Haiti and France: Settling the Debts of the Past

Abstract

The rapid expansion of Haitian historiography over the past decade, especially in the work of French and North American scholars, has progressively and convincingly challenged the process that Michel-Rolph Trouillot—as recently as 1995—dubbed “silencing the past” (Trouillot, 1995). New histories of Haiti and its revolution have reasserted the global significance of the decade-long struggle led by Toussaint Louverture and to this work has been added important original studies of subjects, periods, and other interconnections hitherto largely unexplored.² At the same time, Haiti has achieved a prominence in popular culture similar to that it last enjoyed in the interwar period following the Harlem Renaissance and the first US occupation, with Madison Smartt Bell’s substantial trilogy of novels of the revolution (themselves translated into French) complemented by the music of Wyclef Jean and by Danny Glover’s soon to be completed biopic of Toussaint.³ At the same time, this scholarly and cultural interest has been supplemented by the persistence of Haiti in the international media. This presence has been evident in particular since the aborted celebrations of its bicentenary of independence, as a result not only of Aristide’s ousting from power in February 2004 but also of a series of subsequent events including the natural disasters of the devastating tropical storms of 2004 and 2008, and, most notably, the earthquake of January 12, 2010.

Haiti has never really been a French colony, but we have effectively enjoyed, for a long time, friendly relations with Haiti in that most notably we share the use of the same language.

Jacques Chirac, March 10, 2000, cited by Dorigny, 2005, p. 47.¹

France’s relations with Zimbabwe, Cuba or Burma are a matter of foreign policy. Our relations with Haiti are more sensitive, more emotional and more hidden because, in an often obscure way, they bring into play France’s relations with itself.

Debray, 2004, pp. 16–17