Following its 1804 independence after a thirteen-year revolution, Haiti faced continued French hostility. In 1825, threatened with invasion, President Boyer agreed to pay 150 million francs to secure recognition from France—an unprecedented case of formerly enslaved people compensating their enslavers. This 2025 conference, marking the
bicentennial of this devastating agreement, examines its profound impact on Haiti and connects this historical injustice to contemporary global discussions about reparations for descendants of slavery.
Conference organized by Pierre Saint-Amand and Marlene L. Daut
Funded with the support of The Edward J. and Dorothy Clarke Kempf Memorial Fund, The Whitney and Betty MacMillan Center for International and Area Studies at Yale and the Cultural Services of the Embassy of France in the US.
Program
9:30-9:45
Welcome remarks, Pierre Saint-Amand, Yale University
Morning sessions: Chair, Pierre Saint-Amand, Yale University
9:45-10:45
Marlene Daut, Yale University
“Extortion, or the Greatest Heist in History: France, Haiti, and the Threat of Violence”
Jean Casimir, Université d’État d’Haïti
“The Debt of Independence and the Gagging of the Haitian Independence”
Coffee Break
11:00-12:30
Malick Ghachem, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
“Bubble Colony: Saint-Domingue and the Debt of France”
Jean-Marie Théodat, Sorbonne Université
“Haïti 1825-2025 : Géopolitique de la dette” (via Zoon)
Moderator: Grégory Pierrot, University of Connecticut
Afternoon sessions: Chair, Marlene Daut, Yale University
2:00-4:00
Daniel Desormeaux, Johns Hopkins University
“L’Autre double dette (1825-2025): échange, restitution, don et pardon”
Chelsea Stieber, Tulane University,
“The Idea of Indemnity: Tracing the 1825 Ordinance through Precedent and archives”
Julia Gaffield, William and Mary
“The Demi-Droit of 1825: Haiti’s International Trade after the 1825 French Ordonnance”
Moderator: Lewis Clorméus, Université d’État d’Haïti, Yale University
Coffee Break
4:30-5:30
Chair, Kaïama L. Glover, Yale University
Keynote (Remote) : Yanick Lahens,
“La Blessure de la dette: la littérature pour prendre soin de l’imaginaire”
Abstracts
Jean Casimir (Université d’État d’Haïti)
“The Debt of Independence and the Gagging of the Haitian Independence”
Since the issue of the Debt of Independence was popularized by The New York Times, in an article that bruised the self-image of the French State, it has become quite popular in various sectors of the discourse. My concern is not so much the restoration or reparation of the damages caused to us, as the eventual consequences of the supposed solutions. My paper explores how certain political authorities could have negotiated and accepted the debt.
Marlene Daut (Yale University)
“Extortion, or the Greatest Heist in History: France, Haiti, and the Threat of Violence”
The French began planning the reconquest of Haiti soon after the Haitian Declaration of Independence on January 1, 1804, and threatened the new nation under all its first leaders from its founder, Emperor Jean-Jacques Dessalines (assassinated in 1806) to both King Henry Christophe (who ruled after Dessalines in the north until he committed suicide in 1820) and Alexandre Pétion ( simultaneously president over a republic in the south and west until 1818 when he died of natural causes). By the time Pétion and Christophe’s successor, President Jean-Pierre Boyer, agreed to the indemnity in 1825, the French had been openly plotting for two decades to “exterminate” the Haitian populace in the name of restoring slavery. This talk discusses how that history of planned genocide is essential to understanding the threat of violent warfare, not merely financial exploitation, that 19th-century Haitians lived with because, in the words of Dessalines, they “dared to be free.”
Daniel Desormeaux (Johns Hopkins University)
“L’Autre double dette (1825-2025): échange, restitution, don et pardon”
Since Antiquity, the vanquished have reimbursed the vanquishers for war expenses. Never before 1825 had we seen victors pay indemnities to the defeated army. It was not Napoleon Bonaparte who demanded a ransom from Haiti, but the regime of the Restoration, more precisely the reign of Charles X, an anachronistic, indebted, unpopular, mocked, contested sovereign who was unable to spend more than six years in power (1824-1830). Because of Napoleon Bonaparte, France is, to our knowledge, the first European nation to claim and be claimed heavy war reparations in all of contemporary history after 1789. What then can be said of a nation considered the first of former enslaved people of the modern era to agree to pay this kind of debt to the point of bankruptcy?
Julia Gaffield (College of William and Mary)
“The Demi-Droit of 1825: Haiti’s International Trade after the 1825 French Ordonnance”
This paper explores how the demi-droit of Article 1 of the 1825 Ordonnance affected Haiti’s relationship with the British Empire. The demi-droit damaged trade negotiations with the British and affected perceptions of Haiti’s sovereignty. Even though it was short-lived, the demi-droit had lasting implications as Haitian leaders continued their fight for equality among nations.
