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. As Michel-Rolph Trouillot argued in Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History—his landmark 1995 book that exposes historiographical erasures of the Haitian Revolution—all historical narratives are shaped by “a bundle of silences.” And in France’s art museums, those silences were palpable. Few public art museums seemed interested in joining the larger national conversation about Haiti’s double debt and its association with slavery and colonialism and their legacies.

This absence was thrown into profound and disturbing relief by two art exhibitions we visited in 2025. Both were devoted to Charles X, who was known as the comte d’Artois before his coronation: Le Dernier sacre (The last coronation) at the Mobilier National / Les Gobelins (April 11–July 20, 2025); and Le comte d’Artois, prince et mécène. La jeunesse du dernier roi de France (The comte d’Artois, prince and patron. The youth of the last king of France) at the Château de Maisons (November 14, 2025–March 2, 2026). Remember, Charles X played a pivotal role in Haiti: as the king who enacted and enforced Haiti’s double debt, and as the comte d’Artois, who was entangled in pre-independence Haiti. In fact, before 1789, the comte d’Artois tried to establish a refinery for raw sugar shipped from Haiti (Saint-Domingue) and had Black “servants” who were, most likely, actually slaves.

Given d’Artois / Charles X’s actions and possessions, we would have expected these two shows to participate in the public discourse around France and Haiti’s shared history. But in both cases, we were surprised and disappointed to encounter no engagement whatsoever: even in 2025, this supposed year of acknowledgment and remembrance.

Finding nothing—where we had expected to find at least something—made the silence in these exhibitions louder than ever. Our experience was compounded by the fact that our visits to these museum shows coincided with attending other events that were not only forcefully addressing legacies of French slavery but also attempting a turning of the tide in France’s reckoning with its colonial past.

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One afternoon in June 2025, we visited Le Dernier sacre after attending sessions at the Collège de France’s Haïti, 1825 conference just a short distance away. Marking a very different bicentenary—the extravagant coronation of Charles X, which took place a little over a month after the indemnity decree—the Gobelins’s show focused on the rich material culture of this ritual event, and on the role of royal manufactories in glorifying and historicizing the Bourbon Restoration. Entering the exhibition, visitors walked into luxuriously immersive reconstructions of Charles X’s coronation, with theatrical tableaux showcasing the artistry behind the event’s decor, garments, and accessories.

In terms of understanding the intricate material production of a restoration ceremony, the Gobelins’s show was certainly worthwhile. But for 1825 to be recognized as the anniversary of such contrasting events—France’s last coronation, and Haiti’s double debt—the Gobelins’s triumphant take felt uncomfortably out of touch for 2025. After a morning at the Collège de France hearing about the 1825 indemnities and their catastrophic impact on Haitian society, the shock of an afternoon unproblematically celebrating the sumptuous wealth of Charles X’s coronation was difficult to take.

Installation view of Le Dernier Sacre, Mobilier National / Les Gobelins. Photo: Meredith Martin.

Throughout the show, there were many moments when connections between these two events (the decree and the coronation) could have been highlighted. The exhibition featured, for instance, a didactic “family tree” representing Charles X’s maison du roi, which included the names of illustrious families (Polignac, Rochefoucauld, Talleyrand) whose members had either owned plantations in Saint-Domingue, profited from colonial trade, or received indemnity payments. None of this was mentioned, nor was the fact that many of the materials associated with this event—mahogany (for royal furnishings); tobacco (for souvenir snuffboxes); and sugar (for festive banquets)—were valuable commodities produced with enslaved labor in Saint-Domingue, which had transformed metropolitan France and fueled its wealth.

It wasn’t that we expected an exhibition on Charles X’s coronation to be turned into an exhibition on the double debt. But we did expect the show to complicate the narrative around France’s last king. We expected it to acknowledge France’s colonial past (which, for Charles X, also included the order to invade Algeria prior to his 1830 abdication), rather than ignore it. We expected the show to be more aligned with French public discourse in 2025, rather than maintaining an outmoded silence.

Later in the year, on a wintery weekend in December 2025, we went to see the comte d’Artois show at the Château de Maisons prior to attending a conference the next day called Esclavages et héritages (Slavery and its legacies), organized by the FME and held at the Bibliothèque nationale de France. The Maisons exhibition (jointly organized by the Château de Versailles and the CMN) focuses, as its full title suggests, on Charles X’s “youth” as the comte d’Artois: his failed military career, prodigious art and architectural patronage, and collecting of scientific and ethnographic artifacts from Asia, Africa, and the Americas.

Even when d’Artois’s direct and disturbing imbrication in colonial slavery is so plainly visible … the curatorial silence persisted.

