PREFACE "History does not exist; there is only biography." (Emerson)
By La Rédaction · Port-au-Prince
· 26 min read · Updated 24 April 2026
Translated from French — AI-assisted and reviewed by the editorial team. The French version is authoritative. Read the original · About our translation policy
"Woe to the peoples who believe they know what they want, when they only want! Wanting is the easiest thing in the world."
(Karl Marx)
"Any interest shown by others towards us is of unparalleled indelicacy"
(Fernand Pessoa).
Who is interested in Edmond Paul (1837-1893) today? But why Edmond Paul? Now, why be interested in Edmond Paul? Truly, for the majority of our fellow citizens, this visionary is today just a name. But to forget what he was. This model of an exceptional patriot remained one of the great figures, one of the great witnesses – because he had been one of the great actors – of our tumultuous past, of our History. As for what follows, one cannot imagine it without impatience. His biography illustrates the state of political life in Haiti, undermined since its birth in 2004 by assassinations, palace revolutions and the exile of leaders, bloody struggles between rival oligarchies, socio-economic crises, and the murky game of foreign interference. His story was worth telling today. He is best known for *Les causes de nos malheurs* (The Causes of Our Misfortunes). A century and thirty-one years after his death, what more does this economist, as passionate as he was pioneering, have to teach us?
Few books have been as often cited and as little read as Edmond Paul's *Les Causes de nos malheurs* [1]. Moreover, few authors have been as often cited and as little read as Edmond Paul. And yet, he remains poorly understood. Too often, therefore, he is reduced to a few blunt quotes. This habit of quoting him without having read him, when delving a little deeper, makes one want to seek out the cognitive and historical mechanisms that allowed his thought to spread in such an artificial way. There are works preceded by such a reputation that one enjoys them, satisfied, believing one already knows them. Furthermore, there has never been a monograph about him. He was known only for this polemical work (*Les causes de nos malheurs*) and a few anti-Salomonist harangues or legends passed down from generation to generation. Comments on his complete work published in volume considerably broaden this palette [2]. Everyone seeks a few inspired and striking quotes from Edmond Paul, and everyone ignores the richness of his thought, also demonstrating the painful powerlessness that characterizes our intelligentsia in the search for a renewal of thought, practice, and action for over a century. Does he deserve the isolation in which he is held? Not so sure. But now, at a time when massacres are at our doorstep and the future of the country, in full upheaval, is questioned by banditry, revisiting courage, patriotism, and the will for change takes on full meaning with Edmond Paul.
Almost all past or contemporary appropriations of Edmond Paul are confined to closed circles of intellectuals or marginal apprentice politicians. Timidly, he served as a banner for a liberal thought of the status quo and petty-bourgeois reformism [3]. Half-medium, half-preacher, he was meditated upon and used both against autocratic despotism, frozen by the absence of alternation, and in cyclical reflections on democracy. Furthermore, he is readily credited with a cult of law that seems consistent with the fierce demands embodied today by the ideology of Human Rights [4]. Since Edmond Paul's inspiration, societal modernization through industrialization has been a new idea in Haiti. A century and more has not altered his aura. It is still desired. His contribution to Haitian historiography will remain essentially that of a certain quality of inquiry into economic, social, and political problems.
It must be said and repeated that few Haitian political writers have as strong a moral reputation as Edmond Paul, a fact rare enough to be highlighted. A destiny of a man of rare integrity, with a life conduct free from compromises or cowardice, and not a single tear too many. Pugnacious and committed in form, proud and irreducible in substance, he attracted all eyes, even the most implacable. Thus, in the eyes of Duraciné Vaval [5], Edmond Paul is a poor writer: "Edmond Paul doesn't know how to write, so be it! His sentences are poorly arranged. But he uses neither pen nor speech to shine. He brings forth his thought without caring about form, convinced that his opinions, expressed as they are, will have enough accuracy to make their way. For him, it is better for an idea to be clothed in coarse fabric than in the makeup and adornments of a courtesan. According to his conception of things, it is about teaching good to our democracy and achieving continuous progress in legality and order. One can judge this by his discourse: one must always consider a thing and its opposite.
"His civic virtue made him a contemporary of the past rather than of his own generation, which had already adopted the motto: 'Enjoy!' His books come as a reaction to his time. The economic and financial state of the country, the misery of the masses, the means to improve the masses through labor and industrial education, the salvation of our Haitian society – this is what constitutes the subject matter of his numerous pamphlets."
Why not take a closer look? It is enough to intelligently examine his work and his journey to see more clearly. These debatable lines from Duraciné Vaval call for two remarks, in passing. First, it is what one could call, without too much difficulty, sweeping statements. There are few Haitian politicians or political authors about whom so many enormities have been said as about Edmond Paul, who so cruelly lacked recognition and influence in some respects. How does the work of Edmond Paul, who was a legend in his lifetime, resonate with Haiti today? What makes Edmond Paul a legend? The vision of political liberalism, in particular, that he held, alongside and in opposition to despotism and conservatism, cannot be understood without rooting it in the incandescence of his time, as in this Haiti that he loved so much and whose specificity he strove to affirm among other nations, including in radical struggle and international relations. The more we highlight the past and what remains most present, the closer we get to the future. The quest for identity will, consequently, take a prominent place in his reflection. Let us stop trivializing the case; with his self-assurance, generosity, vivacity, and foresight, among other characteristics, Edmond Paul could only disconcert the critic Duraciné Vaval. Of all the historians of national literature, Duraciné Vaval, without a doubt, is the most allergic to Edmond Paul, that is to say, the least gentle. Sententious, provocative, and terribly malicious, he does not hold back in exaggerating, distorting, and toppling the statue of his subject of study.
Strictly speaking, it would be misleading to present Edmond Paul, born into an environment very porous to French influence, as a writer and man of letters. To correctly describe the entirety of his work and position him as an author of political and economic writings, one should note this: his style was effective, but it served to illustrate and defend ideas; he was an author whose mastery of the French language was undeniable, but his main literary ambition was to express his ideas in language filled with sophisticated words and those figures of speech that the most formal essayists today would dream of. Convincing, lively, full of sound and fury, desires and anxieties, he read many literary authors but was not a literary figure himself. Indeed, Edmond Paul, curious about everything, read quite a few books, casually and quickly.
