Neocolonialism through Debt: How French and U.S. Banks Underdeveloped Haiti

The Indemnity

Alexandre Sabès Pétion, the first president of the Republic of Haiti, had first suggested paying an indemnity in 1814, during his talks with Jean-François Dauxion-Lavaysse, who had been sent by the government of Louis XVIII to negotiate a return of Haiti to French colonial rule.³ Pétion likened the proposed transaction to Napoleon’s sale of Louisiana to the United States. At that time, Pétion only controlled the southern portion of Haiti. The north, meanwhile, was ruled by Henri Christophe, who wrote:

What rights, what arguments can the ex-colonists then allege to justify their claim for an indemnity? Is it that they wish to be recompensed for the loss of our persons? It is conceivable that Haitians who have escaped torture and massacre at the hands of these men, Haitians who have conquered their own country by the force of their arms and at the cost of their blood, that these same free Haitians should now purchase their property and persons once again with money paid to their former oppressors.⁴

Article 38 of the Haitian constitution, which prohibited whites from owning real estate in Haiti, left the former colonists with only one means of recovering their properties: a large-scale military expedition to regain control of the “rebel” colony.⁵ By offering them compensation for the loss of their property, Pétion had hoped to “disarm” them by removing any pretext for the reconquest of Haiti. In 1820, following the death of Christophe, the country was reunited under Jean-Pierre Boyer, who was the successor to Pétion and shared his political outlook.

The accession of King Charles X to the throne of France in September 1824 changed the situation. The new king was even more reactionary and authoritarian than his predecessor, Louis XVIII, and wanted to restore the ancien régime that existed before the French Revolution. Yet, even he recognized that a reconquest of Haiti was impossible, and so he sought to extract as much as he could from people who he still considered rebellious slaves. He instructed an emissary, Ange René Armand, Baron de Mackau, to present the Haitian president with an ordinance, unilaterally drafted by the French government and dated April 17, 1825, “granting” to his former colony an independence that had been held de facto since the beginning of the century. The French emissary arrived with a substantial naval force that threatened to blockade the ports and bombard Port-au-Prince. The conditions of the ordinance included the payment of an indemnity of 150 million francs payable in five years to the Caisse des Dépôts et Consignations (a state fund) for the former French colonists. This was not the original demand of the exiled plantation owners of Saint-Domingue. They wanted their lands back, the insurgent enslaved laborers exterminated, and new enslaved people brought in from Africa.

In the eighteenth century, before the revolution, exports from Saint-Domingue had represented two-thirds of France’s exterior trade, more than all the trade between Britain and its colonies combined. The colony had produced more than half the world’s coffee and exported as much sugar as Jamaica, Cuba, and Brazil put together.⁶ Remembering both their defeat at the hands of the soldiers of Haiti and the profits that had been extracted from the island, the government of France wanted to reach an agreement, particularly as Haiti had entered serious trading relationships with Great Britain and the United States, while banning French flagged ships from its ports.

The amount of the compensation was set unilaterally by the French government when it imposed the ordinance granting Haiti independence on the condition of payment of a financial indemnity of 150 million francs payable in five annual installments, in addition to a reduction in customs taxes in favor of French trade. The ordinance was accepted by the Haitian government only five days after Baron Mackau’s arrival, on July 8, 1825.⁷

Paying the Debt

The ordinance imposed requirements that bore no relationship to the financial situation of Haiti or its ability to pay, a situation made worse by the continual decline in the international price of coffee, which was Haiti’s principal export and source of foreign exchange. One hundred kilograms of coffee fetched 291.2 French francs in 1821, but only 83.7 francs in 1830.

To settle the first installment of 30 million francs, payable in December 1825, the Haitian government, now led by Boyer, had to seek a loan in Paris.⁸ In October 1825, at the request of the Haitian government, the Parisian bank Ternaux and Gandolphe offered at auction a loan of 30 million francs over twenty-five years on behalf of the Republic of Haiti. This sum was divided into 30,000 bonds of 1,000 francs, each yielding an interest of 6 percent per annum. However, the bankers kept, as a commission, a percentage of the amount borrowed. The government of Haiti was therefore going to receive 24 million francs from the consortium, but would have to repay 30 million, plus interest, to the bondholders. To put this amount in perspective, a French franc in 1825 was worth less than a shilling in English money. The indemnity of 150 million francs that France imposed on Haiti was equal to around £6 million, nearly a third of the £20 million paid to the slave owners in the British Empire.

