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The French president on Thursday entered the cold mountain prison where Toussaint Louverture, the famous leader of the Haitian Revolution, died 220 years ago after being tricked, kidnapped and secreted across the ocean and into the interior of France.
Standing in the armory, not far from the cell where Louverture spent his last days, President Emmanuel Macron called the man who took France after his liberation from slavery a hero who embodied the true values of the French Enlightenment and Revolution.
“Toussaint Louverture fought to give life to the Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen,” Mr Macron said in a speech given on the 175th anniversary of the abolition of French slavery. “That gives liberty, equality, fraternity to all.”
It was the first time a French leader paid official tribute to Louverture in the prison where he died, a powerful move from a president determined to reconcile the France of today with the shadow of the past.
But the effort comes at a time when issues of race and colonial history remain very strong, and what Mr. Macron did not say may have been said. louder than he did.
He glossed over racism and colonial oppression that led to Louverture’s imprisonment and said nothing about the lingering effects of his country’s slaving era. In particular, he does not mention the ransom that France extorted from Haiti to compensate former slave owners and which led to Haiti’s economic development for more than a century.
“Toussaint Louverture, it’s true, embodied the brightest side of the French Revolution,” said Karfa Diallo, founder of Memories and Sharing, a French organization that campaigns for greater recognition of French slavery and colonialism.
But France, he said, cannot “pay tribute to Toussaint Louverture while ignoring Haiti’s demands for justice.”
Louverture grew up as a slave in France’s most valuable and brutal colony, Saint-Domingue, then Haiti. He later became one of the leaders of the slave revolt that led the revolutionary government in France to declare an end to slavery in all the colonies in 1794, at the height of the trans-Atlantic slave trade.
But then Napoleon came to power, sent warships to crush the former colonies – unsuccessfully – and restored slavery in the French empire. Louverture was arrested, and imprisoned without trial.
It wasn’t until 46 years later that France, on April 27, 1848, abolished slavery for the second and last time.
By honoring Louverture, the first abolitionist, on his second anniversary, Mr Macron is committing an ahistorical act that undermines his message, said Myriam Cottias, director of the International Center for Research on Slavery and Post-Slavery. in Paris.
The first abolition was brought about by a bloody slave uprising, while the second represented the ideals of the French Republic, especially equality. In addition, Ms Cottias noted, Louverture was betrayed by Napoleon, an autocrat who was crowned emperor.
“To celebrate the Republic in the place where we put out the small fire, the man of the Enlightenment, and where the man who made that man die is also the one who killed the Republic – that ambiguity, I find very dangerous,” he said. .
Mr Macron touched on the betrayal, saying that Louverture and his fellow rebels embodied French revolutionary ideals, unlike the troops sent to arrest them.
“The soldier Toussaint Louverture sang the Marseillaise in front of the French troops who came to restore slavery,” he said. “The Song of the Revolution to remind the occupiers that they betrayed the spirit of the French republic in an unforgivable way.”
In 1998, Louverture’s name was added to a wall in the Pantheon, the tomb of French heroes.
But much of its history remains largely forgotten in France, said Jean-Marc Ayrault, a former French prime minister and head of the French Slavery Memorial Foundation. A report published by the foundation in 2020 said that only one in 10 French primary and secondary school students had learned about Louverture and the Haitian Revolution.
Pap Ndiaye, France’s education minister, admitted to not knowing earlier this month when he honored Louverture at the Pantheon. “While Haitian students all know about the French Revolution, few French students know about the Haitian Revolution,” he said. “This has to change.”
Cottias said France’s belief in the equality of republican ideals is part of the reason the topic remains sensitive.
“It’s hard for people to understand that the history of slavery and the history of colonialism are part of the history of France, and that it’s not a related history,” he said. “That’s the sticking point.”
The French legacy in Haiti did not end there declaration of independence in 1804.
In 1825, French warships returned and forced the young country to pay reparations for colonial losses, or face war. Haiti is the first and only country in the world where the descendants of enslaved people pay reparations to the descendants of their masters, generation after generation. That debt, and the loans the country took out to pay it off, crippled the country’s economy for more than a century.
A New York Times investigation revealed that over six decades, Haiti has sent $560 million in current dollars to the descendants of former colonists and the banks that provided the first loans. If the money stays in the country, then the economy will grow from $21 billion to $115 billion in two centuries. And that does not include loans later taken out.
A number of prominent French and Haitian scholars, activists and politicians have long called for France to return the money. Mr Ayrault, a former prime minister, said his foundation would lobby the commission to explain the history of the payments.
But Mr. Macron did not mention the debt in his speech, emphasizing instead the symbolic power of the tribute. “The simple fact of saying this name, Toussaint Louverture, is therefore a reparation for the insult done to the great Frenchman,” he said.
Mr. Macron barely mentions contemporary Haiti, which is plagued by gang violence.
Jean Josué Pierre Dahomey, Haiti’s Ambassador to France, said the tribute to Louverture should also be “proof of France’s obligation of solidarity to Haiti.”
And Leslie Voltaire, a former Haitian official, welcomed the tribute but said France owed Haiti more than words.
“The legacy of Haiti is the legacy of trying to reimpose slavery, and forcing the neocolonial regime by debt,” Mr. Voltaire, who campaigned for financial compensation from France as a government minister 20 years ago, said from Port-au-Prince.
Mr. Voltaire pointed out that the former French president, François Hollande, promised to pay off the debt in 2015.
“I’d love to hear that follow-up,” he said.
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