Once again, this exhibition offered ample opportunities to complicate Charles X’s narrative, as each of these different areas were strongly tied to France’s colonial pursuits. The comte’s involvement in the campaign to seize Gibraltar from the British, for example, was aimed in part at facilitating trade with the Americas, and many of the objects in his cabinet of curiosities were taken from colonial territories and traveled to France on slave ships.

His closest friend and art advisor, the comte de Vaudreuil, had been born in colonial Saint-Domingue, where his father was governor. Vaudreuil had amassed an extraordinary art collection with profits from his family’s sugar plantations. Both he and d’Artois were part of an ancien régime colonial milieu that speculated on Saint-Domingue plantations, Parisian real estate, the art market, and the slave trade. Years afterward, d’Artois remembered the Vaudreuil family fondly, and they received a large payout from the 1825 indemnities.

Thus, the comte d’Artois’s life cannot be neatly divided into a prerevolutionary “youth” and a restoration rule. Instead, these two moments—and their connections to colonialism and human subjugation—are inextricably linked. And yet we saw none of these colonial connections mentioned anywhere in the exhibition.

Moitte, The comte d’Artois as a Hunter (and detail). Installation view and wall label for the exhibition Le comte d’Artois, prince et mécène. La jeunesse du dernier roi de France, château de Maisons. Photo : Sophia Bevacqua.

Once again, this felt like a missed opportunity. For us, this frustration was crystalized as we stood in front of a gouache portrait by Jean-Baptiste-Philibert Moitte, Le comte d’Artois en chasseur (d’Artois as a hunter), where d’Artois is depicted as accompanied by a Black—probably enslaved—attendant. Instead of highlighting the presence of this young Black man and using the portrait to discuss the comte’s exploitation of Black labor (both in Saint-Domingue and in Paris), the curators seemed to go out of their way to ignore any racial dynamics. The Black boy is identified simply as a “young page,” and the interpretation focused on d’Artois’s “favorite pastime” of hunting, shown here in the grounds of the Château de Bagatelle, one of his most notorious architectural follies.

An additional wall label for children encourages them to “look carefully” to find the horse in the background, with no mention of the Black youth holding the animal’s reins (who may be the same person identified only as a “nègre” in account records for the comte’s stables). Even when d’Artois’s direct and disturbing imbrication in colonial slavery is so plainly visible, as in a portrait like this one, the curatorial silence persisted.

That silence was powerfully counterbalanced by the Esclavages et héritages conference we attended the following day. Organized by the FME, the conference brought together political figures, scholars, and creators to assess the current state of the field of slavery and memory studies in France.

It was an attempt to take stock, at the end of 2025: to highlight advances in research (including awards for recent PhD dissertations) but also to confront unresolved challenges around how memories of slavery are communicated—or sidelined—within French institutions. Central to the day was Dominique Rogers’s presentation of the FME’s LiBRE (Livre blanc de la recherche française sur les esclavages), a wide-ranging audit of French research on slavery, along with 51 practical proposals calling for durable structures, material support, greater visibility, and stronger links between research and cultural heritage institutions.

This assessment of the field helped solidify what we had observed with Le Dernier sacre and Le comte d’Artois. These exhibitions were not merely two missed opportunities to bring greater attention to—not erasure of—the complex history of France’s last king. They were symptomatic of broader systemic and institutional shortcomings within the French art and heritage sectors, particularly regarding the invisibility of slavery and its legacies.

Among the LiBRE’s proposals is one that speaks directly to this systemic challenge. France, according to this proposal—with which we agree—needs to “deepen knowledge of slavery, the slave trade, and their legacies within teaching at the École du Louvre,” the prestigious higher-education institution that trains most of France’s future museum curators.

More and more young curators are concerned with France’s colonial past and want to confront it. But if the next generation is to achieve this with the rigor and complexity that events like the Esclavages et héritages conference demand, then institutions like the École du Louvre and the Institut national du patrimoine—as well as the public art museums that rely on its graduates—should take heed of these propositions. Greater collaboration among these institutions and the FME would presumably yield richer, more nuanced exhibitions (along the lines of Oser la liberté), whereas deeper critical exchanges among historians, curators, and university-trained art historians—perhaps fostered by the uniquely positioned Institut national d’histoire de l’art (INHA)—could make these historical interventions more relevant and meaningful for diverse contemporary audiences.

Without such exchanges, the silence we encountered in 2025 is likely to persist. And that means that the stories of Haiti, its debt, and the human lives caught in the machinery of slavery will remain largely absent from the public spaces where France narrates its own history.