Dan Snow's History Hit - The Haitian Revolution and King Henri Christophe

Episode Date: May 14, 2023

In the summer of 1791, thousands of enslaved people in Saint Domingue, as Haiti was then known, cast aside their shackles and revolted against French colonial rule. The Haitian Revolution lasted for over a decade, and Haiti became the first independent country to be founded by former enslaved people.Among the key leaders of the revolution was a man named Henri Christophe. Born an enslaved person, Christophe served in the American Revolutionary War, fought in the Haitian Revolution and became Haiti's first and only king. But what happened during the Haitian Revolution? And how did Christophe make himself king of the first free black nation in the Americas?Dan is joined by Paul Clammer, author of Black Crown: Henry Christophe, the Haitian Revolution and the Caribbean's Forgotten Kingdom, to guide us through this extraordinary tale.Produced by James Hickmann and edited by Dougal Patmore.You can take part in our listener survey here.If you want to get in touch with the podcast, you can email us at [e-mail], we'd love to hear from you!

Hi everybody, welcome to Dan Snow's History Hit. You know, of all the stories in history, there's one I keep coming back to at the moment because of the amount of new scholarship that people are doing, the amount of new storytelling, and that's the Haitian Revolution, which is the uprising of self-liberated slaves against French colonial rule in what was called Saint-Domingue, but is now the state of Haiti. what was called Saint-Domingue, but is now the state of Haiti. It began in the summer of 1791. It rumbled on and on until the French finally admitted catastrophic defeat in 1804. It was a terrible and embarrassing setback for Napoleon, the great genius at the very zenith of his power. It had enormous repercussions across the Western Hemisphere,

through the United States and the slave colonies of the Caribbean. As Haiti became independent, I think it became the first state in history in which enslaved people had risen up and successfully destroyed the apparatus of their enslavement and formed an independent state on its foundations. the apparatus of their enslavement and formed an independent state on its foundations. It has a cast of characters that rivals anything produced by the United States of America in their rebellion against colonial rule. Toussaint Louverture, known as the Black Napoleon for his extraordinary martial prowess. Jean-Jacques Dessalines, another brilliant commander. And very prominent women as well, like Sanité Belair, who was a female commander who was captured by the French. Her partner then surrendered himself to the French because he couldn't bear to be separated from her.

She insisted that she was executed without the customary eye patches because she wanted to be able to look her executioners in the eyes. It is a profound mystery, in fact perhaps it's not a profound mystery, why Hollywood has never investigated the Haitian Revolution properly for epic, epic subject matter. We have on this podcast done many eps about the Haitian Revolution, you can go back and check them all out, and we've got another one now. We're talking about another great commander of the Haitian rebels. This one interestingly was, was a good, solid soldier, but his particular skill lay in logistics, in organisation. His name was Henri Christophe.

He was a key leader in the revolution, and he would become the only king of the kingdom of Haiti after it was finished. He was a man born enslaved on a plantation, and yet he managed to play a key part in defeating Napoleon's invading troops and becoming a king, a recognised monarch. On the podcast, talk all about him, is Paul Clammer. He's a British writer who's been to Haiti many times. He's written a book called The Black Crown, telling the epic story of this man. And it is an extraordinary tale enjoy t-minus 10 atomic bomb dropped on hiroshima god save the king no black white unity till

there is first and black unity never to go to war with one another again and lift off and the shuttle has cleared the tower. Paul, good to have you back on the pod. Great to talk to you, Dan. I could have Haitian stories all the time in this podcast. Extraordinary characters, the import of what was going on back in the late 18th, early 19th. But let's start with this particular individual, Henri Christophe. Was he born into enslavement or was he? Yeah. I mean, tracing the lives of these people at this time in the time of sort of Imperial

Caribbean slavery is always tricky, but yeah, he was born enslaved. He was born on the island of Grenada in 1767. Greya had been a French colony that had then been captured by the British during the Seven Years' War. And this sort of tension between France and Britain becomes quite important during Christophe's life. He becomes quite an anglophile and he always sort of claims that he was an Englishman by descent when he's lobbying the British government for recognition of his kingdom. You mentioned the age of imperial slavery. We've got to imagine these islands, Grenada, St. Lucia, Dominica, they're being run as slave colonies to produce things like coffee, sugar for the world market. That's right. I mean, he ends up being transported to the colony of Saint-Domingue,

which is what becomes Haiti. And at that time, at the end of the 18th century, the colony of Saint-Domingue is fantastically productive for France. It's producing pretty much two thirds of all of the sugar in the world. It's producing around about half of all the coffee that's being consumed in the world. So this tiny little island is just this sort of industrial powerhouse. Incredibly productive, but of course, incredibly brutal because this is all a produce that's being grown and produced on the backs of enslaved Africans. And once he was on Haiti or Saint-Domingue, he was part of that process.

