1825–1838, May 28: (The Crushing Debt, the Final Treaty, and the Price of Sovereignty): Besides being a lien on Haiti’s sovereignty, the indemnity was crushi…

1825–1838, May 28: (The Crushing Debt, the Final Treaty, and the Price of Sovereignty): Besides being a lien on Haiti’s sovereignty, the indemnity was crushing: to pay even the first 30-million-franc installment, Boyer had to mortgage Haiti’s revenues at usurious rates to the moneylenders of Paris, depleting the treasury of its liquid reserves and flooding the country with printing-press gourde notes no better than monnaie-à-serpent. In the July Days of 1830, Charles X was swept away by Louis-Philippe, and from Haiti’s viewpoint the change was fortunate, as in 1831 only the citizen king’s intervention prevented the Foreign Minister from sending another squadron to collect what was truly uncollectible — between 1825 and 1831, Haiti’s annual expenditures exceeded revenues by amounts ranging from 220,000 gourdes to 1.3 million gourdes. In January 1835, the French naval officer Aubert Dupetit-Thouars came to collect but stayed to find out the facts, and after Inginac opened the books from 1818 to 1834, the admiral’s carefully prepared report convinced the most hardened doubters that both Haiti and French policy toward Haiti were bankrupt. On January 23, 1838, a final French delegation stepped ashore from the frigate La Néréide, and negotiating with a Haitian team headed by Inginac and the historian Beaubrun Ardouin, the French drew up two treaties: one superseding the hated ordinance of 1825 and conceding without qualification the sovereignty and independence of Haiti, the other reducing the remaining indemnity to 60 million francs to be liquidated without interest over thirty years. Final ratifications were exchanged in Paris on May 28, 1838, when Louis-Philippe quietly said to Haiti’s plenipotentiaries: “I hope the Haitians will recollect that they were once French and, however now independent of France, that France has been their metropole.”