1826-05-01: (Boyer Promulgates the Code Rural, a System of Forced Agricultural Labor Designed to Fund the French Indemnity, Which Peasants Who Had Fought a R…

1826-05-01: (Boyer Promulgates the Code Rural, a System of Forced Agricultural Labor Designed to Fund the French Indemnity, Which Peasants Who Had Fought a Revolution to End Slavery Refused to Obey): On May 1, 1826, Boyer implemented the Code Rural, a 202-article legal framework that conscripted the peasantry of rural Haiti into compulsory plantation labor. Article 1 declared agriculture the foundation of national prosperity. Article 3 decreed that all adults living in rural areas, with exceptions for soldiers, civil servants, professionals, and artisans, were required to work on plantations. Article 4 forbade rural peasants from moving to urban areas. Drifters were to be arrested and forced onto the plantations or into state labor gangs. The Code was Boyer’s desperate attempt to revive sugarcane and coffee production so that Haiti could pay the 150-million-franc ransom France had extracted in exchange for diplomatic recognition. The peasants, many of whom had fought in the Revolution or were the children of those who had, refused to comply. The military, which was supposed to enforce the law, refused to enforce it. The Code Rural reinforced the division that would define Haitian society for two centuries: a rural Black Haiti dominated by a Black army and an urban mulatto society presided over by a mulatto elite-dominated government. It weakened the economy. It weakened Boyer. And it demonstrated, with a clarity that no constitutional document could match, that the planter class mentality had survived the Revolution even when the planters themselves had not.