President Emmanuel Macron of France said on Thursday that it was time to “recognize the truth of history,” 200 years after King Charles X recognized the independence of Haiti but demanded that its former French colonists be paid an enormous sum for that freedom.
As a result, Haiti became the only country in the world where the descendants of enslaved people were forced over generations to compensate the descendants of their former colonial masters.
“This decision placed a price on the freedom of a young nation, which was thus confronted, from the moment of its constitution, with the unjust force of history,” President Emmanuel Macron of France declared.
Mr. Macron, who became president in 2017 and had not previously addressed in public the question of the debt, called for the establishment of a joint French-Haitian commission of historians to examine “two centuries of history, including the impact of the 1825 indemnity on Haiti.”
The commission will be led by Yves Saint-Geours, a French historian and diplomat, and Gusti-Klara Gaillard Pourchet, a Haitian scholar living in France.
“Once this necessary and essential work has been completed, the commission will submit recommendations to both governments with a view to learning lessons and building a more peaceful future,” Mr. Macron said.
There was no indication that France would offer Haiti any financial reparations.
The announcement comes almost three years after The New York Times published “The Ransom,” the result of a 14-month-long investigation into Haiti’s accumulated debt to France.
This series of articles estimated the amount paid over six decades to the French banks that made the first loan at $560 million in 2022 dollars. Had that money stayed in Haiti, and been circulated and invested locally instead of going to France, it would have contributed between $21 billion and $115 billion in Haitian economic growth.
French officials did not respond to the Times investigation at the time. But the Foundation for the Remembrance of Slavery, an advisory body to the government partly funded by the state, started a task force after reading the findings.
“In the absence of an official response, our advisory board decided to take up this issue,” said Pierre-Yves Bocquet, the foundation’s director. For two and half years, the group worked on a report published on the eve of the bicentenary of the royal decree that set the amount Haiti owed to France.
“We knew that 2025 was going to be an important year, and we are glad that France is not remaining silent,” Mr. Bocquet added.
Haiti has been struggling for years with the consequences of two devastating earthquakes, in 2010 and 2021, and a political crisis following the assassination of its president, Jovenel Moïse, in 2021. About a year ago, gangs joined forces to attack the government and take over the capital. Violence has been constant since.
According to the United Nations, a million people have been displaced because of violence and about 20 percent of Haiti’s population is facing acute hunger.
Leslie Voltaire, the former transitional president of Haiti, visited France and met with Mr. Macron in January. They discussed the current political crisis in Haiti, but Mr. Macron also brought up the debt, Mr. Voltaire said.
“He asked me for my opinion. I told him that we couldn’t erase the past, that it was a painful past,” Mr. Voltaire told the French newspaper Le Monde.
Mr. Macron’s predecessor, François Hollande, acknowledged the Haitian payments in 2015 during a visit to Guadeloupe, another former French colony. He shocked the crowd at the opening of a memorial center on the slave trade, when he referred to the payments as a “ransom of independence.”
“When I come to Haiti,” he said, “I will, for my part, pay off the debt we have.”
A few hours later, when he arrived in Port-au-Prince, the Haitian capital, Mr. Hollande’s aides told news organizations that he was speaking only of the “moral debt” France owed to Haiti, not of any financial compensation.
In an opinion article published Thursday morning in Le Monde, the mayors of La Rochelle, Bordeaux and Nantes, the main former slave ports, said the time had come “to begin the process of reparations for the Haitian people.”
Citing the Times investigation, the three mayors said that France had a “historical responsibility” for Haiti’s current ordeal. “France cannot turn its back on Haiti as if it had not contributed to this situation,” they wrote.
The debt is well known in Haiti. It figured prominently in a campaign for reparations by another former president, Jean-Bertrand Aristide, during the 200th anniversary of Haitian independence in 2004.
But in France, a country that prides itself on its history, the existence of the debt remains mostly unknown. A former French education minister, Pap Ndiaye, acknowledged that ignorance two years ago.
“While Haitian students all know about the French Revolution, few French students know about the Haitian Revolution,” he said. “This has to change.”
Catherine Porter contributed reporting.
Roger Cohen is the Paris Bureau chief for The Times, covering France and beyond. He has reported on wars in Lebanon, Bosnia and Ukraine, and between Israel and Gaza, in more than four decades as a journalist. At The Times, he has been a correspondent, foreign editor and columnist.
Ségolène Le Stradic is a reporter and researcher covering France.
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