverture had a

00:28:41.860 surname, Toussaint de Breda, but Toussaint Louverture uses that name, the famous revolutionary

00:28:47.980 hero, for those who maybe are less familiar with the story, but he uses that name when he becomes

00:28:54.880 a free man, when he acquires his freedom. But then he starts using the moniker Toussaint Louverture

00:29:01.260 later when he begins to lead the freedom struggle, what becomes the Haitian Revolution.

00:29:06.460 And so did Christophe decide on that name at some other point?

00:29:12.020 At what point?

00:29:13.220 And so in the book, even, I talk about different people with that name, Henri Christophe.

00:29:20.040 There's another Henri Christophe in the colony who I actually traced his genealogies from

00:29:25.120 the South really far, like his kids, his life.

00:29:28.060 So I knew it wasn't my same Henri 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.

00:29:39.080 For example, the number of Boyer family, of course, Jean-Pierre Boyer becomes president of Haiti later, he's Christophe's rival. There were so many of them that I thought, oh, how do I disentangle all of them?

00:29:54.400 There were also a ton of Auger. Vincent Auger is an early revolutionary who fought in the American Revolution as well, but then, you know, tried to lead a revolt of free men of color in October 1790 and was executed for that.

00:30:08.900 Um, but, and so I realized, wow, it's actually kind of special that he has this last name

00:30:15.280 that is not really one that we see very often.

00:30:19.260 And it allowed me because of that to follow his story more closely because there were

00:30:24.120 different moments in the book where I knew it was him because, uh, because he was the

00:30:30.040 only one who could read and, and write and who signed his signature that way.

00:30:35.600 So I knew it was him instead of, oh, no, is this one of the many, many family members or something with that name?

00:30:41.900 So that's, in a way, that's a blessing for you for your historical research.

00:30:46.020 So he is conscripted, basically.

00:30:50.400 I don't know if that's, he's grabbed and taken 11 years old.

00:30:54.260 And then he is involved in the Battle of Savannah, age 12.

00:30:57.080 He's wounded.

00:30:57.680 He's shot, right, in the leg, I think.

00:31:00.100 Yes.

00:31:00.720 Which.

00:31:01.440 He's shot in the leg, yes.

00:31:02.760 Yeah. And for, you know, that sort of wound in that era, the fact that he didn't die, notable.

00:31:08.780 Absolutely. Because especially in the Battle of Savannah, you know, it's a French, the French are, they document everything. So we have Contestin's account. We have also his Ed de Camp O'Connor's account. We have plenty of the soldiers. They kept like journal, campaign journals to describe what was happening.

00:31:29.300 like sometimes by the hour and day. And so there's a hospital outside of Savannah where

00:31:35.940 the French transport their wounded. And it's not well-equipped. Anybody who goes to this hospital

00:31:42.920 and has a serious wound dies, is basically going to die. Pulaski, so many of these famous names

00:31:50.280 from the American Revolution, I mean, they die because the wounds are just too severe. So the

00:31:54.760 fact that he survives. And I also think that, again, in thinking about things that changed him,

00:32:01.600 when Christophe later, post-revolution, becomes general-in-chief of the Haitian army under

00:32:06.540 Haiti's founder, Jean-Jacques Dessalines, he is incensed any time he learns that the military is

00:32:13.940 not properly outfitting the hospitals, giving them the materials that they need, and that

00:32:19.320 veterans of the revolution, so in the years immediately following the revolution, are not

00:32:23.680 being properly taken care of, he will write angry letters commanding people and threatening to

00:32:28.840 punish them that why are you not delivering these things to the hospitals? These people deserve to

00:32:35.380 be taken care of because they are only there for having fought for our independence. And I wonder

00:32:40.200 sometimes if the experience again of beings wounded at this young age and not having the

00:32:46.760 proper care and did it affect him later, his body? Did he live with lifelong pain because of this?

00:32:52.840 We don't know. He doesn't necessarily mention that ever. But 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, 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 their tutelage.

00:33:15.660 because Christophe signs his signature and writes his name and writes letters, not in the shaky

00:33:22.080 hand of someone who just learned to write. When some of the free people of color sign their names,

00:33:27.100 it's very shaky, like as someone who doesn't write often. Christophe has beautiful writing 0.87

00:33:33.520 and a beautiful signature early on, which suggests to me that from a young age,

00:33:39.000 he had learned to read and write somehow. Yeah. And so he's somebody who,

00:33:43.460 i mean having this everything you just said about being involved in the battle of savannah like that

00:33:48.980 just like as a young person he sees the military he sees his operation and he also is someone who

00:33:53.620 intrinsically because lots of boys were there and they didn't go on to become

00:33:58.160 great generals like he had this within him somehow you know and so i would just imagine

00:34:04.900 that somebody saw in him like however he learned to read and write like oh this is a remarkable

00:34:10.400 person like this person stands out somehow because he does later and that that's notable

00:34:16.060 right and pretty quickly too i mean i i and and he i should also say when he comes back to

00:34:23.580 he eventually starts working at this hotel called la couronne the crown and um this hotel is kind of

00:34:32.060 like the crossroads of cat francais which is the most important port city so that's where he is

00:34:37.740 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.

00:34:49.740 And so I think all of the conversations that he would have heard, all of the when, you know, 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, you know, how is he reacting to it? How is he absorbing it?

00:35:09.460 And it seems really possible that he begins to distinguish himself in some manner with 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.

00:35:33.740 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.

00:35:44.820 When he came back, was he still enslaved or not?

00:35:48.500 Or what was that journey?

00:35:50.660 Yeah.

00:35:51.120 So this is one of, again, those mysteries that I tried to unfold.

00:35:55.220 And, you know, in the book, I talk about different things that happened to people who fought at the Battle of Savannah.

00:36:03.740 So, for example, I mentioned that there's a lot of malnage or fugitivity of enslaved people. 0.82

00:36:10.160 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. 0.86

00:36:17.200 It's astonishing. Even the tiniest little hamlet has a jail.

00:36:21.200 And the purpose of this jail is to put enslaved people who had run away until their masters, quote unquote, can come and claim them.

00:36:28.460 and when they would write the notices to say we've captured this person they say their name is this

00:36:34.720 this person claims they are free and had fought in the battle of savannah under the contestant

00:36:40.620 and so a person is captured and says no i'm you're wrongly capturing me i got my freedom from

00:36:47.500 fighting at the battle of savannah and so when i started to see that and and then when i saw

00:36:52.940 enslaved people who did stand captured in Granada up for auction in the colony of Saint

00:37:00.200 Domingue after the siege of Granada, which is how I think Christophe gets hooked up with

00:37:05.680 that army, I started to think, oh, of all the different ways his freedom, if in fact

00:37:11.380 he were granted it, which is what should have happened for fighting in the American Revolutionary

00:37:15.280 War, he should be granted his freedom.