The French banker Jacques Laffitte set up a syndicate, including the Rothschilds, which gave the Haitian government 800 francs for every 1,000 they were forced to repay. Thus, 24 million francs were paid to the Caisse des Dépôts et Consignations. This led to a double debt, the Republic of Haiti still owed 126 million francs to the former slave owners and 30 million to the financial services industry in France, making a total debt of 156 million francs, even before interest. Meanwhile, between 2,000 and 3,000 French investors were convinced to purchase shares in the loan in lots of 1,000 francs.

The government of Haiti could not afford to pay the next installment on the indemnity and failed to service the debt in 1826 and 1827. Laffitte, the banker behind the loan—who himself owned one thousand shares, worth a total of one million francs—persuaded the French government to assume responsibility for the debt and extracted himself from the deal. Nevertheless, most of the ordinary subscribers lost their money as the shares were traded at 660 francs in 1826, declining to 195 francs in 1848. This was considered scandalous at the time, as many of the investors were liberals who were hostile to the regime of Charles X and opponents of enslavement. These liberals had been convinced to support the scheme because they believed that their investment was intended to assist the economic development of independent Haiti and were shocked to discover that their money had been used to pay an indemnity to the former enslavers.⁹

One of the investors thus deceived, a disabled veteran of the Napoleonic wars, wrote that the colonists of Saint-Domingue were the descendants and successors of the European conquerors who had annihilated the first occupants of the island to appropriate their lands; and that the heirs to this legacy only accumulated their wealth thanks to the forced labor of unfortunates torn from the African continent. He argued that it is by virtue of the right of reprisals that these colonists were in turn driven out and dispossessed by those they had enslaved for too long; consequently, the formerly enslaved people owed them no compensation.¹⁰

Resistance and Collaboration

In Haiti, this indemnity was extremely unpopular and there was an armed uprising in the north of the country that was viciously repressed by the Boyer government. Among the propertied classes, and especially the landed aristocracy, many were not at all happy to see their rent or profit reduced for the benefit of French capitalism. Among the general population, it was commonly believed that the constant depreciation of paper money and the corresponding increase in the prices of everyday consumer goods were due to the annual shipments of Haitian gold and silver to France. The workers and peasants were the first to bear the cost of the financial commitments made by the government. In this agricultural country, where feudal exploitation methods were rife, the burden of paying the independence debt had to rest essentially on the shoulders of the poor peasants, who were either sharecroppers or small landowners. The peasant masses were burdened with an indirect tax on the export of coffee, made worse by the issue of paper money, which prevented farmers from knowing exactly what they were being offered for the product of their labor.¹¹ Import taxes had become the only reliable source of state revenue, as they were paid in hard currency, but this meant relying completely on the import and export taxes that were extremely vulnerable to external shocks.¹²

The governing oligarchy, of which Boyer was the principal representative, may be seen as an early example of the comprador bourgeoisie, acting as intermediaries, and ultimately representing the interests of the ruling classes of the former colonizing power while corruptly enriching themselves. A modern example would be Hastings Banda of Malawi. The oligarchy grouped behind the autocratic Boyer sought legitimation from the former colonizers which, they hoped, would end its fears on the international level and give it the prestige necessary to more effectively impose its law on the lower classes, as well as on the anti-French and anticolonialist branch of the aristocracy that had its stronghold in the north of the country.¹³

Despite the Haitian government practicing a policy of coexistence and nonintervention in the affairs of neighboring islands still under colonial domination to the extent of writing such a commitment into the constitution, the French government and other imperialist powers in the region were worried by the example set by the enslaved workers of a colony liberating themselves and setting up an independent nation-state.¹⁴

The indemnity, known as the “ransom of the enslaved,” overwhelmed the economy of the young Haitian republic. Following the ordinance of 1825, the country found itself held hostage economically, chained to the obligation to pay the indemnity and the loan contracted to honor the first payment. This double “debt of independence” was the strategy put in place by the former colonial power to maintain an unofficial hegemony over a rebellious former colony that had become a sovereign state. Although no longer under direct political domination, Haiti was placed permanently under the economic domination of the French government. There was also the question of the sanctity of bourgeois property rights. “Violence can give possession but never property,” asserted the liberal newspaper Le Moniteur industriel. This defended the idea that it was necessary to demand financial compensation from the Haitians for the serious attack on the principle of the legitimacy of colonial property represented by their having gained independence through an insurrection carried out by enslaved people and a national war against the colonial power.¹⁵