One must recognize in him a combative writer figure – finally? This rhetoric, I would say, creates something quite exceptional at its core: a presence. Of course, a presence that seeks to dissolve itself in a demonstrative aim of discourse, line after line, 7 citations after citations, and in this sense, there is no discourse more purely dissuasive than that of Edmond Paul, inseparable from the concept of endogenous or self-centered development. And, like a boa, he swallowed excessively to better elaborate a synthesis, to better crystallize it into his own movement. The writing styles he chose have always been perfectly effective, perfectly eloquent. Impactful. Fragmentary. Dialogued. Rich in warlike imagery, his compositions can be of theatrical subtlety, his developments of a sought-after rigidity, his phrasing will remain expressive, captivating, and will seek its seductive power in the proven forms of discussion and polemic, resorting to citation, inventory, and enumeration. Is this one of the limits of the work? It is Edmond Paul's very idea of the act of writing that is at issue here. The accumulation of citations and references. The taste for excess used intensively becomes an operational, even aesthetic, principle. Prolific and kaleidoscopic, the work therefore does not fold back on itself and the ideals of its author. It breathes didactic insolence, illuminated by an irrepressible taste for progress. Since he led the fight with arguments, ideas, his texts, which helped so many people to see clearly in themselves and in the world, have, in many respects, retained their meaning, their power of fascination, their youth. Edmond Paul belongs to the pathetic cohort of authors who do not view writing as an end in itself. Edmond Paul, who does not write continuously – if one can say so – but makes others write under his own pen: it is true that he spends most of his writing time staging the quotes of others.
Inspired by an ethics of renewal rather than a politics of conventions, he was very close to being a sublime political strategist. And it's better that way. Edmond Paul never donned the uniform of a man of letters, nor passionately discoursed on the torments of creation [6]. In a sensitive and powerful way, he had a strong personality but a heart of gold. Prioritizing the law of knowledge over that of contingencies, he was stubborn but open. Although belonging to high society, he showed great compassion for the destitute, for whom he was passionate, and who would remain a source of inspiration throughout his life, and a whole past resurfaces to tell, in watermark, a tragic story: that of our wanderings and our turpitudes.
Furthermore: regarded and vilified in his time as a dangerous political adversary, Edmond Paul did not receive more amenity from progressive historians and ideologues themselves. For him, the parliamentary regime based on two chambers, the liberal system, was not only a mode of government, of managing public affairs, but also a certain type of society misunderstood and disavowed. Edmond Paul appears today as a beacon of rectitude and demanding standards. His discursive method, that is, his unwavering faith in the modernization of the country, consists of promoting a fairer parliamentary republic and tirelessly pursuing this path with ardor in all circumstances.
Fundamentally, the 20th century has treated Edmond Paul much worse than the 19th century. Considered a moment of decline, the Age of Bayonets is more complex than it seems. It was in the 20th century that he was discarded. Mistreated by public life, this ardent party leader was also mistreated by posterity. In our country, while moving "by leaps and bounds," as Montaigne said, he has not really been "re-framed" beyond the interest of a few chroniclers and politicians. Perhaps he is so intertwined with Anglo-Saxon political culture that it is difficult for us Haitians to see him with fresh eyes. And it is possible that current research will more clearly reveal the foundations and relevance of his thought. A kaleidoscopic enchantment.
But first, how to explain the knot of paradoxes that constitutes his character? His status is at a high altitude, that of the relationships between morality and politics, between action and ambition, between convictions and passions. Here is one of the most prestigious politicians of the 19th century Haitian, so attentive to what specifically characterizes the human and therefore to everything that pushes him towards the summits or towards the abyss. Yet he hardly governed. Ill-prepared for the compromises of duration, condemned to the romance of pedagogical arguments, respected and rejected at once by politicians and leaders, almost all of whom had no idea of economics because he is the opposite of a petty politician. It is probably Edmond Paul's morality – note that I did not say moralism – that will most annoy today's politicians. Opportunism, blindness, ambitions, the malice of the protagonists of "these times of disarray [7]," a host of psychological, political portraits [8], the description of the content of his books, the analysis of the power-grabbing strategies of various individuals, all reveal the personality of this extraordinary man, submerged by the meanders of political struggle. In the 19th century, Haiti was as dangerous as it was scandalous.
"Edmond Paul, a political life, an economic work that helps clarify the progression of his thought, confirms the resurrection of a man of reflection buried by Haitian historiography – he was undoubtedly one of the very great minds of his time. A life dedicated to politics and the country. From this emergence from the tomb, there are less impalpable signs: even if, instead of an exhaustive biography, a journey through the political actions and work of Edmond Paul, who is a central figure in Haitian historiography, was preferred, a meticulous exploration of events and texts conducted, certainly, chronologically, but which results in less of an event-driven biography than a kind of fragmentary, multiple, ever-restarted portrait of this impactful mind. A legend where crazy and happy circumstances arrange themselves into destiny? Here we have a life, a work, an era. It is the opposite of an American-style biography, that is, an evocative, melodramatic, and passionate music. It is not about picking up crumbs or embellishing a memory. It is about revisiting a life with the exactitude that lucidity alone knows how to make contagious. Every biography, it is said, is autobiographical. 'There is no philosophy but autobiography,' affirmed the Hungarian philosopher Agnes Heller. Perhaps, here. More nostalgic than ever, Haitians are not accustomed to biographies. In the thin, infinitely patched and dull fabric of Haitian biography (but it's not just Frédéric Marcelin's Ducasse Hyppolite and Alain Turnier's Mérisier Jeannis that are truly dazzling biographies), can one still cut original patterns? These two biographies, rich yet simple, are deeply moving books. The bio-bibliographical shortcut has its charms but also its risks. Starting with that of being vulnerable to laconism. The main concern that gnaws at us here is therefore to know if I have re-stated everything Edmond Paul had already said. This is why, unlike biographies where history is considered the seductive backdrop to the life of an extraordinary being, the flame of an era is passed through the prism of a first-rate personality, so that the result offers the various facets of a life and a work. This large book of nearly 500 pages is thus made, in the Anglo-Saxon manner, teeming with diverse notations and reflections that compose much more than the life of a man, that of a country that resembles a battlefield.
The youth, the "sad" passions, of the work of a political writer and an economic author, the diagnosis of a statesman's life – who could boast of taking a complete, panoramic view of it? The claim to the totality of existence seems to us a wild chimera. The divisions by periods of electoral fever or political agitation, by bio-psychological touches and by bibliographic summaries, highlight the limits and shortcomings of a strictly historical and ideological biography. The attempt is therefore serious. In short, what interests me here is the continuity of a thought and the discontinuity of an era, where we will see that Edmond Paul's life was far from resembling a fairy tale. This thought prospered, not without moments of eclipse, among diverse audiences and according to generational storms. The reading is only more feverish, more instructive. That said, this monograph is not exactly a biography since I am wary of abusive interpretations from psychologizing inquiries and the refined synthesis of classic biographies: information on Edmond Paul's political activities follows comments on his books. Behind the lived experience, the work is there! Paul is, in everything. Too complete to be confined to critical or complacent judgments, so as not to go in circles, he pulverizes ancestral enmity and contemplative passion. Pettiness and today's certainties, ego wars and violence, his philosophy sweeps everything away. On the last page of this work, a tight and lucid description of an exceptional destiny, one still wonders: "Who was Edmond Paul?" A invigorating and fierce question.
