Haiti Page 11
Knowing the tenuousness of his hold on power, Boyer repressed all forms of political opposition. Hérard Dumesle was one of many who, in the 1820s and 1830s, would discover that there was a cost to speaking out against the president. Boyer was not the first Haitian ruler to crush dissent, but because his rule lasted so long, it had a profound impact on Haiti’s political history, establishing an autocratic approach to the presidency as the country’s norm. Anténor Firmin, a prominent Haitian intellectual of the late nineteenth century, would look back and see in Boyer the “true creator of the militaristic regime whose wounds, un-healable, still poison our national organism.”11
The cost of the political structure established by Pétion and perfected by Boyer—the combination of nominally liberal institutions with thoroughly autocratic governance—was made startlingly clear in 1825, when Boyer finally gained Haiti’s diplomatic recognition by France. Though the deal he made ended his country’s political isolation, the president in fact offered Haiti a defeat disguised as a victory.
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By the mid-1820s, the exiled planters of Saint-Domingue understood that France was never going to reconquer Haiti and they were never going to be able to go back. They did not, however, give up on demanding compensation for what they had lost. Since the French government had offered restitution to individuals who were forced into exile and dispossessed of their properties during the French Revolution, they argued, why shouldn’t the former plantation owners of Saint-Domingue receive the same benefit?
In 1825, Charles X, the king of France, decided it was time to resolve the Haitian situation once and for all. He planned to follow essentially the same approach as that suggested by Pétion in 1814: Haiti would pay an indemnity to compensate the exiled planters, and in return France would recognize Haiti’s independence. But exactly how to carry out this plan was not clear. After all, if France admitted that Haiti was an independent nation, then it would have no right to impose financial demands on it. On the other hand, if France was merely addressing a wayward colony—as the French government had maintained for the past twenty years—then they could not present to Haiti a treaty laying out the conditions of the agreement, since treaties could be negotiated only between independent states.
In the end, Charles X cut through this Gordian knot by issuing the demand for an indemnity as a royal ordinance: a diplomatic instrument which, in the words of one historian, was “as extraordinary in its form as in its content.” Royal ordinances were traditionally used only to address internal matters within a kingdom, so the agreement—although it has often been described as a “treaty” between Haiti and France—really wasn’t one. Rather, it was an order given by the French king to Boyer’s government, which that government accepted. (The constitutionality of this arrangement was in fact challenged several times in both countries in subsequent decades, but to no avail.)12
The royal ordinance didn’t use the term “Haiti,” referring instead to “the French part of Saint-Domingue.” This made some legalistic sense: while the state of Haiti under Boyer controlled the entire island, including Spanish Santo Domingo, France could not legally intervene in the status of the Spanish territory. But the terminology also reflected the sustained reluctance on the part of the French government to accept historical facts. More than two decades after the debacle of the Leclerc mission and Dessalines’s declaration of independence, the French government still had difficulty uttering the name “Haiti.”
In its content, Charles X’s royal ordinance was deceptively simple. To address the “interests of French commerce,” the “miseries of the former colonists of Saint-Domingue,” and the “precarious state of the current inhabitants of the island,” it laid out three articles. The first declared that the ports of the “French part of Saint-Domingue” would henceforth be “open to the commerce of all nations,” with “equal and uniform” tariffs on trade—except that tariffs on French goods would be only half the standard rate. The second article declared that Haitians would deposit in the French treasury 150 million francs “to compensate the former colonists who request an indemnity,” payable in five equal installments starting in December 1825. The amount was supposed to represent the value of the property held by French planters that was lost as a result of the Haitian Revolution, though the method of calculation was in fact rather vague. Finally, the third article offered something in return: “According to these conditions, we concede with this ordinance to the current inhabitants of the French part of the island of Saint-Domingue the full and complete independence of their government.”13
Once the ordinance was written, Charles X sent Ange René Armand, the Baron de Mackau, to Haiti with orders to get Boyer’s government to accept the conditions of the royal decree. According to Mackau’s instructions (labeled “very secret”), the terms of the ordinance were “the only ones which his majesty deigns accept in granting independence to the government of Saint-Domingue.” If the Haitian government balked at paying the 150-million-franc indemnity, Mackau was to reassure them that they could “easily take out a loan in France under acceptable conditions”; indeed, he was to “insist” that they not look anywhere else for such a loan. And if that offer still didn’t persuade the Haitians to be “grateful” and sign the agreement, Mackau was to threaten them with the “interruption of all maritime commerce.” A squadron of French warships would be waiting off the shores of Haiti, ready to carry out a blockade; and that blockade would end only “after the island has submitted itself, without any conditions, to the supremacy of France.” In short, there was to be no compromise: either the Haitian government accepted the ordinance as written or it went to war with France.14