00:37:17.740 But when he came back, he was so young, how would he keep it?

00:37:21.420 it would have been so hard unless he had somebody who really took him under his wing

00:37:26.500 and so in the book I talk about different possibilities of the person who probably

00:37:31.460 took him under his wing is probably a man named Petini and I think this because Christophe takes

00:37:37.120 care of this man and his whole family when he becomes king when he has this uncommon trajectory

00:37:42.500 this man is older he's there he's being taken care of and so are his children they're being

00:37:48.760 given high-level positions in the administration. And this is a name that other Christophe

00:37:53.960 chroniclers and eyewitnesses had associated with Christophe. It's just that people didn't

00:37:59.760 really investigate it because Petit Mee, he never became famous. And so I tried to pull that thread

00:38:05.740 and find the link between them. And I was able to see, oh, this is someone who became important

00:38:10.760 to Christophe later. And so it's potentially was this person who maybe protected him in those early

00:38:16.420 days back in the colony. I'm going to be very superficial for a minute and just say that there

00:38:21.680 is a portrait. I don't know if there's more than one portrait, but I've seen a portrait that was

00:38:26.380 taken of Henri Christophe when he was king. And he is like a handsome guy. He's like, I think he's

00:38:32.940 like a big person. Like he's tall and strapping, very good looking. And I can feel like if he also

00:38:37.900 had that, some sort of spark, some sort of charisma about him when he's like, I think you

00:38:42.380 remember me. I'm like, I feel like maybe that's part of it too. He's just like, he stands out

00:38:46.760 maybe among the hotel staff. Absolutely. Because that's, that's actually what I witnesses people

00:38:53.060 who stayed in the hotel, who confirmed that he worked there, people who stayed in the hotel,

00:38:57.220 they said, Oh, it was obvious to us that he was the most, he was extremely important and very

00:39:02.600 bright. And this became important later because when he begins to fight in the Haitian revolution

00:39:08.860 and fight with the freedom fighters and become important there. The British and the French say

00:39:14.560 to watch out for him because he knows how to read and write and he knows English and French.

00:39:20.820 So in your missives, be careful because Henri Christophe is someone who would be able to

00:39:26.300 transmit information. So they have already, and then later, this is what is very interesting

00:39:31.140 about all that as well, that after the revolution, in the post-emancipation period, when France wants

00:39:37.140 to, quote unquote, restore the colony, which means to take back over Haiti and bring back

00:39:43.200 slavery, they say, we are going to have a problem in only Christophe.

00:39:47.540 Like, he's going to be our biggest problem.

00:39:49.200 And throughout the 1810s, they keep saying, Christophe is the big problem.

00:39:53.980 The others, we can deal with them.

00:39:56.120 He's our problem.

00:39:57.360 Yeah.

00:39:57.560 And he's also, well, I mean, we'll get into it, but we just see through his military career

00:40:01.740 that develops like he he's he just finds his way to the top because people just trust him people

00:40:07.660 like him like he's got this in terms of just like people i've read about in history like he's got

00:40:11.940 this star quality like people are just drawn to him like you see that today now like if you i don't 0.96

00:40:16.920 know if he was around today like people just be drawn to him if he if he had a tiktok you know

00:40:21.500 people just be like oh my god you see what he just said like he's just like clearly so charismatic

00:40:26.060 but well-spoken, tall, handsome. Like he's, yeah, I don't know. He's got it all really.

00:40:33.720 In a situation where the opportunity was right, that he was able to make use of his talents and

00:40:39.100 that he was nurtured in this way, that he was able to get these opportunities. And that's because

00:40:44.380 we're going to get into it. The Haitian revolution happens. Actually, before we get into that, 0.74

00:40:49.720 it's at the hotel where he meets his wife, right? Well, we don't know. So that's what some of the,

00:40:54.840 I call them Christophe chroniclers because I feel like I'm in a conversation with all the people who

00:41:00.420 were writing about him before. And I love that they were writing about him because they gave me

00:41:04.440 things to investigate again. And so we think potentially at this hotel because Christophe's

00:41:11.680 wife, Marie-Louise, who was quite a bit younger than him when they got married, but she's from a

00:41:17.540 prominent free black family. They, the Kwa David, who I think is her stepfather, actually,

00:41:23.220 he's in the army as well he's in the militia um and he's he becomes a prominent kind of black

00:41:30.460 officer in the revolutionary period but even before that i mean he's in the military and he

00:41:35.860 when i look to see he's you know we find his name on baptismal certificates for other prominent free

00:41:41.360 black families like they this this is somewhat this is a connected family and you know was did

00:41:48.000 he go and stay at the hotel and you know he had his daughter with him you know there are questions

00:41:52.240 that we still have about, you know, how they met, but it's clear that, you know, somehow they find

00:41:58.760 their way to one another. And in 1793, so two years after the revolution begins, they get married

00:42:05.580 and they have a child immediately in 1794, François Ferdinand. And so definitely by that time,

00:42:13.820 Christophe has free status, whether he got it many years before or recently acquired it in

00:42:20.120 relationship to the revolution again there's still a question mark there but definitely by 1793 he um

00:42:26.720 by the summer even before general emancipation he is he's he gets married i think that's interesting

00:42:33.180 too just in the context of thinking of the revolution in general the very bizarre time

00:42:39.820 period we're all living in right now in the world where it's like you know there's there's so much

00:42:44.580 uncertainty there's so much um you don't know what's going to happen and he's a military guy

00:42:49.260 or he becomes a military guy.

00:42:50.640 And yet he still had the hope for the future

00:42:52.980 that he's like, I'm going to marry,

00:42:54.100 I'm going to have a child.

00:42:55.200 Like that speaks to the fact that he felt comfortable,

00:42:58.520 not comfortable enough,

00:42:59.600 but just sort of like,

00:43:01.020 even though this is happening,

00:43:01.940 he's like, I still want to have a family.

00:43:03.660 And I think that's interesting.

00:43:05.020 Like other people didn't make that choice.

00:43:07.520 Yes, absolutely.