Former Enslavers

Needless to say, the former plantation owners were unhappy with this arrangement. The more reactionary amongst them still dreamed of reclaiming their property by military means. However, most sensible opinion in France was clear that this was impossible. Napoleon had sent the biggest military expedition ever to cross the Atlantic, and it had been soundly defeated. Since then, the people of Haiti had been organized into armed militias. A French invasion, despite the divisions caused by the varied interests of different social classes in the country, would have united the resistance. Threatening to bombard Port-au-Prince from the sea was one thing; a full-scale land invasion was a completely different matter.

The majority of former enslavers were quite content to be paid for their loss. However, they considered 150 million francs to be far too little, claiming that the real value of their property was ten times that.¹⁶ They also argued that it was the responsibility of the French state to compensate them and that they should not have to await the arrival of money from Haiti, which was slow in coming. The indemnity was, in theory, only to recompense the former French colonists for their real estate, not for their loss of human “property.”¹⁷ However, it was well-known that real estate in the colonies of the Americas was of little value without the labor to work it, so the values placed on the former plantations were implicitly calculated in a way to recognize the number of enslaved laborers involved.

The government of Charles X made great play of the poverty in which the former colonists now found themselves. Nearly fifteen thousand of them had perished in the upheavals of the Haitian Revolution. Approximately seven thousand others escaped, mainly to Cuba and the United States, where they took a large part of their property: money, dismantled installations, as well as transporting many of their enslaved workers in chains with them. This left around eight thousand former colonists who sought refuge in France, many of whom did live in reduced circumstances. However, historian Benoît Joachim, in going through the accounts, found that the largest sums of money went to already wealthy aristocrats and landowners, as well as the politically well connected.¹⁸

While France under Charles X was dominated by the landed aristocracy, the financial services industry nonetheless held an important place in the political and economic life of the country.¹⁹ The indemnity from Haiti enabled the restored monarchy to help the nobility to restore its image, as well to accelerate its integration into a society increasingly dominated by the financial services industry.

Moreover, most of the former enslavers were greatly indebted to banks and finance houses in France and, whether coincidence or not, their total debt was calculated at 150 million francs.²⁰ Thus, a considerable portion of the indemnity went to the financial bourgeoisie of Paris, Nantes, Bordeaux, and La Rochelle—the same group who had dominated the trafficking of enslaved Africans to Saint-Domingue in the first place.

Who Paid the Indemnity?

The second payment of 1826 was never honored, despite the enactment of a series of measures by the government of Haiti: foreign loans, patriotic subsidies, forced loans, sales of public lands, and tax increases. The Haitian bourgeoisie had tried, from Toussaint Louverture onward, to restore plantation monocrop agriculture. The peasants, having fought hard for their freedom from enslavement on the plantations, very strongly resisted this, clearly preferring farming their own lands as family farms. The need to pay the double debt gave the Haitian government a justification for its attempts to impose capitalist agriculture.²¹

Baron Mackau, in his report to the French government, presumed that the peasant masses could be made to work for the well-being of the political and military elite. In order to meet the deadlines for servicing the “debt of independence” and the financial repercussions of customs relief granted to French goods, the Boyer government instituted a particularly restrictive rural code in the 1820s. The Code Rural of May 6, 1826, aimed to encourage peasants to work in capitalist agriculture. Anyone who did not have another job had to work the land. The peasants could not leave their commune without the authorization of a Justice of the Peace. This attempt to strengthen the plantation economy was not a success. The rural masses were able to maintain their hold on the land and resist complete proletarianization, but were not able to take political power from the landowners and bourgeoisie. Michel Hector and Jean Casimir argue that the peasant farmers wanted to establish a version of the African village life from which they had been kidnapped and enslaved, while the bourgeoisie wanted to be part of the world capitalist system through which they sought to enrich themselves.²² This stalemate inhibited the development of a fully capitalist economy without allowing for a viable alternative.²³ Sugar production continued to decline, and so it was coffee, more adapted to family farming, that would be the commodity that would provide tax revenues to pay the indemnity. Haiti became the third most important coffee exporter, behind Brazil and the Dutch East Indies.²⁴

