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...

"Unlike his mentor and fellow revolutionary Toussaint Louverture, King Henry Christophe has not been kindly treated by historians. Much of what was written about him in the...

The First and Last King of Haiti: The Rise and Fall of Henry Christophe: Jim Herlihy, host of The San Francisco Experience, talks with author Marlene Daut

With everything going...

On June 2, 1811, Henry Christophe and his wife Marie-Louise Coidavid were crowned the king and queen of Haiti. Little did they know, they would be Haiti's first and last....

I...

July 11, 1825 was a tragic day for Haiti: It was on this day that Haiti’s president Jean-Pierre Boyer "agreed" to pay an indemnity to France’s Charles X, amounting to 150 million francs, as the price of France's recognition of Haitian independence and to compensate the former French colonists for the loss of their “property.”

Ange René Armand, Baron de Mackau, the diplomat whom Louis XVIII’s brother and successor King Charles X sent to deliver the ultimatum (in the form of an ordinance dated...

By Marlene L. Daut

What a great read! I'm talking about Julia Gaffield’s new book recently published with Yale University Press, I Have Avenged America: Jean-Jacques Dessalines and Haiti’s Fight for Freedom. I found it incredibly absorbing, and I learned so much that I even endorsed it. Here is my blurb, which appears on the back cover of the book:

“A distinguished scholar known for her precise archival research, Julia Gaffield has succeeded in the vital mission of writing a faithful account of...

What writing about Haiti’s first, last, and only king taught me about archives, ethics, and unreliable narrators.

By Marlene L. Daut

As a literary and intellectual historian, I have spent a large part of my career focusing on how literary fictions (poetry, drama, novels, and short stories) affected the way that people living in the 18th and 19th centuries understood the Haitian Revolution (1791-1804). My newest book, a biography called The First and Last King of Haiti: The Rise and Fall of...