French President Emmanuel Macron said Thursday that historic injustice was imposed on Haiti when it was forced to pay a colossal indemnity to France in exchange for its independence 200 years ago.
Macron also announced the creation of a joint French-Haitian historical commission to ‘’examine our shared past’’ and assess relations, but did not directly address longstanding Haitian demands for reparations.
France ″subjected the people of Haiti to a heavy financial indemnity, … This decision placed a price on the freedom of a young nation, which was thus confronted with the unjust force of history from its very inception,’’ Macron said in a statement.
Based on a quick Wikipedia look up on this, it effectively took Haiti 122 years to pay of this debt with the final payment being in 1947.
The original debt was 150 million francs and while I couldn’t immediately find an inflation calculator for francs that went back to 1825, I was able to convert it to USD and apply a USD inflation calculation to give a value of $7,155,188,451.38 USD which is 5,780,760,331.77 francs.
France was originally graceful enough to require the 150 million amount in five annually payments and was gracious enough to reduce the remaining debt in 1838 but I see no reason for anyone but the Haitians to decide if they would want to return the favor.
With a GDP of 3.2 million, that feels more than doable. France may have to cut their baguettes consumption but I believe in their ability to yank those bootstraps.