French President Emmanuel Macron on Thursday said a joint commission of French and Haitian historians would investigate the legacy of the “heavy price” Haiti was made to pay for its independence, two centuries after France extracted a crippling indemnity from its former colony. His statement made no mention of Haitian demands for reparations for the ransom imposed on the first people in the modern world to free themselves from slavery.
Issued on: 17/04/2025 -
By: Benjamin DODMAN
On April 17, 1825, Haitian President Jean-Pierre Boyer was coerced into accepting an indemnity of 150 million gold francs in exchange for French recognition of his country's independence. © Wikimedia Creative Commons
It should have been a joint quest for liberty, equality, fraternity. Instead, it was a history of vengeance, plunder and enduring injustice.
French President Emmanuel Macron lamented the failure to “strike a common path” with Haiti on Thursday in a statement marking 200 years since the French King Charles X extracted a punitive indemnity from former slaves who had already won their freedom in battle.
Macron said the indemnity placed “a price on the freedom of a young Nation, which was thereby confronted, from its inception, with the unjust force of History.” Haitians’ successful struggle for freedom, he added, “was in harmony with the ideals of the French Revolution and should have enabled France and Haiti to strike a common path.”
His statement blamed a revanchist monarchy for dashing those hopes, appearing to exempt Napoleon – who previously tried, and failed, to crush the Haitian Revolution and reimpose slavery – from scrutiny.
The French president announced the establishment of a commission tasked with establishing the “truth” about the two countries’ fraught history, and notably the legacy of the “independence debt” imposed on Haiti. He said the commission, made up of French and Haitian historians, would propose recommendations to appease tensions and strengthen ties between the two countries.
But he made no mention of Haitians’ long-standing demands for reparations from the country that enslaved their ancestors and then trapped them in a vicious debt cycle, hobbling the Caribbean nation to this day.
Haiti’s ‘double debt’
The history of Haiti, previously known as the French colony of Saint-Domingue, is one of many firsts, both heroic and tragic, that turned an inspiring story into one of chronic poverty, violence and injustice.
Haiti is a product of the modern world’s first successful slave revolution, which kicked off in 1791, two years after the fall of the Bastille. The victorious Haitians proclaimed their independence in 1804, having defeated what was then the world’s mightiest military power in a feat that horrified slaveowners on both sides of the Atlantic.
“In a world that was still largely colonial and based on slavery, it was seen as an aberration that former slaves were able to free themselves,” says Frédéric Thomas, a Haiti expert at the Belgium-based research lab Centre tricontinental (CETRI). “No country wanted to recognise Haiti.”
Frozen out by France and other colonial powers, the fledgling nation was soon made to pay for its impudence.
It should have been a joint quest for liberty, equality, fraternity. Instead, it was a history of vengeance, plunder and enduring injustice.
French President Emmanuel Macron lamented the failure to “strike a common path” with Haiti on Thursday in a statement marking 200 years since the French King Charles X extracted a punitive indemnity from former slaves who had already won their freedom in battle.
Macron said the indemnity placed “a price on the freedom of a young Nation, which was thereby confronted, from its inception, with the unjust force of History.” Haitians’ successful struggle for freedom, he added, “was in harmony with the ideals of the French Revolution and should have enabled France and Haiti to strike a common path.”
His statement blamed a revanchist monarchy for dashing those hopes, appearing to exempt Napoleon – who previously tried, and failed, to crush the Haitian Revolution and reimpose slavery – from scrutiny.
The French president announced the establishment of a commission tasked with establishing the “truth” about the two countries’ fraught history, and notably the legacy of the “independence debt” imposed on Haiti. He said the commission, made up of French and Haitian historians, would propose recommendations to appease tensions and strengthen ties between the two countries.
But he made no mention of Haitians’ long-standing demands for reparations from the country that enslaved their ancestors and then trapped them in a vicious debt cycle, hobbling the Caribbean nation to this day.
Haiti’s ‘double debt’
The history of Haiti, previously known as the French colony of Saint-Domingue, is one of many firsts, both heroic and tragic, that turned an inspiring story into one of chronic poverty, violence and injustice.
Haiti is a product of the modern world’s first successful slave revolution, which kicked off in 1791, two years after the fall of the Bastille. The victorious Haitians proclaimed their independence in 1804, having defeated what was then the world’s mightiest military power in a feat that horrified slaveowners on both sides of the Atlantic.
“In a world that was still largely colonial and based on slavery, it was seen as an aberration that former slaves were able to free themselves,” says Frédéric Thomas, a Haiti expert at the Belgium-based research lab Centre tricontinental (CETRI). “No country wanted to recognise Haiti.”
Frozen out by France and other colonial powers, the fledgling nation was soon made to pay for its impudence.
