In 1811, eight years after Toussaint Louverture, the leader of the Haitian Revolution, died in a French prison, and five years after Jean-Jacques Dessalines, Haiti’s emperor, was assassinated, Henry Christophe was crowned as king.

The ceremony took place in a magnificent church, built for the occasion, with an 80-foot cupola in the middle of which sat a throne embroidered in gold. The church was located in a fortress, built by the forced labor of tens of thousands of former slaves, called “Citadelle Henry Christophe” when it was completed in 1813, and dubbed “the eighth wonder of the world.”

King Henry had a stroke in 1820. Deserted by his troops with a decades-long civil war still raging, Christophe committed suicide. When he died, Haiti had not been recognized as independent and sovereign by a single nation.

In “The First and Last King of Haiti,” Marlene Daut, a Professor of French and African Diaspora Studies at Yale University, provides a full-scale biography of Christophe, set in the context of immensely consequential decades in Haiti’s history.

Read the full article here: https://www.post-gazette.com/ae/books/2025/01/05/review-the-first-and-last-kind-of-haiti-henry-christophe-marlene-daut/stories/202501050039