What conditions would he have sort of witnessed? What would have been, well, how would they have lived and under what conditions did they work? Well, Christophe was transported to the main city of Saint-Domingue, which was a city called Cap-Francais. Nowadays, it's the city of Cap-Haitien. This is a very rich city. It's about the size of colonial Boston.

And the city is served by this hinterland of the northern plains where there are around 2,000 sugar plantations. So you're looking at about 200,000 enslaved Africans who are working there. that the French colonists could maintain their colony was actually by constantly importing more and more people into this sort of bloody machine because the attrition rates, the survival rates were incredibly low. So the outbreak of the Haitian revolution in 1791, Saint-Domingue was importing around 18,000 kidnapped Africans every year. So there's about almost 400 people a week are feeding through the port of Cap-Francais that are being sort of fed into this bloody, brutal machine. Now, Christophe himself lived in Cap-Francais, so he wasn't working on a sugar plantation, but he would have seen the ships come into the harbor. Three quarters of the population of the city itself were enslaved Africans. These

were urban slaves, so they were working in, he worked in an inn, so they were working in an inn. So they were working on the walls of docks and as builders. So he would have been very much up front with that, but he was sort of an urban inhabitant rather than living in the plantations. But at that time, there was a lot of sort of movement between the two. Every week, the enslaved would be coming in from the plantations to bring their produce to market and really keeping the city alive by feeding what they were growing in their little market gardens. So you are not sort of shielded from the horrors of this regime. And we should say, just before we get to the extraordinary revolution itself, you write that he did claim that he'd actually served in the French Army as a drummer boy against the British during the American Revolutionary War in the 1770s and 80s. Yes. I mean, it's an incredible period of history. So

how he's transported from Grenada to Saint-Domingue is that the early years of the American war independence, the French send a fleet to the Caribbean, they recapture Grenada from the British, and then they decide to send soldiers, colonial soldiers from their Caribbean possessions to the North American colonies to support the Americans. So they stop in Saint-Domingue, they stop in Cap-Francais, and they pick up a contingent of 800 soldiers to take part in the siege of Savannah. Now, the incredible thing about this is that nearly 600 of these soldiers were actually free black men so these were men of african descent who had either were emancipated or mixed race so possibly had a european parentage so were born free so one of his

formative experiences and christoph here really he's on the cusp of his 12th birthday one of his really i think profound experiences of him was seeing these black men in uniform going to fight white men. And they take part in the siege of Savannah, which it has to be said is not a great moment for the revolutionary forces. Britain manages to hold Savannah. And then as the French forces retreat, they return to Cap-Francais, they return to Saint-Domingue. That's how Christophe ends up there.

But I really think this sort of incredible, unknown, or very little talked about part of history. If you go to Savannah today in Georgia, there's actually a statue commemorating these black soldiers, the forts in the siege. Remarkable. So, well, these and maybe many other freed or recently enslaved black people in Haiti would have had some military experience. Do you think that helps to explain the success of the revolution or get me onto the revolution? What happens? Well, of course, just to set the scene, of course, in 1789, you've got the French Revolution kicks off, and these ideas of liberté, égalité, fraternité start to filter back to the French colonies.

