NYTIMES: How a French Bank Captured Haiti
Every sentence of the invitation ended with an inky flourish, a triple loop of calligraphy befitting a night of dinner, dancing and fireworks at Haiti’s national palace.
Debt had smothered the country for more than half a century. Despite ousting its colonial rulers in a war of independence, Haiti had been forced to pay the equivalent of hundreds of millions of dollars to its former French slave masters, a ransom for the freedom it had already won in battle.
But on the night of Sept. 25, 1880, paying off the last of that money finally seemed within reach. No longer would Haiti lurch from one financial crisis to the next, always with a weather eye on the horizon for the return of French warships. The new president, Lysius Salomon, had managed a feat that had eluded the nation since birth.
“The country will soon have a bank,” he told his guests, proposing a toast. Outside, soldiers paraded down streets festooned with enormous flags.
Salomon had reason for optimism. European national banks had financed railroads and factories, softened the blows of recessions and added certainty to the business of governing. They helped bring life to a majestic version of Paris, one with clean water, sewers and grand avenues — investments that would pay off long into the future.
Now, it was Haiti’s turn. Salomon called it “a great event, which will go down in history.”
It was all a mirage.
The National Bank of Haiti, on which so many hopes were pinned that night, was national in name only. Far from an instrument of Haiti’s salvation, the central bank was, from its very inception, an instrument of French financiers and a way to keep a suffocating grip on a former colony into the next century.
Haiti’s central bank was set up by a Parisian bank, Crédit Industriel et Commercial. At a time when the company was helping finance one of the world’s best-known landmarks, the Eiffel Tower, as a monument to French liberty, it was choking Haiti’s economy, taking much of the young nation’s income back to Paris and impairing its ability to start schools, hospitals and the other building blocks of an independent country.
Crédit Industriel, known in France as C.I.C., is now a $355 billion subsidiary of one of Europe’s largest financial conglomerates. But its exploits in Haiti left a crippling legacy of financial extraction and dashed hopes — even by the standards of a nation with a long history of both.
Haiti was the first modern nation to win its independence after a slave uprising, only to be financially shackled for generations by the reparations demanded by the French government for most of the 19th century.
And just when that money was nearly paid, Crédit Industriel and its national bank — the very instruments that seemed to hold the promise of financial independence — locked Haiti into a new vortex of debt for decades more to come.
6 takeaways
about the reparations Haitians paid to former slaveholders.
French elites, including a descendant of one of the wealthiest slaveholders in Haiti’s history, controlled Haiti’s national bank from the French capital. Their ledgers show no investments in Haitian businesses, much less the kinds of ambitious projects that modernized Europe.
Instead, original records uncovered by The New York Times show that Crédit Industriel siphoned tens of millions of dollars out of Haiti and into the pockets of French investors.
The national bank that Crédit Industriel created charged fees on nearly every transaction the Haitian government made. French shareholders earned so much money that in some years, their profits exceeded the Haitian government’s entire public works budget for a country of 1.5 million people.
That history has been all but erased. Scholars say most of Crédit Industriel’s archives have been destroyed, and Haiti does not appear on the timeline used to publicize the company’s history as one of France’s oldest lenders. When it commissioned an official history to commemorate its 150th birthday in 2009, Haiti barely warranted a mention. The scholar who wrote that history, Nicolas Stoskopf, called the company “a bank without a memory.”
How a French Bank Captured Haiti