En visit to Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, Tuesday, November 19, on the sidelines of the G20, French President Emmanuel Macron was heard treating Haitians as “completely stupid”. There is no need to emphasize that this does not honor his function and, in the process, tarnishes the image of the country he is supposed to represent. France deserves better than these cookie-cutter declarations to which Mr. Macron, no doubt bored, has accustomed us recently. In search of sterile controversy, one could retort that the Haitian people have no lesson to learn from the one who failed, because of his inconsiderate decision to dissolve the National Assembly, to bring the extreme right to power in France.
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Let us instead look beyond these borderline vulgar remarks in the mouth of a President of the Republic. In his response to his interlocutor, he said: “I defended him, they fired him”speaking of the Haitian Prime Minister, Garry Conille, recently fired. It is not a question, we understand, of defending the basket of crabs that is the Haitian presidential transition council (CPT).
Mr. Macron's words border on the arrogance and class contempt that he is constantly accused of in France itself, especially when he addresses people who are socially poorly off. We remember, on this subject, his famous sentence to a job seeker: “I cross the street, I find you some [du travail]. » We have the impression that what irritates Mr. Macron the most is that the CPT dared to fire someone he defended.
Read between the lines
He also says: “It was the Haitians who killed Haiti. » And there you have to read between the lines. When we know that the president, to use his flowery language, is not “completely stupid”, we say to ourselves that he did not say these words by chance. His interlocutor's error was to question him about France's share of responsibility in the disastrous situation of the former French colony of Saint-Domingue. The presidential blood has only gone one round.
Mr. Macron is aware that April 17 will be the bicentenary of the “Haiti’s double debt”. What is it about? The slaves of Saint-Domingue freed themselves with weapons in their hands and proclaimed their independence to the world on 1is January 1804. After twenty-one years of negotiations to try to recover the former colony, Paris agrees to give it up, but on its conditions: recognition of the independence of the young State in exchange for guarantees of commercial exchanges favorable to the kingdom and, above all, 150 million gold francs intended to compensate the slave-owning colonists. This took the form of an order signed on April 17, 1825 by Charles X.
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