And a lot of the colonists are very worried about this, because the idea of equality, obviously, is quite a horrendous idea when your entire existence is based on enslaving other human beings. But in 1791, there is a conspiracy set amongst the enslaved in the plantations in northern Saint-Domingue and led by a voodoo priest named Bookman and a voodoo priest escort, Cecily Fatiman. And they decide to have a mass uprising. And in the middle of August 1791, they set the plantations, the sugarcane ablaze. And what's interesting is that at the time, the French colonists are completely baffled by this. In fact, they blame the French revolution for this because

they blame these ideas of equality that are coming over in France, because they can't quite put their heads around it, that if you've kidnapped people and brought them from Africa, they might have a few ideas about what freedom means to them as well. And you mentioned the black soldiers who'd fought in the American Revolution. Well, of course, a lot of the people who had been kidnapped and brought to Saint-Domingue had actually been soldiers in wars in Africa. So there was a lot of military experience happening in Saint-Domingue. And this experience is used. They use guerrilla warfare. And within months, the whole of the northern colony is really ablaze. The main cities like Cap-Francais are really under siege. Because of what's happening in France, the colonial powers can do

little to sort of defend themselves. You can't get a lot of troops in from the metropole. So slowly, white power starts to retreat in the face of these mass uprisings. But Henri Christophe is just one of this generation of founders, men and women, who provoke consternation in the kind of racist North Atlantic world that people of color could be this brilliant. People are absolutely terrified and baffled that these Africans have their own agency. So you have figures like Toussaint Louverture, who was born enslaved and had emancipated himself and very rapidly rises to the top of the command of the armies of the formerly enslaved but you also have figures like jean-jacques d'assalines who is destined to be the man who actually proclaims haitian independence in 1804 he had been born on a plantation his face had traditional african scars which a lot of french commentators were sort of very racist and said this is a sign of his ghost sort of and almost bestial nature, as opposed to connecting him with the roots

of his ancestors in Africa. But there are many figures like this that are ready really to take their opportunity. Many figures who had experience of wars in West and Central Africa, and they're ready to put that experience to the cause of claiming their own liberty. So what's Henri bringing to the table? Well, Henri was an urbanite. He almost certainly, before the revolution, worked in the rural police, and he very quickly joins the city militia. Now, the history of the Haitian revolution is incredibly rich and complicated. So probably during the first few years of the revolution,

the first two or three years, certainly, he was on the side defending the city. And then in 1793, there was really very revolutionary commissioners who were sent from Paris who genuinely believed in the equality of the races and set about reforming these militia, promoting black and mixed-race officers. And this is really when we see Henri Christophe start to come into his own because in June of 1793, there's an attempt really at a counter-revolution where the white royalists try to overthrow this white republican power base in the city of Cap-Francais.

And the city is actually burned to the ground as a result. And this is the first time we really can reliably see Christophe in the written archives. And he is there defending the white Republicans against these white racist reactionaries. And it's the firing of Cap, the destruction of what really is one of the wealthiest cities of the time in the Americas. But it's this destruction of this that the French commissioners realized that the only way that they can save the revolution is to say to the enslaved

masses of Saint-Domingue, if you support us, you are all free. And this is this Emancipation Proclamation of 1793 that really starts to put the revolution down this road to ultimately to independence. Does he have great skill as a commander? What is his kind of particular skill set, would you say? Christophe was a solid fighter. As we see later in life, he is a great organizer. So compared to someone like Jean-Jacques Dessalines, who becomes the second in command of the Revolutionary Armies under Toussaint Louverture, Christophe becomes a commander in the north, and he is a solid commander, but he's great on on logistics this is his great thing of course we all know that military campaigns are won as much by what goes on to support the soldiers on the front line as anything and so many of the surviving letters and the ledgers that we have

from christophe from both the revolution and from the time when he was the king of haiti show that he was just this incredible manager i mean almost a micromanager he was on king of Haiti, show that he was just this incredible manager. I mean, almost a micromanager. He was on top of every detail. So there are accounts of later in the revolution, the American consul in Saint-Domingue writes about Christophe's troops and says, you know, these are the best equipped troops. They have brand new uniforms. They have this incredible supplies of their salt beef and their herring. They have vast supplies of ammunition.

And he says this is entirely to the credit of Christophe. And he becomes not just sort of this commander in the north, but also the commander of the city of Caffer and Sayer. He becomes the central administrator. This is his absolute skill that he brings to bear once Haiti is declared its independence in 1804. So he's really a kind of logistician. Absolutely.