The virtues of conciseness and analytical exposition make the articulation of the author's thematic program clearer to current generations: there is cumulative progress due to the renewed opportunity for interpretive re-readings. The best of Edmond Paul, the ideological inspirer of parliamentarism and monetary rigor, the champion of integral civism and administrative probity, is found in the pages titled "Haiti in the Sun of 1880," "The Causes of Our Misfortunes," "Posthumous Works." In 1876, while in exile, he dedicated one of his most remarkable works, published in Jamaica, to the fiscal question, under the title: "On the Tax on Coffee and the Laws of Internal Trade." Uncomfortable in his time, and often misunderstood by his contemporaries, Edmond Paul found in intellectual production a refuge where, beyond the real world, his talent as a thinker could fully express itself. Yet, his conception of economics is an expression of the concerns of his era. Embracing the optimistic rationalism of the Age of Enlightenment, he strove, like the best of his contemporaries, to propagate ideas of technical progress and economic planning. This demand for rigor seemed essential to any serious government program. National economic development must be boosted by profound reforms, agricultural and financial, among others, to free itself from the grip of the status quo. Theorizing self-centered development, which is the object and common thread of all his commitments and writings, he desired a paradigm shift, believing that the Revolution of 1804 had not completed its work. For him, the question of national progress is the very raison d'être of the country. It must be added that political debates, at a time when a rapprochement between politics and economics was witnessed in confusion and violence, were for him powerful and also, unfortunately, dramatic. Stimulating. The main axes of his work, capable of making the country a "headless body," concern the status of politics and economics – not just public economics – the relations of powers and groups, both national and international, and the weight of ideas. Almost all areas within economics are thus addressed, from industry to financial management, including monetary crisis, banking issues, savings, taxation, etc. Some are of primary importance, particularly those concerning paper money, taxation, and industry, to take three very different but inseparable areas, one should not be mistaken, nevertheless. Allow me first to return to the assertion that the notion of economic history would be, concerning Haiti, vague. It is true that the word "economy" itself carries some high-sounding concepts. This is what will not be taken away from him and to which his detractors are themselves obliged to subscribe. His work crumbles into economics, politics, history, morality; it infuses time and the present. Edmond Paul, connected to the issues of our time, would today be more of a disillusioned lyricist who had elegant despair and anxiety ingrained in his being, an idealistic and mocking moralist, a liberal economist, a progressive above all with a generous outlook and mobilizing, i.e., conquering, reflections.
Edmond Paul's life smells of ink, blood, and heat. One refrains from hagiography, an ineffective genre in matters of intellectual debate, which primarily leads to flattery or other soporific delights. Edmond Paul has long held an enviable place in the country's political history, although historical research in this regard is non-existent, and the intelligentsia has moved far from studying the political and economic elements of his work, which ultimately count as much as his fluctuating image in ensuring the longevity of an exemplary life. For this very reason, recognized and designated as the liberal doctrinaire who exerted the most fruitful influence on the 19th century, loved by several generations without whom Haiti would not be a country with democratic aspirations – also: Anténor Firmin and Hannibal Price, Seymour Pradel and Auguste Magloire, Jean Price-Mars and François Dalencour. Edmond Paul's image stands at the threshold of a new era. And on this threshold, all those who defended the causes of parliamentarism fundamentally stood, perceiving their hope first as a challenge and a patriotic act.
A passionate reader of John Stuart Mill, Adam Smith, and Jean-Baptiste Say, he also devoured Jean-Gustave Courcelle Seneuil, Henri Baudrillart, François Quesnay, and Thomas Malthus. Edmond Paul's formation was primarily due to the fact that he was, at once, a politician who understood the so-called "cold" sciences and an economist who meticulously navigated the humanities. A passion for studies was another of his obsessions. Michel Chevalier, his appointed tutor, was also his master. Carrying a culture that never ceases to impress but to instruct, thanks to a structure alternating extensive quotes and personal theses, visions and disappointments.
"Edmond Paul: A Political Life, an Economic Work," at once political history, critical bibliography, sketchbook, collection of non-anecdotal portraits, and perpetual dialogue with the present, belongs to a critical liberal current (he undoubtedly inaugurated it), that of those reformers for whom this great man is present amidst the follies and struggles of this fin de siècle: a watchman, a companion, a support, a questioner, an answerer, a model, an alternative. A life of struggles and tears, but also of courage and tenacity. Honesty was a rule of life for him, which gave his voice its special strength. A book that will make history, absolutely, as it is the only one to date in understanding a work whose full scope is far from being explored. Obviously, it cannot be reduced to the ideological use that has been made of it. There is a certain lightness in wanting to make Edmond Paul a kind of orthodox or ultra-liberal, as opposed to a statist Salomon or Louis Joseph Janvier. If, politically, he is known primarily as a party leader, economically, it is notably his programmatic thought that places him in modernity, if only for his work in deciphering Haitian taxation and the national development model. It is therefore comforting to have guides such as Edmond Paul, finally dusted off and cleaned up, to navigate our past century. The public is rediscovering him: never has his thought appeared so captivating. His life, through its ideological and moral implications, is a fertile subject that Haitians, more than anyone, should address. We now have a great interest in reopening his entire body of work: we will find there one of the most profound meditations on the relationships between economics and politics, societal problems, and the blood-filled destiny of Haiti. Certainly, we do well to popularize the thought of the rare liberal minds within our tradition, but it is not only about that.
Today, what remains of Edmond Paul, great popularizer of human progress? The myth. An enormous shadow known to have been one of the inspirers of several generations of Haitians. That of a consciousness that had embraced its time. That of an actor who was ahead of his time. Be that as it may, to be a "great man," a "historical figure," and to rub shoulders with Lysius Félicité Salomon Jeune, Florvil Hyppolite, and Boisrond Canal, it is not enough to have been the emblematic figure of an era. His intellectual importance coincides with a certain interest in economic history and the questions it underlies. Above all, a great debate has begun concerning the place now to be reserved for the history of economic facts and problems, in the turmoil of the post-Duvalier era and at the dawn of the year 2000. Is this a sign of the times? The time is undeniably for works of economic popularization. He is known for his "best-seller" "The Causes of Our Misfortunes." His other texts are less known. The related comments or explanations, meticulously reproduced here, are there to allow everyone to make their way in the Paulian world with attention and will consciously realize, as Jean-Claude Bajeux told me, that there is not a single political author of that era whose work and life could be of more salvific and ethical use to us. The exceptional nature of "The Causes of Our Misfortunes" should not, however, obscure the rest of Edmond Paul's work, which remains one of the most brilliant figures in Haiti's history. A heritage must be made accessible again, one hears from various sides, and the kickoff can begin with Edmond Paul, whose highly patriotic inspiration ensures his eternity. To be convinced, one only needs to compare "On the Tax on Coffee and the Laws of Internal Trade" (1876) and "Haiti in the Sun of 1880: 113 Million for 16 Million; Our Treasures in Foreign Hands" (1880). The legal question is what is the object of all this. What is the domain of economic history? Everything depends on the definition one gives to history. The first work shows an extraordinary expansion, for years, of the interest of thinkers, and of all elites, in economic history. It is false to observe among politicians – stubborn and narrow-minded conservatives for the most part! – an interest in the history of economic, monetary, fiscal, commercial, and banking phenomena. As for the way of conceiving and practicing this history, it is a fact that for a long time in Haiti, there has been a kind of preemption of money over the global history of economic phenomena. With "On the Tax on Coffee," one can welcome the openness, but one would not want to lose sight of the idea that one is making the history of a progress of knowledge.