00:43:08.540 And he makes the choice to have a family

00:43:10.660 and still to fight in the freedom struggle

00:43:13.320 because during that time,

00:43:15.680 so from 1793 to 1794,

00:43:17.560 I should mention he's jailed twice

00:43:19.140 so he's very smart and has a lot of um savvy but it's also clear that he sometimes makes mistakes

00:43:27.160 and we don't know why he's jailed that first time he just he doesn't say what he did but the second

00:43:36.380 time when he gets jailed he does say what he did which was misrepresent his connection to one of

00:43:42.000 the commissioners whom the french had sent to kind of calm things down in the in the colony

00:43:47.780 especially as relates to the free men of color and their demands and their struggle with the

00:43:52.100 white French colonists. And what those commissioners do instead is recognize that

00:43:58.580 they cannot stop the freedom struggle, the freedom movement. It's impossible at this point. Too many

00:44:03.420 enslaved people are in rebellion. And so they declare general emancipation. And Christophe,

00:44:08.760 we already see, is working on their behalf, but he must have told someone that he was more

00:44:15.840 connected to them than he was. And so he ends up detained and actually in the southern part of the

00:44:20.780 colony in Port-au-Prince, which had been renamed Port-au-Prince because that's what the French

00:44:25.300 did in the revolutionary era. They tried to eliminate things that spoke of monarchy.

00:44:30.060 And he writes this letter in December 1793, and it's a kind of a sad letter. It's like,

00:44:37.640 I've been detained here and I want to go home. And he doesn't mention his wife, but she would

00:44:42.060 have been pregnant at that time based on the birth date of his son. And he was a newlywed.

00:44:46.640 And so I just think, oh, this is someone who, you know, he wants to keep contributing, but

00:44:53.040 he needs to go back home and he does get himself free. And it's astonishing because from December

00:45:00.520 1793 to December 1794, he becomes an extremely wealthy businessman. He's got all these business

00:45:07.180 ventures. And he continues on in various posts in the military at the same time. Now, eventually,

00:45:13.940 those military positions are going to kind of lead him away from his business enterprises,

00:45:17.500 and he'll just have various kind of associates take those on in his absence. So he's got different

00:45:23.700 things happening. He's got a wife. He ends up having three more children with her. And he's

00:45:30.700 got this business enterprise. He's rising in the military. It's really an uncommon trajectory.

00:45:35.260 It really is.

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00:48:15.160 And we're back.

00:48:17.020 He's really, yeah, he's a multi-hyphenate.

00:48:20.240 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?

00:48:34.520 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-Francay and it firms almost completely to the ground.

00:48:54.280 And so those commissioners I mentioned that France had sent, they are certain now that they must do something.

00:49:03.040 And because the enslaved have de facto freed themselves, so they make that official.

00:49:07.080 But in the meantime, Spain and England have invaded.

00:49:12.500 And 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.

00:49:23.520 And so the world powers are fighting again. They're trying to get this little piece of earth that is French Saint-Domingue. And so in addition to needing to stop the freedom struggle, France also needs to fight England and Spain.

00:49:37.120 And 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. 0.62

00:49:49.820 And so that's what happens. And in Christophe's case, in Toussaint Verteur's case, in Jean-Jacques 0.52

00:49:55.020 de Salines' case, in so many of the cases of the free men of color who were free already before

00:50:00.580 general emancipation and the enslaved Africans become literal official members of the French

00:50:06.660 military. And they're the only reason that France hangs onto this colony. Because in 1795, the French 0.94

00:50:13.660 and the Spanish strike a treaty called the Treaty of Val, and that treaty forces Spain to cede the

00:50:20.300 eastern two-thirds to France. So now the whole island is under French hands, but they still have

00:50:25.460 to fight the British. And Toussaint de Verture and Christophe and Dessalines are key to the

00:50:31.340 eventual battle that where France, technically, their black French soldiers and generals and 0.54

00:50:38.760 officers, um, is able to force England to retreat. I will put it that way because it's kind of 0.52

00:50:45.140 complicated, but they forced them to retreat. And the only reason is because of the black 1.00

00:50:51.040 military officers and having them on their side. That's, that's just an interesting parallel. I

00:50:55.980 did an episode a bit ago about, um, Joseph Boulogne, the Chevalier de St. George, and he had

00:51:01.800 the all black regiment in during the French revolution. So I'm just like, oh, wow, there's

00:51:05.980 so many. And then, oh, who is it? The Dumas, Alexandre Dumas' father, who was also like,

00:51:11.540 he was in that regiment. So yeah, just like the involvement. I don't know. I'm just like,

00:51:15.460 there's so many black soldiers fighting for France at this time.

00:51:18.820 Yeah, absolutely. Even independently of that, right? Because the Chasseur Volontaire, 0.98

00:51:23.460 some of those were free men of color, some of them who were mixed race, but many of them were

00:51:28.400 actually, you know, they were these free black families because the colony had been in existence

00:51:33.300 for so long and they fought in the French military. And it wasn't an equal military.

00:51:37.880 They did suffer prejudices there, but it's, it's a remarkable part of history to be exploring.

00:51:42.980 So, I mean, you explain this like step by step by step in your book, but effectively,

00:51:48.400 if we can leap forward to Haiti getting its independence, and this is where I get sort

00:51:54.100 of mixed up because it's like, there's an, there's a governor general, then there's an emperor,

00:51:57.720 then there's a king, but then there's two kings. So like, what's the first, the first person it's,

00:52:01.780 oh, now I forget. Is it Toussaint Louverture is the first person in charge of it?

00:52:08.560 Well, yes. I mean, it is an extremely complicated history. So in 1801, so before Haitian independence,

00:52:16.540 Toussaint Louverture is governor general of the colony, the whole island technically,

00:52:21.260 per the constitution that he issues in 1801. This is what gets him in trouble. At least that's the

00:52:26.820 official account. The real account is the French want to bring back slavery because Napoleon Bonaparte

00:52:31.420 has risen to power in France, and he never agreed with the abolition of slavery that the French were

00:52:36.580 forced to concede. And so he wants to bring that back. But Toussaint de Verteur is already kind of

00:52:41.320 taking measures to preempt him. And so he issues this constitution, which Bonaparte says, oh,

00:52:46.180 that's de facto independence. Like you've done this thing that you're not authorized to do.

