October 17, 1806: Dessalines, founder of Haiti, gunned down at Pont-Rouge by his own generals

On October 17, 1806, Jean-Jacques Dessalines, founder of the world's first independent Black state, was gunned down at Pont-Rouge, north of Port-au-Prince, by officers from his own army. Two and a half years earlier, in Gonaïves on January 1, 1804, this former slave had proclaimed Haiti's independence and restored the island's Amerindian name. It has been 220 years since his death.

Historians do not agree on his birthplace. The Encyclopædia Universalis places his birth around 1758 in West Africa, in present-day Guinea, before his deportation to Saint-Domingue; other encyclopedic entries place it on the Cormier plantation, near Grande-Rivière-du-Nord, within the colony itself.

Vertières, then the Empire

An enslaved person until 1791, Dessalines joined the revolt in the North, became a lieutenant to Toussaint Louverture, and then rose up against France when Bonaparte attempted to re-establish slavery. In November 1803, he crushed General Rochambeau at Vertières, and the French army evacuated the island. Proclaimed emperor under the name Jacques I in September 1804, he signed the Constitution of May 20, 1805, which prohibited land ownership by white people.

His power had its dark sides: he maintained forced labor on the plantations, and his reign was marked by the massacres of white colonists in 1804, which historian Philippe Girard estimates resulted in between 3,000 and 5,000 victims.

A plot by his own generals

In the summer of 1806, an insurrection began in the South. The government had just decided on land reform to benefit landless former slaves, which clashed with the interests of officers who had become landowners. Alexandre Pétion, Étienne-Élie Gérin, and Jean-Pierre Boyer are among the conspirators cited. The role of Henri Christophe, like the exact sequence of the murder, remains debated; it rests primarily on the fact that he took the head of the government afterward. The mutilated body was recovered by Dédée Bazile, known as Défilée, who had him buried.

Independence fined

The Empire was immediately abolished and the country divided: Pétion in the South, Christophe in the North. Nineteen years later, the ordinance of Charles X on April 17, 1825, imposed 150 million gold francs on Haiti to compensate former colonists for the loss of their land and their slaves, with the French fleet patrolling offshore. According to the Senegalese daily Le Soleil, the final interest payments were made in 1952, and a New York Times investigation estimates the total cost at between 21 and 115 billion dollars. In 2025, Emmanuel Macron acknowledged an "initial injustice."

Key takeaways

Haiti won its independence by force of arms, then paid for it twice: in 1806 with the assassination of its founder, and in 1825 with a debt imposed under the threat of cannons. The question of reparations remains open.