By MARLENE L. DAUT
On June 2, 1811, the royal family of Haiti—including the king and queen, their two teenage daughters, and their young son—rode into their coronation in a church constructed for the occasion. They arrived in two separate, but equally magnificent, carriages purchased from England. Styled as a mass, the proceedings were presided over by a white French Catholic priest from Brittany, Father Corneille Brelle, who pronounced the service in Latin.
The immediate opulence and splendor of the royal coronation is described at length in my book The First and Last King of Haiti, and I am grateful to the digital magazine Women’s Writers, Women’s Books for publishing an excerpt. In the short sample below, I narrate the days long festivities that led up to and then followed King Henry and Queen Marie-Louise’s coronation. Little did they know at the time that they were to be Haiti's first and last king and queen.
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The work of preparing the renamed capital city, Cap-Henry, for President Christophe to become King Henry happened within the astonishing space of just two months. On March 26, 1811, Christophe issued a proclamation announcing that his council of state had just promoted him from the position of president of the State of Haiti to king of the Kingdom of Haiti. Just one week later, another edict announced the creation of the nobility, with Christophe’s most cherished friends and administrators among the dozens of dukes, counts, barons, and chevaliers named to the royal order of Saint Henry.
For the coronation, which took place on the Champ de Mars of Cap Henry, the country’s builders erected a temporary church. Two hundred fifty feet long and just as wide, the interior of the edifice was divided into nine arcades. In the center stood an eighty-foot-high cupola, in the middle of which sat the king’s throne. A design feat fit to rival that of any of old Europe’s creations, the seventy-foot-tall throne was positioned under a “superb baldachin” of crimson silk. Embroidered in gold and adorned with gold fringes, the opulent and oversized chair had been studded with golden stars and phoenixes, which gave it the appearance of “rising majestically,” in the words of the ceremony’s official recorder, Julien Prévost, the Comte de Limonade.
The interior of the church shone as well with two rows of galleries on both sides of the nave, draped entirely in silk cloth the color of celestial blue, adorned with gold fringes, and “pleasingly studded with gold stars.” Tapestries bearing the king’s coat of arms—two crowned lions holding a black flag strewn with stars and imprinted with a gold phoenix rising from flames hovering over a gold ribbon that read “I am reborn from my ashes”—covered nearly everything in the church. A large gold crown, not dissimilar to the one the king would don, hovered over a ribbon on his coat of arms bearing the words “God is my cause and my sword.”
Read the rest of the excerpt here: https://booksbywomen.org/the-first-and-last-king-of-haiti-the-rise-and-fall-of-henry-christophe-by-marlene-l-daut-excerpt/
Adapted from The First and Last King of Haiti: The Rise and Fall of Henry Christophe © 2025 by Marlene L. Daut. Excerpted by permission of Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.