There is no shortage of horrifying conflicts in the world right now, including two wars the United States is deeply bound up in. You’d be forgiven, therefore, for not knowing about a barely-reported-on catastrophe unfolding in Haiti right now, a mere few hundred miles off of the coast of Florida. And you might write it off as regrettable and tragic but ultimately the responsibility of Haitians themselves—because most of us do not know just how deeply the West, especially France and the United States, have created and recreated the conditions of Haiti’s current immiseration.
In solidarity with the plight of the Haitian people, I am reposting this piece that I originally published a year ago on a different, shortly-lived politics-focused Substack, with a few minor updates. It was one of my favorite pieces from that publication. It’s more political than my usual work lately, but I consider a study of our experience of politics rather than a political piece in itself—more impressionistic than argumentative.
The question that consumes me here is simple: how are we to respond to a tragedy of the magnitude of Haiti’s history, especially one abetted by our own governments? There is no clear answer to this, perhaps—our responsibility may lie chiefly in the asking. We’ve already done enough damage by meddling, in any event.
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The 1775 American Revolution defeated the world’s largest empire to create the first modern constitutional democracy in the world.
The 1789 French Revolution overthrew the old feudal order in the most populous country in Continental Europe to realize the ideals of liberal republicanism.
The 1791 Haitian Revolution freed an entire island of enslaved Africans in one of the French Empire’s most lucrative possessions—entirely at the hands of the slaves themselves.
This revolution was the only successful slave revolt that led to the founding of a nation-state, and it was an event that stunned the world so soon after the American and French revolutions.
The American Revolution inspired countless constitutional democracies worldwide, and birthed the most powerful and wealthy country in the world today.
The French Revolution formed the basis for the modern nation-state, and is regarded as one of the most epochal events of modern European history, if not the event that inaugurated modern Europe itself.
The Haitian Revolution has been all but forgotten outside of Haiti.
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A recent bombshell New York Times investigation unearthed an abhorrent story about the aftermath of the Haitian Revolution.
This multi-party series is gripping, fascinating, infuriating, and absolutely worth reading in its entirety. You’ll find it boggles your sense of proportion—much less decency—to learn just how far French and American governments went to snuff out the nascent freed-slave state.
The story, in a nutshell, is this: Twenty-one years after Haiti cast off the yoke of slavery, its former colonizers returned with a squadron of French warships equipped with 500 cannons. They demanded that the slaves pay reparations to their former French slave masters for their loss of their “human property”. You read that right. Reparations for the slave masters, not for the former slaves.
What came to be known as the “double debt” exacted not only an initial crushing levee of 150 million francs, but exorbitant interest payments as Haiti struggled to pay off the debt for decades thereafter.
The Haitian government didn’t have enough money to pay even the first of five installments. The servicing of these Haitian reparation loans would build Paris into the financial capital of continental Europe.
And Haiti, a small island nation, could do little but acquiesce to the French double debt.
Which ballooned to the tune of $560 million in today’s dollars.
Which, if it had stayed in the country’s economy and been invested in businesses and infrastructure, would have added $115 billion to Haiti’s economy over the subsequent two centuries.
$115 billion in the economy that is not there today.
That’s six times the size of Haiti’s economy in 2020. Haiti could be six times richer than it is today.
That would put Haiti on par with neighboring Dominican Republic, equivalent to the typical Latin American economy.
Haiti is now the poorest country in the Western Hemisphere, with a poverty rate of 59%. It is the most likely country in the world to be devastated by climate change in the coming years. After the 2021 assassination of President Jovenel Moïse, Haiti has been plunged into political violence. The state has broken down and an alliance of ruthless armed gangs have recently overthrown the weak and illegitimate government of Ariel Henry. One million of Haiti’s 11 million people are on the brink of famine.
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History is strange, and unsettling.
A French grudge led to two centuries of Haiti’s deep immiseration.
The history of colonialism is full of such horrors.
But it’s not all that often that its present-day impacts can be quantified so directly, and depressingly.
A country of 11 million people, six times less well-off than it might be otherwise.
“History is written by the victors,” the old saw goes.
Haiti is no victor, in spite of its successful war of independence.
And if history is written by the victors, history’s inspirational symbols and slogans are especially written by the victors.
“Liberté, égalité, fraternité”.
“Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness”.
What slogan would the Haitians have chosen, if it were their values that were allowed to inspire the world?
