<i>Haiti since 1804: Critical Perspectives on Class, Power, and Gender</i> by Alex Dupuy

If historians of Haiti accept Dupuy’s revisionary argument that being forced to exchange a massive indemnity payment to France for recognition did not—contrary to accepted wisdom—on its own cripple Haiti’s effort to develop economically in the nineteenth century, then the campaign to make contemporary France pay reparations will surely stall.King Charles X of France demanded, and Haitian President Jean-Pierre Boyer agreed, in 1825 to pay 150 million francs (roughly $1.3 billion in today’s dollars) to compensate plantation owners who had been deprived of their estates and their incomes by the revolution that was led by Toussaint Louverture and Jean-Jacques Dessalines. A French fleet had been instructed to blockade Haitian ports if the request were denied. Moreover, Britain and the United States had obstinately refused to recognize Haiti as a sovereign nation, and Boyer was desperate to gain recognition.Dupuy asserts that Boyer accepted the heavy 1825 French imposition “not because he feared war … but because he believed it was in his interest and that of the newly emerged Haitian ruling class to do so” (11). Indeed, Boyer had good reason to doubt France’s ability even to blockade his ports. The agreement with France would finally transfer the old colonial properties to the new landed gentry. Thus, Dupuy says, Boyer—acting on behalf of a new ex-slave bourgeoisie—saddled the embryonic Haiti and its embattled poor with a national debt that primarily served the bourgeoisie, not the people as a whole. (He also invaded what is now the Dominican Republic, ruling much of it for twenty-two years in order to extract taxes and labor from Dominicans to help pay the French.)Boyer took out a loan for 30 million francs from a French bank to begin to pay France. Later, Boyer in 1838 managed to negotiate the full original amount down to 60 million francs, meaning that Haiti was still stuck with a 90-million-franc debt, a vast impediment that it finally paid off in 1883.The class that Boyer was empowering included formerly free Black and mixed-race people. Together, after the revolution they owned perhaps 33 percent of the coffee plantations that had originally been established by French proprietors. Many of the new owners were ex-revolutionary military officers. If the old “owners” had returned to claim their estates the new “owners” would have had to give them up. And none of the newcomers could afford to purchase the lands that they now held. Boyer’s agreement constituted a “massive transfer of property to the mulatto and black elite” (28).Agreeing to the indemnity, avers Dupuy, “solved” the property ownership question without—a further problem for nineteenth-century Haiti—addressing the bigger problem of who would labor on those continuing plantations. Most ex-slaves, now a released peasant class, wanted to farm their own small plots, a development that Boyer and his fellow estate owners rejected. They wanted the ex-slaves to return to the plantations and work on them for the new proprietors. Indeed, Boyer passed a draconian law that tried to bind peasants to labor on the plantations to which they had once been assigned. Years later, in 1844, Boyer was removed from office by middle-class Haitians who were angered by his authoritarian measures and his attempts to ban free expression and a free press.This Marxist-influenced approach to Boyer’s motives makes good sense. But it hardly fully explains Haiti’s failure to develop. The usual explanations are that the young nation was saddled with the original massive debt and that everyone (led by the still slaving United States) refused to trade openly with Haiti. In turn, that led to further borrowings to support the various administrations that succeeded Boyer. From his ouster to 1915 (when the United States occupied Haiti), twenty-two men ruled Haiti, none ever accomplishing much for their constituents. (Thirteen were tossed out by force, three were killed in office, and only two completed their terms.)The indemnity was not the “primary” cause of Haiti’s failure to develop in the nineteenth century, says Dupuy (31). More important was the new elite’s failure to enlist the needed labor for their estates: Dupuy says the elites failed to “proletarianize” the former slaves (47). As a result, plantation agriculture gave way to smallholder subsistence farming. Equally damaging, he argues, was the new elite’s “egregious” incurring of crippling debts (a total of 166 million francs from 1875 to 1914) that could never be repaid (99). Thus, instead of becoming productive and earning export revenues, Haiti turned inward, elites competing for the only thing that could offer revenue—living off returns from governing. Much of the borrowed money was embezzled. Corruption, in other words, sapped the resources of the state then, just as it did throughout the era after the U.S. occupation from 1915 to 1934. The Duvaliers, father and son, were corrupt, and so were those who came after them—all living off the state and its people.The remainder of Dupuy’s book is equally provocative and rewarding: a coruscating chapter on the American occupation, another on the oppression and exploitation of women in Haiti’s capitalist economy, and a third on Haiti after the assassination of President Juvenel Moise in 2021. Dupuy’s thoughtful reexamination of why Haiti is the poorest nation in the Western Hemisphere is a compelling treatise.