36 pages • 1 hour read
Alejo CarpentierThe Kingdom Of This World
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 1949A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Part 3, Chapters 5-7Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Part 3, Chapter 5 Summary: “Chronicle of August Fifteenth”
This chapter opens on a church service attended by King Henri Christophe and Queen Marie-Louise. Christophe is contemplating the likelihood that his subjects are “sticking his images with pins” when the new archbishop suddenly collapses (92). He believes he sees the dead archbishop at the stained-glass windows and that he hears a drumbeat. The king falls ill, and his attendants pray to the Christian god. A drumbeat seems to sound from the mountains.
Part 3, Chapter 6 Summary: “Ultima Ratio Regum”
A week later, the king is still ill, and the atmosphere in Haiti is festive, with men and women drinking and laughing in the streets. The military bands begin playing their drums with their hands, and all the guards leave the palace. Christophe wanders the deserted palace while his wife and daughters weep. The only followers left are his five pages, “the Royal Bonbons” (98), whom he purchased from Africa. Christophe realizes he erred in rejecting Vodou: the “true traitors” were Christian saints. Fire breaks out in the palace, and Christophe attempts to die by suicide.
Part 3, Chapter 7 Summary: “The Only Gate”
The pages carry the dying king to the Citadel. Looters storm the palace. The governor of the Citadel learns what has transpired. A prisoner suggests that the queen should be decapitated, but confusion sets in, and men flee the Citadel. The governor cuts a pinkie off Cristophe’s now-dead corpse and gives it to the queen. Then he places the body into a mound of mortar, entombing it.
Part 3, Chapters 5-7 Analysis
These chapters show the swift downfall of Christophe’s regime, which is much swifter than the fall of enslavement in Haiti. While the white enslavers can wrest dominance back even after plagues, Henri Christophe is immediately abandoned by everyone except his family and his five pages. It is of particular significance that these five pages are enslaved people Christophe himself purchased from Africa; they have not experienced racism or revolution and consequently do not see the continuities between Christophe’s rule and that of the white enslavers.
Previously, poison and disease have twice plagued the ruling population. Here again, a plague seems to affect only the rulers, leaving the common men and women to party and plan. Also as before, the theme of Catholicism Versus Vodou is key to the unfolding rebellion. Christophe suspects his subjects are using supernatural methods—dolls stuck with pins—to topple his regime, but he responds by doubling down on the religion of the enslavers even as the new archbishop collapses. Christophe’s realization of his mistake comes too late, with the manner of his death underscoring his ties to Catholicism. Christophe entombed his former archbishop alive as a form of punishment; although Christophe dies by suicide, he is similarly entombed.
Christophe’s tomb is also one of several prisons in the text that mirror the bondage of enslavement. While Christophe thinks he can get away with his abuses because he is a Black king, the fact that he is of the same race as his subjects deepens resentment both because it reads as a betrayal and because it exposes the absurdity and injustice of one human “owning” another. Christophe cannot even rationalize his actions with recourse to pseudoscientific theories of race, so it becomes clearer than ever that the enslaver’s relationship to the enslaved person is one of pure brute force.