In 1914, on the verge of World War I, 120 years after the Haitian Revolution, 84% of the globe was under the rule of a handful of European imperial powers.
Haiti wasn’t, at least not on paper.
But no one could envy them for this.
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Touissant L’Ouverture and Jean-Jacques Dessalines are the two most important founding fathers of Haiti.
They were both commander-in-chief generals, and therefore, in a way, both George Washingtons, if the first George Washington (L’Ouverture) had died on the cusp of victory and was replaced by another George Washington (Dessalines) who went on to complete the war of independence and rule as Haiti’s first post-liberation leader.
But where both men deviate far from Washington is that both declared themselves leaders-for-life. Dessalines, in particular, modeled himself off of Napoleon, then-emperor of France.
Declaring himself emperor of Haiti in 1804, Dessalines ruled autocratically, subjecting the population to punishing work routines and military conscription, out of fear for the return of the French.
He was assassinated two years later, in 1806.
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The image that surprised me the most in the New York Times investigation was that of Haitian leaders like L’Ouverture and Dessalines, dressed in same military-statesmen uniforms that might have been worn by Napoleon or Washington.
Bicorne hats with ostentatious feathers, gold epaulets, colorful military greatcoats.
It broke my heart to see.
Because these were their signifiers of political legitimacy. They were dressed in the same garb worn by their erstwhile oppressors. They were seeking that same respect, the same legitimacy of sovereign government.
These were leaders who were themselves well-read on Enlightenment ideas. They might have emphasized those ideals in their rule if they were given a free chance to rule their country. Instead they resorted to a militarized autocracy out of a fear of the return of the French.
And the irony is, the French Revolution opened the door for the Haitian Revolution, by both inspiring Haitian slaves to agitate for their freedom and shaking up the conditions in France to give the revolutionaries a window of opportunity.
But as Napoleonic reaction and militarism took hold in France, Napoleonic reaction and militarism became the primary model for Dessalines’s rule. And he himself fell to the same violence he wielded.
And in due time the French, once so animated by the liberal ideals of their revolution, charged back into Port-au-Prince to extract their blood money.
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Dessalines ordered the massacre of the 5,000 remaining white population upon taking power.
This act remains a blot on the historical record of Dessalines and, by extension, the founding fathers of Haiti. In every essay or resource I’ve read online, when the subject of Dessalines comes up, a mention of the massacre is not far behind.
How many dead were the French enslavers responsible for?
500,000, out of 900,000 slaves brought over from Africa.
The average life expectancy of a slave brought to Haiti from Africa was three years.
That is, for those who managed to survive the journey in the first place.
For $65.66, you can buy a 24” x 36” poster of a depiction of Jean-Jacques Dessalines holding a severed French head on Walmart.com.
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No one was more stunned and frightened by the Haitian Revolution than American slave owners. The United States would not recognize Haiti for six decades.
The United States later occupied Haiti for 19 years, from 1914 to 1934, robbing it of wealth at Wall Street’s behest and subjecting the country to forced labor, extrajudicial killings, and martial law.
It would continue to prop up dictators and destabilize the country until the present day.
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The national anthem of Haiti is called La Dessalinienne, after their eponymous founding father. Its martial pace and lifting vocals put one in mind of the French La Marseillaise.
The official French lyrics of La Dessalinienne touch on similar themes to La Marseillaise, too—talk of fatherland and dying for your country. Typical national anthem stuff, in other words. Nothing too out of the ordinary.
But the Creole version of the song includes some notable additions in the lyrics:
People are not born to serve others
That is why all mothers and fathers
Need to send children to school,
to learn, to know
what Toussaint, Dessalines, Christophe, Pétion
did to take Haitians from under the whites' rope.
And
We have a flag like all peoples.
Let us love it, die for it.
It was not a gift from the whites—
It was our Ancestors' blood that was shed.
No white nation needs to note its former captivity in its national anthems.
For a people once enslaved, however, you can’t afford not to have an eye on the former enslaver.
You can’t afford not to remind yourself that all you got, you got yourself, and that the former enslaver still isn’t about to do you any favors.
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In the wake of the recent bombshell New York Times investigation, French officials responded to calls for Haitian restitution with studied silence.
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On a recent ride through the Little Haiti neighborhood of Brooklyn, I came upon a sign reading “Jean-Jacques Dessalines Boulevard”.
I smiled, not knowing what else to do.