Baron de Mackau hands Haitian President Jean-Pierre Boyer a French order demanding payment of 150 million gold francs in exchange for recognition of Haiti's independence. © BNF, Wikimedia Creative Commons
Just two decades after independence, France sent a powerful fleet to extract a huge indemnity from the young nation, in exchange for recognition of its independence. Its staggering amount – 150 million gold francs – was nearly twice what the US had paid in the Louisiana Purchase, which almost doubled the country’s nominal size.
France also ensured its former colony took out a massive loan from French banks to make the payments, saddling the young nation with a “double debt” that showered French lenders with cash while pushing Haitians into poverty.
Effectively a ransom, this “double debt” ensured Haiti would also become the world’s first and only country where the descendants of slaves were forced to compensate the descendants of their masters over multiple generations.
“France granted an independence that had already been hard-won in 1804, on condition that Haiti gave it privileged access to its wealth and compensated the former colonists,” adds Thomas, describing the ransom imposed on Haiti as “a way of rewriting history”.
A dangerous precedent
Rewriting the history of Haiti has long been standard practice in Saint-Domingue's former colonial power. As late as March 2000, former French president Jacques Chirac argued that, “Haiti was not, strictly speaking, a French colony.”
Saint-Domingue wasn’t just any French colony. Dubbed the “pearl of the Antilles”, it was the richest French possession in the Caribbean, its exports of sugar and coffee generating fabulous wealth for France’s slave owners and merchants.
“It was also France’s cruelest colony, where the French forcibly transported more captive Africans than in any of their other possessions in the Caribbean,” says Marlene Daut, a professor of French and African American studies at Yale University, who has written extensively about the Haitian Revolution and its legacy.
Conditions were so ghastly that the colony’s estimated population when the independence struggle began was just over half the total number of people France forcibly transported there in the first place.
“Even people the French sent to study the population came back remarking on the extraordinarily high death rate, saying that a captive African wouldn't live beyond two or three years, and that an African born there would only live to about 15 or 16,” adds Daut.
Just two decades after independence, France sent a powerful fleet to extract a huge indemnity from the young nation, in exchange for recognition of its independence. Its staggering amount – 150 million gold francs – was nearly twice what the US had paid in the Louisiana Purchase, which almost doubled the country’s nominal size.
France also ensured its former colony took out a massive loan from French banks to make the payments, saddling the young nation with a “double debt” that showered French lenders with cash while pushing Haitians into poverty.
Effectively a ransom, this “double debt” ensured Haiti would also become the world’s first and only country where the descendants of slaves were forced to compensate the descendants of their masters over multiple generations.
“France granted an independence that had already been hard-won in 1804, on condition that Haiti gave it privileged access to its wealth and compensated the former colonists,” adds Thomas, describing the ransom imposed on Haiti as “a way of rewriting history”.
A dangerous precedent
Rewriting the history of Haiti has long been standard practice in Saint-Domingue's former colonial power. As late as March 2000, former French president Jacques Chirac argued that, “Haiti was not, strictly speaking, a French colony.”
Saint-Domingue wasn’t just any French colony. Dubbed the “pearl of the Antilles”, it was the richest French possession in the Caribbean, its exports of sugar and coffee generating fabulous wealth for France’s slave owners and merchants.
“It was also France’s cruelest colony, where the French forcibly transported more captive Africans than in any of their other possessions in the Caribbean,” says Marlene Daut, a professor of French and African American studies at Yale University, who has written extensively about the Haitian Revolution and its legacy.
Conditions were so ghastly that the colony’s estimated population when the independence struggle began was just over half the total number of people France forcibly transported there in the first place.
“Even people the French sent to study the population came back remarking on the extraordinarily high death rate, saying that a captive African wouldn't live beyond two or three years, and that an African born there would only live to about 15 or 16,” adds Daut.
01:49© FRANCE 24
Historians suggest those conditions, and the need to constantly renew the supply of slave labour from Africa, ultimately planted the seeds of Haiti’s uniquely successful slave revolt.
“They were still Africans, people who remembered their homeland and could envision perhaps returning there,” says Daut. “They had no reason to think that the condition the French had put them into was permanent. It wasn't generation upon generation upon generation of slaves being conditioned to believe that this is how the world works.”
That in turn informed the way colonial powers and slaveowners on both sides of the Atlantic debated slavery, leading some to advocate an end to the slave trade not on moral grounds but in order to stave off future revolt.
“The effects of Haiti's revolution on the world were enormous in terms of the policies that emerged to contain and prevent this kind of Black freedom from happening elsewhere in the world,” adds Daut.
A history of interference
Economic subjugation was another way of preventing a repeat of the Haitian Revolution.
“When the indemnity agreement is struck, it merely shifts France’s colonial war with Haiti from being one that is primarily physical, about land control, to one that is economic,” says Daut. “Today, Haiti is still locked in economic conflict with world powers, with the United Nations, with all the entities that it supposedly owes money to – when it should be the other way round.”
