If it were to be seen as a French victory, it would, undoubtedly, be the most shameful of all. On July 11, 1825, in Port-au-Prince, after three days of negotiations conducted under the threat of a fleet of warships, Baron Ange René Armand de Mackau, admiral of the French Royal Navy, secured Haitian President Jean-Pierre Boyer's acceptance of French King Charles X's ordinance of April 17, 1825, by which the king recognized the independence of the young Republic of Haiti in exchange for preferential terms on import duties for French ships and an indemnity payment of 150 million gold francs, to compensate dispossessed French slave-owning planters.

This debt, which was reduced to 90 million gold francs, led to the Haitian state continuing to repay interest on loans taken to repay the indemnity until the 1950s (the "double debt"), and it has long affected the small country's public finances. For this reason, since the early 2000s, during Haitian President Jean-Bertrand Aristide's time in office, demands that France pay reparations to its former colony have regularly resurfaced in political discourse, both in Haiti and abroad. Two hundred years after the nation's independence, President Emmanuel Macron announced, on Thursday, April 17, the creation of a joint French-Haitian historical commission to "examine our shared past" and assess relations, but did not address the reparations demands.

You have 80.3% of this article left to read. The rest is for subscribers only.