Absolutely. I mean, there are, as his biographer, I have to say there are a few incidences where you read reports of battles where he's clearly overextended himself and his command of the troops is not possibly what he might hope for. And you think, oh, you want this guy

to be a hero on the battlefield in the same way that Toussaint Louverture was. But really, his skills were out of organizing. The course of the revolution is super complicated, as you've already referred to. And you end up with Spain, Britain, France fighting on various different sides at various different times. How do we get to the point where Haiti becomes the first black republic in the Western Hemisphere? The first, I think, first polity in history where the enslaved people rose up and overthrew their former masters to establish a sovereign country.

Absolutely. This is really to do with the rise of Napoleon in France, because Toussaint Louverture had taken control of the colony. He had effectively declared himself governor for life. And Napoleon, if he'd been clever, could have accepted that. And Toussaint Louverture went back to rebuild the plantations and try to recreate an export economy. But Napoleon couldn't stand the idea, basically, of an African being controlled. So he sends an army of 21,000 men under his brother-in-law, General Charles Emmanuel Leclerc, who was married to Pauline Bonaparte, with this idea that he can take back control of not just

Saint-Domingue, but of all of the colonies that had emancipation declared. So he explicitly instructs the French to reinstate slavery in the French colonies. It's a little bit, he hedges his bets in Saint-Domingue. But this armada essentially arrives saying, we've come, there's peace in Europe now. This is sort of 1802. This is the time of the brief peace between England and France. And he says, don't worry, we're here to take control. And to Saint-Louis Richard is outraged. They said, well, you were here to bring peace, but we are at peace.

Why have you, you, you come with this iron fist and Christophe he's in charge in Cap-Francais and rather than let the forces of Leflot land, he basically sets fire to the city. So he says, well, by even calling us rebels is an argument for us to resist your landing. He sets fire to the city. So the French are left to conquer a city in ashes, and they retreat to the interior, and they fight this incredibly brutal, bloody guerrilla warfare that becomes increasingly violent. Leclerc never gets to see the end of it. He dies of yellow fever.

Thousands and thousands of French troops die of yellow fever toussaint louis vautier is sort of tricked into a parley he's arrested by the french he's sent back to france where he dies of exposure in a prison cell in the jura mountains but it's not really until the summer of 1803 where the revolutionary armies under the control of Dessalines for the first time really explicitly make it clear that the only way they can be free is to be their own country. And at a place called Acai, they create the Haitian flag by symbolically ripping the white out of the French tricolour and stitching the red and the blue back together. white out of the French tricolore and stitching the red and the blue back together. And within seven months, they have the French armies on the back foot. War has restarted in Europe. So British blockades mean that the French are not able to resupply their troops in Saint-Domingue.

And on the 18th of November, 1803, the French received their final licking in the Battle of Vertier, just as I kept from saying. And on January the 1st, 1804, Jean-Jacques Dessalines, with Christophe at his side, declares Haitian independence. Listen to Dan Snow's history. We're talking about the Haitian Revolution more afterwards. To be continued... latest groundbreaking research from the greatest millennium in human history. We're talking Vikings, Normans, kings and popes, who were rarely the best of friends, murder, rebellions, and crusades. Find out who we really were by subscribing to Gone Medieval from History Hit, wherever you get your podcasts. Well, it was a huge moment, not just in Haiti, but for the whole of the world, really, because that was what led then Napoleon to sell his chunk of North America to the Americans, the so-called Louisiana Purchase.

I mean, enormous consequences right across the continent. But in Haiti itself, sadly, not the bright new beginning that many had hoped for. Why was Haiti discriminated against, punished by all the European powers around it? Presumablyably it was terrifying, the idea that an island had declared it successfully fought and won its independence. Absolutely. I mean, Haiti is a day's sail from Jamaica, where the British have a colony in a very similar situation.

