By Miriam Franchina
Mix a fascination for Haitian history with an overdose of pandemic-induced Internet searching, flavor it with the postdoctoral angst of a project born under the ominous star of Covid-19, and then add a myriad of helping hands from across the globe. That is how the idea for a memorial commemoration for Marie-Louise Christophe, Queen of Haiti (1811-1820), came about sometime in late 2020.[1] The thought became reality on April 23, 2023, when two historical markers were unveiled in Pisa, the Italian city where the Queen and her daughters relocated to in 1824 and where they are interred. The event was never a one-person initiative, not even at its inception. A big inspiration came from the blue plaques dedicated to Marie-Louise in England, where she had lived before moving to Italy.[2] I initially scoffed at commemorating yet another crowned head, but Haitians in Italy – led by the non-governmental association Fraternità Haitiana – enthusiastically embraced the project to celebrate their heritage and Haiti’s fight for freedom through the Queen. They dubbed the initiative, “Je renais de mes cendres.” (“I rise from my ashes.”) This motto was on the Christophe family’s royal coat of arms and resonates deeply with the Haitian diaspora in Italy.
About 70 of the approximately 300 recorded Haitian residents of Italy[3] – alongside some who traveled from France, Quebec, and Haiti – reached Pisa on April 23 to celebrate Marie-Louise whom they see as their ancestor. The only Queen of independent Haiti made Italy her second home but never forgot her homeland. In her later years, Marie-Louise requested a passport to return to Haiti, and her will stated that “she never wanted to abandon Cap-Haïtien.”[4] For Fraternità’s president Monette Etienne, the celebration was a message of hope for and by Haitians. Just as the Queen survived the ashes of burned sugar plantations during the Haitian Revolution, so too should Haiti rise from its current political difficulties. The Association wanted to center the cultural event around a woman who is usually little-known to suggest that women may have a prominent role to play in shaping a future of hope for Haiti. The Haitian organizers, for instance, imagined that Marie-Louise was possibly instrumental in encouraging the 1818 edict that promoted education for boys and girls.[5] The history of women in the Haitian Revolution is difficult to reconstruct given the slim archival record. After the civil turmoil that led to her husband’s suicide and the proclamation of the republic, Marie-Louise left Haiti. Accompanied by her two daughters, princesses Anne-Athénaïre and Françoise-Améthyste, and the maid Sabine Zéphyrin, she first landed in England.[6] In 1824, Marie-Louise crossed Europe by land and eventually arrived in Pisa. Despite hiring various Italian domestics and cooks (and possibly a “Black servant from Pisa”) over time, the Christophes never parted ways with Zéphyrin after she joined their household in Haiti.[7] The historical markers in Pisa made a point of not neglecting this maid, to remember how this tight-knit group of Haitian women stood together through exile and personal loss.
Why Marie-Louise opted for Pisa remains one of historians’ many unanswered questions. At the time, the Grand Duchy of Tuscany welcomed refugees from across Europe and the political spectrum – despite its overall alignment with the Restoration provisions and with the dynastically-related Habsburg Empire. The sunny strolls and thermal baths with purported health benefits may have been only part of the Queen’s choice. The Christophes valued their privacy (to the dismay of historians in search of clues[8]) but also savvily moved within high society. Such high-profile networking may explain why the maid Zéphyrin, the last of the Haitian women to die in Italy, had a prominent Tuscan banker commission her funerary tomb despite her humble social standing.[9] Marie-Louise’s last residence, now marked by a panel, was located a minute walk away from that of Leopold II, the Grand Duke of Tuscany.[10] He resided in Pisa for half of the year and attended mass at the nearby church of San Nicola, just like Marie-Louise, who may have preferred Catholic Tuscany over a Protestant place like England. King Henry I of Haiti had sought diplomatic recognition from various European states, including openings with Austria’s Habsburgs – dynastically related to Tuscany and without a formal empire in the Atlantic. Finally, Tuscany had a free port connected to the Atlantic (Livorno).