The 1825 ransom marked the start of what Thomas described as “normalised interference” in Haiti’s affairs that continues to this day.
“Two hundred years on, we're still in the same system,” he adds. “International players are constantly interfering and making arrangements with the oligarchy, generally to the detriment of the population.”
By any measure, the cost to Haitians has been immense.
It took more than half a century for Haiti to pay the indemnity and another 50 years to pay off its debt, during which time education, health care and infrastructure were starved of funding.
A 2022 study by the New York Times found that Haitians paid about $560 million in today’s dollars in indemnity and debt payments. Had that money stayed in the Haitian economy, the newspaper wrote, “it would have added a staggering $21 billion to Haiti over time, even accounting for its notorious corruption and waste.”
Citing a recent study by a ground of international scholars, the NYT added: “If Haiti had not been forced to pay its former slave masters (...), the country’s per capita income in 2018 could have been almost six times as large” – roughly equivalent to that of its much wealthier neighbour, the Dominican Republic.
‘Fancy words by Macron will not be enough’
While the plight of Haiti’s population – stricken by gang violence, disease and natural calamities – is frequently addressed in the media, France’s role remains little known in the former colonial power.
Read moreFRANCE 24 exclusive report in Haiti: The Iron Grip of the Gangs
Daut, who previously taught in France, says the ransom imposed on Haiti was largely omitted from history books and classes.
“I teach a class called Black France, and I get students from Martinique and Guadeloupe who tell me that it’s widely known that if you want to learn about slavery and France's colonial history, you go to the United States because it’s actually taught there,” said the Yale professor, citing Caribbean islands that have remained French.
She noted that the US had done no better at teaching its own history of economic plunder of Haiti and its brutal military occupation of the country between 1915 and 1934, which was also tied to the Haitian debt that US lenders eventually took over from the French.
12:28© France 24
In both cases, recognising this past would mark an important first step towards reconciliation, says the Haitian-American scholar.
“The first step would be for France to apologise, to recognise their wrong and to offer reconciliation – and that means engaging in conversations with Haitians living in Haiti, with civil society and with whatever government comes into place,” she says, though cautioning that apologies will not suffice.
“It’s one thing to acknowledge the past and teach about it. It’s quite another thing to recognise the contemporary injustice this past still generates, and find ways to repair it,” she says. “Fancy words by Macron will not be enough unless there is going to be a corresponding action that is about repair.”
US and Canada-based scholars Sabine Cadeau, Michael Kwass and Mary Lewis made a similar case in an op-ed published by French daily Libération on Tuesday, calling for the establishment of a commission tasked with “considering the restitution of the 1825 debt as well as reparations for the slavery that preceded it”.
Changing the conversation
On January 1, the now-former president of Haiti’s Transitional Presidential Council, Leslie Voltaire, urged France to “repay the debt of independence and reparations for slavery”. His call echoed former president Jean-Bertrand Aristide’s 2002 claim that France should give his country $21 million in compensation – a stance Haiti observers say partly explains French support for the coup that removed Aristide two years later.
“French officials don't want to hear talk of ‘repayment’ or ‘restitution’; they prefer to talk of ‘aid’, because it shifts the relationship in their favour,” says Daut. “If you're helping someone, they don't get to make demands upon you. They need to be grateful. But when you think about restorative justice, it shifts it the other way. You need to ask people what that justice looks like for them. You need to have a relationship. You need to listen.”
Following Aristide’s compensation claim, a French government-appointed committee concluded that such a demand was “anachronistic”.
Ahead of a state visit to Haiti in May 2015, former French president François Hollande raised false hopes by acknowledging that France needed to “settle the debt”, before his entourage clarified that he was referring to a “moral” debt. Hollande was duly welcomed in Port-au-Prince with signs reading: “We'll take the money, not the morals."
"We'll take the money, not the morals": A poster welcoming former French president François Hollande in Port-au-Prince on May 12, 2015. © Alain Jocard, AFP
Daut suggests the discrepancy between French and Haitian views on compensation has much to do with the way the discussion is framed in former colonial powers.
“The situation is typically presented as, ‘Why should contemporary people apologise or be responsible for something others did?” she explains.
“If the conversation were framed differently, I think French people could understand why there should be an apology, why there should be reconciliation and some form of restitution,” Daut adds. “Because while contemporary French people might not be the perpetrators who have harmed Haitians, contemporary Haitians continue to be harmed by that past.”
Daut suggests the discrepancy between French and Haitian views on compensation has much to do with the way the discussion is framed in former colonial powers.
“The situation is typically presented as, ‘Why should contemporary people apologise or be responsible for something others did?” she explains.
“If the conversation were framed differently, I think French people could understand why there should be an apology, why there should be reconciliation and some form of restitution,” Daut adds. “Because while contemporary French people might not be the perpetrators who have harmed Haitians, contemporary Haitians continue to be harmed by that past.”
