Henri Christophe, King of Haiti, was not such a ridiculous figure

In January 1804 the West Indian island of Saint-Domingue became the world’s first black republic after the slaves toiling in the sugar fields rose up against their French masters and, at the end of a 13-year insurgency, proclaimed independence. Saint-Domingue was renamed Haiti (an aboriginal Taino-Arawak Indian word meaning ‘mountainous land’) and the Haitian flag created when the white band was solemnly removed from the French tricolore. Haiti’s is the only successful slave revolt in recorded human history. It was led by Toussaint Louverture, a Haitian former slave himself and emblem of slavery’s hoped-for abolition throughout the Americas.

Thousands of French settler colonists were massacred during the Louverturian struggle. The prospect of a free black state founded on the murder of its white community horrified Napoleon. Saint-Domingue, ‘the pearl of the Antilles’, was too valuable a colony for the First Consul to lose. Ancien- régime France owed its maritime prosperity to commerce with its great Caribbean dependency, whose cane plantations produced more sugar than all the British West Indies together.

The new French republic could not flourish overseas unless slavery was reinstated, Napoleon reasoned. In the winter of 1801, in flagrant violation of the principles of the French Revolution, he organised an expedition to overthrow the upstart ‘gilded African’ Louverture and destroy the ‘new Algiers in the Caribbean’. Louverture was abducted from the bright exalting sunlight of the West Indies and shut away in a dungeon in the Jura mountains of France, where, in 1803, he died of pneumonia, aged 60. He did not live to see the proclamation of the Haitian republic after yellow fever had devastated the French armies and put paid to Napoleon’s dream of a New World empire in the Caribbean. (‘Damn sugar, damn coffee, damn the colonies!’ fumed the Corsican.)

The aftermath of these revolutionary convulsions is the subject of Paul Clammer’s superb life of King Henry Christophe I of Haiti, who rose to prominence under Louverture but went on to rule in a climate of titanic if not deranged grandeur.