This revelatory work restores a lost figure to the pantheon of pivotal world leaders.
The Shakespearean drama of Haitian revolutionary Henry Christophe’s life is revealed in all its glorious color and complexity in Marlene L. Daut’s superb The First and Last King of Haiti. A product of more than a decade of research, this stout biography is a shimmering synthesis of his life within the rebellious milieu of Saint-Domingue/Haiti in the late 18th and early 19th centuries.
Born a slave on the British-claimed island of Grenada in 1767, Christophe lived an early life that is more shadow than sunlight, standing mostly undocumented. But Daut’s keen instincts for parsing primary sources inspire many “what ifs” about how Christophe came to land in the French colony of Saint-Domingue, where he went from “being a child slave to a child soldier” in the employ of the French military as part of the chasseurs-volontaires, or free men of color who served as soldiers. She cites the amazing fact that Christophe fought at the American Revolutionary War battle of Savannah in 1779, where he would have “celebrated his twelfth birthday either on this bloody battlefield or in the hospital.”
Back in Saint-Domingue, Christophe spent the next decade working at a French luxury hotel before the “enormous freedom uprising” began in August 1791. Here, Daut moves from the murky historical record of Christophe’s early life to the far more substantial documentation of his revolutionary career, arguing that, by 1792:
“Henry Christophe had gone from being an enslaved child to a military officer participating in one of the most momentous struggles for freedom the world has ever seen.”
Read the full review here: https://www.washingtonindependentreviewofbooks.com/bookreview/the-first-and-last-king-of-haiti-the-rise-and-fall-of-henry-christophe