They'd had their own problems. I say problems, but they'd had their own fought wars with the Maroons there. Haiti is a two-day sail from Cuba. Again, another very important colony for Spain. So the idea that the enslaved could free themselves horrifies colonial powers. And when Haiti produces its first constitution later on in 1804,

they are the first constitution really in the modern world to say that all men and women are equal regardless of race. And for all of the principles of the French Revolution and the American Revolution, they all fell short on this. So the history of Haiti in the time that I write about, the sort of first 20 years after independence, is really a story of Haiti trying to find international recognition when the global powers cannot possibly bring themselves to recognize that this country could even exist. The idea of Haiti is really something that is completely unthinkable to them. And it's about how Christophe and Dessalines try to negotiate these very, very complicated waters that dominate Haiti's immediate

period after independence. What is Christophe's role? Christophe at this stage is basically the second most powerful man in the country. Quite soon after independence, Haiti actually declares itself to be an empire. Jean-Jacques Dessalines has a coronation. He sends this incredible letter to Napoleon Bonaparte, which today we would call trolling, where he says, we're independent. I'm really sorry. We can't find anybody in Haiti to come and be an ambassador to France, but why don't you send your sister Pauline, the widow of General Leclerc, back to Haiti so that I can marry her and we can have these beautiful children mixing the Corsican blood and the African blood and we can produce this wonderful country together.

And it's this absolutely outrageous, confident, two fingers up to Napoleon. So Dessalines and Christophe are really trying to work out what freedom can mean in a world where you're surrounded by hostile powers. And it's a really, really complicated question because for Haiti to maintain its independence, it needs to maintain a standing army. They're afraid that the French will try to invade again. For very good reasons, the eastern side of the island of Hispaniola, which is now the Dominican Republic, is still occupied by France and they still send raids across the border to kidnap Haitians and enslave them. So this is a really, really serious question of national defense. But the only way that you can buy arms, the only way that you can make gunpowder

is to produce crops to export. And Haiti has these plantations. It has sugar and it has coffee. So Dessalines and Christophe think the only way that they can build up their armies to defend their liberty is to make people go back to labor on the plantations again. Now, if you thought in the Haitian Revolution, if you had been a laborer on these plantations, your idea of liberty is rather different to that of the generals. What you want to do is just be by yourself. You want to have a little plot of land. You weren't born in this country.

The idea of Haiti is such an abstract concept to you. You really just want to have your plots, raise your crops, bring up your family in peace, and you want to be an autonomous person. And the great struggle that Desilines face and the struggle that Christophe faces is how do you reconcile these two conflicting ideas of liberty? And there's no roadmap. It's very easy to look back more than 200 years after the event and say, well, clearly, these ideas of individual liberty are so enshrined in how we understand the modern world. But there is no roadmap for building a nation which hasn't existed, where the majority of your people were not born in that country. They were taken by arms from their own homes. And the history of Haitian independence is really a question of negotiating these two tensions.

Christophe ends up as the king eventually. How does he do that? So there's a power struggle. Dessalines is assassinated. His political rivals, who are mainly in the south, engineer a conspiracy and assassinate him. And they say to Christophe, we would like you to be the president. But what they do is they strip the president of all its powers. It's just a ceremonial role. And Christophe, who was the number two in the army, says, I'm not really having this. And he tries to invade the south. He lays siege to his rivals in Port-au-Prince, and the island falls into a stalemate. The island basically becomes partitioned into between

the northern regime under christophe and the southern regime under his rival alexander pechon he was very much a francophile and in 1811 christophe decides that the only way to make his rule permanent is to crown himself king and it's really interesting the way he does this because he creates this commission to analyze the political future of Haiti. And they publish this great report and they say, you know what, we've looked at all the other political solutions. We've looked at what happened in America and we've looked at George Washington and we decided, you know, that system doesn't work for us. They say, we've looked at some of these small states in Europe, these little micro states,

they all have monarchies and they prosper and everyone recognizes them. And then they also say that before Columbus had arrived at the island of Hispaniola, the indigenous Tainos had their own hereditary chiefs. And through this wonderful coincidence, one of the last chiefs to resist Spanish colonial rule was a man who's given the name Enrique, so Henri. And through this wonderful coincidence, one of the last chiefs to resist Spanish colonial rule was a man who's given the name Enrique, so Henri. So this is almost like a manifest reason that Christophe should crown himself king. And you have to remember that, again, because so many Haitians have been born in Africa,

