The Assassination of Dessalines
On 17 October 1806, Emperor Jacques I of Haiti — born Jean-Jacques Dessalines, founder of the Haitian state, victor at Vertières, the man who had declared Haitian independence on 1 January 1804 — was ambushed and shot dead by his own officers at Pont-Rouge, just north of Port-au-Prince. His body was dismembered by the crowd that gathered. The remains were collected from the dust of the road by a woman known to history as Défilée la Folle (Dédée Bazile), who buried them at her own expense. He had been emperor for less than two years.
When Dessalines proclaimed Haitian independence on 1 January 1804 he became governor-general of the new state. In September 1804 he had himself crowned emperor as Jacques I, modeled in part on Napoleon's recent self-coronation in France. On 20 May 1805 he promulgated an Imperial Constitution that confirmed the abolition of slavery, declared the equality of all Haitians "under the generic appellation of Black" regardless of skin color, prohibited any white person from owning property in Haiti, and concentrated executive authority in the person of the emperor. The constitution also reaffirmed the post-independence massacre of the remaining French planter population, which Dessalines had ordered between February and April 1804.
Dessalines's domestic project was the rapid restoration of Haiti's plantation export economy under a militarized labor regime, the caporalisme agraire system, which required cultivators to remain on the land producing sugar and coffee for export. The system was less brutal than slavery but fell far short of what the formerly enslaved had expected from independence; many felt themselves to be working under conditions that uncomfortably resembled the old regime they had fought to destroy. The light-skinned (gens de couleur libres) elite, who occupied many of the educated administrative posts in Dessalines's government, also saw their interests threatened by his attempts to redistribute land seized from white planters. By the summer of 1806 a coalition of disaffected officers, including Alexandre Pétion in the south and Étienne-Élie Gérin, had concluded that Dessalines had to be removed.
The Conspiracy and the Ambush
An insurrection broke out in the south in August 1806. On 16 October Dessalines left Marchand for Port-au-Prince intending to crush the rebels personally. On the morning of 17 October he was riding north of the capital, en route to engage the southern rebels, when his escort — turned by the conspirators — opened fire on him at Pont-Rouge (then called Pont Larnage). He was shot multiple times. Once he was dead, a crowd of soldiers and civilians dismembered his body with bayonets and sabers; pieces were paraded through Port-au-Prince. The exact circumstances of the killing remain disputed by historians. Some accounts place his death at Pétion's house in the city after a meeting to negotiate the future of the state; the dominant account places the killing in the open at Pont-Rouge.
The assassination did not produce a unified successor regime. By early 1807 Haiti had split in two: Pétion proclaimed a Republic in the south, with himself as president; Christophe withdrew to the north and established the State (later Kingdom) of Haiti, with himself as president and then king. The two states would remain separate, sometimes in open warfare, until Pétion's death in 1818 and Christophe's suicide in 1820, after which Pétion's successor Jean-Pierre Boyer reunified the country in 1820. The Pétion-Christophe split that followed the assassination is generally taken by historians as the origin of the regional and class divisions that have shaped Haitian politics ever since.
Dessalines himself was largely erased from official Haitian state memory for nearly a century. The republican governments of Pétion and Boyer, dominated by the lighter-skinned elite who had organized the assassination, had no interest in commemorating an emperor whose project they had violently rejected. It was only with the centenary of Haitian independence in 1904 that Dessalines was rehabilitated as a national founder; the new national anthem, La Dessalinienne, dates from 1903. Today, 17 October is a public holiday in Haiti.
"Let us swear to fight to the last breath for the independence of our country"
— Jean-Jacques Dessalines