Economic history is thus a field where one sees that determinations are multiple. Economic problems are not strictly economic in nature. Economic historians and theorists do not have a right over economics, as if it were their property. Economic history is not a discipline like any other, as it travels through discursive categories found in other bodies of thought and action. To speak of the coffee tax and its commercialization, one must evoke the State, agriculture, the interface with the terms of international trade, one must consider the concrete organization of national production, and public protection practices that have become fundamental. None of this can be ignored in contemporary reflections. Therefore, one must not reduce the discipline to a certain interplay of institutions and power relations and repeat the positivist error that consisted of saying that history or empirical analysis must free itself from dreams, imagination, and speculation. Never, neither with "Letters" nor with "Politico-Economic Questions," not even with Frédéric Marcelin, nor with all the others combined, had Edmond Paul's thought resonated with such force, intelligence, youth, and true perspicacity. In reality, one is very often in a complete desert. One might as well say it! More than a researcher, he behaves here as a doctrinaire. And when he later produces a polemic like "Haiti in the Sun of 1880," economic history is both emotional and referential, as he leads disinherited populations to finance the wealth of advanced countries, notably France. This evolution is naturally perceived as a worrying attack on national sovereignty. Nothing resists his terribly argued critique, centered on patriotic values, fate, the blocked horizon, and it is indeed a statement of desolation that he delivers by moralizing to the whole world. This so frankly displayed hostility also arouses a kind of retrospective powerlessness and humiliation. From his intimate knowledge of the Haitian space, he paints a portrait of a country to abandon marked by violence and ignorance. Everything now invites a more complete look at Edmond Paul, both theorist and politician. The man, moreover, has enough to draw all eyes after him: the brilliance of talent, the strength of ideas, authentic love of the homeland, and also a soul so touching that his weakness was to prejudge the goodness or ferocity of others. The fog that still obscures the Paulian figure therefore stems, without a doubt, from that which continues to envelop what is called the "Liberal Party." Embodying a great and beautiful tradition, Paul, his head full of questions, is the very image of the fundamental impetus of the democratic right, having been its magnet and its dazzling desire, and as this idea of impetus is also present throughout Haitian memory, which has moreover frequently expressed itself in an intimate relationship with shock images of our political culture. Tested but upright and firm, he has become a first-rate reference. With the appearance of a Greek tragedy, he may have been mistaken many times about the path to follow in difficult circumstances, but the nobility of his positions has remained intact. His legacy remains with us; his memory will grow with the success of liberal democracy in our country.
A poignant and desperate moralist, a bittersweet satirist, a kind of policeman tortured by his fight against evil, extraordinarily generous, he studies the functioning and evolution of the "French Bank of Haiti" under the presidency of Lysius Félicité Salomon Jeune, whose savagery is matched only by the distress of the country he intended to reform. An ambitious reflection on the idea of independence through institutional and political spheres. The observation was not obvious for those who, by rejecting contemporary testimony in favor of an objective and impalpable history, thought they had finished with the excesses of the battle of ideas and with the too long proximity between history and party spirit. To better preserve his lyricism from shrillness, he abandoned, by force of circumstances, the conscientious research of his early works for the role of a combat intellectual in a warlike society. Throughout almost all the historiography of the Age of Bayonets, one can see how illusory this proclaimed rupture was. In a text to which one must always return, "The Causes of Our Misfortunes," he had formulated with biting irony this fundamental tension between reflection and reality. If it has already happened in Haiti that a book leaves an imprint in its genre, being among the best books in a country's history is an even more unforgettable performance. This is the case with "The Causes of Our Misfortunes," since 141 years after its publication, it remains an unshakeable classic. Edmond Paul depicts an immoral and sinister world where egoism prevails to the detriment of the common good. Violence spares nothing and no one. His writing is a self-reflexive practice that produces knowledge, but a practice dependent on the variations of its thematic procedures, the constraints imposed by the political stakes and the socio-historical link through which it is exercised, or the obligatory rules of his inspiration. For example, "Haiti in the Sun of 1880" can be seen as a swollen drama of the elite, as an illustration of the blindness of the political world, as a historical struggle between nationalist self-withdrawal and modernist openness, as the doctrinal confrontation of independence and interdependence. But, in accordance with the very spirit of an ultimately inexorable drama, it is societal decay that emerges: the loss of energy and morality, of dignity and future, the decay of patriotic values, fate, the blocked horizon. In the name of the global disaster observed through President Salomon's financial and banking policy. Torn between the unleashed, dreamlike, and constant flame of love for the homeland and the cold, direct analysis of reality, he, swelling with passion and disgust, denounces the effects of the internationalization of the economy, attacks the excesses of free trade without resolving to the status quo, and lambastes the country's increased dependence which, through scandalous loans and prestige spending, casts a gaze of astonishing cruelty upon our country. And his most merciless or most desperate judgments ring true [9]. From illusions to misfortune, from storms to overwhelming lulls, for this man, it is the time of ideas of progress, the life of ideas that simply pulsate. Carried by a life force and an insatiable appetite for change, he breathes the deleterious atmosphere of this mysterious island lost in the Caribbean Sea, its violence and covetousness, its burdens and its torpors. All this did not prevent him from traversing almost the entire second half of the 19th century: as a statesman, as a citizen, as an ideologue, but also as a reformist – that was his pride. With this grandiose dignity. Always, he ended up preferring the dawn's glow to that of twilight.
Reflecting in a very special measure the political antagonisms and divergences of opinion of the past century, he represents one of the most prolific liberal thinkers, in both success and failure. The studies and reflections he published on the problems of industry [10] and the transformation of the political system, for example, constitute the culmination of a modernizing Haitian tradition that took seriously the questions of a constructivist national policy, beyond the obscure phraseology of the old free and the new free, of the commercial bourgeoisie and the landed bourgeoisie. Hence the question arises: should we revise or refine the image we have of the economist and political activist Edmond Paul? Should he also be considered an author? Moreover, who dares to assert that Edmond Paul, a republican before everyone else, is not of our time? The depth of his thought, his political commitment, the contemporary relevance of his work [11], and it must be said, an exceptional moral acuity, ensured the man's prestige. From an uninterrupted flow of dreams whose modulations from whisper to cry one perceives, he was closer than any other activist to the universal spirit whose humanist authenticity he embodied. It was only in its worst periods that political economy, or economic science, became excessively mathematized and theorized and moved away from the
(Karl Marx)
"Any interest shown by others towards us is of unparalleled indelicacy"
(Fernand Pessoa).
