1w ago

France’s president says that making Haiti pay for its independence was unjust

France's president says that making Haiti pay for its independence was unjust

French President Emmanuel Macron said Thursday that historic injustice was imposed on Haiti when it was forced to pay a colossal indemnity to France in exchange for its independence 200 years ago.

Macron also announced the creation of a joint French-Haitian historical commission to ‘’examine our shared past’’ and assess relations, but did not directly address longstanding Haitian demands for reparations.

France ″subjected the people of Haiti to a heavy financial indemnity, ... This decision placed a price on the freedom of a young nation, which was thus confronted with the unjust force of history from its very inception,’' Macron said in a statement.

18 comments

- Once you start looking at reparations for slavery and colonialism, you quickly realize it's a debt that the former colonizers will never be able to repay.
  And to be honest, for wrongs that were committed over a 350+ year period, it doesn't make sense to repay a debt within a single lifetime.
  So I agree with you, something would be better than nothing.
  But it is important to make an inventory on what would be justly owed and what has been paid back to date and in what form. Perhaps this process should also last 350 years.
  
  Once you start looking at reparations for slavery and colonialism, you quickly realize it's a debt that the former colonizers will never be able to repay.
  Why, because it would be as financially ruinous as the ones imposed on Haiti were?
  
  The numbers may sound big to us peons but I'm sure once calculated they'd be a fraction of the countries annually gdp. For the US it would probably only take pausing some military contracts. $40 million per jet adds up quickly and there would be knock on savings from maintenance that would not be required.
  It's literally a lack of will and uses the same excuses that keep the 99% poor.
  Think of the jobs that would be created trying to calculate each individual's owed amount.
- Based on a quick Wikipedia look up on this, it effectively took Haiti 122 years to pay of this debt with the final payment being in 1947.
  The original debt was 150 million francs and while I couldn't immediately find an inflation calculator for francs that went back to 1825, I was able to convert it to USD and apply a USD inflation calculation to give a value of $7,155,188,451.38 USD which is 5,780,760,331.77 francs.
  France was originally graceful enough to require the 150 million amount in five annually payments and was gracious enough to reduce the remaining debt in 1838 but I see no reason for anyone but the Haitians to decide if they would want to return the favor.
  With a GDP of 3.2 million, that feels more than doable. France may have to cut their baguettes consumption but I believe in their ability to yank those bootstraps.
- Not just a reasonable economy. They were one of the most profitable colonies in the whole world during slavery. All that wealth is currently locked-up in Europe.
- at the very least, even if reparations aren’t likely, if aid is needed after some kind of emergency then you can possibly get more by pointing and saying that the aid is just interest on what was taken

It's good that the head of state says so publicly. I won't exactly hold my breath for anything beyond this acknowledgement to happen, sadly.
We're coming up on the 1-year anniversary of Macron dissolving the French Parliament, which is when he will be legally allowed to dissolve it again. The last time he hoped to bolster his party by capitalizing on the country's reactance to the far-right surge in the (then-) recent European Parliament elections, but the left got their shit together and managed to form a coalition that arrived ahead of both the far-right and macron's party. This time around he seems to be courting the moderate left a lot harder: a few weeks ago he announced that France could formally recognize a Palestinian State later this summer, last week he courted American Scientists fleeing the Trump Administration, and now this.
It stinks of opportunism, and I don't trust him as far as I can throw him. Still, this is better than him not saying anything. It is a disgrace that France made Haiti trade their freedom on the basis of compensating for the market price of the former slaves, and has (to my knowledge) never given back a cent.
- Opportunism indeed. Maybe he's thinking France needs any potential business allies in the future now that the US might be gone out of the picture, although the reconstruction of Haiti and building a consumption-happy middle-class there would take long time... If that's the case, it might be bound to remain a pale attempt compared to China showering investments into African and Asian infrastructure.

if anyone was curious of how much france needs to pay back:
They approximated that in total 112 million francs was paid in indemnity, which when adjusted for the inflation rate would be $560 million in 2022, but considering that if it had been invested in the Haitian economy instead, it could be valued at $115 billion.
(from Wikipedia)
and obviously, this is only from the debt. reparations for the enslavement of Haitians will cost much, much more
- iirc most countries agreed to pay huge sums of money to the slavers, not to the slaves, when slavery was abolished

Yes.

Didn't they overthrow them violently? They didn't buy independence .
- Its been a while since I read about Haiti, but if I remember correctly, several years after haiti's revolution the french threatened them with warships demanding payment for the "loss of property" (aka slaves and stolen land) in exange of diplomatic recognition of their country and independence.

18 comments