Two centuries ago, in 1825, the French state imposed a tribute on Haiti to compensate slave owners for their loss of property. This debt, which the fragile Haitian state had to struggle to repay until the 1950s, heavily crippled the country’s development, and it is, today, one of the poorest in the world. All the regimes France has experienced during this period – monarchies, empires and republics – continued to collect these sums, which were paid to the Caisse des Dépôts bank in due form. All of these facts are well-documented and are contested by no one.
Let’s state it outright: France owes approximately €30 billion to Haiti, and should immediately start restitution talks. The notion that France cannot afford such a payment does not hold up. While the sum is significant, it represents less than 1% of France’s public debt (€3.3 trillion) and barely 0.2% of private wealth (€15 trillion): It’s like a drop in the ocean.
If people are worried that the money might be misused, it could be placed in dedicated funds, earmarked for essential education and health infrastructure, as the Caribbean Community (CARICOM) countries have been explicitly proposing since 2014. This proposal was further explored in a remarkable 2023 report, published by the Centre for Reparation Research at the University of the West Indies (Kingston, Jamaica) and the American Society of International Law. Coordinated by Patrick Robinson, the Jamaican former president of the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (ICTY) and an ex-judge of the International Court of Justice, the report looks beyond the Haitian case only, and is likely the most important document published on post-slavery reparations to date. Its conclusions, backed by figures, have since been officially endorsed by the Caribbean Community and the African Union. The very fact that they have been so little debated in Western countries reflects the alarming North-South disconnections that characterize our era.
In these turbulent times, in which Trumpism is attempting to resurrect the most brutal strains of colonial extractivist ideology, France would benefit from adopting an opposite approach, by demonstrating its ability to acknowledge and correct past injustices, starting with the specific but highly symbolic case of Haiti.
In the 18th century, Haiti, then known as Saint-Domingue, was the crown jewel of French colonies, the most profitable of them all, thanks to its sugar, coffee and cotton production. Slaves transported from Africa accounted for 90% of the island’s population, which reached half a million people before 1789. This represented the highest concentration of slaves in the Atlantic area at the time. They revolted and took control of the island in 1791-1792. Under pressure from this uprising, France’s Convention regime abolished slavery in 1794.
Slave owners mobilized and quickly secured the reinstatement of slavery in other French slaveholding islands (such as Martinique, Guadeloupe and Reunion Island, where slavery continued until 1848). However, despite several attempts, France could not take back control of Saint-Domingue, which declared its independence in 1804, under the name of Haiti.
The French state eventually recognized the country in 1825, but only through imposing the infamous tribute of 125 million gold francs. For Haiti, the sum represented about 300% of its national yearly income, three years of production. It was impossible to pay it all at once. A consortium of French bankers advanced the sum, with interest. This is the debt that Haiti dragged around, like a ball and chain, until the 1950s. In 1904, the authorities of France’s Third Republic refused to attend Haiti’s ceremonies for the centenary of its independence, to protest against debt payment delays. In 2004, in a very different context, then-president Jacques Chirac decided not to attend the bicentenary, as he feared restitution demands. What will we do in 2104?
To translate the 1825 tribute into an amount for 2025, the most transparent approach is to apply the same proportion to Haiti’s current national income, leading to a minimum sum of around €30 billion, taking debt reductions into account. If the initial amount were indexed not on nominal economic growth but on the average return on capital, the amount would be five or 10 times higher! The minimalist indexation proposed here is similar to the one used in the 2023 Robinson report.
However, the report concludes with much larger total sums (several trillion dollars in post-slavery reparations for France, and about $100 trillion on a global level), because it not only includes the 1825 tribute but also an estimation of all wages not paid to slave workers under slavery, as well as an evaluation of the mistreatment suffered (an amount comparable to the total wages). This approach is defensible and is very clearly explained in the report.
We can also consider that not everything can be resolved with explicit reparations, and that this discussion must be framed within a more general debate on reforming the international economic and financial system and addressing the 21st century’s social and climatic challenges, which is also the spirit behind the Robinson report. The Haitian case, in my view, justifies direct restitution, insofar as it involves well-documented inter-state payments. On a more general level, it is probably better to prioritize a universal and forward-looking approach to justice, which would lead to sums that are at least as large as those that would be paid from the perspective of restorative justice. What is certain is that Western countries cannot indefinitely avoid these debates, except by permanently isolating themselves from the rest of the world.