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<!DOCTYPE html><html lang="en"><head><title>SAMPLE FILE</title></head><body><h1 id="top">Table of Contents (Total Read Time: 1 hr 16 min)</h1><ol><li>(1 hr 16 min) <a href="#1226"></a></li></ol> <a href="#top">[- top]</a>
<h1 id="1226"><a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2022/05/20/world/americas/haiti-history-colonized-france.html"></a></h1>
<a href="#top">[skip -]</a>
<h2>List of Articles To Read</h2>
<h3>Fetched content(15343 words: est. 1 hr 16 min)</h3>
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<section class="interactive-content interactive-size-scoop css-bd1t98" data-id="100000008101379" data-source-id="100000008101379" id="haititop-1">
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Getty Images
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<p>
<span class="g-padtext">
In 1791, enslaved Haitians did the seemingly impossible.
<span class="break">
They ousted their French masters and founded a nation.
</span>
</span>
</p>
<p aria-hidden="true" class="g-bg">
<span class="g-padtext">
In 1791, enslaved Haitians did the seemingly impossible.
<span class="break">
They ousted their French masters and founded a nation.
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Universal Images Group, via Getty Images
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<p>
<span class="g-padtext">
But France made generations of Haitians
<span class="break">
pay for their freedom -- in cash.
</span>
</span>
</p>
<p aria-hidden="true" class="g-bg">
<span class="g-padtext">
But France made generations of Haitians
<span class="break">
pay for their freedom -- in cash.
</span>
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Bettmann Archive, via Getty Images
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<p>
<span class="g-padtext">
How much has remained a mystery, until now.
<span class="break">
The Times scoured centuries-old documents to find the answer.
</span>
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</p>
<p aria-hidden="true" class="g-bg">
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How much has remained a mystery, until now.
<span class="break">
The Times scoured centuries-old documents to find the answer.
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Federico Rios for The New York Times
</span>
<div class="g-hed">
<b>
The Ransom
</b>
<div class="g-hedwrap">
<h2>
<span class="g-padtext">
The Root of Haiti's Misery:
<span class="break">
Reparations to Enslavers
</span>
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<h2 class="g-bg">
<span class="g-padtext">
The Root of Haiti's Misery:
<span class="break">
Reparations to Enslavers
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<div class="g-translations">
<a href="https://www.nytimes.com/fr/2022/05/20/world/haiti-france-dette-reparations.html">
Lire en francais
</a>
<a href="https://www.nytimes.com/ht/2022/05/20/world/ayiti-lafrans-esklavaj-etazini.html">
Li an Kreyol
</a>
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<h1 class="css-1l8buln e1h9rw200" data-testid="headline" id="link-20d7b7c1">
The Root of Haiti's Misery: Reparations to Enslavers
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DONDON, Haiti -- Adrienne Present steps into the thin forest beside her house and plucks the season's first coffee cherries, shining like red marbles in her hands.
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<p class="css-at9mc1 evys1bk0">
The harvest has begun.
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Each morning, she lights a coal fire on the floor of her home in the dark. Electricity has never come to her patch of northern Haiti.
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<p class="css-at9mc1 evys1bk0">
She sets out a pot of water, fetched from the nearest source -- a mountain spring sputtering into a farmer's field. Then she adds the coffee she has dried, winnowed, roasted and pounded into powder with a large mortar called a
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pilon
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, the way she was taught as a child.
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Adrienne Present preparing coffee early in the morning at her house in Dondon, Haiti.
</span>
<span class="css-1u46b97 e1z0qqy90">
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Credit...
</span>
<span>
Federico Rios for The New York Times
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Coffee has been the fulcrum of life here for almost three centuries, since enslaved people cut the first French coffee plantations into the mountainsides. Back then, this was not Haiti, but Saint-Domingue -- the biggest supplier of coffee and sugar consumed in Parisian kitchens and Hamburg coffee houses. The colony made many French families fabulously rich. It was also, many historians say, the world's most brutal.
</p>
<p class="css-at9mc1 evys1bk0">
Ms. Present's ancestors put an end to that, taking part in the modern world's first successful slave revolution in 1791 and establishing an independent nation in 1804 -- decades before Britain outlawed slavery or the Civil War broke out in America.
