Slave. Revolutionary. King. Taken together, these words describe only one man: Henry Christophe I of Haiti. Born in 1767 to an enslaved mother on the island of Grenada, he first fought to overthrow the British in North America, before helping enslaved Africans in Saint-Domingue, as Haiti was then called, to gain freedom from slavery. After the Revolution, he offered to lead independent Haiti and became the country’s first and only king. But it all came to a sudden and tragic end when after only thirteen years of ruling, Haiti’s King Henry I shot himself in the heart, some say with a silver bullet.
Marlene L. Daut is the Chester D. Tripp Professor of Black Studies and French at Yale University and the author most recently of The First and Last King of Haiti: The Rise and Fall of Henry Christophe (Knopf, 2025), winner of the James Tait Black Prize in Biography and a finalist for the Cundill History Prize. She was recently awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship and will spend the academic year 2026-2027 as the John and Constance Birkelund Fellow at the Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers (NYPL).
This event is sponsored by the Department of French and Italian’s French Center of Excellence, which receives funding from French Cultural Services in the US and the Consulate General of France in Chicago. This series is also supported by the following Departments and Centers at Ohio State: Spanish and Portuguese, Slavic and Eastern European Languages and Literatures, Near Eastern and South Asian Languages, Germanic Languages and Literatures, History, Design, and the Humanities Institute.
