France’s Art Museums Remain Silent on Haiti
By Meredith Martin and Hannah Williams
On April 17, 1825, France’s King Charles X signed a decree that would confer independence on Haiti. But the king’s signature ensured that that freedom would come at a terrible cost: Haiti would be forced to make a massive indemnity payment of 150 million francs to its former French colonizers. The colossal financial burden that France imposed on Haiti—now known as the double debt—plunged the new nation into a crippling economic dependency, inhibiting growth and creating devastating repercussions that are still being felt in Haiti’s current crisis.
Last year marked two centuries of Haiti being made to pay for its freedom. And on that tragic bicentennial—on April 17, 2025—France’s President Macron announced the creation of a joint commission of French and Haitian historians. This commission, explained Macron, would study the impact of the indemnities and make recommendations for “a more peaceful future” (although precisely what that means has yet to be determined). That same month, scholars from the Sorbonne organized a conference on the 1825 indemnities, followed by another conference in June at the Collège de France entitled Haïti, 1825 : de l’indépendance à la dette. These events were accompanied by a special issue of the journal L’Histoire and other publications in France, Haiti, and around the globe, as well as a documentary on France TV entitled Haïti : la rançon de la liberté.
Contemporary artists and history museums—notably, those in French port cities with slave trading pasts—also made meaningful commentaries on Haiti and the indemnities. Bordeaux’s Musée d’Aquitaine, for instance, devoted a small section of its newly reinstalled permanent collection to the Haitian debt. Meanwhile, the city of La Rochelle hosted the exhibition Echoes of a Ransom / Debt, curated by Haitian artist Mildor Chevalier. At Paris’s contemporary art center, the Palais de Tokyo, the artist Raphaël Barontini’s exhibition Somewhere in the Night, the People Dance offered a spectacular reimagined vision of the court of Henry Christophe, Haiti’s first king. The show included Barontini’s images of Haitian revolutionaries and other Black freedom fighters, some of which had been installed earlier in the Panthéon alongside Oser la liberté (2023–4), an important exhibition about that subject curated by Florence Alexis and Jean Marie Théodat in collaboration with the Fondation pour la mémoire de l’esclavage (FME) and the Centre des monuments nationaux (CMN).
Yet within the sphere of France’s public art museums and national monuments, particularly those in and around Paris, the indemnity’s bicentennial passed with a conspicuous and frustrating lack of acknowledgment.
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