1825–2025: France, Haiti, & the Question of Indebtedness
Symposium | Wednesday, October 8th, 2025 from 1PM to 5PM | Hill Memorial Library
Lecture Hall, LSU
This year marks the bicentennial of King Charles X of France’s 1825 Royal Ordinance
demanding that Haiti pay 150 million gold francs to former French colonists and slaveholders
in exchange for recognition of its independence. As is well known in Haiti and increasingly
recognized outside of the country, this punitive indemnity was made even more damaging
by the massive loans the Haitian state had to take out from French banks to settle
its “debt,” effectively burdening the nation with what many refer to as the “double
debt” of independence. Despite a sizable reduction in 1838, it still took another
five decades to pay off the 112 million francs in indemnity, loans, and accrued interest
(nearly 560 million in today’s dollars), which eventually paved the way for over a
century of foreign interference or direct interventions in Haiti’s social, political,
and economic life. Today, this ruinous indemnity continues to condition Haitians’
experience of sovereignty and self-determination—as illustrated by the U.N.-backed
mission now unfolding to restore “law and order” in Port-au-Prince and “pacify” its
surrounding areas.
In light of this bicentennial, the CFFS is organizing a symposium on “1825–2025: France, Haiti, and the Question of Indebtedness,” to be held at LSU on October 8, from 1PM to 5pm in the Hill Memorial Library Lecture Hall. Gathering scholars from LSU, Tulane University, Texas A&M University, UC-Berkeley, and Scripps College, this interdisciplinary event will explore the facts and fictions of this crucial moment in the history of Franco-Haitian relations, with particular attention to the question of “indebtedness” and its conditions of (re)production. By assessing and unpacking the competing discourses and affects involved in what has been invariably dubbed the “1825 indemnity,” “double debt” or “ransom-debt,” participants will contribute to the CFFS’s long-standing reflection on the role of humanistic work and cultural critique in addressing the afterlives of slavery and colonialism in the Francophone Atlantic and the Circum-Caribbean region specifically. Louisiana—a state that received thousands of people from Saint-Domingue/Haiti following the start of the revolution in 1791—is a particularly relevant location to grapple with these enduring legacies. Consequently, the CFFS invites students, faculty, and anyone interested from LSU and the broader community to join and participate in this reflection.
Supported by the Cultural Services of the French Embassy, this symposium is LSU’s
contribution to a broader programming including partners at Yale University and Brown
University.
We kindly request that you RSVP.
Photo: Haitian President Jean-Pierre Boyer receiving Charles X’s decree recognizing
Haitian independence on July 11, 1825, Bibliotheque Nationale de France.
Program:
1PM - Opening Remarks
1:15 PM - 2:45 PM | Panel 1
Documenting the indemnity: French bureaucratic centralization of information on compensation
claims
Chelsea Stieber, Associate Professor of French Studies, Tulane University
In order to receive an indemnity payout, claimants to the 1825 indemnity needed to
provide sufficient evidence to prove both that their property had existed during the
colonial period and that they were the actual owner. Indeed, many indemnity claims
were denied because of insufficient documentation of such claims (the Dépôt des papiers
publics series at the Archives nationales d’outre-mer holds the records of many such
unprocessed claims—indemnités non-traitées). These judgments relied on documentation
that had been dispersed throughout the Atlantic world during the revolutionary period.
This presentation focuses on an 1823 Ordonnance du Roi that sought to centralize this
information: it required former public officials and notaries to submit any original
records of acts they had executed in the colony to the Ministry of the Navy. While
the text of the ordinance itself is rather broad, subsequent consular correspondence
from the US (and in particular New Orleans) reveals that the ordinance was aimed at
securing the necessary documentation to eventually process indemnity claims. This
suggests that the mechanisms for processing indemnity claims were well underway before
1825.