Under the supervision of the rural police, farmers were required to cultivate export commodities, mainly coffee. At the end of the chain, it was the export taxes on this commodity that ensured the servicing of the external debt. At first, these levies were extorted in kind—but when international coffee prices collapsed, it was the small producer who saw his standard of living fall, rather than the incomes of speculators and exporters. In addition, since the payment of the domestic debt was ensured mainly from import taxes that were passed on by importers to the sale price of goods, the rural majority contributed heavily to these state revenues.²⁵

This tax burden fell heavily on these peasant farmers, while the government and ruling class did not feel the weight of debt directly. Conversely, the urban bourgeoisie was precisely the group most at risk from the French Navy who, being unable to invade, could have bombarded and blockaded the main ports where the wealthy lived.²⁶ As always, the comprador bourgeoisie preferred to repress and extort their own fellow citizens, rather than to oppose the demands of the imperialists, particularly when they saw a way of corruptly enriching themselves in the process.

Who gained from the 1825 double debt?

1. The former colonial landowners and enslavers.
2. The creditors to whom the former colonists owed considerable sums for the purchase of plantations or enslaved workers. These creditors were able to seize 10 percent of the compensation paid to the colonists in the event of a court order.
3. French commodity traders who profited from the opening of the Haitian market to French ships. They were able to also profit by paying their customs dues with bonds that they had purchased cheaply in Paris.
4. The real winners were the financial intermediaries who arranged the loans and took enormous commissions. For every bond costing 1,000 francs, the Haitian government only received 800 francs, and the rest disappeared into the commissions of the bankers. Laffitte, the man who set up the original loan, sold his bonds directly to the Haitian government for 1,000 francs each at a time when they were trading at 220 francs.²⁷

Amongst the losers must be counted the subscribers to the loans who, tempted by high interest rates, invested in the bonds. The bonds rapidly decreased in value as it became increasingly unlikely that the Haitian government could meet its obligations. In the Bourse de Paris, a bond with a face value of 1,000 francs traded for 660 francs in 1826, but only 195 francs in 1848.

New Debts

Following the July Revolution of 1830 in France, which removed King Charles X and replaced him with his cousin Louis-Philippe, Duke of Orléans, the debt was renegotiated, but only reduced to 90 million francs, leaving 60 million still to be paid. These negotiations took place in Port-au-Prince in February 1838. The French mission, Baron Emmanuel Pons de las Casas and Admiral Charles Baudin, was backed up, as ever, by the threat of blockade and bombardment.²⁸ Baudin went on to command the French naval blockade of Mexican ports and the attack on the city of Veracruz later that year. This was also part of a French government bid to extract money that they claimed was owed to French citizens. The blockade of Mexico ended in 1839, when the Mexican government agreed to pay an indemnity of 600,000 pesos. However, this was never paid—a fact that was later used as one of the justifications for the second French intervention in Mexico in 1861.²⁹

Following these negotiations, a treaty dated February 1838 halved the balance of the indemnity, from 120 to 60 million francs, and spread out its payment over thirty years, from 1838 to 1867. Despite this new arrangement, Haiti did not pay the full amount of the indemnity and the 1825 loan until the 1880s.³⁰

After half a century, the crushing payments tied to the double debt had nearly been repaid in 1880. Then, a French bank, Crédit Industriel et Commercial (CIC), offered to help Haiti establish its own national bank. The Banque Nationale d’Haiti (National Bank of Haiti) was Haitian in name only. It was owned and administered from Paris by CIC, which took a commission on nearly every transaction the Haitian government made. CIC siphoned tens of millions of dollars from Haiti while saddling the country with still more loans.³¹ By the early twentieth century, half of the taxes on Haiti’s coffee crop, which was by far its most important source of revenue, went to French investors in CIC. After Haiti’s other debts were deducted, the government was left with just 2 percent of its taxation income with which to run the country.

Five years earlier, in 1875, CIC had loaned the Haitian government 36 million francs for major infrastructure projects, 20 percent of which was intended to pay off the last of the debt linked to the former enslavers’ original compensation of 150 million francs. The French bankers took 40 percent of the loan in commissions and fees. The balance paid off old debts or disappeared into the pockets of corrupt Haitian politicians. Upon signing the loan contract, CIC committed in writing to paying the equivalent of 1.5 percent of the amount of the loan for the nonexistent “charitable works” of Vice-President Septimus Rameau. When this corrupt deal became public, he was assassinated in Port-au-Prince on April 15, 1876.³² Very little of the 1875 loan was used for any projects that might benefit ordinary Haitians.