Marie-Louise appears to have been a devout Catholic, to the point of obtaining permission from the pope – via the archbishop of Pisa – to host mass at her residence.[11] She spoke Italian; her daughters also wrote it (as they did English).[12] Catholicism would have functioned as an added language that the Christophes shared with the locals in Pisa and something that reminded them of their homeland. The Queen, for instance, had her family funerary chapel built in a church that belonged to the Capuchin order – San Donnino, where a further marker was installed. Being from northern Haiti, she presumably mostly interacted with missionaries from this order during the colonial and revolutionary times; and a Capuchin crowned her in 1811.[13]
The Christophes’ public display of Catholicism in Pisa included donations and their high-ranking networks set them apart from the enslaved Africans who arrived in Tuscany via Livorno. Nevertheless, in nineteenth-century Italy, Marie-Louise’s skin color presumably trumped the blue of her royal blood and did not make it easy for her to find immediate acceptance. The Christophes were referred to as “more” (Moors), a word that indicated Muslims from North Africa and increasingly described also enslaved Africans from South of the Sahara.[14] The markers unveiled in Pisa deliberately avoided including the fraught term not to perpetuate the self-indulgent Italian amnesia of its colonial and racist past. The memorial day chose to celebrate Tuscany as a safe harbor for (prominent) political exiles. However, Italy should go beyond this initial celebration and engage in deeper self-reflection regarding its involvement in the interconnected Mediterranean and Atlantic slave trades, as well as its role in fostering racist policies – as called for by an expanding community of researchers and activists.[15]
Monument of the 4 Moors in Livorno and a detail.
Marie-Louise’s time in Pisa, from 1824 until her passing in 1851, coincided with Haiti’s reiterated negotiations for a concordat with Rome, which was eventually achieved in 1860[16]. It was her husband, King Henry I, who had first sought formal recognition for Haiti from the Holy See and demanded that local clergymen – thus men of African descent – be ordained.[17] Marie-Louise’s rumored visit to the Pope remains so far unsubstantiated by historical evidence, but she might have had a subtle political role to play given her proximity – geographical and relational – to local Catholic powerhouses. When they joined the Confraternity of the Misericordia to help the needy, the Christophes possibly reenacted on smaller scale the role that the Queen had presented in Haiti as a caring mother of the nation. There, the ten-day fête de la Reine celebrated annually on Marie-Louise’s saint patrons’ days was part of a complex agenda to fashion the newborn nation alongside canons recognizable to the international community.[18]
Catholicism is thus non-incidentally something that many of the Haitians who participated in the memorial day saw as a potential bridge to foster intercultural communication with Italians.[19] And although the Catholic Church endorsed the slave trade during the colonial period and the persecution of Vodou in independent Haiti, some Haitian priests celebrated in Pisa a Requiem Mass that honored Marie-Louise as an exemplary Catholic, mother, and queen consort. This description may be beyond historical accuracy but served to reflect the profound emotion of the bystanders in remembering their ancestor and former head of state. For the Haitian community gathered in Pisa, such description broke the persistent silence around their national history and culture in Italy and may prompt dialogue.
Several scholars are now increasingly receptive to framing Italian nation-making within the global Age of Revolutions, and Marie-Louise was part of that history.[20] By her mere existence, the Queen embodied resilience and served as a constant reminder of the fragile nature of the Restoration. She came from Haiti, the country that by proclaiming and preserving its independence defied the international order decided on by European powers at Vienna in 1815. From Pisa, the Queen must have witnessed the numerous insurrections of the early Risorgimento that, disregarding those same Vienna provisions, would eventually lead to a united Italy.[21] Whenever she enjoyed a trip to Lake Maggiore, Marie-Louise frequented Italian patriots of Catholic leanings.[22] Would she join their discussions about shaping the prospective nation and share her own token of experience? The archival record has remained hitherto silent.
