Since Haiti was one of France's most profitable colony during the 1800s, was there any more serious attempt by the French to retake it after Napoleon?

by King_Vercingetorix

Did a revanchist culture of retaking Haiti ever developed within any of the French governments after the Napoleonic Era? If not, why is that?

Cobra_D

Generally, no.

For one thing, years of revolution had damaged the island's economy, and attempts by post-independence leaders like Dessalines and King Christophe faced intense resistance when they tried to maintain the plantation system that had made Saint-Dominique so profitable. Since the plantation system required brutal slave labor to work, and since Haiti's population was willing to die to defend their freedom, it would never be easy to restore things to had they had been.

That said, there was one notable example of renewed French colonialism after independence. France refused to recognize Haitian independence, but in 1825 its King Charles X extended the olive branch and the sword. He send a flotilla of warships to the island, threatening invasion unless Haiti "repaid" French slave-owners for losses caused by the Revolution. Successive Haitian governments spent a lot of time worrying and planning for another French invasion, which would have certainly been destructive, so they agreed to pay what amounted to reparations for their own slavery to the tune of a 150 million francs - which required loans from France and saddled Haiti with a debt it could not repay in full until the 1940s, counting interest. In return Charles X recognized Haitian independence and renounced any French claim to the island.

Yet I am not sure how sincere Charles's threat was - the monarchy was debt-riddled itself, and one of the reasons it invaded Algeria in 1830 was to steal its treasury, so I suspect it may have been an closer to blackmail than a real threat. Sadly there's very few sources I've been able to find on this attempted invasion.

Otherwise Haiti seemed to prove that "old-style" colonialism, built on slavery and mercantilist trade was on its way out. New revolutionary ideals gave slaves the means by which to oppose oppression, Haitian victory showed that they could win their freedom by force, and the abolition of the slave trade by Britain made it difficult to re-impose slavery elsewhere. The loss of Haiti was therefore actually a turning-point in the way French colonizers conceived of empire. Few Frenchmen, even liberals, wanted to repudiate colonialism altogether, but clearly it needed to be re-imagined in a way that would be both profitable and suitable to post-revolutionary values. France still held onto slave plantation colonies, such as Guadeloupe, but even there slave-owners bowed to the inevitable and merely tried to push off emancipation and demand compensation rather than defend the system as a whole. The solution that the French arrived at was settler colonialism, in which a restored empire would be worked by free white men.

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Sources:

Jennifer Sessions, By Sword and Plow: France and the Conquest of Algeria. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2011.