This debt to CIC gave the bank a powerful lever and, when the National Bank of Haiti was established, CIC took over the country’s treasury operations: printing money, receiving taxes, and paying government salaries. The National Bank of Haiti was chartered in France and thus exempt from Haitian taxes and laws. All decisions were made by the board of directors in Paris composed of French bankers and businessmen, including Édouard Delessert, a great-grandson of one of the biggest slaveholders in French colonial history, Jean-Joseph de Laborde.³³

This disadvantageous arrangement was negotiated by Charles Laforestrie, a Haitian Minister of Finance. When the true picture became clear to the Haitian public, Laforestrie faced allegations of corruption. He resigned and, with a generous pension from the government of Haiti, retired to France, where he was appointed to the board of directors of the National Bank of Haiti.³⁴

In the second half of the nineteenth century, global demand for coffee was high, and Haiti’s economy was built around it. However, the government lost much of its coffee taxes to its former slaveholders, and then to CIC. But when coffee prices plummeted in the 1890s, Haiti’s export taxes on coffee were more than the market price of the coffee itself. The Haitian government borrowed its way out of this untenable situation with another loan, this time for 50 million francs from the National Bank of Haiti in 1897.

Public revenue might still have been sufficient in Haiti if the state had not faced an increase in expenditure on debt service. In order to meet this additional expenditure, the government increased the scale of customs duties, rather than try to diversify the tax base. This increase in taxation disappeared into debt-service, with the result that the Haitian people saw very little benefit.³⁵

Opposition to the power of the National Bank of Haiti was led by Frédéric Marcelin, Minister of Finance in the years 1892–1895 and 1905–1908.³⁶ In October 1910, Haitian President Antoine Simon revoked the National Bank of Haiti’s concession, causing it to close. He granted the concession for issuing currency and other government treasury operations to the newly formed Banque Nationale de la République d’Haiti (BNRH, National Bank of the Republic of Haiti), also established in Paris. The initial majority shareholder of BNRH was the Banque de l’Union Parisienne, which led a consortium of French, German, Belgian, and U.S. financiers. The headquarters of BNRH were in Paris, but a New York committee was established in the headquarters of the National City Bank of New York on Wall Street in order to coordinate U.S. financial and diplomatic interests.

This new national bank continued charging the government for every deposit and expense while generating big profits for its shareholders abroad. It also issued a loan to the Haitian government.³⁷ After commissions and profits were deducted, the government of Haiti received about U.S. $9 million, but still had to repay the full face value of nearly $12.3 million. The government of Haiti complained that the bank, which was responsible for collecting customs revenue, was withholding government funds for their own speculations and manipulating the value of the gourde, Haiti’s national currency. Money collected from customs duties was used to first prioritize the payment of interest on debt and the commission of bankers, while the Haitian state had to be content with what remained. Moreover, auditors found considerable discrepancies between the amount of money listed on its deposit ledgers and the actual amounts held in its safes.³⁸ This was, however, successfully covered up when the U.S. government sent in the Marines in 1915.

“Send in the Marines”

The U.S. government had long wanted to intervene in Haiti in order to rewrite the constitution, which forbade foreigners from owning property. A number of German businessmen had evaded this prohibition by marrying into prominent Haitian families of mixed African-French descent. These German businessmen controlled about 80 percent of the country’s international commerce and were believed to have links with German military intelligence. In the lead-up to the First World War, the U.S. government feared a German presence near the Panama Canal. The U.S. Navy also wanted to secure control of the harbor at Môle-Saint-Nicolas, or at least to deny it to European powers. New York financial interests, led by the National City Bank, played on these fears to encourage U.S. military intervention.³⁹ Furthermore, there had been a series of coups in Haiti between 1911 and 1915, and the U.S. government used this political instability to invade and occupy Haiti.