In command of the French warships that accompanied Mackau was the Admiral Jurien de la Gravière. He was a striking choice: his personal history was a microcosm of all the reasons Haitians had to resist the French. Gravière had first visited Saint-Domingue in 1789 as a sailor on a slave-trading vessel arriving from Africa with a cargo of captives. Later, in 1803, he had captained a ship with a grisly mission: to fetch from Cuba 150 dogs specially trained to attack blacks, so that they could be used against insurgents in Saint-Domingue. Now, in 1825, he was in command of a naval squadron ready to sever the island nation from the outside world.15
On July 3, 1825, three French ships arrived off the coast of Haiti. Two of them anchored far enough away to be out of the range of the country’s coastal batteries, while Mackau entered the harbor of Port-au-Prince on the third. He presented Charles X’s ordinance to President Boyer, who set up a commission to examine it and respond to the French. The members of the commission, shocked by what they read, rejected the document immediately and categorically. As he had been ordered to do, Mackau responded that the French squadron was prepared to blockade the island. The Haitian commission replied pugnaciously that Mackau had better go move the ship he’d arrived in: the Haitian guns were ready.16
Before leaving, however, Mackau set up a personal meeting with Boyer in a last-ditch effort to salvage the negotiations. The Haitian president was much more conciliatory than his commission, though he complained that the indemnity was too large. Mackau reassured him: the amount could be renegotiated in the future, he promised, based on the friendly relationship between the two countries. And if Haiti couldn’t pay immediately then French banks would be happy to offer a loan. After a brief conversation, Boyer decided to accept the deal. The essential point, he considered, was that after twenty years of political isolation and constant worry about another French invasion, his country finally had the opportunity for recognition and peace.17
Boyer never publicly shared the details of his negotiations with Mackau, or indeed even the terms of the deal he had made. The Haitian Senate registered approval of the agreement after hearing it read publicly to them; then the document was locked away in a velvet case. When the French squadron—fourteen ships in all—sailed into the harbor of Port-au-Prince, Boyer did not mention that it had been poised to blockade the island, but
simply announced that he had secured French recognition of Haitian independence. The French ships, he declared, had come “to salute this land of liberty” and in so doing had “consecrated the legitimacy of your emancipation.” There were several days of festivities in Port-au-Prince, punctuated by toasts and songs celebrating the dawn of a new era of cooperation between the two countries. It was only several months later, when newspapers describing the agreement arrived from France, that Haitians found out that—without consulting the citizens of his country—Boyer had contracted a massive debt, one they would have to pay for generations.18
Many citizens were furious at Boyer for giving away Haiti’s meager wealth to their former colonizer, and several officers even sought to organize an uprising to force the government to reverse Boyer’s decision. There were other forms of scattered protest as well: in Port-au-Prince, a few angry residents harassed French citizens, while the following year a group of Haitians tried to prevent one of the first payments from being loaded onto a French ship. Over time, Boyer would come to realize that many considered what he had done a crime, one for which he could never be forgiven. But by then it was too late.19
To be fair, Boyer was confident that Haiti would be able to pay the indemnity. The country was agriculturally very productive, exporting coffee and dyewood along with other goods, and the government collected taxes from all the exports. He also hoped that French merchants, absent in the colony since 1804, would return after the agreement was signed, and commerce would boom. Boyer even imagined that with a little discipline and control the population could be made to go back to cultivating sugar, further boosting exports and filling state coffers. Those sugar dreams never came to pass, though, and while the opening up of trade did create some new opportunities for Haitians, the economic advantages did not counterbalance the cost of the indemnity.20
In November 1825, Boyer took out a huge loan from a French bank in order to pay the first installment of the indemnity. The terms of the loan were highly disadvantageous: the Haitian government was obligated to repay 30 million francs over 25 years at an annual interest rate of 6 percent, but the bank charged an additional 20 percent fee just to provide the money to Haiti, so in fact only 24 million francs went toward the indemnity. This arrangement helped create what Haitians came to refer to as the “double debt” of independence, with the original amount of the indemnity significantly increased over the long term by loan fees and interest. Though Boyer eventually brokered a deal that decreased the indemnity itself from 150 million to 60 million francs, the 1825 loan turned out to be only the first of many, and the repayments represented a constant drain on the Haitian treasury. With the indemnity, Haiti suddenly became a debtor nation, an unlucky pioneer of the woes of postcolonial economic dependence.21
From the French perspective, the deal between Boyer and Charles X marked the beginning of a bright new era for France in its former colony. The Haitian population “speak our language, and share our habits,” one French writer enthused. He even asserted that the only memories Haitians had were French, since their links with Africa had been entirely “broken.” Building on these connections, France would elevate Haiti by bringing its arts and sciences there, exchanging “all the treasures of the human spirit” for the “products of that fertile land.” By recognizing Haitian independence, the writer exulted, France had gained for itself a much better form of control over the country than they could have achieved through war. In a way, he was right. The extent of French economic dominance in Haiti throughout the nineteenth century is starkly illustrated by the fact that when the National Bank of Haiti was founded in 1888, it was fully owned and controlled by a French bank.22
