Two Revolutions, Two Killings
By Sean Wickham
A comparative study of the political executions of Charles I and Dessalines, exploring the mechanics of power, immediate outcomes, and the long arc of domestication.
The End of Divine Right:
On 30 January 1649, King Charles I of England was beheaded outside the Banqueting House at Whitehall after a public trial conducted by his own subjects. On 17 October 1806, Emperor Jean-Jacques Dessalines of Haiti was ambushed and killed by his own officers at Pont-Rouge, just outside Port-au-Prince, his body mutilated by the crowd that gathered afterward. Both men had led successful revolutions that defeated the prevailing political order, one against monarchical absolutism, the other against racial slavery and colonial rule. Both were killed less than three years after their revolutions reached their constitutional climax. Both were killed by people who had once fought beside them.
The Murder of a Founder:
The two killings differ as much as they overlap. Charles's death was a formal regicide, conducted under the legal authority of an act of parliament; Dessalines's was an ambush, conducted with no judicial pretense at all. Charles's death produced a cult of martyrdom and an eventual restoration of his son to the throne; Dessalines's was followed by his official erasure from Haitian state memory for nearly a century, and by France's diplomatic and economic punishment of Haiti for nearly two centuries. This site examines the two events as a paired study in revolutionary violence, and asks why one revolution was eventually folded into a European constitutional tradition while the other was punished for the radical thing it had done.