The first move came on December 16, 1914. The USS Machias, USS Brutus, USS Hancock, and USS Marietta arrived in the harbor of Port-au-Prince. The staff of BNRH loaded gold valued at half a million dollars into seventeen wooden boxes. At 1 p.m., eight U.S. Marines, dressed in civilian clothes and armed with revolvers, disembarked from the ships. They loaded the gold onto a wagon and returned to the wharf, where armed Marines were waiting with a motorboat that took the gold to Machias, which sailed for New York with the gold at 2 p.m. Two days later, it was in the vault of the National City Bank.⁴⁰

The overthrow of President Vilbrun Guillaume Sam on July 28, 1915, and subsequent civil disturbances gave U.S. President Woodrow Wilson the final excuse to order the invasion of Haiti to “protect American business interests and restore order.” The invasion forces seized control of Haiti’s customs houses, administrative institutions, banks, and the national treasury, using 40 percent of Haiti’s national income to repay debts to North American and French banks until 1934. Haiti would pay its final indemnity remittance to National City Bank in 1947, with a United Nations report stating that the people of Haiti were “often close to the starvation level.”⁴¹

The Full Cost

Trying to establish when the double debt was finally paid is complicated, as other loans were taken out with other countries to service it. Technically, the double debt was indeed paid in full in 1883, but new loans could (and should) be seen as part of the same debt. New loans were contracted in 1874, 1875, 1896, and 1910. For each loan, excessive commission and excessive interest rates made repayment completely impossible. There was serious fraud in all these loan agreements, with the 1910 loan being particularly scandalous. This era of new loans came at a time when Haiti had managed to pay back most of the double debt, as there were only 7.7 million francs left to pay by the end of 1875 and 90 percent of the debt had already been paid over the previous fifty years. By the time of the U.S. invasion in 1915, the total external debt had increased to 121 million francs.⁴² In 1922, BNRH was completely acquired by National City Bank and its headquarters moved to New York City. The repayment of Haiti’s debt to French banks was thereafter paid to U.S. investors.⁴³

Two New York Times journalists, Constant Méheut and Matt Apuzzo, have researched the full cost of the double debt between 1825 and 1957 in order to answer the questions of what kind of loss to Haiti’s economic development that payout represented over time and how much this money would be worth today had it remained in Haiti. Assuming that this money had stayed in the Haitian economy, it would have, at a minimum, grown at a rate of return equal to Haiti’s real GDP growth between 1825 and today. Using estimates of Haiti’s GDP in the nineteenth century provided by Simon Henochsberg, a French banker who has studied Haiti’s public debt, the journalists calculated the average annual growth rates and compared them with Haiti’s annual payment flows. They found that the double debt would have been worth $21 billion to Haiti over time.⁴⁴ This $21 billion is exactly what Haitian President Jean-Bertrand Aristide demanded in 2003—and this is probably why the U.S. and French governments are thought to have been deeply involved in his removal. In interviews, a dozen French and Haitian political figures recounted how the French government worked quickly and with determination to stifle Aristide’s call for reparations before siding with his opponents and collaborating with the United States to remove him from power.⁴⁵

Why Did the Government of Haiti Pay the Indemnity?

The threat posed by French gunboats in Port-au-Prince harbor was of course a powerful incentive. However, once the ships had departed to bombard Veracruz, the Haitian government could have repudiated the deal.⁴⁶ This might have meant war, but, given the devastating effect of the double debt, it may have been less harmful in the long run. Be that as it may, we have also to look at the nature of the Haitian ruling class, particularly Pétion and Boyer, both of whom came from free mixed French-African families and had been sent to France to be educated. They both served in the French army, and, having gone into exile in France in 1800 following a rebellion against Toussaint L’Ouverture, led by André Rigaud, they returned as part of the French army led by General Charles Leclerc in December 1801 that intended to restore colonialism and a slave economy. However, when Jean-Jacques Dessalines and Christophe restarted the war of liberation in October 1802, Pétion and Boyer joined them. The French forces were finally expelled the following year. Their commitment to Haitian independence can therefore be seen as partial and opportunist, being more interested in their own personal power and prestige.

Pétion and Boyer had long wanted to restore plantation agriculture and the need to pay the indemnity gave them the excuse to impose the Code Rural of 1826. Both presidents, having spent their youth in France and having been officers in the French army, had much more in common culturally and economically with the French bourgeoisie than with the poor Haitian peasantry. After he was removed from office by a peasant uprising in 1843, Boyer lived his remaining years in Paris.

The Haitian bourgeoisie and landowners wanted diplomatic recognition from France—which would in turn lead to recognition from other imperialist countries—in order to enable full commercial relations with Europe. The nature of the loans also gave them opportunities for graft. They would profit from such commerce and corruption, while the poor farmers paid the indemnity.

Conclusion

The first debt was forced upon Haiti by French gunboats, but during the thirty years before the U.S. occupation, external and internal indebtedness was increased by loans contracted by corrupt governments resulting in a cumulative increase in total debt. Despite official promises, very little was spent on infrastructure or development. The need for hard currency to service and repay the debt forced the government of Haiti to concentrate on coffee production for export. This in turn made the country’s finances vulnerable to the world market.

