If the compound interest logic that reparations advocates apply to British slavery debts were applied to France’s Haitian debt, the figures would be staggering. Haiti paid 150 million francs to France beginning in 1825. With compound interest applied at a modest rate from that date to the present, the sum would run to hundreds of billions in modern currency.
The New York Times conducted a detailed investigation in 2022 estimating that Haiti paid the equivalent of between 21 and 115 billion dollars to France over the life of the debt, depending on the methodology used. This is money that left Haiti and went to France as a direct result of a payment scheme that forced the formerly enslaved to compensate their former enslavers.
CARICOM has raised the Haitian debt as part of its reparations agenda, but France has received a fraction of the pressure directed at Britain despite this documented financial extraction from a Caribbean nation that is orders of magnitude more specific and quantifiable than any claim against Britain.