Who is interested in Edmond Paul (1837-1893) today? But why Edmond Paul? Now, why be interested in Edmond Paul? Truly, for the majority of our fellow citizens, this visionary is today just a name. But to forget what he was. This model of an exceptional patriot remained one of the great figures, one of the great witnesses – because he had been one of the great actors – of our tumultuous past, of our History. As for what follows, one cannot imagine it without impatience. His biography illustrates the state of political life in Haiti, undermined since its birth in 2004 by assassinations, palace revolutions and the exile of leaders, bloody struggles between rival oligarchies, socio-economic crises, and the murky game of foreign interference. His story was worth telling today. He is best known for *Les causes de nos malheurs* (The Causes of Our Misfortunes). A century and thirty-one years after his death, what more does this economist, as passionate as he was pioneering, have to teach us?
Few books have been as often cited and as little read as Edmond Paul's *Les Causes de nos malheurs* [1]. Moreover, few authors have been as often cited and as little read as Edmond Paul. And yet, he remains poorly understood. Too often, therefore, he is reduced to a few blunt quotes. This habit of quoting him without having read him, when delving a little deeper, makes one want to seek out the cognitive and historical mechanisms that allowed his thought to spread in such an artificial way. There are works preceded by such a reputation that one enjoys them, satisfied, believing one already knows them. Furthermore, there has never been a monograph about him. He was known only for this polemical work (*Les causes de nos malheurs*) and a few anti-Salomonist harangues or legends passed down from generation to generation. Comments on his complete work published in volume considerably broaden this palette [2]. Everyone seeks a few inspired and striking quotes from Edmond Paul, and everyone ignores the richness of his thought, also demonstrating the painful powerlessness that characterizes our intelligentsia in the search for a renewal of thought, practice, and action for over a century. Does he deserve the isolation in which he is held? Not so sure. But now, at a time when massacres are at our doorstep and the future of the country, in full upheaval, is questioned by banditry, revisiting courage, patriotism, and the will for change takes on full meaning with Edmond Paul.
Almost all past or contemporary appropriations of Edmond Paul are confined to closed circles of intellectuals or marginal apprentice politicians. Timidly, he served as a banner for a liberal thought of the status quo and petty-bourgeois reformism [3]. Half-medium, half-preacher, he was meditated upon and used both against autocratic despotism, frozen by the absence of alternation, and in cyclical reflections on democracy. Furthermore, he is readily credited with a cult of law that seems consistent with the fierce demands embodied today by the ideology of Human Rights [4]. Since Edmond Paul's inspiration, societal modernization through industrialization has been a new idea in Haiti. A century and more has not altered his aura. It is still desired. His contribution to Haitian historiography will remain essentially that of a certain quality of inquiry into economic, social, and political problems.
It must be said and repeated that few Haitian political writers have as strong a moral reputation as Edmond Paul, a fact rare enough to be highlighted. A destiny of a man of rare integrity, with a life conduct free from compromises or cowardice, and not a single tear too many. Pugnacious and committed in form, proud and irreducible in substance, he attracted all eyes, even the most implacable. Thus, in the eyes of Duraciné Vaval [5], Edmond Paul is a poor writer: "Edmond Paul doesn't know how to write, so be it! His sentences are poorly arranged. But he uses neither pen nor speech to shine. He brings forth his thought without caring about form, convinced that his opinions, expressed as they are, will have enough accuracy to make their way. For him, it is better for an idea to be clothed in coarse fabric than in the makeup and adornments of a courtesan. According to his conception of things, it is about teaching good to our democracy and achieving continuous progress in legality and order. One can judge this by his discourse: one must always consider a thing and its opposite.
"His civic virtue made him a contemporary of the past rather than of his own generation, which had already adopted the motto: 'Enjoy!' His books come as a reaction to his time. The economic and financial state of the country, the misery of the masses, the means to improve the masses through labor and industrial education, the salvation of our Haitian society – this is what constitutes the subject matter of his numerous pamphlets."
Why not take a closer look? It is enough to intelligently examine his work and his journey to see more clearly. These debatable lines from Duraciné Vaval call for two remarks, in passing. First, it is what one could call, without too much difficulty, sweeping statements. There are few Haitian politicians or political authors about whom so many enormities have been said as about Edmond Paul, who so cruelly lacked recognition and influence in some respects. How does the work of Edmond Paul, who was a legend in his lifetime, resonate with Haiti today? What makes Edmond Paul a legend? The vision of political liberalism, in particular, that he held, alongside and in opposition to despotism and conservatism, cannot be understood without rooting it in the incandescence of his time, as in this Haiti that he loved so much and whose specificity he strove to affirm among other nations, including in radical struggle and international relations. The more we highlight the past and what remains most present, the closer we get to the future. The quest for identity will, consequently, take a prominent place in his reflection. Let us stop trivializing the case; with his self-assurance, generosity, vivacity, and foresight, among other characteristics, Edmond Paul could only disconcert the critic Duraciné Vaval. Of all the historians of national literature, Duraciné Vaval, without a doubt, is the most allergic to Edmond Paul, that is to say, the least gentle. Sententious, provocative, and terribly malicious, he does not hold back in exaggerating, distorting, and toppling the statue of his subject of study.
Strictly speaking, it would be misleading to present Edmond Paul, born into an environment very porous to French influence, as a writer and man of letters. To correctly describe the entirety of his work and position him as an author of political and economic writings, one should note this: his style was effective, but it served to illustrate and defend ideas; he was an author whose mastery of the French language was undeniable, but his main literary ambition was to express his ideas in language filled with sophisticated words and those figures of speech that the most formal essayists today would dream of. Convincing, lively, full of sound and fury, desires and anxieties, he read many literary authors but was not a literary figure himself. Indeed, Edmond Paul, curious about everything, read quite a few books, casually and quickly.
