Civil Law, Constitutionalism, and the Haitian Independence Debt

In 1825, King Charles X of France imposed on Haiti, by royal ordinance, an indemnity payment of 150 million francs in exchange for recognizing the infant nation’s independence. Current historiography focuses on the indemnity’s basis in colonial and racial hierarchies, its imperial extension of property rights and international law, and its deleterious effects on future Haitian governance. Jurists have meanwhile articulated potential avenues for reparations or lawsuits under the current standard of public international law. Amidst this, not enough has been made of the decade of legislative debates preceding the ordinance, in which the logistics and rationale of imposing an indemnity were contested, nor of the flurry of grievances, complaints, and justifications that emerged after King Charles’ unilateral declaration.

This poster analyzes French legislative debates from roughly 1814 to 1827 regarding the imposition of an independence debt on Haiti, attempting to embed them within larger legal debates that the indemnity forced to the point of crisis. For instance, the unilateral nature of King Charles’ ordinance raised again the topic, repeatedly broached and dropped over the past decade, of whether the Charter of 1814 granted the King the ability to cede French territory without legislative approval. Because of the Charter’s wording, this threatened the classical distinction between the domain of the crown and the territory of France, also raising awkward questions about whether colonies were exterior enough from the French core to be subject only to political, not civil, law, and whether the droit des gens, the law of nations, could be applied in colonial contexts. Even more debated than the indemnity itself was how the finances of Haiti’s former colonists, for whom the indemnity was intended, should be handled. With many of them having taken out huge debts from French creditors before the revolution, questions arose of whether the colonists or their creditors should receive the indemnity, whether the colonists should have their debts reduced or waived in light of extraordinary political circumstances, and who had the power to waive these debts and thereby abrogate private law.

In treating these topics, this poster highlights the centrality of colonial relations to the development of international law. It argues that the unprecedented legal statuses that the Haitian Revolution engendered, statuses brought to a crisis point by the imposition of the indemnity, forced a contentious extension of longstanding legal categories, creating meaningful precedents in international and French constitutional law. It also gestures at some afterlives of these developments, although the focus is on the debates themselves. The poster’s main content is split into two sections—issues of jurisdiction and creditors vs. debtors—broad categories under which the aforementioned legal issues fall. Each issue will be covered by a depiction of the controversy, a brief review of the development of the debate, and a summary of the eventual consensus reached, with a focus on similarities across issues. It also includes, at the top, an abbreviated abstract and pertinent historical information, as well as several salient pictures throughout.