/ 12 January 2025

Haiti: The failed return of French domination

Henry Christophe
Henry Christophe

One hundred days.

That is how long Napoléon Bonaparte lasted after overthrowing Louis XVIII in March 1815 following the first Bourbon Restoration.

One hundred days.

That is how the French king lost France’s penultimate attempt to recover its erstwhile colony.

One hundred days alone stood between the uncertainty of Haiti’s eleven-year standoff with France and the Haitian king’s emergence as the triumphant victor against the greatest army the world thought it ever saw. Again. 

Yet the story of the king of Haiti’s first defeat of the Bourbon monarch and his attempt to reduce the Haitian people once more to slavery does not begin with the emperor Napoléon’s infamous one hundred days.

The story starts much earlier in April 1814, when the emperor of France was forced to abdicate his throne and then saw himself exiled, for the first time, to the island of Elba, and when the newly restored king of France, Louis XVIII, evidently having learned nothing from Napoléon’s ill-fated Leclerc expedition, began to prepare his own military fleet for a Saint-Domingue reconquest.

To understand France’s failure, we must begin with three French spies: Dravermann, Médina, and Dauxion-Lavaysse. Memorise these names, because they are the ones who would take the fall for the French king’s unconscionably arrogant dream of restoring his authority and slavery once more to “Saint-Domingue”. 

On June 28, 1814, not three months after the long since beheaded Louis XVI’s brothers benefited from England’s defeat of Napoléon, which sent him into exile on the island of Elba, the Kingdom of France, led by Louis XVIII, formally opened its mission to “restore Saint-Domingue”.

A former French colonist and planter from Saint-Domingue, Pierre-Victor, the Baron de Malouet, oversaw the mission. Previously dismissed by Napoléon for not supporting his incursion into Russia, Malouet was immediately rein-stated by Louis XVIII and appointed minister of the marine and colonies. 

Under the imprimatur of Louis XVIII, in June 1814 Malouet sent a letter to Agoustine Franco de Médina (of Santo Domingo), Jean-François Dauxion-Lavaysse (of Gascogne), and Herman Dravermann (of Bordeaux).

The missive directed the three men to travel to the Caribbean island of Jamaica, under British rule, and from there to form a plan to approach the two different rulers of Haiti.

Their mission was twofold: gain entry to either part of the island — the kingdom or the republic — to gather information that might be helpful for the planned military expedition. In the process the three needed to gauge the feelings of Haiti’s two rulers vis-à-vis the return of French authority. 

Malouet instructed Dravermann to travel to the southern republic to meet Borgella, Pétion’s second-in-command, while Dauxion-Lavaysse was meant to go with him to Port-au-Prince to appeal to Pétion.

The rulers of the southern republic were to be approached first because Malouet believed that both Pétion and Borgella remained open to the prospect of French return. Médina had the most dangerous mission of them all, one that he would end up paying for with his life.

Malouet instructed him to go to the northern part of the island, to the Kingdom of Haiti, and try to meet Christophe. 

This might have been a reasonable plan, if Christophe’s state-run newspapers were not printing constant diatribes against France, warning both the ex-colonists and the French government, under the pain of death, to never return to the island whose people they once forced into bondage. Only three months before Médina’s arrival in Cap-Henry, the Royal Gazette of Hayti gleefully announced that the emperor of France had at last been dethroned.

“The execrable Bonaparte, who vainly tried to exterminate us, has just succumbed to the united efforts of the allied powers … Europe has just broken his tyrannical yoke forever.”

Although the Haitian king expressed doubt about the politics of the French king with respect to Haiti, the same number of the Gazette issued a stern warning to all of France:

“If by a false and reckless policy, owing to absurd calculations, dictated by a sordid and rapacious interest, unjust aggressors once again come to defile our territory, by placing a hostile foot here; … [i]f our implacable enemies, the colonists, particularly, persist in their absurd and chimerical projects; if they do manage to entice the current government of France to wage an unjust, ruinous, and disastrous war against us … they will be the first to be sacrificed to our revenge …. 

“It is then that we will wage a war of extermination, and we will give no quarter, spare no prisoner,” the article finished.

Even if Médina, who previously fought under Toussaint Louverture and the French on the eastern side of the island, was not acquainted with Christophe, did he really imagine that after ten years of independence Haitians in his kingdom would once again consent to French domination? 

Adapted from The First and Last King of Haiti: The Rise and Fall of Henry Christophe © 2025 by Marlene L. Daut. Excerpted by permission of Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.

Marlene L Daut is professor of French, African American Studies and History at Yale University. She is the author of The First and Last King of Haiti: The Rise and Fall of Henry Christophe (Knopf, 2024); the award-winning Awakening the Ashes: An Intellectual History of the Haitian Revolution (UNC Press, 2023); Baron de Vastey and the Origins of Black Atlantic Humanism (Palgrave, 2017); and Tropics of Haiti: Race and the Literary History of the Haitian Revolution in the Atlantic World (Liverpool, 2015).

6 Replies to “Haiti: The failed return of French domination”

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