the idea of a monarchy is very natural to them. There were a lot of kingdoms in Africa. So Christophe crowns himself king. actual to them there were a lot of kingdoms in africa so christophe crowns himself king and it's this incredible sort of melding of african and european and indigenous caribbean traditions so he creates this heraldry that his kingdom will be defined by his own coat of arms is a phoenix rising from the ashes because of course he had set fire to his own city to proclaim the freedom but when the the heralds they go to to create the coats of arms of all his nobility as well as leaning on european traditions they also look to african traditions and to caribbean traditions so you have this fantastic armorial which is in the royal college of arms in l London now. So you have coats of arms with elephants, with rhinoceroses,

with iguanas and Caribbean manatees and flamingos. So he's really, really trying to create something brand new to give his country an identity. How does his reign go? I think we should say that Christophe is not a man who is shy. He is a pretty self-confident guy. He was born enslaved. He's raised himself up to this sort of supreme executive power. And as we've said, he's this great micromanager. So as the commander of the army, he creates almost sort of a militarized regime. So people are forced to work on the sugar plantations. They're forced to work on the coffee plantations to build the riches that are going to be the foundation of this nation. And he produces this nearly 800-page book of law called the Code Henri. Very importantly,

the workers on the plantations, although they have to be workers, everyone has their part to play in this family. He envisages the whole country as a family with him as the symbolic father. But the workers on the plantations are actually given a share of the profits. And the Cotonou, when it's translated in England, figures like Sir Joseph Banks, the president of the Royal Society, and a lot of the white abolitionists, they actually see this being as an incredibly progressive law.

And they make this contrast between the poor working conditions of the English laboring poor and say, look, in Haiti, they've created this system where workers are invested. They get the profits. The more they produce, they get to share in these profits. And no white man has ever come up with such a progressive system. And he brings in teachers from England. He brings in smallpox inoculation. And he has this really a sort of a PR campaign, particularly in the English press, where the achievements of his regime are reprinted in, you can read the Morning Chronicle and all of these other newspapers at the time.

And it's this sort of lobbying by soft power. And his ships are arriving in London for a period. The admiral of his navy is actually from Bristol. And you can buy Haitian sugar at the London docks. And this is produced by free labor. and a great deal is made of this. And he passes some of this legislation, but in his essential task of kind of putting Haiti on a sustainable post-war footing, growing as a nation, how does he do? This is the really complicated question, because we're reliant on the accounts of a lot of the foreigners the teachers the artists

that went to work for the regime and of course they say everything's brilliant he's very very enlightened and i think they're very unaware of some of the undercurrents that are taking place because as we've said you know a lot of the the people who had fought in the revolution who are now essentially be sort of essentially these peasant farmers, they don't want to work on these plantations. So there's a very telling moment when an English missionary comes to Haiti because Christophe invites in the Quakers to send missionaries to Haiti. And he has the correspondence with people like Wilberforce. And he's very good actually at telling them exactly what they want to hear.

He says, we want to make Haiti an Anglican country. So he sends missionaries, but there's a very telling moment when a missionary is in the country and he comes across one of these maroons, one of these people who've said, I don't want anything to do with this regime. I'm going to raise my own crops and have my own gardens and just get on with it. And this missionary, because of the prejudices of the time, he sort of dismisses this chap as being a lazy man who doesn't want to work because he doesn't really quite appreciate the context. So the coffee plantations are incredibly productive. Coffee is a relatively easy crop to produce. It pretty much grows itself. The sugar plantations do go into a gradual decline. This is a very, very labor-intensive

plot. There's an amazing ledger that I found in an archive in the US where we look at it where you can actually see the amount of sugar and coffee that was being deposited in these customs houses. And you can see a year-on-year decline in the sugar. And not just the amount of sugar, but the quality of sugar there. They're just producing raw brown sugar rather than this very fine white refined sugar that Saint-Domingue had been famous for. Because it's a very, very labor-intensive crop. And for all of the will in the world, there just aren't enough people to enforce the labor on these plantations. So again, there's this tension between this great, this sort the nobility and that Christophe is spending freely in London.

He buys these incredibly opulent state carriages and beautiful dresses for his wife and his daughters. And on the outside, everything is fantastic. But the regime in a way is becoming hollowed out because this is ultimately a system that is going to prove unsustainable. ultimately is a system that is going to prove unsustainable. Unsurprisingly, I don't know how these people survive a year in this kind of intensity of life that they had. By the time he's in his early 50s, he's pretty ill. He is ill. There's a portrait of him that is painted, we think, in about 1819.

