1804: (The Physical Portrait and Vanity of the Emperor): Writing in 1819, the French author Charles Malo described Dessalines as small but powerfully built, …

1804: (The Physical Portrait and Vanity of the Emperor): Writing in 1819, the French author Charles Malo described Dessalines as small but powerfully built, active, and of a courage proven under every trial, whose authority derived principally from the terror he inspired rather than from affection. Malo noted that Dessalines occasionally showed himself to be open, affable, and even generous, but his vanity led him to conceive strange caprices — he loved embroidery and ornaments, sometimes dressing with great magnificence and at other times appearing in the most common costume. The Emperor harbored the pretension of being an accomplished dancer and traveled everywhere with a personal dance instructor who gave him lessons in his moments of leisure, making the most flattering compliment one could pay him that he danced well. (4) The historian Bellegarde added a description attributed to the French adjutant general Ramel, who observed that Dessalines’s face was hard and that when angered, blood rushed into his eyes and mouth, marking him as the terror of the noirs. This portrait of a man simultaneously vain, fearsome, and culturally aspirational captures the contradictions of the first ruler of the world’s first Black republic.