EITHERN of July 8, 1825, under a pressure that was intended to be a diplomatic, but proved to be a military and coercive, the government of Haitian President Jean-Pierre Boyer yielded to the demands of King Charles X of France. He imposed an ordinance dated April 17, 1825, stipulating that Haiti had to pay the colossal sum of 150 million gold francs to the French state, “aimed at compensating the old settlers” who had coined a colonialist, who has omitted and the racist and the racist system.
Haiti was recovering from an exhausting and heroic liberation war (1791-1801) against this system, achieving in 1804 what the historian Michel-Rolph Touillot (1949-2012) described as “unthinkable” for time. Since then, France had maintained Haiti in economic and political isolation with the support of the imperial powers of that time.
Question of ‘restitution’
In exchange for the payment of this compensation, France would receive the independence of the former colony and end this isolation. This exorbitant sum, which represents approximately 15% of the France budget and three years of that of the young Haitian nation, is equivalent to economic and social fraud.
The money for the first delivery was due in December 1825, five months after the signing of the Ordinance. But because the young state was insolvent, a clause was not touched in the request for the ordinance that the money for that quota was panel of French banks. Historians and economists refer to this as the “double debt.”
Haiti found himself trapped in the vicious circle of the agency. Its economy, oriented out, was subjected to this unfair debt. To honor him, the Haitian peasantry, the heartbeat of the nation, was exploited for decades, and the large -scale logging of precious wood exacerbated the ecological disaster initiated by the planting system, while the “moderate taxes” were requested on all the products from France.
The members of the economic and political elites, through corruption mechanisms, became control in this fraud. Through this debt, Haiti occupies an emblematic place in world history, since he inaugurates what would become North-South relations and the neocolonial governance model.
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