In a declaration marking the bicentenary this month of the 1825 recognition by France of the independence of Haiti, when it demanded a crippling ransom in return, which remains a major grievance for the Caribbean country, French President Emmanuel Macron pledged to look at this episode of history “in the face” and announced the creation of a “mixed Franco-Haitian commission tasked with examining our common past” and which is to provide both governments with “recommendations”.
But in his statement on April 17th, a moment long awaited for by the authorities in the Haitian capital Port-au-Prince, the French president studiously avoided any specific commitment to paying reparations to Haiti for the debt imposed upon it by France and which many historians argue is the root cause of decades of economic and social collapse.
Modern-day Haiti became a French colony in 1697, when Spain ceded the western third of the island of Hispaniola. France named the territory as Saint-Domingue, and it became the most profitable of its many colonies, a major producer of cotton, sugar and coffee from the plantations managed by French settlers and worked on by slaves brought from West Africa.
Beginning in 1791, the majority slave population, estimated at between 500,000 and 700,000, began a revolt which snowballed into a bloody revolution that led to the defeat of the French military under Napoleon Bonaparte’s command, and to the creation of an independent country of self-emancipated slaves, Haiti, in 1804.
It was only on April 17th 1825 that French king Charles X formally recognized the independence of Haiti, but only on several conditions. The most notable of these was the payment to France of 150 million “golden francs” which, in the words of the treaty, were “destined to compensate the former colonial settlers” for their losses. It was, in effect, a ransom demand, made under threat of invasion by a heavily armed French fleet dispatched to the region.
The indemnity payment imposed on the new Caribbean state became known as a “double-debt” because Haiti was obliged to borrow from banks, mostly French, on a massive scale and the repayments on these plus interest represented the vast majority of Haiti’s public spending, well into the 20th century. In a report published last week on the double-debt, Amnesty International highlighted that in 1900, repayment of the French ransom represented 80% of Haiti’s public budget.
A report entitled ‘Haiti’s double-debt’ published earlier this year by the Paris-based Fondation pour la mémoire de l’esclavage (Foundation for the remembrance of slavery), chaired by former French prime minister Jean-Marc Ayrault, underlined that this was “an indemnity which former slaves must alone pay their former masters and oppressors despite having defeated them”. The foundation describes the 1825 treaty as the moment when “colonialisation through slavery” tipped into “economic neo-colonialisation”.
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The argument today for the payment by France of reparations to Haiti centres on the fact that the debt burden for the Caribbean state prevented its economic development. A series of investigations into Haiti’s accumulated interest payments to French banks, published by The New York Times, estimates that had the sum of those payments – which it calculated at 560 million dollars in 2022 terms – remained in Haiti and were used for investment it would have by now contributed between 21 billion-115 billion US dollars in economic growth.
“This debt, as well as the colonialism and slavery that preceded it, has still today terrible consequences on the political, social, economic, humanitarian, and human rights situation in the country,” commented Anne Savinel Barras, head of Amnesty International France, in its report on the double-debt issue published last week.
Now with a population of almost 12 million, nearly one third of whom live on average with less than 2.15 US dollars per day, Haiti, reports the World Bank, “remains the poorest country in Latin America and the Caribbean and among the poorest countries in the world”. Most of Port-au-Prince is under the control of rampant criminal gangs, and last year more than 5,500 people died in gang-related violence in the country, contributing to the massive displacement of local populations who, according to the International Organization for Migration, totalled more than one million people in 2024. The country is governed by a transitional council because it has been unable to organise presidential elections since 2021.
France has never recognised its responsibility in the economic and accompanying social and political crises in Haiti, nor responded to the increasing demands by the country for reparations.
Jean-Marc Ayrault, chair of the Fondation pour la mémoire de l’esclavage, described Macron’s declaration last Thursday as “an important step that carries hope for the future”, adding: “It’s about knowing the truth about a story that is extraordinarily little-known.”
