Henri Christophe

With Haiti in the news these days, I thought it might be appropriate to take a chapter from Richard Halliburton’s intriguing book,

Seven League Boots, and comment on the incredible Haitian dictator, Henri Christophe.  Halliburton himself was drawing heavily upon another book, W.W Harvey’s Sketches of Hayti from the Explusion of the French to the Death of Christophe.  

 In 1802, France’s prized possession, Haiti, rose in a slave rebellion.  Napoleon sent his crack armies to put down the rebellion, but they were defeated by disease, the locals, and a hostile British fleet.  After Jean Jacques Dessalines became emperor and was soon assassinated, the former slave and dishwasher, Henri Christophe, rose to power.

 Dictators.  “Absolute power, corrupts absolutely.”  The problem with concentrating supreme executive authority in one ruler is that he has no checks on his authority and faces constant threats to his legitimacy.  The ruler, faced with enemies real and imagined, has to ask himself not “am I paranoid”, but “am I paranoid enough?”  Any sign of compassion or mercy is a sign of weakness and an invitation to rebellion, either by his inner circle or by the people at large.  This dooms the rule of any would-be “enlightened despot”, as so imaginatively described in the Star Trek (Original Series) episode “Patterns of Force”, in which a well-meaning Earthman tried to set up a Nazi dictatorship without a Holocaust or Gestapo.  If erring on the side of weakness could be fatal, this turns the dictator to the other extreme, ruthlessness, which provokes hatred and opposition, which in turn requires even more oppression to subdue – a vicious cycle. Oderint dum metuant, (let them hate me, so long as they fear me) was the famous quote of the Roman dictator Caligula.  The Bolsheviks understood this, which is why they terrorized the peasants and workers with Cheka; and later on, in the late 80s, the East German and eventually the Soviet dictatorships unraveled exponentially as various reforms snowballed.  And it was the same in the early 19^th century.  Henri Christophe understood this perfectly.

 It didn’t help that he was a man with grandiose designs, ambitions, and ego, with no inclination to be gentle, merciful or compassionate even to his own people, much less his former masters.  He ruled with an iron hand, shooting anyone accused of loafing.  He built a lavish chateau, finer than any in Europe, which he named Sans Souci.  He assembled a court, and hired American ladies to teach his daughters social graces.  He encouraged the population to procreate to increase the labor force.  Whatever form of exploitation and excess a megalomaniac ruler can use, Christophe was determined to take full advantage of the trappings of power.

 Finally, Christophe built a huge fortress which he designed – and expected – to be an impregnable redoubt against which all opposing forces, domestic or foreign, would smash themselves ineffectually.  He ruthlessly drove his people, armies of workers, to produce this gargantuan fortress, which took years to complete.  It was right out of the Bible and Ramses II’ pyramid work projects, slaves driven to death for his egotistical monument.

 In 1820, however, he suffered a stroke after witnessing the ghost of a priest he had murdered.  When his people learned of his paralysis, they rose in rebellion, no longer restrained by an army which no longer obeyed his orders.  An angry mob surrounded his chateau, and faced with the will of the people, fearful of being torn apart alive by the vicious mob, Henri Christophe took his own life with a silver-mounted pistol, shooting himself through the heart.  His wife Marie-Louise dunked his corpse into a vat of liquid lime to prevent it from being desecrated by the angry mob.  And Haiti yet again descended into anarchy…