00:52:50.960 And in that constitution, it said slavery was forever abolished. So now this is going to be

00:52:55.220 a problem for France. So Bonaparte sends his brother-in-law, a general named Leclerc, to the

00:53:01.180 island, initially with 30,000 troops, to try to get rid of L'ouverture, that's part of their

00:53:07.040 mission, and then pave the way to reinstate slavery. Christophe is an obstacle for them,

00:53:12.340 but then he kind of changes sides briefly, and Toussaint L'ouverture ends up being arrested,

00:53:19.400 deported, left to die a terrible death in a French prison. Back in the colony, the freedom fighters

00:53:27.040 who had even joined with France at certain points have now seen through. They know that France wants

00:53:33.660 to bring back slavery. This is the period that we call the War of Independence, so late 1802 into

00:53:39.060 1803. And on January 1st, 1804, the freedom fighters calling themselves the Armée Indigène,

00:53:45.700 the indigenous army, are victorious. They declare independence. And Jean-Jacques de Salines, who is

00:53:51.320 Christophe's friend, becomes the new head of state, and he gives himself the title initially,

00:53:56.880 or takes the title, of governor general. And this is obviously problematic, because that's the title

00:54:02.860 that Toussaint-Vertre had under French rule, and that speaks to, like, you're not really

00:54:08.760 the sovereign power. And so by the end of 1804, Dessalines, the military council, says, we want

00:54:15.780 you to be the emperor. He becomes emperor. So now Haiti is an empire technically. And in 1805,

00:54:22.360 they issue an imperial constitution. And unfortunately, this is not a long-lived empire

00:54:29.320 for Desalines anyway. And he is assassinated in October of 1806. And I think I mentioned

00:54:37.420 Christophe was general in chief of the whole Haitian army at this time. So it was natural 0.99

00:54:42.760 that he would kind of take the interim reigns, but the conspirators from the southern part of

00:54:48.160 the colony, they say they want Christophe to take the permanent reigns, but they want to create a

00:54:53.740 republic. And so they create a constitution in December 1806 for the Republic of Haiti.

00:54:59.100 They vote Christophe in as president, but by this time, he doesn't really trust them.

00:55:03.900 Well, they just assassinated Desaline, right?

00:55:06.040 Exactly. And he knows that because it's one of those things that I thought was going to be more of a mystery than it was because people said that Christoph was involved. They had different people they would point to, the various chroniclers. But Petion in his correspondence, which I had the opportunity to see firsthand, doesn't deny it.

00:55:29.540 Now, the question of whether Christophe knew about it, 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.

00:55:44.200 Like, they tell him to be president, you have to come to Port-au-Prince in the south to be sworn in.

00:55:50.340 So, like, are they luring him there?

00:55:52.840 So he's got a question mark.

00:55:54.100 Should I go there?

00:55:55.160 Would this be folly?

00:55:56.020 And so what he does instead is he takes a huge army.

00:55:58.880 But Pétion, who is the person who's orchestrated the conspiracy, has an army of his own.

00:56:04.140 And they oppose.

00:56:04.720 They start fighting.

00:56:05.880 And this convinces Christophe that they were really going to kill him if he had shown up there kind of with one or two,

00:56:13.760 you know, military officers at his side to be sworn in, quote unquote. And this occasions a

00:56:18.820 civil war and Haiti is split in two. Christophe initially becomes, wait for this title, the

00:56:25.120 president and generalissimo of the forces of the earth and seas of the state of Haiti

00:56:29.820 in the north. And Pétion becomes president of the Republic of Haiti in the south. And so this

00:56:37.760 situation persists from 1807 to 1811. And then Christophe's military council and council of

00:56:44.180 state, they nominate him to become king. So people often say he made himself king.

00:56:51.760 Every king sort of makes themselves king because of course you have to accept it.

00:56:55.860 But it's actually technically the council of state said, we want you to become king. He accepts

00:57:01.640 their nomination two days later. And on June 2nd, 1811, he's crowned king. But again, in a

00:57:07.600 divided Haiti. He's now king, and Petion is still president in the Southern Republic. So that's why

00:57:13.520 it's so confusing, because there are, they change, they're experimenting with different

00:57:18.560 forms of governments in this time period, all on this very small part of the, of the earth, you

00:57:23.980 know? Yeah, if you look, well, just when I'm trying to sort of like get my bearings on a

00:57:28.100 historical time period, especially with kings and stuff, you know, I go to, I go to the Wikipedia

00:57:31.380 page, and it always says like, this person is the king, and they're preceded by, and this one, it's

00:57:35.320 like it's preceded by this person as this, but also this person as this and by themselves as

00:57:41.620 this. And it's just like, what is the sequence of events here? So, but ultimately we're talking

00:57:45.700 about Henri Christophe. So he's king now and he sets about building some amazing buildings that

00:57:51.740 are currently UNESCO World Heritage Sites. Can you talk about Sans Souci and the other projects he

00:57:58.020 did? So Christophe's famous palace is called Sans Souci, which means without worry in French.

00:58:03.940 And he also builds a huge fortress called, in his era, the Cite d'Henri, today known as the Cite de la Ferrière.

00:58:12.220 And this fortress is widely hailed as the eighth wonder of the world.

00:58:16.560 It's the largest fortress in North America.

00:58:18.940 It sits atop one of the highest mountain peaks in Haiti.

00:58:22.460 To get there, you have to walk up with a donkey, usually, a winding 35 degree dangerous angle.

00:58:29.900 But when you get up there, you realize the magnificent feat that is this structure that

00:58:37.000 peers all the way out to the ocean.

00:58:39.080 It's meant to protect the Asian people.

00:58:41.580 It was not just...

00:58:42.760 Now, Christoph, as you know from reading the book, loves luxury, which I think he probably

00:58:48.200 learned about in that very luxurious hotel where he saw people selling jewelry and tapestries

00:58:53.360 and carriages.

00:58:54.740 Oh, I tell a story in the book about...

00:58:56.320 Because Christoph loved carriages.

00:58:57.480 He had more than a dozen of them that he ordered from England, special orders.

00:59:01.920 And but in the book, I tell the story of while he's working at that hotel, a saddle maker

00:59:07.740 auctions off a carriage in a kind of lottery, I should say.

00:59:11.960 And it's this beautiful, magnificent carriage.

00:59:14.020 So I wonder, oh, OK, all the things he saw that taught him about, you know, how to set

00:59:20.160 up a military because he has a huge military, how to reinforce it.

00:59:23.500 this citadel has all these cannons and they're still there to this day. All of this ammunition,

00:59:30.460 it's vast like a city. And his different experiences in various forms of various

00:59:36.720 colonies, in various revolutions, in various kind of business environments, I think he brings all

00:59:43.280 that to bear on what he does in commissioning these architects to make these magnificent

00:59:50.380 structures and then bringing them to fruition. He has an architect and an engineer he's known

00:59:58.040 from the colonial era. They lived in the same building, a man named Faro, who becomes a part

01:00:03.840 of the nobility. He designs the citadel. This is his friend. This is Christophe's friend.

01:00:10.640 And so he knew people who had the knowledge to accomplish what he wanted them to accomplish.

