Abandoning the documentary objectivity of Toussaint Louverture: la révolution française et le problème colonial, his history of the Haitian Revolution, Césaire brings to his play [La Tragédie du Roi Christophe] an altogether new attitude toward fact and fiction. He omits certain unflattering details about Christophe's past … in order to create an exemplary revolutionary hero at the outset. On the other hand, he leaves unmentioned the king's very positive achievements … while stressing only the destructive consequences of his acts and states of mind. This moral decline from absolute virtue to monstrosity furnishes the abruptness and excess typical of tragic theatre. Certain adjustments of historical fact and chronology permit Césaire to motivate his protagonist's early, critical choices simply and plausibly, while letting those choices develop under the pressures of particular fears infuses them with disastrous potential. Selecting episodes from history and legend with little heed to the distinctions between these two realms, the playwright exploits whatever material serves to body forth his political and social message with greater drama and theatricality than mere historicity could possibly afford. The poet and the historian in Césaire thus weld their respective disciplines in one of French America's finest literary expressions. (p. 21)

Aimé Césaire's idea of tragedy in La Tragédie du Roi Christophe is at least double, as are his philosophical aims. His main artistic problem, successfully solved in the play, is the intersection of two tragedies, one individual and the other collective. The two intermèdes, surprisingly neglected by the play's critics, hold the key to the failure of Christophe as a man and of the monarchy as a political event. As his spokesmen, Césaire chooses anonymous representatives of the people, the final arbiters of history. (p. 23)