CONTINUE
Under the suffocating heat, with humid, and subjected to hard work, in which they had to avoid the bites of snakes and insects, try not to be injured during the work in the mills and avoid whipping or the sinister Black Code punishments , the slaves of the Santo Domingo plantations cultivated sugar cane and turned their land into the richest colony in the Caribbean. In his book 'Haiti. The Aftershocks of History' (Picador, 2012), Laurent Dubois, one of the historians who has investigated the amazing past of that Santo Domingo that was later called Haiti, and that in the media usually appears associated with news about catastrophes and disasters As if it were a place condemned to suffering and misery, it describes the environment that gave birth to the slave revolt of 1791, one of the most fascinating events of the XNUMXth century.
In order to understand the tragedies that followed that revolt -at present, Haiti is the poorest country in America and one of the poorest in the world, located in the last positions of the Human Development Index-, the American newspaper 'The New York Times' (NYT) this week published a series of historical background articles, explaining what happened during the following decades. It is a great journalistic work that has had a double repercussion, since it has not only transferred to public opinion the ins and outs of an exciting period, but it has also opened a sober debate on the way reporters and historians relate to one another.
XNUMXth century lithograph depicting Haitian President Jean-Pierre Boyer receiving the ordinance from Charles X – French National Library
a new chain
With the abuses of the French bank Crédit Industriel et Commercial (CIC) at the end of the 1825th century and the American occupation at the beginning of the 1802th, the NYT cited as one of the causes of the underdevelopment of Haiti the sum that France forced to pay in July 150 I met old colony. By getting King Charles X to recognize their independence and scaring away the specter of a military incursion - Napoleonic troops arrived on the island in 90, but were defeated the following year - the Haitians agree to pay 560 million francs to compensate the former Proprietary settlers or their descendants, a figure that Lego reduced to 21 million. According to the calculations of the reporters of the New York newspaper, the total sum paid over six decades was equivalent to 115 million real dollars, which caused the loss of between XNUMX thousand and XNUMX thousand million for the growth of the country. Overwhelmed by the amount, Port-au-Prince banks had no choice but to borrow from the English, which gave rise to the so-called 'double debt'.
Professor at the Higher Normal School of the State University of Haiti and member of the Haitian Society of History, Gusti-Klara Gaillard (1) has provided valuable information to learn about this episode. Through the analysis of a document called 'Report for the King') drawn up by a commission appointed by Charles X in September 1825 -a document that, among other things, contains a proposal for articles for the law on the payment of compensation and establishes a price for each type of slave-, Gaillard has concluded that, to obtain their independence, the Haitians had to compensate the colonists for the loss of their real estate and also of the slaves that were associated with them. This is a key finding, which the historian unravels in 'The debt of independence. The monetized freedom of the human race (1791-1825)', forthcoming article.
As Gaillard recalls, another Haitian president, Alexandre Pétion, had already considered paying compensation to France at the beginning of the 1791th century, but in no case did it include the loss of the slaves, since they had carried out a successful revolt between 1793 and 1794 and had become free French citizens with the decree passed by the National Convention in February XNUMX.
According to the calculations of 'The New York Times', the total sum paid to France over several decades was equivalent to 560 million real dollars, which caused Haiti to lose between 21 thousand and 115 thousand million for its growth
“The payment of the debt is one of the main reasons for the underdevelopment of Haiti, but we cannot say that it is the only one. There is a more general context. It can be said that underdevelopment began in the 3th century, from the beginning of the colonial era,” explained historian and lawyer Malick Ghachem, a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). “It is difficult to know if the debt is the cause of underdevelopment. It could play a role, but one must not fall into the counterfactual story, taking only the hypothesis of a virtuous development of the island in the event that it had not existed. You have to see all the possibilities. Haiti was the scene of civil wars at the beginning of the 90th century and it can be argued that the money was lost in military spending. It is very difficult to make hypotheses over such long periods”, adds historian Paul Chopelin, professor at the Jean Moulin Lyon 2000 University, one of the most terrible on a human level. The slaves who arrived from Africa made up XNUMX percent of the population”, summarizes historian Paul Cohen, a professor at the University of Toronto. “Before the year XNUMX, this story was ignored by most of the English and very quickly evoked in school curricula. Everything began to change with the Taubira law».
Enacted in May 2001, the Taubira law receives the known number of Christiane Taubira, a former deputy for Guiana who became Minister of Justice under former President François Hollande. In her first article, she establishes that the slave trade and slavery constitute a crime against humanity, and claims, in the second, that this historical phenomenon is included in school programs and becomes the object of historical research.
Two years later, the then president of Haiti, Jean-Bertrand Aristide, demanded in France the return of compensation for independence, which amounted to 22 billion dollars. According to the book 'A Concise History of the Haitian Revolution' (Wiley-Blackwell, 2011) by Jeremy D. Popkin, "The English government firmly rejected Aristide's request, and the French anguish against him for bringing the issue to light has been cited as one of the reasons that country joined the United States in forcing Aristide out of office in February 2004."
Former Haitian President Jean-Bertrand Aristide claimed compensation for independence in France, which amounted to 21,7 billion dollars
historical journalism
“Former President Hollande visited Guadeloupe in May 2015 and said that he would pay France's debt when he arrived in Haiti. He came to Haiti and said that France's debt was moral, but not financial”, notes Ghachem. "It is a difficult subject, because the Quai d'Orsay does not want to open this question, which has implications for France's relations with its former colonies, not only in North Africa, but also in the West, and in South Asia," add him. “I think that few English people know that Haiti was a colony in the XNUMXth century, and that there are more recent traumas, such as World War II and the Algerian war, that attract more attention,” said Chopelin. "The NYT articles give the impression that the episode of the debt has been hidden from French history, but the fact is that the entire XNUMXth century is poorly known and little taught," he considered.
Although the historians consulted praise the work of the American newspaper and celebrated its reach - for example, the CIC bank announced in a statement that it will finance "independent university works" to clarify the role it played in Haiti two centuries ago - many have also affected the NYT by its pretensions, as if it had addressed a subject left out by other researchers. "Historians are not saying that the NYT was wrong, but that they have exaggerated their own contribution, minimizing those of other experts," says Cohen, who meticulously spoke on Twitter about the controversy. "However, it must be said and repeated that what they have done is magnificent, because they have demonstrated the extraordinary potential of historical journalism, of a marriage between historical research and journalism," he concludes.
Notes:
(1) Gusti-Klara Gaillard is authorized to conduct research (University of Paris 1 Pantheon Sorbonne) on 'Haiti-France: a practice of unequal relations in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Economy, politics, culture. His work on the compensation that Haiti paid to France in the XNUMXth century was based on the work of ancient historians (Jean Fouchard, Father Cabon…) and current colleagues (J-.F. Brière, M. Lewis, P Force , F. Beauvois), as well as in Taubira law.