01:00:16.560 And the palace at Saint-Souci is also a kind of magical place just in thinking about what it was like in the kingdom.

01:00:25.600 It still partially stands today.

01:00:28.040 It was unfortunately crumbled, partially crumbled by a massive 8.1 magnitude earthquake in May 1842.

01:00:37.380 But it's kind of facade remains.

01:00:40.780 And you can, 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.

01:01:02.040 um difficult structures to be sure because you have to think how do you build things like this

01:01:07.080 what type of labor force do you use to build things like this um but magnificent architectural

01:01:12.200 feats well when i did um when i spoke with vanessa riley ages ago about her book queen of

01:01:17.000 exiles about henry's wife marie louise she was describing because she um she writes a lot of

01:01:23.220 like regency books regency era like said in england um and she was saying like imagining

01:01:28.660 during his reign like this beautiful palace and you said he created a nobility so it was like

01:01:33.600 what people see you know in bridgerton the tv show she was like that was what it was it was

01:01:39.100 like black people like attending these beautiful balls at this beautiful palace um and they had

01:01:45.020 noble titles and everything so can you explain sort of like that the before it all goes wrong

01:01:50.440 spoiler, what this life was like of him as king living in this palace.

01:01:56.900 It was truly, it was like out of the pages of a fairy tale in certain ways for certain people,

01:02:03.560 because we will talk about the flip side of that, the understory, if you will. But

01:02:07.840 for those who are nobles, who are in the military, and for foreigners coming to visit,

01:02:12.520 this kingdom is a place of balls, of parties, of magnificent culture being performed every day

01:02:20.900 because Christophe loved the opera. He loved ballet. He had famous plays and operas put,

01:02:27.360 you know, he commissioned them to be performed at court for these parties. But he also had writers

01:02:33.500 writing their own original operas. So a man named Juste Chanlade who becomes the Comte de Rosier

01:02:39.580 in this aristocracy and his wife who's a singer they he's a songwriter and he writes operas and

01:02:46.680 plays and those are performed at court there's ballerinas one of de saline's daughters salina

01:02:52.580 de saline she's a ballerina and she dances as a child in one of these ceremonies for who she came

01:02:59.200 to visit they would be toasting the king in these kind of bombastic speeches and singing songs from

01:03:05.840 their own country. You have to think about how in the 18th and 19th centuries, that's what people

01:03:11.440 did in parties, right? I mean, they don't have TV. They don't have record players. They could

01:03:18.460 talk to one another and they also entertained each other with song and dance. And that's what

01:03:23.740 they were doing at these balls that could last all night long. They also, and that's why I always

01:03:29.020 say it rivals Bridgerton, anything that you would see there, they had fireworks and they would shoot

01:03:34.380 them off into the sky. And the writers would describe how the night sky was illuminated with

01:03:40.300 all of these lights of different colors and what's called the sheaf of the king and queen,

01:03:44.780 which are their initials. So they knew how to make the fireworks resemble initials. It's amazing to

01:03:50.380 me. And I can see why so many foreigners, especially from Great Britain and England in

01:03:56.320 particular, wanted to go to the kingdom of Haiti. And in fact, Christophe's doctor, his main doctor

01:04:02.720 at the time he dies, is Scottish. It's a doctor named Duncan Stewart from Scotland. And his son's

01:04:10.480 school teacher, Prince Victor, who's the heir to the throne. He has William Wilson, who's from

01:04:16.600 England as well. There are a lot of foreigners living. There's the famous British, or there's

01:04:22.620 the famous, I should say, Connecticut-born abolitionist Prince Saunders, Black, free man

01:04:27.700 of color. And he lives there and helps Christophe set up schools. So there's the military aspect of

01:04:34.200 it. There's a cultural aspect, but Christophe creates a school system, a national school

01:04:39.020 system. And in his correspondence with the famous British abolitionist, William Wilberforce,

01:04:44.540 Christophe talks about this education should be for men and women. And the only reason he's never

01:04:49.740 able to set up the female school system, because it's the 19th century, so they would have 0.98

01:04:54.220 different, they would not be in the class together with the boys. He's having trouble 0.72

01:04:58.520 finding female school teachers because the idea in the era is also that female children need to

01:05:04.840 be taught by women, not by men. And he has trouble kind of commissioning or really enticing women,

01:05:12.320 finding women who want to come. But there's no shortage of male school teachers who are willing

01:05:16.200 to come from overseas to help with this school system. And so it's pretty robust around the

01:05:20.780 country. And so, I mean, we're going to get into the, uh, what's helping support this like

01:05:26.740 luxurious lifestyle that he's living, but also as part of it, just that Haiti is still such 0.61

01:05:32.800 the plantation system, the crops and stuff. Like it's a very wealthy place still. So he's, 0.60

01:05:39.080 he's the King and he's able to afford this because of the trade and things like that. Right.

01:05:44.740 Yeah, absolutely. So while in the colonial era, the main export was sugar. Um, now the main

01:05:50.460 export is coffee. And the greatest trading partner, you'll notice the theme here of the

01:05:56.080 Kingdom of Haiti is Great Britain. So they're not formally recognizing Haitian independence,

01:06:01.140 but they're perfectly willing to trade with the country. So imports and exports are going out.

01:06:08.200 And so this is lucrative business for Great Britain as well. And King Henry, he toasts King

01:06:15.000 George III of England all the time. Like he, he conceives of him as an ally. What is really

01:06:21.320 interesting is the United States is also a huge trading partner of the kingdom. And Christoph

01:06:28.760 will, as King Henry will toast American presidents as well, never Jefferson, because Jefferson had

01:06:36.220 instituted a trade embargo that had really, it started under de Saline's rule and it carried

01:06:41.860 over until 1810, until it expired and wasn't renewed. And this actually harms independent

01:06:48.060 Haiti because they export coffee and also cacao and indigo and sugar still, but they import many,

01:06:57.060 many things. And when the United States stops this, there's still a little bit of an illegal

01:07:02.340 trade going on. They have grain shortages. They have flour shortages. People die. They can't get

01:07:07.440 materials that they need. So in those toasts, it's never going to be Jefferson, but he will

01:07:14.860 talk about other presidents, Madison, for example, and this is how they're getting money.