Poor health and advanced age prevented Marie-Louise from returning to her beloved island. However, other factors might also have contributed. Haiti experienced turmoil from the late 1830s onward and became an empire with a new dynasty in 1849. Near the end of her life in 1851, Marie-Louise witnessed the proclamation of a (fleeting) republic, this time in Tuscany. Her port of departure would have been Livorno, which was blocked by Austrian troops that suppressed patriotic uprisings in support of the ousted Grand Duke.
While scholars seek answers or at least clues, the markers in Pisa engraved a piece of Haitian history into the city’s fabric and will hopefully pique the interest of residents and tourists alike. Adding the Queen to the long list of notable people who made Pisa their home was an important motive for the local tourism bureau to support the memorial day. However, I am not as confident that the alleged nineteenth-century hospitality applauded at the memorial is today flourishing in Italy, where national identity is increasingly defined through exclusionary and restrictive categories. The date of the memorial was determined by the prosaic needs of the city’s electoral campaign and several bureaucratic hurdles. But it happened to coincide with ongoing debates over the significance of April 25th, the day when Italians commemorate the liberation from Nazism and Fascism in 1945, and thus the end, at least by law, of racial discrimination.[23] While Haiti was being saluted in Pisa for introducing the first constitution in the world to outlaw prejudice based on skin color, some members of the Italian government questioned the significance of Liberation. There was regrettably no time during the festive atmosphere of April 23rd to discuss the complex experiences of Haitians in Italy regarding racism and integration.
Instead, Fraternità and Haitians wished to celebrate Haiti as a proud, rich, and lively culture for Italians and people from various African diasporas to discover and Haitians to rekindle. Live coverage on Twitter inspired a Haitian friend in Berlin to talk about his roots with his German-Haitian children and seek out fellow Haitians in Germany. Some Italian families who adopted children from Haiti found gathered in Pisa a community that they did not know existed – small in numbers but with big ambitions. Fraternità plans to collaborate with Haitian institutions and diasporic associations to organize more events. Research and cultural promotion undertaken in Haiti sometimes have difficulties resonating abroad,[24] and Fraternità, as representative of the diasporic community, wishes to bridge these domestic efforts with audiences in the birthland of Christopher Columbus. Future initiatives will hopefully remind Italian public opinion that Columbus was the first to claim colonies on behalf of a European crown and to initiate the Atlantic slave trade. And he did so from the island that Haiti shares with the Dominican Republic.
Haitian history is not only a history of Haiti. It’s an American; it’s European, African, and global history. The markers in Pisa convey this by commemorating Marie-Louise not only as the first Queen of Haiti but especially as the first Queen in the Americas with African roots. US-based African American and Italy-based African associations donated significantly to support the initiative. Despite the constraints of limited space due to using multiple languages (Italian for regulation, English for visibility, and French over Kreyòl, amidst some internal divisions),[25] these markers encapsulate a revolutionary history while also representing the complexities of Marie-Louise’s later life. With Marie-Louise, the narration of the Haitian Revolution takes the shape of a woman who was never enslaved but joined and survived the most successful slave uprising in world history. She was revolutionary because Haiti, according to many in the same European countries that provided her with refuge, should never have existed – an independent country in the Americas led by Afro-descendants and where formerly enslaved Africans became free citizens. Marie-Louise, born to an African mother and a French father, embodied the contradictions of Haitian nation-building projects. When she survived the violent death of a son[26] and her husband and crossed the Atlantic in the opposite direction than that forced for centuries on thousands of enslaved Africans, she carried the memory of the Haitian Revolution with her. On April 23, 2023, some of her descendants walked the same streets she walked in Pisa to bring to life that same revolutionary memory and spark hope for the country she helped found.
Miriam Franchina received her Ph.D. from the University of Halle, Germany, with a dissertation on European intellectual history (Paul Rapin Thoyras and the Art of Eighteenth-Century Historiography, Oxford Studies in the Enlightenment, 2021). She is now a research fellow at the University of Trier, Germany, for the project “Religion, Slavery and Race in the Age of Revolutions: Catholicism from Colonial Saint-Domingue to Independent Haiti” funded by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft.
Title image: Image of unveiling, April 23, 2023. Author’s photo.
