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...

April 17th is the 200th anniversary of the indemnity "agreement" with France that was a condition for French recognition of Haitian independence. Over the next 122 years, Haiti...

Recalling the life of Henry Christophe, Haiti’s first and last king

In a new book, Yale’s Marlene Daut follows the remarkable trajectory of Christophe’s life and Haiti’s...

Hosted on WTNH/ABC's Good Morning Connecticut, scholar Marlene L. Daut unravels the enigma that was Henry Christophe, the revolutionary, freedom-fighter, and only king of Haiti....

Way back in 2019, phew!, what a different, but also similar world it was then. We were pre-pandemic, but prime Trump, and I am now at Yale, not the University of Virginia, but universities and academia are still under attack, and even more so..... Sigh....

Well, today, because it is still Haitian Heritage Month, and I want to keep the hope alive, I am resurrecting one of my first forays into public-facing scholarship. In April 2019, I partnered with WAMU/NPR's show "The Academic Minute" to...

Although my recently published book The First and Last King of Haiti: The Rise and Fall of Henry Christophe (Knopf, 2025) naturally focuses on the king himself, his wife Queen Marie-Louise is a central force throughout, and her own biography reveals complex layers to the story of the Haitian Revolution, Haitian independence, and the rise of the Kingdom of Haiti.

I wrote about Queen Marie-Louise's journey after her husband's tragic death in this excerpt adapted from my book (originally...

I initially wrote this article following the July 7, 2021 assassination of Haiti’s President Jovenel Moïse after one Haitian official requested that the U.N. and U.S. send troops to help stabilize the nation. As can be imagined, many Haitian activists and artists recoiled at the prospect of yet another outside intervention.

The Haitian-American novelist Edwidge Danticat is one artist who has repeatedly railed against past U.S. occupations of Haiti. In her foreword to Jan J. Dominique’s “...