1879–1880: (Salomon the Modernizer: The Banque Nationale, the National Coinage, and the French Debt): Louis-Félicité Lysius Salomon-jeune was the first presi…

1879–1880: (Salomon the Modernizer: The Banque Nationale, the National Coinage, and the French Debt): Louis-Félicité Lysius Salomon-jeune was the first president since Geffrard to enter the Palais National with a program: he intended to restart public education, put Haiti’s finances on a sound basis, restore agricultural productivity, improve the army, and upgrade public administration — aims that Henry Christophe would well have understood. Eleven years as Soulouque’s Finance Minister had not gone for nothing: the new president’s first efforts were directed toward fiscal reform, bluntly telling the country on November 30, 1879, that its credit was ruined. Within four months he had hammered legislation through the assembly to establish a national bank — not a thieves’ rat hole like Rameau’s Trésor but a central bank of orthodox function — capitalized by a consortium of seventeen French bankers with 10 million francs, and on May 13, 1880, Le Moniteur proudly announced the success of Finance Minister Léon Laforesterie’s Paris mission. Salomon resumed payments to France on both the Domingue loan and the 1825 millstone, managing to pay up all arrears and — before the very end of his regime in 1888 — liquidate the entire original indemnity. He authorized a hard national coinage on September 24, 1880, struck in gold, silver, and copper at the Paris mint. On June 1, 1880, Haiti adhered to the International Postal Union, and by statute of October 7 authorized its first postage stamps, both coins and stamps designed by Laforesterie and manufactured in France. The president obtained French post-office specialists, took up Boisrond’s cable project connecting Port-au-Prince and Kingston, recruited French teachers for the Lycée Pétion, improved the lycées at the Cap and Cayes, reopened rural schools, and resurrected the defunct law school and moribund medical school. Salomon the francophile revealed an instinctive inclination toward France — not unlike Henry’s toward England — for help in modernization, yet the deeper structural irony was that every instrument of the national bank, the coinage, the postal system, and the education reform was designed by, capitalized by, and manufactured in the former colonial metropole, reproducing at the institutional level the very dependency that Salomon’s fiscal independence was meant to overcome.