Further Readings:
Barsotti, Edoardo M. “Race and Risorgimento: An Unexplored Chapter of Italian History.” Journal of Modern Italian Studies, 25:3 (2020): 273-294.
Bonazza, Giulia. Abolitionism and the Persistence of Slavery in Italian States, 1750-1850. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2019.
Bonvini, Alessandro. “Patriots without Borders: Towards an Atlantic History of the Risorgimento during the Age of Revolutions.” Age of Revolutions, 2021. https://ageofrevolutions.com/2021/04/05/patriots-without-borders-towards-an-atlantic-history-of-the-risorgimento-during-the-age-of-revolutions/ .
Clammer, Paul. Black Crown: Henry Christophe, the Haitian Revolution and the Caribbean’s Forgotten Kingdom. La Vergne: Hurst Publishers, 2023.
Clorméus, Lewis A. État, religions et politique en Haïti (XVIIIe-XXIe s.). Paris: Karthala. 2014.
Daut, Marlene. “The King of Haiti’s Dream.” AEON (2020). https://aeon.co/essays/the-king-of-haiti-and-the-dilemmas-of-freedom-in-a-colonised-world.
Franchina, Miriam. “Atlantic Ripples in the Mediterranean: Early Nineteenth-Century Patriotic Readings of Haiti in the Italian Peninsula.” Atlantic Studies, 18:2 (2021): 172-192.
Isabella, Maurizio. Southern Europe in the Age of Revolutions. Princeton University Press, Princeton, 2023
Gaffield, Julia. “The Racialization of International Law after the Haitian Revolution: The Holy See and National Sovereignty.” The American Historical Review, 125:3 (2020): 841–868.
Hawthorne, Camilla A. Contesting Race and Citizenship: Youth Politics in the Black Mediterranean. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2022.
Hurbon, Laennec. Religions et lien social. L’Eglise et l’Etat moderne en Haïti. Paris: Cerf, 2004.
Willson, Nicole. “A Haitian Queen in Georgian Britain.” History Today, 72:6 (2022).
Endnotes:
[1] This essay is a personal reflection by one of the organizers. For more details and complete acknowledgments, check the official website and Twitter account of the memorial day and an article by Le Nouvelliste. A personal thanks from my side goes out to Marlene Daut, Louinel Estimable, Bodeler Julien, Megan Maruschke, Alessandro Panajia, Grégory Pierrot, Jésus Ruiz, Alyssa Sepinwall, Marie-Lucie Vendryes, and Nicole Willson. Please note that Fraternità Haitiana is still collecting donations via PayPal to cover the expenses incurred.
[2] On February 7, 2022, Nicole Willson and the Haitian Chamber of Commerce in Great Britain unveiled a Nubian Jak Community Trust blue heritage plaque at 49 Weymouth Street, London. Dr. Willson and Black Butterfly inaugurated a second plaque at 5 Exmouth Place, Hastings on October 3, 2022.
[3] The National Institute of Statistics counted 336 Haitian citizens resident in Italy in 2022.
[4] The will is nuncupative and dates to July 6, 1841, in Archivio di Stato di Firenze, Notarile moderno n. 33958, atto n. 105. The transcription of its English version is available at Fanm Rebèl. The Kingdom of Haiti extended to the North of Haiti, while the South established a Republic.
[5] In the Gazette Royale.
[6] Nicole Willson is researching the English period of Marie-Louise’s exile.
[7] Information on Marie-Louise’s household are in the “atti delle anime” held in different parish archives in Pisa (retrieved by the author with Alessandro Panajia). Zéphyrin’s name is variably spelled. The information on a servant “from Pisa” who was “Black but less than the Christophes” is found in a brief printed note taken from the catalogue of the Museo di Anatomia Umana Filippo Civinini, Pisa. I am thankful to Gianfranco Natale for sharing the note with me. The first document to officially record Marie-Louise in Pisa is the 1828 Nota delle famiglie forestiere di distinzione, found in Archivio di Stato di Pisa by Alessandro Panajia.