One must recognize in him a combative writer figure – finally? This rhetoric, I would say, creates something quite exceptional at its core: a presence. Of course, a presence that seeks to dissolve itself in a demonstrative aim of discourse, line after line, 7 citations after citations, and in this sense, there is no discourse more purely dissuasive than that of Edmond Paul, inseparable from the concept of endogenous or self-centered development. And, like a boa, he swallowed excessively to better elaborate a synthesis, to better crystallize it into his own movement. The writing styles he chose have always been perfectly effective, perfectly eloquent. Impactful. Fragmentary. Dialogued. Rich in warlike imagery, his compositions can be of theatrical subtlety, his developments of a sought-after rigidity, his phrasing will remain expressive, captivating, and will seek its seductive power in the proven forms of discussion and polemic, resorting to citation, inventory, and enumeration. Is this one of the limits of the work? It is Edmond Paul's very idea of the act of writing that is at issue here. The accumulation of citations and references. The taste for excess used intensively becomes an operational, even aesthetic, principle. Prolific and kaleidoscopic, the work therefore does not fold back on itself and the ideals of its author. It breathes didactic insolence, illuminated by an irrepressible taste for progress. Since he led the fight with arguments, ideas, his texts, which helped so many people to see clearly in themselves and in the world, have, in many respects, retained their meaning, their power of fascination, their youth. Edmond Paul belongs to the pathetic cohort of authors who do not view writing as an end in itself. Edmond Paul, who does not write continuously – if one can say so – but makes others write under his own pen: it is true that he spends most of his writing time staging the quotes of others.
Inspired by an ethics of renewal rather than a politics of conventions, he was very close to being a sublime political strategist. And it's better that way. Edmond Paul never donned the uniform of a man of letters, nor passionately discoursed on the torments of creation [6]. In a sensitive and powerful way, he had a strong personality but a heart of gold. Prioritizing the law of knowledge over that of contingencies, he was stubborn but open. Although belonging to high society, he showed great compassion for the destitute, for whom he was passionate, and who would remain a source of inspiration throughout his life, and a whole past resurfaces to tell, in watermark, a tragic story: that of our wanderings and our turpitudes.
Furthermore: regarded and vilified in his time as a dangerous political adversary, Edmond Paul did not receive more amenity from progressive historians and ideologues themselves. For him, the parliamentary regime based on two chambers, the liberal system, was not only a mode of government, of managing public affairs, but also a certain type of society misunderstood and disavowed. Edmond Paul appears today as a beacon of rectitude and demanding standards. His discursive method, that is, his unwavering faith in the modernization of the country, consists of promoting a fairer parliamentary republic and tirelessly pursuing this path with ardor in all circumstances.
Fundamentally, the 20th century has treated Edmond Paul much worse than the 19th century. Considered a moment of decline, the Age of Bayonets is more complex than it seems. It was in the 20th century that he was discarded. Mistreated by public life, this ardent party leader was also mistreated by posterity. In our country, while moving "by leaps and bounds," as Montaigne said, he has not really been "re-framed" beyond the interest of a few chroniclers and politicians. Perhaps he is so intertwined with Anglo-Saxon political culture that it is difficult for us Haitians to see him with fresh eyes. And it is possible that current research will more clearly reveal the foundations and relevance of his thought. A kaleidoscopic enchantment.
But first, how to explain the knot of paradoxes that constitutes his character? His status is at a high altitude, that of the relationships between morality and politics, between action and ambition, between convictions and passions. Here is one of the most prestigious politicians of the 19th century Haitian, so attentive to what specifically characterizes the human and therefore to everything that pushes him towards the summits or towards the abyss. Yet he hardly governed. Ill-prepared for the compromises of duration, condemned to the romance of pedagogical arguments, respected and rejected at once by politicians and leaders, almost all of whom had no idea of economics because he is the opposite of a petty politician. It is probably Edmond Paul's morality – note that I did not say moralism – that will most annoy today's politicians. Opportunism, blindness, ambitions, the malice of the protagonists of "these times of disarray [7]," a host of psychological, political portraits [8], the description of the content of his books, the analysis of the power-grabbing strategies of various individuals, all reveal the personality of this extraordinary man, submerged by the meanders of political struggle. In the 19th century, Haiti was as dangerous as it was scandalous.
"Edmond Paul, a political life, an economic work that helps clarify the progression of his thought, confirms the resurrection of a man of reflection buried by Haitian historiography – he was undoubtedly one of the very great minds of his time. A life dedicated to politics and the country. From this emergence from the tomb, there are less impalpable signs: even if, instead of an exhaustive biography, a journey through the political actions and work of Edmond Paul, who is a central figure in Haitian historiography, was preferred, a meticulous exploration of events and texts conducted, certainly, chronologically, but which results in less of an event-driven biography than a kind of fragmentary, multiple, ever-restarted portrait of this impactful mind. A legend where crazy and happy circumstances arrange themselves into destiny? Here we have a life, a work, an era. It is the opposite of an American-style biography, that is, an evocative, melodramatic, and passionate music. It is not about picking up crumbs or embellishing a memory. It is about revisiting a life with the exactitude that lucidity alone knows how to make contagious. Every biography, it is said, is autobiographical. 'There is no philosophy but autobiography,' affirmed the Hungarian philosopher Agnes Heller. Perhaps, here. More nostalgic than ever, Haitians are not accustomed to biographies. In the thin, infinitely patched and dull fabric of Haitian biography (but it's not just Frédéric Marcelin's Ducasse Hyppolite and Alain Turnier's Mérisier Jeannis that are truly dazzling biographies), can one still cut original patterns? These two biographies, rich yet simple, are deeply moving books. The bio-bibliographical shortcut has its charms but also its risks. Starting with that of being vulnerable to laconism. The main concern that gnaws at us here is therefore to know if I have re-stated everything Edmond Paul had already said. This is why, unlike biographies where history is considered the seductive backdrop to the life of an extraordinary being, the flame of an era is passed through the prism of a first-rate personality, so that the result offers the various facets of a life and a work. This large book of nearly 500 pages is thus made, in the Anglo-Saxon manner, teeming with diverse notations and reflections that compose much more than the life of a man, that of a country that resembles a battlefield.
The youth, the "sad" passions, of the work of a political writer and an economic author, the diagnosis of a statesman's life – who could boast of taking a complete, panoramic view of it? The claim to the totality of existence seems to us a wild chimera. The divisions by periods of electoral fever or political agitation, by bio-psychological touches and by bibliographic summaries, highlight the limits and shortcomings of a strictly historical and ideological biography. The attempt is therefore serious. In short, what interests me here is the continuity of a thought and the discontinuity of an era, where we will see that Edmond Paul's life was far from resembling a fairy tale. This thought prospered, not without moments of eclipse, among diverse audiences and according to generational storms. The reading is only more feverish, more instructive. That said, this monograph is not exactly a biography since I am wary of abusive interpretations from psychologizing inquiries and the refined synthesis of classic biographies: information on Edmond Paul's political activities follows comments on his books. Behind the lived experience, the work is there! Paul is, in everything. Too complete to be confined to critical or complacent judgments, so as not to go in circles, he pulverizes ancestral enmity and contemplative passion. Pettiness and today's certainties, ego wars and violence, his philosophy sweeps everything away. On the last page of this work, a tight and lucid description of an exceptional destiny, one still wonders: "Who was Edmond Paul?" A invigorating and fierce question.
