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...

From their website:

The following list was decided after consultation between California Review of Books co-editors David Starkey and Brian Tanguay and the journal’s most...

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, ...

By Marlene L. Daut

As we approach the 250th anniversary of the American Revolution, I have noticed a lot of misinformation going around, especially in public broadcasts and on social media. As a corrective, I thought I would post a factually correct video from the Open Education Resources Project, which details how the first permanent abolition of slavery happened in Haiti in 1804.

Importantly, this kind of immediate emancipation of enslaved people only occurred in the rest of the Atlantic...

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,...