Merchants of Blood: Necro-Capitalism and the Domestic Consequences of French and US
Underdevelopment of Haiti
Westenley Alcenat, Assistant Professor of History and Africana Studies, Scripps College
This paper traces how the 1825 French indemnity institutionalized Haitian necro-capitalism—an
economic regime that extracts value through death, dispossession, and systemic violence,
exemplified by the plasma trade and exploitative tourist economy between the U.S.
and Haiti. By examining how external predation (French colonial extraction, U.S. occupation,
Cold War interventions) converged with internal elite complicity (military and financial
elites adapting to global market demands), the study traces how the reproduction of
structural inequities reverberated in the two centuries following the debt. The “merchants
of blood”—foreign banks, sex and medical tourists, Haitian elites, corporations, and
NGOs—profit from Haiti’s engineered crises, while neoliberal austerity exacerbates
dependency. Analyzing these necro-capitalist logics reveals how Haiti served as the
first fertile ground for new machinations in the deployment of sovereign debt to service
postcolonial extractions in the perpetuation of enduring poverty, ecological ruin,
and political fragility.
“Bovarysme” Revisited: Debt, Cultural Nationalism and Political Economy in Haitian
indigénisme
Christopher Bonner, Assistant Professor of French Studies, Texas A&M University
This paper discusses symbolic economies of debt and indebtedness in Haitian writing
during the US Occupation (1915-1934), especially in writings of the Haitian indigéniste
movement. It situates indigénisme’s aesthetic contestation of Haitian putative cultural
indebtedness to foreign (French) high culture within the political-economic context
of Haiti’s crippling financial debt to foreign banks. Specifically, the paper draws
out moments in La Revue indigene and other indigéniste writings in which the discussion
of culture slips into discussion of political economy. Though poems and essays by
figures such as Carl Brouard and Jacques Roumain will be mentioned, the central focus
of the presentation will be an analysis of the (in)famous term coined by ethnologist
Jean Price-Mars to criticize the Haitian elite’s imitation of European cultural forms:
“bovarysme collectif.” While many critics have discussed “bovarysme collectif” in
the context of Haitian cultural nationalism (especially in connection to the Griots
movement), this paper focuses on the understudied politico-economic undertones of
“bovarysme collectif.” Emma Bovary—to whom Price-Mars compares the Haitian elite—is
not destroyed by fantasizing about being someone else, but by debt.
2:45 PM - 3:00 PM | Coffee Break
3:00 PM - 4:00 PM | Panel 2
Cultures of Indebtedness: Anténor Firmin, Haiti, and the Empire of Francophonie
Bastien Craipain (convener), Assistant Professor of French Studies, LSU
How did Haitian intellectuals engage with the ruinous legacies of the ransom-debt
that France imposed on their nation in 1825? With a focus on the late nineteenth century,
this presentation shows how Anténor Firmin articulated a counterintuitive critique
of this tool of neocolonial domination by using the language of liberal imperialism
and Francophone expansion. In the two conferences he gave at the Grand Cercle de Paris
and the Société des études coloniales et maritimes in 1891 and 1892 respectively,
Firmin made a point of presenting Haiti not as a nation burdened by its revolutionary
past but as a neglected actor in France’s imperial present. I argue that this denunciation
of a Francophone empire of neglect—to use and supplement Christopher Taylor’s phrase—is
best read as an inversion of the flows of cultural and economic indebtedness aimed
at repositioning Haiti as a rightful claimant to the promises of Atlantic modernity.
Paying close attention to the rhetorical strategies mobilized and the affective registers
activated in these two texts, I show how Firmin leveraged discourses of familial obligation
along with theories of civilizational affiliation to advocate for the renewal of economic
and cultural ties between Haiti and France.
“Dechoukay la poko fini:” Haitian Returned Intellectuals and Unfinished Projects of
Restitution
Darlène Dubuisson, Assistant Professor of African American Studies, UC Berkeley
This talk explores how Haitian intellectuals, who returned to Haiti after the fall of Duvalier in 1986, sought to engage in popular movements of restitution. It focuses on the dechoukaj (uprooting) period in 1986 to reflect on the limits of the “engaged intellectual” in capturing and redirecting popular reparative mobilizations. Rather than taking a linear or teleological approach, the talk makes historical comparisons, looking both back to the 1825 indemnity and forward to the present day. The questions guiding this discussion are: What has been the role of Haitian intellectuals in collective projects of repair? What are the limitations of using violence to achieve reparative ends? How can coloniality in its myriad forms still be uprooted? Echoing Haitian folksinger and political activist Manno Charlemagne’s sentiment that “Dechoukay la poko fini” (The uprooting is unfinished), the talk also considers ongoing struggles for restitution and the potential for Haitian intellectuals to collaborate in these efforts.