</p>
<p class="css-at9mc1 evys1bk0">
But for generations after independence,
<a class="css-yywogo" href="https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2022/05/20/world/americas/enslaved-haiti-debt-timeline.html" title="">
Haitians were forced to pay the descendants of their former slave masters
</a>
, including the Empress of Brazil; the son-in-law of the Russian Emperor Nicholas I; Germany's last imperial chancellor; and Gaston de Galliffet, the French general known as the "butcher of the Commune" for crushing an insurrection in Paris in 1871.
</p>
<p class="css-at9mc1 evys1bk0">
The burdens continued well into the 20th century. The wealth Ms. Present's ancestors coaxed from the ground brought wild profits for a French bank that helped finance the Eiffel Tower, Credit Industriel et Commercial, and its investors. They controlled Haiti's treasury from Paris for decades, and the bank eventually became part of one of Europe's largest financial conglomerates.
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The bank that benefited most from an 1875 loan to Haiti was Credit Industriel et Commercial, a French institution that helped finance the Eiffel Tower.
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Agence France-Presse -- Getty Images
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Haiti's riches lured Wall Street
</a>
, too, delivering big margins for the institution that ultimately became Citigroup. It elbowed out the French and helped spur the American invasion of Haiti -- one of the longest military occupations in United States history.
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Yet most coffee farmers in Ms. Present's patch of Haiti have never had running water or septic tanks. They have crude outhouses and cook their
<em class="css-2fg4z9 e1gzwzxm0">
diri ak pwa
</em>
-- rice and beans -- over campfires. They deliver their coffee harvests on the backs of thin horses with palm-leaf saddles and rope reins, or hoist the loads on their heads to carry them, by foot, for miles on dirt roads.
</p>
<p class="css-at9mc1 evys1bk0">
Many, like Ms. Present's husband, Jean Pierrelus Valcin, can't read, having never "sat on a school bench," as the Haitian Creole saying goes. All six of the couple's children started school, but none finished, given the steep fees charged in Haiti, where the vast majority of education is private because the country never built more than a tiny public school system.
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"There is nothing here," said Mr. Valcin, who is losing his eyesight but can't afford to visit a specialist. "Our children have to leave the country to find jobs."
</p>
<p class="css-at9mc1 evys1bk0">
He used a term you hear often in Haiti --
<em class="css-2fg4z9 e1gzwzxm0">
mize
</em>
. More than poverty, it means misery.
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Cap-Haitien. Haiti's "double debt" -- the ransom and the loan to pay it -- helped cement its path into poverty and underdevelopment.
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Credit...
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Federico Rios for The New York Times
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Violence. Tragedy. Hunger. Underdevelopment. These bywords have clung to Haiti for more than a century. Kidnappings. Outbreaks. Earthquakes. The president assassinated -- this time in his bedroom.
</p>
<p class="css-at9mc1 evys1bk0">
How is it possible, many ask, that Haiti shares an island with the Dominican Republic, with its underground subway system, health care coverage, public schools, teeming resorts and impressive stretches of economic growth?
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Corruption is the usual explanation, and not without reason:
<a class="css-yywogo" href="https://www.nytimes.com/2021/07/10/world/canada/Haiti-Canada-Celestin-corruption.html" title="">
Haiti's leaders have historically ransacked the country for their own gain,
</a>
legislators have spoken openly on the radio about accepting bribes and oligarchs sit atop lucrative monopolies, paying few taxes. Transparency International ranks it among the most corrupt nations in the world.
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<p class="css-at9mc1 evys1bk0">
But another story is rarely taught or acknowledged: The first people in the modern world to free themselves from slavery and create their own nation were forced to pay for their freedom yet again -- in cash.
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Twenty-one years after Haiti's revolutionary heroes declared their country's independence, swearing to die before being put back in chains or living under French domination again, a squadron of French warships -- equipped with some 500 cannons -- loomed off Haiti's coastline.
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Twenty-one years after Haiti's revolutionary heroes declared their country's independence, swearing to die before being put back in chains or living under French domination again, a squadron of French warships -- equipped with some 500 cannons -- loomed off Haiti's coastline.
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The king's envoy, the Baron of Mackau, issued a daunting ultimatum:
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The king's envoy, the Baron of Mackau, issued a daunting ultimatum:
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Hand over a staggering sum in reparations to Haiti's former slave masters, or face another war.
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Hand over a staggering sum in reparations to Haiti's former slave masters, or face another war.