The virtues of conciseness and analytical exposition make the articulation of the author's thematic program clearer to current generations: there is cumulative progress due to the renewed opportunity for interpretive re-readings. The best of Edmond Paul, the ideological inspirer of parliamentarism and monetary rigor, the champion of integral civism and administrative probity, is found in the pages titled "Haiti in the Sun of 1880," "The Causes of Our Misfortunes," "Posthumous Works." In 1876, while in exile, he dedicated one of his most remarkable works, published in Jamaica, to the fiscal question, under the title: "On the Tax on Coffee and the Laws of Internal Trade." Uncomfortable in his time, and often misunderstood by his contemporaries, Edmond Paul found in intellectual production a refuge where, beyond the real world, his talent as a thinker could fully express itself. Yet, his conception of economics is an expression of the concerns of his era. Embracing the optimistic rationalism of the Age of Enlightenment, he strove, like the best of his contemporaries, to propagate ideas of technical progress and economic planning. This demand for rigor seemed essential to any serious government program. National economic development must be boosted by profound reforms, agricultural and financial, among others, to free itself from the grip of the status quo. Theorizing self-centered development, which is the object and common thread of all his commitments and writings, he desired a paradigm shift, believing that the Revolution of 1804 had not completed its work. For him, the question of national progress is the very raison d'être of the country. It must be added that political debates, at a time when a rapprochement between politics and economics was witnessed in confusion and violence, were for him powerful and also, unfortunately, dramatic. Stimulating. The main axes of his work, capable of making the country a "headless body," concern the status of politics and economics – not just public economics – the relations of powers and groups, both national and international, and the weight of ideas. Almost all areas within economics are thus addressed, from industry to financial management, including monetary crisis, banking issues, savings, taxation, etc. Some are of primary importance, particularly those concerning paper money, taxation, and industry, to take three very different but inseparable areas, one should not be mistaken, nevertheless. Allow me first to return to the assertion that the notion of economic history would be, concerning Haiti, vague. It is true that the word "economy" itself carries some high-sounding concepts. This is what will not be taken away from him and to which his detractors are themselves obliged to subscribe. His work crumbles into economics, politics, history, morality; it infuses time and the present. Edmond Paul, connected to the issues of our time, would today be more of a disillusioned lyricist who had elegant despair and anxiety ingrained in his being, an idealistic and mocking moralist, a liberal economist, a progressive above all with a generous outlook and mobilizing, i.e., conquering, reflections.
Edmond Paul's life smells of ink, blood, and heat. One refrains from hagiography, an ineffective genre in matters of intellectual debate, which primarily leads to flattery or other soporific delights. Edmond Paul has long held an enviable place in the country's political history, although historical research in this regard is non-existent, and the intelligentsia has moved far from studying the political and economic elements of his work, which ultimately count as much as his fluctuating image in ensuring the longevity of an exemplary life. For this very reason, recognized and designated as the liberal doctrinaire who exerted the most fruitful influence on the 19th century, loved by several generations without whom Haiti would not be a country with democratic aspirations – also: Anténor Firmin and Hannibal Price, Seymour Pradel and Auguste Magloire, Jean Price-Mars and François Dalencour. Edmond Paul's image stands at the threshold of a new era. And on this threshold, all those who defended the causes of parliamentarism fundamentally stood, perceiving their hope first as a challenge and a patriotic act.
A passionate reader of John Stuart Mill, Adam Smith, and Jean-Baptiste Say, he also devoured Jean-Gustave Courcelle Seneuil, Henri Baudrillart, François Quesnay, and Thomas Malthus. Edmond Paul's formation was primarily due to the fact that he was, at once, a politician who understood the so-called "cold" sciences and an economist who meticulously navigated the humanities. A passion for studies was another of his obsessions. Michel Chevalier, his appointed tutor, was also his master. Carrying a culture that never ceases to impress but to instruct, thanks to a structure alternating extensive quotes and personal theses, visions and disappointments.
"Edmond Paul: A Political Life, an Economic Work," at once political history, critical bibliography, sketchbook, collection of non-anecdotal portraits, and perpetual dialogue with the present, belongs to a critical liberal current (he undoubtedly inaugurated it), that of those reformers for whom this great man is present amidst the follies and struggles of this fin de siècle: a watchman, a companion, a support, a questioner, an answerer, a model, an alternative. A life of struggles and tears, but also of courage and tenacity. Honesty was a rule of life for him, which gave his voice its special strength. A book that will make history, absolutely, as it is the only one to date in understanding a work whose full scope is far from being explored. Obviously, it cannot be reduced to the ideological use that has been made of it. There is a certain lightness in wanting to make Edmond Paul a kind of orthodox or ultra-liberal, as opposed to a statist Salomon or Louis Joseph Janvier. If, politically, he is known primarily as a party leader, economically, it is notably his programmatic thought that places him in modernity, if only for his work in deciphering Haitian taxation and the national development model. It is therefore comforting to have guides such as Edmond Paul, finally dusted off and cleaned up, to navigate our past century. The public is rediscovering him: never has his thought appeared so captivating. His life, through its ideological and moral implications, is a fertile subject that Haitians, more than anyone, should address. We now have a great interest in reopening his entire body of work: we will find there one of the most profound meditations on the relationships between economics and politics, societal problems, and the blood-filled destiny of Haiti. Certainly, we do well to popularize the thought of the rare liberal minds within our tradition, but it is not only about that.
Today, what remains of Edmond Paul, great popularizer of human progress? The myth. An enormous shadow known to have been one of the inspirers of several generations of Haitians. That of a consciousness that had embraced its time. That of an actor who was ahead of his time. Be that as it may, to be a "great man," a "historical figure," and to rub shoulders with Lysius Félicité Salomon Jeune, Florvil Hyppolite, and Boisrond Canal, it is not enough to have been the emblematic figure of an era. His intellectual importance coincides with a certain interest in economic history and the questions it underlies. Above all, a great debate has begun concerning the place now to be reserved for the history of economic facts and problems, in the turmoil of the post-Duvalier era and at the dawn of the year 2000. Is this a sign of the times? The time is undeniably for works of economic popularization. He is known for his "best-seller" "The Causes of Our Misfortunes." His other texts are less known. The related comments or explanations, meticulously reproduced here, are there to allow everyone to make their way in the Paulian world with attention and will consciously realize, as Jean-Claude Bajeux told me, that there is not a single political author of that era whose work and life could be of more salvific and ethical use to us. The exceptional nature of "The Causes of Our Misfortunes" should not, however, obscure the rest of Edmond Paul's work, which remains one of the most brilliant figures in Haiti's history. A heritage must be made accessible again, one hears from various sides, and the kickoff can begin with Edmond Paul, whose highly patriotic inspiration ensures his eternity. To be convinced, one only needs to compare "On the Tax on Coffee and the Laws of Internal Trade" (1876) and "Haiti in the Sun of 1880: 113 Million for 16 Million; Our Treasures in Foreign Hands" (1880). The legal question is what is the object of all this. What is the domain of economic history? Everything depends on the definition one gives to history. The first work shows an extraordinary expansion, for years, of the interest of thinkers, and of all elites, in economic history. It is false to observe among politicians – stubborn and narrow-minded conservatives for the most part! – an interest in the history of economic, monetary, fiscal, commercial, and banking phenomena. As for the way of conceiving and practicing this history, it is a fact that for a long time in Haiti, there has been a kind of preemption of money over the global history of economic phenomena. With "On the Tax on Coffee," one can welcome the openness, but one would not want to lose sight of the idea that one is making the history of a progress of knowledge.