“Who knows the story of this debt?” he asked. “Who knows that the French banks which dealt money to Haiti enriched themselves? Not many.”
Following the 2022 investigations by The New York Times, the foundation made the Haiti double-debt controversy one of its main working projects, and saw in Macron’s speech last week the proof that it had been heard on the issue. But at a symposium organised by the foundation last Thursday evening, not everyone shared Ayrault’s optimism. French historian Myriam Cottias, who took part in the 2003 “Debray commission” to advise France’s foreign ministry on the country’s relations with Haiti (see box further below), dismissed Macron’s declaration as being “totally limp, which says very little, and which above all doesn’t name the problems”.
Macron was careful not to explicitly recognise the responsibility of France in Haiti’s dire financial situation, preferring to use phrases like “the unjust force of history”, and “the forces of the counter revolution in movement since 1814, [Editor’s note: the return of the House of Bourbon monarchy after the fall of Napoleon Bonaparte] the restoration of the Bourbons and the monarchy [which] decided differently on the writing of history”.
Speaking to Mediapart, Myriam Cottias said she found it “delightful that all responsibility be placed on the monarchy and the counter-revolution. As if the Haitian indemnity had not continued to be received by the [French] Republic [Editor’s note: on its return later in the 19th century]. It seems a bit hasty to place responsibility on the royalty, and to put the Republic in the clear”.
For Jean-Marie Théodat, a geographer and lecturer with the Université Panthéon-Sorbonne University and a professor with the Haiti State University, Macron’s declaration was “on the right path, but it’s certainly not sufficient”.
“What we can observe for the moment is that after 200 years of bilateral relations, Haiti has become considerably impoverished, and that this impoverishment has essentially benefited France through the ‘ransom’ of 1825.”
Also taking part in the foundation’s symposium last Thursday was Mackendie Toupuissant, honorary president of the Platform of Franco-Haitians Associations, who spoke of his “great disappointment” over Macron’s speech. “The catastrophic situation in Haiti does not allow for waiting for the results of a commission, while Haiti’s debt is already widely documented.”
“That the president speaks on the day of the bicentenary is a good thing,” said historian Mathilde Ackermann-Koenigs, the author of a thesis about the former French settlers who benefited from the indemnity paid out by Haiti, speaking on the sidelines of the symposium. “It sheds light on the event. But work is already underway, and the Fondation pour la mémoire de l’esclavage has recently made important propositions in its report.”
“Haiti is asking for the restitution of money, while France talks of creating a commission to reflect on the issue,” she added. “We still have two very different dynamics on the one side and the other.”
The declaration released by the Élysée Palace makes no mention of a precise calendar for the workings of the future commission, nor does it mention the involvement of Haitian civil society.
Louino Volcy, Haiti’s chargé d’affaires in France (filling in for the post of ambassador), was also at the symposium. “The injustices that stem from the imposition of the 1825 indemnity can no longer be a taboo issue,” he said. “And Haiti must not be overlooked in the French national memory. Do the current generations know that Haiti was the most profitable among French colonies?”
The commission announced by Macron will be co-chaired by French diplomat Yves Saint-Geours and the Haitian historian Gusti-Klara Gaillard-Pourchet, whose authoritative works about the imposition of the Haitian debt and its subsequent history will no doubt lend credit to the eventual conclusions of the commission.
While Macron last week avoided mentioning the uncomfortable subject of the enrichment of French banks through their loans to Haiti, Ayrault was optimistic that the issue will be examined. “I wrote this week to the director of the Caisse des dépôts et consignations [Editor’s note: the ‘Deposits and consigments fund’, the French state’s investment arm],” said Ayrault last Thursday evening. “I believe the time has come for [the banks] to join in this approach.” He cited the example of the mea culpa and apologies of the Dutch central bank (DNB) in 2022 for its involvement in the 19th-century slave trade.
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- The original French version of this report can be found here.
English version by Graham Tearse