01:07:21.660 And so that's also why it's very important to play nice with those world powers because there's so

01:07:27.340 many foreigners living in the kingdom. They take the newspapers home. So you can see in the U.S. 1.00

01:07:32.780 press and the British press, excerpts translated into English from Haiti's newspapers. So there's

01:07:38.980 a performative aspect to it where they have to say, oh, we love the United States. And we're

01:07:45.380 not going to criticize the fact that there's still slavery happening there. We're going to

01:07:50.040 criticize France. We're going to rail against slavery in our publications, but we're going to

01:07:54.920 focus on France. And so that's what they do. They focus for the most part in their criticisms, 0.98

01:07:59.160 not on Great Britain, where there's still slavery in their colonies as well, but on France as their

01:08:04.180 way around it to keep that trade going. I'm just thinking about the performative aspect too,

01:08:08.600 like the fact that to be taken seriously as a kingdom, like you'd want to have a palace,

01:08:13.040 you'd want to have the fireworks shows and the beautiful balls and stuff like that. He knew to

01:08:17.560 be taken seriously, he needed to be at the same level as what England was doing and things like

01:08:24.380 that. So on the one hand, he does love carriages and he loves luxury and stuff. But on the other

01:08:28.940 hand, he kind of knew this is how he would have to present himself to be taken seriously.

01:08:33.600 Absolutely. Because all leadership is performative. You have to do the things that a leader,

01:08:38.800 like even a president. You know how in the United States, there's so much talk about what

01:08:43.600 Michelle Obama, for example, was wearing when she met the queen, right? Like there's,

01:08:48.500 in order to be taken seriously, you can't show your arms or something like that, right?

01:08:53.060 Or what color tie should a presidential candidate or a president wear? What kind of suit should they

01:08:58.440 have on? Are they allowed to wear like a khaki colored suit, right? There are trappings, the

01:09:03.560 trappings of leadership. And Christophe knows this very, very well. And he is determined he's going

01:09:10.380 to do it. He's commissions his portrait too, because that's what leaders do. You commission

01:09:14.340 your portrait. And in so doing, he left this enormous cultural heritage for Haiti, for his

01:09:23.320 country that this is a difficult rule as all rules of kings are that's you know France is having a

01:09:29.860 revolution against exactly what Christophe is doing right this display of opulence amid what

01:09:36.820 the people who are in the fields every day you know you know planting the and and um and digging

01:09:45.080 and you know carrying things and refining things and making all of this opulence happen

01:09:53.360 And so it's this performance for the world powers, but you also have to think about the

01:09:58.920 people of Haiti see this as well.

01:10:01.240 And it would be natural to compare one's life circumstances to his.

01:10:05.580 And whereas the European kings had for centuries convinced their populace that this was a divine

01:10:12.380 right given from God, Christophe doesn't have that rhetoric to use.

01:10:19.020 He doesn't have that rhetoric to use.

01:10:20.920 He never says, he does say God wants it this way, like divine providence, but it's not the divine right of kings, which is different.

01:10:31.180 But this is destiny because only things that God would want to happen will happen, right?

01:10:35.880 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.

01:10:43.620 which is what the only thing that the European kings and queens had on their side was that

01:10:48.580 centuries of training, brain training, that you have no choice but to accept this.

01:10:55.560 And I think that goes back to one of your earlier questions about the American revolution,

01:11:00.460 but I think it's truer perhaps of the French revolution in terms of how the world powers

01:11:04.360 react. Like, oh, if they say that their king doesn't have a right to be king and they behead

01:11:10.420 him, like, will our populace do that? And remember, the English had been through it in the English

01:11:15.320 Civil War, like they knew that regicide could happen. They knew that a civil war could bring

01:11:20.900 the monarchy down. And so that's the other reason I think that these powers, you know, really want

01:11:26.100 to try to stop what's happening in Saint-Domingue, but also keep France from completely going full

01:11:32.020 tilt away from monarchy. And this struggle is going to continue for them into the 19th century

01:11:40.140 as well for the world the allied world power so to speak that we think of now which were anything

01:11:44.380 but in this era yeah it's such a it's such a unique situation like to to what he's living

01:11:52.740 through like he went from being enslaved to being the army to being a general and now he's the king

01:11:57.860 and he was part of this revolution of like of the slaves like of trying to be like we like 0.96

01:12:03.060 fuck this like we are taking this ownership of all this and then they did and it's like wait a minute 0.83

01:12:08.860 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? Yeah. 0.98

01:12:17.920 Yes. So I was really interested in, again, with that investigative question. So many people after

01:12:25.480 Christophe's death said he reinstated slavery or he brought a form of pseudo-slavery or he used

01:12:31.800 forced labor. And so I went into this, yes, knowing a lot about this story already because

01:12:37.280 of my previous research, but I went into it like, this is, I need to understand what this labor

01:12:43.920 system was, and I need to see what it was. And so it's clearly not chattel slavery. Nobody's

01:12:49.140 being bought or sold. Forced labor is not slavery. Also, it is not free labor. And there were forms

01:12:56.900 of unfree labor that were not slavery all around the world at the time, right? And Corvée is one

01:13:01.900 of them. And that's the word that Christoph uses in the era of Dessalines, as well when he's general

01:13:08.040 and chief of the army, and the word that he uses for the kingdom. And I think this is really

01:13:12.280 important because if you were to look up corvée in the dictionary, you'd say, oh, this forced

01:13:16.240 labor, right? But the way they use it and explain it is that the corvée is labor in lieu of taxes.

01:13:24.000 So everyone has to pay taxes in Desalines' empire and in Christophe's state and then in kingdom.

01:13:30.920 And if they can't, because they have outlawed idleness, it's literally a law. You're not

01:13:36.340 allowed to be idle. You must be productive. That's the language that they use. And so if you are not,

01:13:41.320 you can be sent up for the corvée, which usually, because of the massive amount of labor and hands

01:13:48.900 needed, was to work up at the citadel. And failing that, they put you in prison. And if you went

01:13:54.460 into prison, which was at the citadel, the main prison, you usually never came out. And so there's

01:14:02.000 this kind of undercurrent to what, when we think about freedom, I think that most people define

01:14:09.960 freedom as, you know, I can do whatever I want. But of course that isn't actually how freedom

01:14:14.560 works. Like you're free from slavery, but you're not free to do whatever you want. And no one in

01:14:21.000 the world who lives in a state, a nation is free to do whatever they want. We have all kinds of

01:14:25.800 laws, right? And so their laws say you have to work and be productive and everyone has to

01:14:31.760 contribute. And again, if you are not doing that, you're going to be set up for hard labor. And the

01:14:37.580 way to contribute was you would work on the former plantations. They still did use that word

01:14:43.640 habitation in French, because it wasn't solely associated with slavery the way that plantation

01:14:49.560 is now. And so you could do that voluntarily, or you could be sent up to work at the palace

01:14:59.700 or up at the citadel. And failing that, if you absconded or ran away and they caught you,

01:15:05.520 you're going to prison. And so bring this all together. So how he was the king for

01:15:11.520 how many years? So he was the king from 1811 to 1820. Okay. So it's like, and then what happened?

