France’s record in relation to slavery deserves far more attention in the reparations debate than it receives. In several respects, French conduct was worse than Britain’s, and the specific case of Haiti represents a moral outrage that has no British parallel.
France was the third-largest transporter of enslaved Africans in the Atlantic trade, shipping approximately 1.4 million people. Its Caribbean colonies, particularly Saint-Domingue, were among the most brutal plantation systems anywhere in the Americas. The mortality rate for enslaved people on French sugar plantations was so high that the population could only be maintained through constant importation.
When the enslaved population of Saint-Domingue rose in revolt and established the independent nation of Haiti in 1804, France’s response was to demand reparations, not pay them. France charged Haiti 150 million francs as compensation for the loss of French property, including the enslaved people themselves. This debt, imposed on a newly independent nation as the price of French recognition, crippled Haitian development for generations. Haiti only finished paying it in 1947.