Malick Ghachem (Massachusetts Institute of Technology)
“Bubble Colony: Saint-Domingue and the Debt of France”
The subordination of Haiti to the demands of servicing French public and private debt goes back to the Mississippi Bubble. It was in 1720 that Haitians were first placed under the yoke, not only of the tropical plantation enterprise, but of the perverse logic that says people of west African descent must be sacrificed to satisfy the unbridled monetary appetites and financial woes of the French nation. That is an unrecognized cost of the Mississippi Bubble and of so much of the Euro-Atlantic experience of fifinancial modernization. The bubble that was the sugar revolution did not burst in Saint- Domingue with the defeat of Law’s plans for the colony. Instead, the planters internalized and privatized the financial and economic logic of the System against which they had rebelled, making of it a script for the management of plantation society. Saint-Domingue became a bubble colony.
Chelsea Stieber (Tulane University)
“The Idea of Indemnity: Tracing the 1825 Ordinance through Precedent and Archives”
This paper proceeds on two fronts: first, it sketches out the idea of indemnity within legal and diplomatic history in order to highlight how lawless, aberrant and uncustomary the 1825 ordinance was. Next, it looks closely at the preparations the French government made in the lead up to the 1825 negotiations in order to clarify the chronology of the indemnity agreement. It focuses on an 1823 Ordonnance du Roi that required former notaries and current consular agents to submit any original records of acts related to Saint Domingue to the Ministry of the Navy. While the text of the ordinance itself is rather broad, consular correspondence from the US (and in particular New Orleans) reveals that the 1823 ordinance was aimed at securing and centralizing the necessary documentation to assist in processing future indemnity claims—claims for an agreement that did not yet exist.
Speakers’ Bios
Jean Casimir, Université d’État d’Haiti
Professor Casimir teaches at the Faculty of Human Sciences, State University of Haiti. He was a visiting Professor at Stanford University, at the University of the West Indies in Kingston, Jamaica, and a Mellon Visiting Professor at Duke University. He published on social structures of Mexico, Brazil, Haiti, and the Caribbean in general. His major work La cultura oprimida published in Mexico in 1981 is also available in French. Casimir is a former Ambassador of Haiti to the United States of America and to the Organization of American States. He has recently published The Haitians: A Decolonial History (University of North Carolina Press, 2020).
Daniel Desormeaux, Johns Hopkins University
Professor Desormeaux works as a comparatist, primarily on French and Francophone literatures and cultures of the long nineteenth century. His research interests include French and Caribbean literature and thought of the “long” 19th century; Haitian Revolution, race, and slavery; comparative analysis of Caribbean literature and religion. His books include Alexandre Dumas: Fabrique d’immortalité (Paris: Classiques Garnier, 2014) and Mémoires du général Toussaint Louverture, a critical edition with an introduction (Paris: Classiques Garnier, 2011). Desormeaux is the William D. and Robin Mayer Professor of Arts and Sciences. He also edited Haiti Beyond Commemorations, Politics, and History (L’Esprit créateur 56.1 (2016).
Julia Gaffield, William and Mary
Professor Gaffield is Associate Professor of History and Interim Editor of the William & Mary Quarterly. Her first book, Haitian Connections in the Atlantic World: Recognition after Revolution was published by the University of North Carolina Press in 2015. Gaffield is currently working on two book projects: the first, entitled I have Avenged America: Jean-Jacques Dessalines and Haiti’s Fight for Freedom, (under contract with Yale University Press, forthcoming in June 2025). The second, entitled The Abandoned Faithful: Race and International Law in the Aftermath of the Haitian Revolution (under contract with OIEAHC/UNC Press).
Yanick Lahens is a celebrated Haitian novelist, short-story writer, essayist, and literary professor. She pursued university studies in France, then returned to Haiti, where she taught literature at the University of Haiti. Her literary work includes essays, collections of short stories, and novels. Notable works include Dans la maison du père, La couleur de l’aube, Guillaume et Nathalie, Bain de lune, and Douces déroutes. Her novel Bain de lune won the Prix Femina in 2014. In recognition of her contributions, Lahens has received numerous national and international awards. She was appointed the first holder of the Francophone Worlds Chair at the Collège de France for 2018–2019.
Chelsea Stieber, Tulane University
Chelsea Stieber is Associate Professor and Kathryn B. Gore Chair in the Department of French and Italian at Tulane University. She specializes in nineteenth-century Caribbean literature, history, and culture with an emphasis on Haiti. She is the author of Haiti’s Paper War: Post-Independence Writing, Civil War, and the Making of the Republic, 1804–1954 (New York University Press, 2020) and co-editor with Brandon R. Byrd of the critical translation of Louis-Joseph Janvier’s Haiti for the Haitians (Liverpool University Press, 2023).
Jean-Marie Théodat, Université Paris 1-Panthéon-Sorbonne
Professor Théodat is a geographer and associate professor of geography at Paris 1. He specializes in globalization, geopolitics, the Caribbean, Haiti and the Dominican Republic. He is the author of Haiti et la République dominicaine (2003), co-editor of France-Haiti, les chaînes de la dette on the Mackau report, 1825 (2021), and he was one of the curators of the exhibit Oser la liberté: Figures des combats contre l’esclavage at the Pantheon (now a catalogue, 2023).