01:15:20.880 Well, I mean, as you might imagine again, I mean, the, the people he's presiding over,

01:15:27.260 he has several problems first they remember slavery they the majority of the population

01:15:34.760 has previously been enslaved and so anything that is going to be super harsh or reminds them of

01:15:42.100 former punishments for example whipping or that mass incarceration i talked about that happened

01:15:47.620 from fugitivity in the colony and that christoph also incarcerates people for not doing what they're

01:15:52.880 supposed to be doing in his mind. All of these things, how could it not remind people who have

01:15:58.860 already fought for their freedom that, hmm, is this really what freedom is? Is this really the

01:16:05.420 form of freedom that we want? So he has this problem that does lead to revolts and rebellions

01:16:11.700 sometimes that he then has to squash with his military, who he used to tell his military to

01:16:16.420 go and harm the Haitian people. And then remember they're in the civil war with the Southern

01:16:21.020 Republic. So whereas the Haitian army had, you know, under the Al-Méan Dijon was fighting

01:16:26.700 foreign invaders who want to enslave them. Now they're fighting and killing each other.

01:16:31.280 And you have to walk a fine line, right? As king, you can't celebrate how many victories you get

01:16:37.700 over the Republic. So every time he wins a battle in these various battles across this long time

01:16:43.260 span of 13 years civil war with the Republic, he has to mourn it also. We mourn that our brothers

01:16:50.940 were led into treason against us by Pétion.

01:16:54.480 We have to blame somebody.

01:16:55.900 Pétion led them into this treason

01:16:57.380 because there are people like Juste Chamlotte,

01:17:00.760 the comte de Rosier,

01:17:01.700 that great writer from the kingdom again,

01:17:03.900 who have their family members

01:17:05.060 who live in the Southern Republic.

01:17:06.700 His brothers live there.

01:17:08.600 And so they're walking this constantly fine line.

01:17:12.060 And then in August of 1820,

01:17:15.360 Christophe is at a church in Limonade

01:17:17.080 to celebrate two things,

01:17:18.740 his wife's feast day and the Assumption, which happened to fall on the same day that year,

01:17:24.500 and he suffers a stroke. And it's very clear that even though Dr. Stewart is able to revive him,

01:17:32.100 that he's paralyzed. And so now he's convalescing there for a while. And in that period of

01:17:37.620 convalescence, the wheels begin to turn in the military against him. The wheels begin to turn

01:17:43.620 in the aristocracy against him. If you think about it from the point of view of those who

01:17:48.600 end up leading this kind of conspiracy, they're thinking, oh, what's going to happen after

01:17:55.440 he goes?

01:17:56.360 The kingdom that loves to publicize their parties and everything is astonishingly quiet.

01:18:02.580 They do not have freedom of the press, right?

01:18:05.040 It's a state-run press.

01:18:06.580 It is an arm of the government.

01:18:08.100 It is for the information that they want the people to have, and they wouldn't want to

01:18:13.240 so worry and unrest, but they also don't say, oh, the king's fine.

01:18:16.460 They say nothing, as far as we know.

01:18:18.600 They say nothing. And so in that information vacuum, what are the people talking about in

01:18:23.980 the streets? What are the rumors that are swirling? But then Christophe starts to get better as fall

01:18:29.980 comes into play, fall 1820 arrives. And, but it's too late. The conspiracy is too sort of far

01:18:38.540 advanced. And the military in a city called Saint-Marc ends up rebelling against him and

01:18:44.060 joining the Southern Republic. At that moment, led by Jean-Pierre Brouillet, Pétion died in

01:18:49.100 March 1818 after a sudden illness. And they begin to strike against him. And all the nobles turn

01:18:57.140 against him, led by the Duc de la Marmelade, Richard. And by the time Christophe really begins

01:19:05.640 to take this seriously, it's too far advanced. The perpetrators, if you will, from his perspective,

01:19:11.940 art have entered Cap Henri. So it was Cap Francais under the French. He renames it Cap Henri after

01:19:19.120 himself, this beautiful maybe port city. And on the night of October 8th, 1820, Christophe takes

01:19:27.380 his life. He realizes he's sunk. Every time he sends troops to stop the advance of the Southern

01:19:34.060 troops, they join them. And so instead of vive le roi in the streets, William Wilson, his son's

01:19:41.220 teacher says you hear viva la republique something that is absolutely unheard of before this moment

01:19:46.260 to say that so it's like so many other stories of leadership in history it's like the it dependent

01:19:54.840 on him and like i've talked about you've talked about he was this remarkable smart brilliant

01:19:59.920 charismatic handsome person but in his absence that it was dependent on him and once he you know

01:20:07.960 was removed because of his illness just there wasn't anything else there like it was his he

01:20:13.140 was it was him like it was so based on this cult of personality or whatever you want to call it

01:20:18.120 and if he had died at that point the heir was his like young teenage son which we also see so often

01:20:23.600 in history it's like oh well that's where like adult men can come in because like a young boy

01:20:28.000 can hardly I don't know and then I'm just thinking like taking his own life that reminds me of that

01:20:33.620 what happened so often in Roman history,

01:20:35.740 like that was seen as like the noble thing to do.

01:20:38.820 Like this story, it just reminds me in so many ways

01:20:42.100 of so many other kings of so many other places.

01:20:46.120 Yeah, and I think this is also where

01:20:49.340 that experience of knowing French history

01:20:52.120 would have worked against Christophe as well,

01:20:54.660 because he has this teenage son

01:20:56.700 who he's already been positioning

01:20:59.280 to take the reins of power one day.