The indemnity was certainly not the only reason why the coffers of the Haitian state were empty throughout the nineteenth century. Money raised by taxing exports was wasted on a bloated army that served mainly to buttress the presidential regime; it was drained away by corruption and consumed by internal conflicts. Yet there is no doubt that the payment of the indemnity, and of interest on the loans that it required, profoundly sapped the public treasury. Year after year, Haiti’s population watched as money that could have been used to build roads, ports, schools, and hospitals simply vanished. In 1838, according to Victor Schoelcher, about 30 percent of Haiti’s total annual budget was spent servicing the national debt, and almost 50 percent went to the military. By contrast, less than one percent was spent on education. “Everything you need to know about Haiti’s government is summarized in that,” Schoelcher lamented.23
Would a different kind of leader have acted differently in the face of France’s demands? Christophe, of course, had steadfastly refused to even hear of an indemnity. Pétion, who had originated the idea, ended up, under pressure, taking a similarly firm stance against the French. Boyer had much in common with his predecessor: like Pétion, he was born a free man of color in colonial Saint-Domingue, fought against Louverture and Dessalines as part of Rigaud’s breakaway government during the Haitian Revolution, was exiled to France, and came back to Haiti as a member of the Leclerc expedition. Like Pétion, he was a landowner himself, and on that basis perhaps sympathized with the plight of the white planters of Saint-Domingue who had lost their properties. Without the counterbalancing presence of someone like Christophe, Boyer in a way represented just what French officials and writers had for years hoped to find in Haiti: a pliant and cooperative elite, ready to work with France to create a new form of external control. Perhaps he had no real choice, facing the squadron of French ships and the threat of a blockade. Yet it is hard not to wonder whether it might have been better to fight than pay, especially in view of Haiti’s previous military successes against France.
More generally, Boyer’s choice shows how costly it was to the Haitian people to live in a political order organized around near-absolute presidential power and lacking in broader structures of accountability. If others had been present at the meeting between Boyer and Mackau, and if the Haitian head of state had felt that it was impossible for him to make such a consequential deal without any consultation, things might have turned out differently. Instead, he made the decision essentially by himself, confident that he knew what was best for the nation. Boyer could not accept, it seems, that all around him Haitians were busily creating a very different social order—a true alternative both to the slavery they had experienced and to the new forms of foreign dominance that their president was ready to allow.
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For decades—as Dessalines defended Haiti, as Christophe and Pétion fought each other, as Boyer consolidated power and negotiated with France—ordinary men and women had been building their own local communities. Drawing on traditions of farming that they had brought from Africa and developed in their plantation gardens, they took the plantations and created something new. Thanks to a remarkably strong and widely shared set of cultural forms—the Kreyòl language, the Vodou religion, and innovative ways of managing land ownership and extended families—they built a society able to resist all forms of subjection that recalled the days of slavery. More than the military leaders who claimed to represent the Haitian Revolution, these new settlers were the ones who truly pursued the core goals of that uprising.
By the 1820s, the establishment of the “counter-plantation” model was essentially unstoppable. Thanks to Pétion’s distribution of land to his troops, some Haitians now had legal access to small farm plots; others simply squatted on privately-owned or state-owned land. Landowners soon found that they had little choice but to negotiate with rural residents. Many simply sold off their land piece by piece, while others became absentee landlords, living in towns and leasing small parcels of their land to farmers in exchange for half the crop produced. This métayage system, originally developed in Pétion’s republic, quickly became an established method of agricultural production throughout the country.24
After Boyer agreed to the indemnity, he tried to reverse this process, considering it particularly urgent to rebuild the plantat
ion system and increase tax revenues. In 1826 he inaugurated a new Code Rural meant to reestablish state control over agricultural production. The new legislation placed rural residents under a set of specific laws that gave landowners extensive powers over their laborers. Declaring, as earlier rulers had, that agriculture was the “principal source of prosperity for the state,” Boyer decreed that any rural resident who was not employed by the government or working in another profession “must cultivate the land.” He outlawed agricultural cooperatives, used by farmers to jointly buy needed supplies and agree on prices for their products, and forbade rural laborers to set up their own farm stands to sell what they produced. The code also limited the movement of rural residents, denying them the right to travel to towns or cities without authorization from a local official, and created a rural police to enforce these regulations. In addition, Boyer’s new laws provided for so-called corvée labor, which allowed officials and the police to temporarily force rural residents to work on road repair projects without pay. One British visitor noted that corvée laborers were spared the whip by their overseers, but that the “bayonet or sabre is used in its stead (to prick them).”25