Marlene L. Daut

In 2002, Haiti’s former president Jean-Bertrand Aristide argued that France should pay his country US$21 billion.

The reason? In 1825, France extracted a huge indemnity from the young nation, in exchange for recognition of its independence.

April 17, 2025, marks the 200th anniversary of that indemnity agreement. On Jan. 1 of this year, the now-former president of Haiti’s Transitional Presidential Council, Leslie Voltaire, reminded France of this call when he requested that France “repay the...

In this series commissioned by Marlene L. Daut, scholars reveal what 220 years of Haitian independence means for how we tell the story of abolition and the development of human rights around the world.

BY MARLENE L. DAUT

The first land to be colonized in the Americas was Haiti. Europeans first enslaved native Americans and captive Africans there, too. But the first permanent abolition of slavery also happened on Haiti, in 1804: 220 years ago this month. Such abolition only occurred in the rest...

An exiled revolutionary, André Rigaud’s return to the island of his birth changed Haiti’s political destiny. Was he sent back to help reinstate slavery? His enemies would have us believe so.

In 1893 the Black American playwright William Edgar Easton published Dessalines, a Dramatic Tale: A Single Chapter From Haiti’s History, a play about the Haitian Revolution. Ostensibly a biopic of independent Haiti’s founder General Jean-Jacques Dessalines, the play prominently featured another of the...

The very best of the hundreds of books on international politics, economics, and history that were featured in the magazine this year, selected by Foreign Affairs’ editors and...

‘An illuminating snapshot of editing as care work’--Marlene L. Daut is Professor of French and Black Studies at Yale University

For their December 2025 end of the year issue, ...

The First and Last King of Haiti was featured in this Miami Times article about the ReadCaribbean series at the 2025 Miami Book Fair:

Two panels on Nov. 22 tackled the issues of...

By Marlene L. Daut

In 1948, when he was just 19-years old, the St. Lucian poet and playwright Derek Walcott wrote his first play, Henri Christophe: A Chronicle in Seven Scenes. The play went on to be published in Bridgetown, Barbados in 1950, and thereafter it was played on the radio and staged in London in 1952. That performance was directed by Errol Hill, who later taught as a distinguished scholar of theatre at my current place of employment, Yale University. Hill also played Christophe's...

By Marlene L. Daut

This week marked the anniversary of the historic Battle of Vertières (November 18, 1803), considered to have been the formal end of the Haitian Revolution, as it led directly to French general Rochambeau’s surrender on November 19, 1803 and to formal Haitian independence several weeks later on New Year's Day 1804.

Yet one little known fact is that only ten days after Rochambeau's capitulation, on November 29, 1803, Haitian generals Augustin Clervaux, Jean-Jacques Dessalines,...

By Marlene L. Daut

The month of October was a very busy one for me. First, my colleague Pierre Saint-Amand and I hosted a conference to analyze, discuss, and deliberate the implications of the bicentennial of the 1825 indemnity “agreement” with France that impoverished Haiti. Participants included Julia Gaffield, Daniel Desormeaux, Jean Casimir, Chelsea Stieber, Grégory Pierrot, Jean-Marie Théodat, Kaiama L. Glover, Yanick Lahens, Malick Ghachem, and Lewis Clorméus.

The conversations were...