01:21:01.600 and he like his son travels all around the country and talks to troops and talks to the people and

01:21:08.780 talks to the farmers and in the newspapers of the kingdom they talk about oh he's the worthy heir

01:21:14.120 and so um the men who have conspired against Christophe understand this and they know that

01:21:20.920 young kings that has existed they know that Christophe's son has this education and has

01:21:26.880 been prepared for this for a moment, for however it would come about. And so they execute his son

01:21:33.220 shortly after Christophe's suicide. They execute Prince Victor. They execute all the Christophe

01:21:41.920 loyalists. So that's Baron de Vate and others who was Christophe's secretary and who didn't

01:21:48.100 turn against him. They execute his older son. Christophe has, as far as we know, three

01:21:56.760 sense. He has a son named Eugène, who we think is the son from a previous relationship. So he's

01:22:03.560 not the heir. He's not Marie-Louise's son. And then François Ferdinand, who was the first child

01:22:09.080 he had with Queen Marie-Louise before she was queen, but he died in France. Christophe had sent

01:22:15.800 him to France to be educated. And when Christophe joined the Armée Indigène, the French retaliated

01:22:22.220 and threw his son into an orphanage and then allowed him to die this terrible death in the

01:22:26.360 streets of Paris. And so Prince Victor is the heir to the throne. And Richard and the other nobles

01:22:34.160 who oversee these executions, they say he pleads for his life. Prince Victor does. He says, I didn't

01:22:40.100 do anything except be the son of this man. And they're like, that's enough. And they literally

01:22:46.000 throw his body in a ditch. They just leave it there. I just want to let the listeners know,

01:22:50.760 if they haven't heard my episode I did with Vanessa Riley, if you want to know what happens

01:22:54.180 to Henri's wife and daughters,

01:22:56.480 that's what we talk about.

01:22:58.140 So maybe I'll put a link to that

01:22:59.580 in the show notes for this

01:23:00.440 if people want to get the sequel to this story.

01:23:03.720 But Henri, do we know where he's buried?

01:23:07.320 Is there...

01:23:08.560 Where is he buried? 0.84

01:23:09.780 After he commits suicide, 0.99

01:23:11.840 he shoots himself in the heart. 0.96

01:23:14.020 His wife and children

01:23:16.020 carry him up to the citadel in the night

01:23:19.640 because he shoots himself.

01:23:21.120 There's different accounts.

01:23:22.020 There's lots of coroners

01:23:22.900 and they write different accounts.

01:23:24.180 between 7.30 PM and 10.30 PM. And they take his body up there because they don't want it to be

01:23:32.200 kind of maimed or desecrated. And so they take it up to the Citadel, they bury it in a courtyard,

01:23:37.940 and the story is that they pour lime over it. And today at the Citadel, there is a plaque

01:23:43.200 commemorating the death of Christoph there. And so that's what happens. And yes, his wife and

01:23:51.160 daughters, they, they survive all of this, but they are forced to leave their home, forced down

01:23:57.120 to live in the Southern Republic in the city of Port-au-Prince initially. And so, I mean, again,

01:24:03.200 everybody like that we've had such a good discussion. And your book has so many details

01:24:10.460 about like, this is just a high level summary of, of his life. But my question for you just to sort

01:24:15.960 of, as a final question, like how is he remembered today and how complex is that memory?

01:24:23.980 Oh my goodness. So he's remembered in so many different ways because there are those who

01:24:29.620 really now, after the fact, can see the visionary leadership that he, what he wanted to do,

01:24:36.000 um, which was build a sovereign free black state in the middle of all of these other

01:24:43.460 slave colonies, surrounded by world powers with militaries that he could only dream of,

01:24:50.620 right? The United States, he's got Great Britain, he's got France, Russia. I mean,

01:24:54.100 this is the world he lives in. And I think that there are plenty of people who see this,

01:25:00.460 but then there are also people who say, you know, we cannot forget, fail to remember this

01:25:08.160 forced labor system, this courvet, the harsh treatments that he meted out to people who did

01:25:14.280 not fall in line, that these are difficult symbols to think of just in a sort of straightforward way

01:25:21.760 as magnificent as they might be. And so playwrights and novelists and comic book writers

01:25:27.600 around the world have been fascinated with this story. I talk in the book about, I opened the

01:25:32.840 prologue this way, which in some ways, I wrote the prologue last, I had a completely different

01:25:36.980 prologue before. But I thought, oh, people need to understand that I am standing on the shoulders

01:25:44.920 of the chroniclers of his life, but also how fascinated people have historically been with

01:25:50.600 his life that today his story is not, and his name is not a household name. But there was a time in

01:25:56.480 which this person for a black writer, like in the era of the Harlem Renaissance, this was one of the

01:26:02.740 most fascinating people you could write about, hope to portray on stage, that you could associate

01:26:08.980 with like Derek Walcott and Aimé Césaire later even. Derek Walcott's a Nobel Prize winning author

01:26:15.100 and his first works were about the Haitian Revolution and Amé Christophe in particular,

01:26:19.660 his first plays. And people wanted to figure out who this person was and could be. And to me,

01:26:27.200 that called for a reassessment. That's why I said, oh yes, lots of people have written about

01:26:31.380 crease, but we need to reassess. I want to understand who this person is. It's better to

01:26:35.920 understand. We don't need to know all the answers. We can never know all the answers because even if

01:26:41.500 we had pages and pages of diary from him, that would be his perspective. And I do give his

01:26:46.700 perspective whenever possible, but we do need to understand because that's the way we get out of

01:26:52.120 the conundrums of the past is we try to understand each other on a human level. And so that's what I

01:26:56.640 tried to do in the book well and that's what you accomplished i would say um thank you so much for

01:27:02.240 joining us today um this was i i was so i really really really wanted to have a discussion of the

01:27:09.100 haitian revolution on my podcast this season and when your book came out i'm like this is this is

01:27:13.100 perfect if she'll agree to be on the show because i mean yeah you're the person to talk to clearly

01:27:18.000 and i really the way that it marries so many of the themes of things we've been talking about the

01:27:23.260 American Revolution, the French Revolution, just slave resistance. Like this story has everything

01:27:27.460 and it's so little known. So thank you so much for sharing it. Yes. Well, thank you. And this

01:27:33.540 was really my pleasure to be here. So again, the title of the book, Marlena's book is The First

01:27:44.020 and Last King of Haiti, The Rise and Fall of Henri Christophe. And this book is available. You can

01:27:48.900 buy it from wherever you get your books from. She's also on tour giving talks and things about

01:27:53.940 this book so you can keep up with her. I'll put a link in the notes just so how you can keep up

01:27:59.800 with Marlena is up to where she's going to be popping up giving talks and things. And yeah,

01:28:05.720 I really recommend this book if you are someone who, like me, didn't know a lot or much at all

01:28:11.520 about the Haitian Revolution. She really explains things in such an understandable, approachable

01:28:17.820 way. Like it's a book, it's not an academic book. It's really written for, for the casual reader.

01:28:22.980 And I appreciate that because that means more people hopefully will be able to read and learn

01:28:26.860 about this history. And next week on Vulgar History, we're going to be talking about more

01:28:32.420 black history, more history about the connection between enslaved black people in the Caribbean

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Vulgar History - January 08, 2025

Haitian Revolution： The First and Last King of Haiti

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