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The Baron of Mackau
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Cannaday Chapman
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The Haitians had ample reason for alarm. Two decades earlier, Napoleon had tried to destroy them, sending one of the largest expeditions of warships ever dispatched by France, with his brother-in-law at the helm. The Haitians won and declared independence. Napoleon lost more troops than he did at Waterloo and withdrew.
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But rich French colonists continued to press to reconquer the territory, and they found another sympathetic ear when the Bourbon monarchy returned to power. One minister of the navy, a former colonist and prominent defender of slavery, even drafted a new plan to put Haitians back in bondage or "crush them" with a still larger army.
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No country could be expected to come to Haiti's defense. The world powers had frozen it out, refusing to officially acknowledge its independence. American lawmakers in particular did not want enslaved people in their own country to be inspired by Haiti's self-liberation and rise up.
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An illustration depicting troops sent by Napoleon attacking Haiti in 1801.
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Gamma-Rapho, via Getty Images
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So, Haiti's president, eager for the trade and security of international recognition, bowed to France's demands. With that, Haiti set another precedent: It became the world's first and only country where the descendants of enslaved people paid reparations to the descendants of their masters -- for generations.
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It is often called the "independence debt." But that is a misnomer. It was a ransom.
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The amount was far beyond Haiti's meager means. Even the first installment was about six times the government's income that year, based on official receipts documented by the 19th-century Haitian historian Beaubrun Ardouin.
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But that was the point, and part of the plan. The French king had given the baron a second mission: to ensure the former colony took out a loan from young French banks to make the payments.
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This became known as
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Haiti's "double debt"
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-- the ransom and the loan to pay it -- a stunning load that boosted the fledgling Parisian international banking system and helped cement Haiti's path into poverty and underdevelopment. According to Ardouin's records, the bankers' commissions alone exceeded the Haitian government's total revenues that year.
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And that was only the beginning. The double debt helped push Haiti into a cycle of debts that hobbled the country for more than 100 years, draining away much of its revenue and chopping away at its ability to build the essential institutions and infrastructure of an independent nation. Generations after enslaved people rebelled and created the first free Black nation in the Americas, their children were forced to work, sometimes for little or even no pay, for the benefit of others -- first the French, then the Americans, then their own dictators.
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Two centuries after French warships blew their terrifying cannons from Port-au-Prince's harbor to celebrate the debt, the echoes from that moment still wash across the country in its slums, bare hospitals, crumbling roads and empty stomachs, even in the countryside, once considered the most lucrative and productive in the world.
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"This was a poor country that was always impoverished after 300 years of exploitation," Cedieu Joseph said over the buzz of cicadas in his coffee garden in Dondon, the town in northern Haiti where Ms. Present lives. He manages a coffee cooperative named after a Haitian revolutionary hero from the area, and calls the so-called independence debt a modern whip, wielded by France to punish its former colony for wanting, and winning, its freedom.
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Coffee growers taking their crops to the Vincent Oge cooperative in Dondon.
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Federico Rios for The New York Times
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"The slaves fought for our independence," he said. "To make them pay for that independence again, it was setting up another form of slavery."
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Since then, the double debt has largely faded into history. France has repeatedly downplayed, distorted or buried it. Only a few scholars have examined it deeply. No
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detailed accounting of how much the Haitians actually paid
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has ever been done, historians say. Even in Haiti, debates over its effect on the country's economy, development and political destiny continue today.
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The New York Times spent months sifting through thousands of pages of original government documents, some of them centuries old and rarely, if ever, reviewed by historians. We scoured libraries and archives in Haiti, France and the United States to study the double debt and its effect on Haiti, financially and politically.
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In what leading historians say is a first, we tabulated how much money Haitians paid to the families of their former masters and to the French banks and investors who held that first loan to Haiti, not just in official government payments on the double debt but also in interest and late fees, year after year, for decades.
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We found that Haitians paid about $560 million in today's dollars. But that doesn't nearly capture the true loss. If that money had simply stayed in the Haitian economy and grown at the nation's actual pace over the last two centuries -- rather than being shipped off to France, without any goods or services being provided in return -- it would have added a staggering $21 billion to Haiti over time, even accounting for its notorious corruption and waste.
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For perspective, that's much bigger than Haiti's entire economy in 2020.
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We shared our findings and analysis with 15 leading economists and financial historians who study developing economies and how public debt affects their growth. All but one either agreed with our $21 billion estimate, said it was squarely within the range of possibilities, or considered it conservative. A few suggested additional ways of modeling, which mostly showed far bigger long-term losses for Haiti.
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