And he doesn't really look a very well man. He's put on weight. He's got bags under his eyes. And then in the early spring of 1820 he's attending mass at a church and he has a stroke and it's a very public affair he collapses to the floor of the church in front of the the mass ranks of all the nobles who are of course his old generals this is how he manages to stay in power because he has the support of the army. But it's a very, very public illness. And he retreats from view for quite a period.

We have a wonderful account by the English tutor to his son, a young man called William Wilson, who talks about the way that Christopher's retired from public life. And so these things fester. And the generals, some of his men, some of his nobles who had hitherto been quite loyal, see their opportunity. And there is a man called Jean-Pierre Richard. His title under the nobility is the Duke de Marmelade. And he essentially engineers a conspiracy to take control of the regime. rarely the best of friends. Murder, rebellions. And crusades. Find out who we really were. By subscribing to Gone Medieval from History Hit.

Wherever you get your podcasts. And we have to remember at this time that Haiti is partitioned between the kingdom in the north and the republic in the south. The people in the south, when the president in the south learns of Christophe's illness, of course, they realize that there is an opportunity. So at the same time, there is a coup in the north. The troops from the south are moving up into Haiti. And in October of 1820, the net really tightens on Christophe and he's well enough to walk around.

He's not well enough to mount a horse or command his own troops. He's actually has to ask his two daughters to literally pay this palace guard to keep defending him. And as the noose tightens, he retreats to his apartments in this fabulous palace that he's built, and he shoots himself in the heart. God, and then his dynasty doesn't last much longer, I'm guessing. The whole royal family is taken prisoner. His son, Victor Henri, is executed along with all of the leading lights of his regime. But his wife, Marie-Louise, and his two daughters, Amethyst and Athenair, are sent into exile to Britain. And for a time, they actually lived with the abolitionist Thomas

Clarkson at his home in Suffolk. And they actually live in England for about four years before they decide, for I think understandable reasons, that the English weather is not very suitable for those who had grown up in the Caribbean. And they retire to Europe for a time. They join this sort of rather interesting circus of former royalty that seems to be rolling around Europe at the time. And eventually they settle in Italy. Tragically, Mary Louise's two daughters pre-deceaser. But Mary Louise dies in 1851. So she outlives her husband by 31 years, but she's never allowed to return to Haiti. She regularly asked permission of subsequent Haitian regimes for a passport to return, but she's never given permission to return. So she

dies in Pisa where she is buried haiti has had a very troubled history up to the present day but his legacy is profound i mean his family are still part of the kind of a haitian elite right yeah and he's known today as the great builder because as well as we've said he was this great administrator, he left behind probably the most visible monuments of Haitian independence. So a few months after Haiti declared itself independent, there was a plan essentially to fortify the interior and build fortresses on the mountaintops within. So if the French ever returned, the plan was to burn the towns and retreat to the interior and fight a guerrilla war. And Christophe has this incredible vision, and he builds what is now known as the Citadel Henri,

which is the largest fortress in the Americas. It's a UNESCO World Heritage Site. It's on the top of a mountain near Cap-Haïtien. It could garrison about 3,000 soldiers. The walls are five meters thick. It is a very advanced piece of military engineering. It was one of the most advanced fortresses built anywhere in the world at that time. He also built himself the Palace of Sanssouci, two and a half times the size of the White House,

an incredibly opulent building. This was looted in the aftermath of his regime and was reduced to a shell in an earthquake that hit northern Haiti in 1842. But these are really visible reminders of his achievements. So the people, particularly in the north of Haiti, still refer to Christophe as the great builder. So even though his legacy is slightly equivocal because he forced people to labor under regime he produced these great monuments of Haitian independence and that's something that Haitians still celebrate today Paul thanks so much man for coming on the pod and I know you've been to those amazing mountain fortresses you describe and you fired my passion I would absolutely love to get out

there and see that it was my first visit to the citadel Henri that really sent me on this path to finding out more of Christophe. It's an incredible place to visit. Thanks very much, Paul. What is the book called? The book is called Black Crown, Henri Christophe, the Haitian Revolution and the Caribbean's Forgotten Kingdom. Good luck with it.

Thanks for coming on. It's been a pleasure to chat to you, Dan. you