Praising French “values” while celebrating Haitian independence is like applauding the eight men hung in front of indigenous students at the Battleford Industrial School in 1885 but lauding the country that killed them.
If Justin Trudeau wants to commemorate the great uprising against racial slavery and assist Haiti, he should call on his French ally to repay the ransom it exhorted from the country.
On January 1, Trudeau released a statement “celebrating the 221st anniversary of Haiti’s independence.” On January 1, 1804, Haiti was born in maybe the greatest victory ever for equality and human dignity. Over 13 years hundreds of thousands of enslaved Africans rose up in a struggle against one of the most barbaric forms of enslavement and white supremacy. During the uprising the Haitian masses defeated the French, Spanish and British empires. Naval vessels from Halifax and some leading pre-Confederation ‘Canadians’ such as John Graves Simcoe and Charles Michel Salaberry fought to suppress the former slaves.
The Haitian Revolution led to the world’s first and only successful large-scale slave revolution. The first nation of free people in the Americas, Haiti established a slave-free state 27 years before human bondage was abolished in today’s Canada and 58 years before the USA’s emancipation proclamation. “Arguably”, notes Peter Hallward in Damming the Flood: Haiti and the Politics of Containment, “there is no single event in the whole of modern history whose implications were more threatening to the dominant global order of things.”
After independence the white European powers sought to strangle Haiti economically. The country was embargoed from much international trade.
Exploiting divisions among the colonial powers was important to the success of the slave uprising and independence struggle. But the French and British ended more than a decade of war in 1815. In a stronger position, Paris sought to reassert its claim on Haiti.
After years of pressure to make Haiti pay for winning its freedom, 12 French warships with 500 cannons were dispatched to Haiti’s coast in 1825. Under threat of invasion and the restoration of slavery, Francophile Haitian president Jean-Pierre Boyer agreed to pay French slaveholders 150 million francs for lost land and their other ”property” — the now free Haitians.
In 1825 the debt of independence represented about 300% of the country’s GDP. While the principal was later reduced, the interest Haiti paid was exorbitant.
It took Haiti 122 years to pay the debt. In 1898 half of government expenditures went to paying France and French banks. By 1914 that reached 80%. (The debt was bought by US banks during the 1915-34 occupation and the final payments were made to them in 1947.) A 2022 New York Times investigation headlined “The Ransom” calculated the cost to Haiti of paying France at between US$21 billion and $115 billion. (In recent years the Haitian government budget was just over $1 billion.)
In the lead-up to Haiti’s 200-year anniversary, Jean-Bertrand Aristide’s government instigated a commission to estimate the cost of the ransom and legal proceedings to force Paris to repay it (France, along with Canada and the US, helped overthrow Aristide partly in response). Activists in Canada’s Haitian community have been calling for France to repay the ransom for more than two decades. In 2010 a group of mostly Canadian activists published a fake announcement indicating that France would repay the debt. Tied to France’s Bastille Day and the devastating 2010 earthquake, the stunt by the Committee for the Reimbursement of the Indemnity Money Extorted from Haiti (CRIME) forced Paris to deny it, which was widely reported. The group also held a press conference in Montréal and published a public letter that garnered significant international attention.
After Trudeau and Emmanuel Macron met in September partly to discuss Haiti, I asked the French President when Paris would repay the ransom. As he processed my question Macron shrugs oddly while the police push me away. My video of the exchange in Montréal’s Old Port received 5.8 million impressions on TikTok and hundreds of thousands more viewed it on other platforms.
Despite the subject being raised repeatedly in Canada, I searched in vain for a comment by a Canadian political leader criticizing the French ransom or asking Paris to repay Haiti. From what I could find Canadian officials stayed mum concerning France’s extortion of Haiti while it was taking place.
Over the years, however, Canadian politicians have often touted French ideals, including while Haiti was still paying the indemnity. Three months before his statement on Haitian independence Canadas PM congratulated Michel Barnier on his appointment as Prime Minister of France. Trudeau wrote, “Canada and France share a history, a language, and the values of democracy and freedom.”
Really Mr. Trudeau? You forgot another shared value: denial of our colonial pasts.
Canada should call on France to repay what it ransomed from Haiti.
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