The French government’s desire to exert neocolonial control over Haiti through financial demands backed up by armed force led the Haitian government to contract a debt they could not afford to service. The rapacious banks, particularly CIC and National City Bank, both supported by their respective governments, charged exorbitant interest and commissions. The setting up of the National Bank of Haiti and its successor, the NBRH, by these two banks was little more than a con to rob the country’s exchequer. In this, they were aided by the corrupt ruling class of Haiti. When this scheme started to unravel, the U.S. government sent in the Marines.

The coup that removed Aristide over a century later may have silenced him, but the demand for restitution of the losses caused by the double debt will not go away. This demand rests at the door of the French government and the North American and French financial services industry. Between them, they owe the people of Haiti $21 billion.

It is their money, and they want it back.

Notes

1. ↩ Eric Nagourney, “6 Takeaways About Haiti’s Reparations to France,” New York Times, May 21, 2022.
2. ↩ For more details of the Haitian Revolution itself, see C. L. R. James, The Black Jacobins (New York: Vintage Books, 1989); and Mary Turner, Enslaved Worker Rebellions and Revolution in the Americas to 1804 (London: Socialist History Society, 2025), chapter 5.
3. ↩ Simon Henochsberg, “Public Debt and Slavery: The Case of Haiti, 1760–1915,” Master’s thesis, Paris School of Economics, 2016, 12.
4. ↩ Henri Christophe to Thomas Clarkson, November 20, 1819, in Henri Christophe and Thomas Clarkson: A Correspondence, eds. Earl L. Griggs and Clifford H. Prator (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1952), 176.
5. ↩ In the context of Haiti at the time, Blanc (“white”) meant “foreigner,” while Noir (“Black”) meant “citizen.” Thus, the Polish troops from Napoleon’s invading army who changed sides and fought with the revolutionaries were given citizenship in the new republic of Haiti and declared to be Noir. Some of their descendants still live in northern Haiti. See Jonathan North, “Soldiers of Misfortune: Napoleon’s Polish Deserters in the West Indies,” in Treason: Rebel Warriors and Internationalist Traitors, eds. Steve Cushion and Christian Høgsbjerg (London: Socialist History, 2017).
6. ↩ David Geggus, The Impact of the Haitian Revolution in the Atlantic World (Columbia, South Carolina: University of South Carolina, 2001), 4.
7. ↩ Frédérique Beauvois, “L’indemnité de Saint-Domingue: ‘Dette d’indépendance’ ou ‘rançon de l’esclavage’?,” French Colonial History 10, no. 1 (January 2009): 116.
8. ↩ Jean-François Brière, “L’Emprunt de 1825 dans la dette de l’indépendance haïtienne envers la france,” Journal of Haitian Studies 12, no. 2 (Fall 2006): 126.
9. ↩ Brière, “L’Emprunt de 1825 dans la dette de l’indépendance haitienne envers la france,” 130.
10. ↩ Laurent, La vérité sur l’emprunt perçu par le gouvernement français pour le compte de la République d’Haïti (Paris, Imprimerie de A.-T. Breton, 1842), 8, cited in Benoît Joachim, “L’indemnité coloniale de Saint-Domingue et la question des rapatriés,” Revue Historique 246, no. 2 (500) (October–December 1971): 362.
11. ↩ Joachim, “L’indemnité coloniale de Saint-Domingue et la question des rapatriés,” 363.
12. ↩ Henochsberg, “Public Debt and Slavery,” 24.
13. ↩ Benoît Joachim, “La reconnaissance d’haïti par La France (1825): naissance d’un nouveau type de rapports internationaux,” Revue d’histoire Moderne et Contemporaine 22, no. 3 (July–September 1975): 374.
14. ↩ Joachim, “La reconnaissance d’haïti par la france (1825),” 379.
15. ↩ Moniteur industriel, April 29, 1838.
16. ↩ Joachim, “L’indemnité coloniale de Saint-Domingue et la question des rapatriés,” 365.