[8] See the works by Marie-Lucie Vendryes, Marie-Louise, veuve Henry Christophe (2022), available directly from the author at: joellevendryes@hotmail.com; and Alessandro Panajia, Da Haiti al bel teatro dell’Arno pisano. L’amara vicenda umana di Marie-Louise Christophe Coidavid (2023), available from the publisher at: amministrazione@edizioniets.com.
[9] The transcription of the tombstone inscription by the banker Agostino Kotzian is available here at p. 371.
[10] The Grand Duke’s palace was at Lungarno Antonio Pacinotti, 46; and the Queen’s residence was at piazza Carrara, 13. The church of San Nicola is at via Santa Maria, 2.
[11] Request dated 23.01.1827, in Archivio Storico de Propaganda Fide, Lettere, decreti, biglietti, vol. 308 anno 1827, f. 41rv. It was not unusual for nobles to receive such permission as a sign of their devotion and high-status.
[12] See Marie-Louise’s will and a letter in Italian by Anne-Athenaïre to Mons. Bonfigli, Sept. 4, 1831, NY Public Library, Jean Blackwell Hutson Research and Reference Division.
[13] On Capuchins’ missionary methods and slavery, see Miriam Franchina, “’Effacés du nombre des Chrétiens’: Reading Enslaved Agency through the Sacrament of Confession in the 18th-Century French Caribbean.” Cristianesimo nella Storia 3 (2021): 855–898., and Justine Walden, “Capuchins, Missionaries, and Slave Trading in Precolonial Kongo-Angola, West Central Africa (17th Century.” Journal of Early Modern History 26 (2022): 38–58.
[14] Giulia Bonazza, “Collective and Individual Experiences of Slaves in Leghorn, Pisa and Florence, 1702-1826,” Esclavages & Post-esclavages 7 (2022).
[15]See, for example: the projects Decolonizing Italian Visual and Material Culture, Postcolonial Italy, the Recovery Plan/Black History Month Florence; the map by WuMing; the conferences Italy’s Decolonization: Multidirectional Memories of Empire’s End and People of Colour in the Mediterranean and the Atlantic; and the new vision for the former colonial museum in Rome. See also: Giulia Bonazza, “La memoria della schiavitù in Europa e il caso italiano,” Memoria e Ricerca 3 (2021): 537-560.
[17] Julia Gaffield, “The Racialization of International Law after the Haitian Revolution: The Holy See and National Sovereignty.” The American Historical Review, 125:3 (2020): 841–868.
[18] Description of the fête from August 15 (the Assumption of Mary) to August 25 (Saint Louis) can be found on the Gazette Royale d’Haïti.
[19] Another way to find common cultural ground was a Haitian buffet that Fraternità offered to challenge Italians’ proverbial reticence to find any other cuisine worthy to compete with theirs.
[20] As signaled by the official support to the initiative given by the Comitato del Risorgimento e dell’Età delle Rivoluzioni, section of Pisa.
[21] In 1820-21 and 1830-31, many Italian states experienced revolutionary attempts that were part of a bigger wave of European and Mediterranean Revolutions. Tuscany was directly involved in the 1848 revolutions (also known as the first war of unification).
[22] She stayed in the northern city of Stresa (part of the Kingdom of Sardinia) at Anna Bolongaro’s villa, a gathering point for prominent Catholic-inspired Italian patriots. The Queen personally knew the most famous among them, Father Antonio Rosmini.
[23] As sanctioned in 1947 by the third article of the Republican constitution.
[24] See, for instance, the initiatives by Fondasyon Felicitée; and Tet ansamn pou okap & ville du Cap-Haïtien.
[25] Fraternità Haitiana eventually opted for French as the language spoken fluently by most Haitians in Italy and to enhance the visibility of the markers. Footage in Kreyòl was made available after the event to acknowledge the cultural importance of this language.
[26] Her eldest son, François-Ferdinand had been sent to France for education and died (possibly of abuses) in a local almshouse around age 10.
Age of Revolutions 