Only a few scholars have examined it deeply. France has repeatedly downplayed, distorted or buried it. Since then, the double debt has largely faded into history. “To make them pay for that independence again, it was setting up another form of slavery.” “The slaves fought for our independence,” he said. He manages a coffee cooperative named after a Haitian revolutionary hero from the area, and calls the so-called independence debt a modern whip, wielded by France to punish its former colony for wanting, and winning, its freedom. “This was a poor country that was always impoverished after 300 years of exploitation,” Cedieu Joseph said over the buzz of cicadas in his coffee garden in Dondon, the town in northern Haiti where Ms. Two centuries after French warships blew their terrifying cannons from Port-au-Prince’s harbor to celebrate the debt, the echoes from that moment still wash across the country in its slums, bare hospitals, crumbling roads and empty stomachs, even in the countryside, once considered the most lucrative and productive in the world. Generations after enslaved people rebelled and created the first free Black nation in the Americas, their children were forced to work, sometimes for little or even no pay, for the benefit of others - first the French, then the Americans, then their own dictators. The double debt helped push Haiti into a cycle of debts that hobbled the country for more than 100 years, draining away much of its revenue and chopping away at its ability to build the essential institutions and infrastructure of an independent nation. According to Ardouin’s records, the bankers’ commissions alone exceeded the Haitian government’s total revenues that year.Īnd that was only the beginning. This became known as Haiti’s “double debt” - the ransom and the loan to pay it - a stunning load that boosted the fledgling Parisian international banking system and helped cement Haiti’s path into poverty and underdevelopment. The French king had given the baron a second mission: to ensure the former colony took out a loan from young French banks to make the payments.

Even the first installment was about six times the government’s income that year, based on official receipts documented by the 19th-century Haitian historian Beaubrun Ardouin.īut that was the point, and part of the plan. The amount was far beyond Haiti’s meager means. He used a term you hear often in Haiti - mizè. “Our children have to leave the country to find jobs.” Valcin, who is losing his eyesight but can’t afford to visit a specialist. All six of the couple’s children started school, but none finished, given the steep fees charged in Haiti, where the vast majority of education is private because the country never built more than a tiny public school system. Present’s husband, Jean Pierrelus Valcin, can’t read, having never “sat on a school bench,” as the Haitian Creole saying goes. They deliver their coffee harvests on the backs of thin horses with palm-leaf saddles and rope reins, or hoist the loads on their heads to carry them, by foot, for miles on dirt roads. They have crude outhouses and cook their diri ak pwa - rice and beans - over campfires. Present’s patch of Haiti have never had running water or septic tanks. It elbowed out the French and helped spur the American invasion of Haiti - one of the longest military occupations in United States history. Haiti’s riches lured Wall Street, too, delivering big margins for the institution that ultimately became Citigroup. They controlled Haiti’s treasury from Paris for decades, and the bank eventually became part of one of Europe’s largest financial conglomerates. Present’s ancestors coaxed from the ground brought wild profits for a French bank that helped finance the Eiffel Tower, Crédit Industriel et Commercial, and its investors. The burdens continued well into the 20th century. Present’s ancestors put an end to that, taking part in the modern world’s first successful slave revolution in 1791 and establishing an independent nation in 1804 - decades before Britain outlawed slavery or the Civil War broke out in America.īut for generations after independence, Haitians were forced to pay the descendants of their former slave masters, including the Empress of Brazil the son-in-law of the Russian Emperor Nicholas I Germany’s last imperial chancellor and Gaston de Galliffet, the French general known as the “butcher of the Commune” for crushing an insurrection in Paris in 1871. It was also, many historians say, the world’s most brutal. The colony made many French families fabulously rich. Back then, this was not Haiti, but Saint-Domingue - the biggest supplier of coffee and sugar consumed in Parisian kitchens and Hamburg coffee houses. Coffee has been the fulcrum of life here for almost three centuries, since enslaved people cut the first French coffee plantations into the mountainsides.

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