Faustin Soulouque Proclaims Himself Emperor of Haiti (1849)

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Haiti won its independence from France in 1804 because of the Haitian Revolution. The Haitian Revolution, which was partly an outgrowth of the French Revolution, began with a slave revolt in northern Haiti in the summer of 1791.

This revolt led the Revolutionary French government to abolish slavery so as to win over the rebel slaves. But when Napoleon Bonaparte tried to re-establish slavery in Haiti (then called Saint-Domingue) in 1802, the Haitians defeated the French army and proclaimed their independence.

The Haitian Revolution led to the rise of well-known Haitian military and political leaders like Toussaint Louverture, Jean-Jacques Dessalines, and Henri Christophe.

After Haiti won its independence it found itself a pariah in the Atlantic World. The nations around it, which all sanctioned and practiced slavery, were not eager to recognize a country created by freed slaves in a bloody revolution.

Haiti also faced internal divisions. In French colonial Saint-Domingue, the black slaves had been legally and socially separated from the mixed-race free “mulattoes” or “people of color”. Because they were not enslaved the lighter skinned mixed-race people had more opportunities to accumulate wealth, and obtain educations than the enslaved majority.

During the Haitian Revolution, the division between these two groups were submerged underneath their common struggle for independence from the French, whose forces carried out quite a lot of racially-inspired massacres of both black and mixed-race people.

But in the political conflicts that followed independence the old divisions began to re-emerge. Dessalines, who crowned himself emperor soon after independence, was assassinated in 1806. After his death the country split in two. A northern kingdom was ruled by the black king Henri Christophe, even as a southern republic was ruled by mixed-race president Alexandre Petion

After Christophe’s death, Haiti was reunited under Petion’s successor, another mixed-race man named Jean-Pierre Boyer. Boyer ruled from 1818 to 1843. After Boyer was overthrown, Haiti descended into political instability. Among the heads of state that followed did not remain in office for a couple of or two years, and there were several coups.

The instability would continue for a number of the 19th century, until the American occupation began in 1915. It was right through this period that the “politique de doublure” was practiced. The “politique de doublure” involved the light-skinned economic elite nominating a black puppet politician as the head of state to look out for their interests even as also appealing to the black majority.

It was under this system than a black military man named Faustin Soulouque became president. Soulouque had been born into slavery around the beginning of the Haitian Revolution. When he was nominated for the position of president by the mulatto elite, he was seen as an inoffensive and pliable puppet.

But once Soulouque became president, he turned on his patrons, ordering the massacre of families in the mixed-race elite. He went on to crown himself emperor of Haiti, adopting the name Faustin I. Soulouque’s 1849 coronation preceded that of France’s emperor Napoleon III in 1852. The opponents of Napoleon III in France mocked him by saying that he was imitating Soulouque.

“Faustin Soulouque Proclaims Himself Emperor of Haiti (1849)” contains English-language translations of one of the documents issued by the Haitian government proclaiming Soulouque‘s coronation. It is also a description of the coronation ceremony.

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