17. ↩ Jean-François Brière, “La France et La Reconnaissance de l’Indépendance Haïtienne: Le Débat Sur l’Ordonnance de 1825,” French Colonial History 5 (2004): 128.
18. ↩ Joachim, “L’indemnité coloniale de Saint-Domingue et la question des rapatriés,” 370.
19. ↩ Bertrand Gille, La banque et le crédit en France (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1959), 52.
20. ↩ Joachim, “L’indemnité coloniale de Saint-Domingue et la question des rapatriés,” 373.
21. ↩ Gusti-Klara Gaillard, “Canonnière et huis clos pour une rançon néocoloniale,” in Haïti-France: Les chaînes de la dette—Le rapport Mackau, 1825, eds. Marcel Dorigny, Jean-Marie Théodat, Gusti-Klara Gaillard, and Jean-Claude Bruffaerts (Paris: Maisonneuve et Larose, 2022), 96–97.
22. ↩ Michel Hector and Jean Casimir, “Le long XIXe siècle haïtien,” Revue de la Société Haïtienne d’Histoire, de Géographie et de Géologie 216 (October 2003–March 2004): 35–64.
23. ↩ Alex Dupuy, Haiti: From Revolutionary Slaves to Powerless Citizens—Essays on the Politics and Economics of Underdevelopment, 1804–2013 (Abingdon: Routledge, 2014), 54–62.
24. ↩ Victor Bulmer-Thomas, “Haiti: From Independence to US Occupation,” in The Economic History of the Caribbean since the Napoleonic Wars (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 161.
25. ↩ Gusti-Klara Gaillard-Pourchet, La corruption en Haïti: esquisse historique 1804–2004 (Programme des Nations Unies pour le Développement, 2005), 23–24.
26. ↩ Jean-Claude Bruffaerts, “Le cercle vicieux de surendettment” in Haïti-France: Les chaînes de la dette, 116.
27. ↩ Bruffaerts, “Le cercle vicieux de surendettment,” 117–20.
28. ↩ François Blancpain and Bernard Gainot, “Les négociations des traités de 1838,” La Révolution française 16 (2019).
29. ↩ Jacques Penot, “L’expansion commerciale française au Mexique et les causes du conflit franco-mexicain de 1838–1839,” Bulletin Hispanique 75, no. 1–2 (1973): 169–201.
30. ↩ Beauvois, “L’indemnité de Saint-Domingue,” 119.
31. ↩ Nagourney, “6 Takeaways About Haiti’s Reparations to France.”
32. ↩ Gusti-Klara Gaillard-Pourchet, La corruption en Haïti, 30.
33. ↩ Matt Apuzzo, Constant Méheut, Selam Gebrekidan, and Catherine Porter, “A Bank Created for Haiti Funneled Wealth to France,” New York Times, May 23, 2022.
34. ↩ Matt Apuzzo, Constant Méheut, Selam Gebrekidan, and Catherine Porter, “How a French Bank Captured Haiti,” New York Times, May 20, 2022.
35. ↩ Bulmer-Thomas, “Haiti: From Independence to US Occupation,” 180.
36. ↩ Frédéric Marcelin, La Banque nationale d’Haïti: une page d’histoire (Paris: Joseph Kugelmann, 1890), gallica.bnf.fr.
37. ↩ Selam Gebrekidan, Matt Apuzzo, Catherine Porter, and Constant Méheut, “Invade Haiti, Wall Street Urged. The U.S. Obliged,” New York Times, May 20, 2022.
38. ↩ Peter James Hudson, “The National City Bank of New York and Haiti, 1909–1922,” Radical History Review, no. 115 (January 2013): 91–114.
39. ↩ Gebrekidan, Apuzzo, Porter, and Méheut, “Invade Haiti, Wall Street Urged. The U.S. Obliged.”
40. ↩ Peter James Hudson, Bankers and Empire: How Wall Street Colonized the Caribbean (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2017), 105.
41. ↩ Westenley Alcenat, “The Case for Haitian Reparations,” Jacobin, January 14, 2017.
42. ↩ Henochsberg, “Public Debt and Slavery,” 27, 34.
43. ↩ Hudson, Bankers and Empire, 116.
44. ↩ Constant Méheut, “Calculating Haiti’s Payments to France,” New York Times, May 25, 2022; Henochsberg, “Public Debt and Slavery,” 50.
45. ↩ Constant Méheut, Catherine Porter, Selam Gebrekidan, and Matt Apuzzo, “Aristide Demanded French Pay Reparations to Haiti. He Ended Up in Exile,” New York Times, May 20, 2022.
46. ↩ Bulmer-Thomas, “Haiti: From Independence to US Occupation,” 190–91.