Economic history is thus a field where one sees that determinations are multiple. Economic problems are not strictly economic in nature. Economic historians and theorists do not have a right over economics, as if it were their property. Economic history is not a discipline like any other, as it travels through discursive categories found in other bodies of thought and action. To speak of the coffee tax and its commercialization, one must evoke the State, agriculture, the interface with the terms of international trade, one must consider the concrete organization of national production, and public protection practices that have become fundamental. None of this can be ignored in contemporary reflections. Therefore, one must not reduce the discipline to a certain interplay of institutions and power relations and repeat the positivist error that consisted of saying that history or empirical analysis must free itself from dreams, imagination, and speculation. Never, neither with "Letters" nor with "Politico-Economic Questions," not even with Frédéric Marcelin, nor with all the others combined, had Edmond Paul's thought resonated with such force, intelligence, youth, and true perspicacity. In reality, one is very often in a complete desert. One might as well say it! More than a researcher, he behaves here as a doctrinaire. And when he later produces a polemic like "Haiti in the Sun of 1880," economic history is both emotional and referential, as he leads disinherited populations to finance the wealth of advanced countries, notably France. This evolution is naturally perceived as a worrying attack on national sovereignty. Nothing resists his terribly argued critique, centered on patriotic values, fate, the blocked horizon, and it is indeed a statement of desolation that he delivers by moralizing to the whole world. This so frankly displayed hostility also arouses a kind of retrospective powerlessness and humiliation. From his intimate knowledge of the Haitian space, he paints a portrait of a country to abandon marked by violence and ignorance. Everything now invites a more complete look at Edmond Paul, both theorist and politician. The man, moreover, has enough to draw all eyes after him: the brilliance of talent, the strength of ideas, authentic love of the homeland, and also a soul so touching that his weakness was to prejudge the goodness or ferocity of others. The fog that still obscures the Paulian figure therefore stems, without a doubt, from that which continues to envelop what is called the "Liberal Party." Embodying a great and beautiful tradition, Paul, his head full of questions, is the very image of the fundamental impetus of the democratic right, having been its magnet and its dazzling desire, and as this idea of impetus is also present throughout Haitian memory, which has moreover frequently expressed itself in an intimate relationship with shock images of our political culture. Tested but upright and firm, he has become a first-rate reference. With the appearance of a Greek tragedy, he may have been mistaken many times about the path to follow in difficult circumstances, but the nobility of his positions has remained intact. His legacy remains with us; his memory will grow with the success of liberal democracy in our country.
A poignant and desperate moralist, a bittersweet satirist, a kind of policeman tortured by his fight against evil, extraordinarily generous, he studies the functioning and evolution of the "French Bank of Haiti" under the presidency of Lysius Félicité Salomon Jeune, whose savagery is matched only by the distress of the country he intended to reform. An ambitious reflection on the idea of independence through institutional and political spheres. The observation was not obvious for those who, by rejecting contemporary testimony in favor of an objective and impalpable history, thought they had finished with the excesses of the battle of ideas and with the too long proximity between history and party spirit. To better preserve his lyricism from shrillness, he abandoned, by force of circumstances, the conscientious research of his early works for the role of a combat intellectual in a warlike society. Throughout almost all the historiography of the Age of Bayonets, one can see how illusory this proclaimed rupture was. In a text to which one must always return, "The Causes of Our Misfortunes," he had formulated with biting irony this fundamental tension between reflection and reality. If it has already happened in Haiti that a book leaves an imprint in its genre, being among the best books in a country's history is an even more unforgettable performance. This is the case with "The Causes of Our Misfortunes," since 141 years after its publication, it remains an unshakeable classic. Edmond Paul depicts an immoral and sinister world where egoism prevails to the detriment of the common good. Violence spares nothing and no one. His writing is a self-reflexive practice that produces knowledge, but a practice dependent on the variations of its thematic procedures, the constraints imposed by the political stakes and the socio-historical link through which it is exercised, or the obligatory rules of his inspiration. For example, "Haiti in the Sun of 1880" can be seen as a swollen drama of the elite, as an illustration of the blindness of the political world, as a historical struggle between nationalist self-withdrawal and modernist openness, as the doctrinal confrontation of independence and interdependence. But, in accordance with the very spirit of an ultimately inexorable drama, it is societal decay that emerges: the loss of energy and morality, of dignity and future, the decay of patriotic values, fate, the blocked horizon. In the name of the global disaster observed through President Salomon's financial and banking policy. Torn between the unleashed, dreamlike, and constant flame of love for the homeland and the cold, direct analysis of reality, he, swelling with passion and disgust, denounces the effects of the internationalization of the economy, attacks the excesses of free trade without resolving to the status quo, and lambastes the country's increased dependence which, through scandalous loans and prestige spending, casts a gaze of astonishing cruelty upon our country. And his most merciless or most desperate judgments ring true [9]. From illusions to misfortune, from storms to overwhelming lulls, for this man, it is the time of ideas of progress, the life of ideas that simply pulsate. Carried by a life force and an insatiable appetite for change, he breathes the deleterious atmosphere of this mysterious island lost in the Caribbean Sea, its violence and covetousness, its burdens and its torpors. All this did not prevent him from traversing almost the entire second half of the 19th century: as a statesman, as a citizen, as an ideologue, but also as a reformist – that was his pride. With this grandiose dignity. Always, he ended up preferring the dawn's glow to that of twilight.
Reflecting in a very special measure the political antagonisms and divergences of opinion of the past century, he represents one of the most prolific liberal thinkers, in both success and failure. The studies and reflections he published on the problems of industry [10] and the transformation of the political system, for example, constitute the culmination of a modernizing Haitian tradition that took seriously the questions of a constructivist national policy, beyond the obscure phraseology of the old free and the new free, of the commercial bourgeoisie and the landed bourgeoisie. Hence the question arises: should we revise or refine the image we have of the economist and political activist Edmond Paul? Should he also be considered an author? Moreover, who dares to assert that Edmond Paul, a republican before everyone else, is not of our time? The depth of his thought, his political commitment, the contemporary relevance of his work [11], and it must be said, an exceptional moral acuity, ensured the man's prestige. From an uninterrupted flow of dreams whose modulations from whisper to cry one perceives, he was closer than any other activist to the universal spirit whose humanist authenticity he embodied. It was only in its worst periods that political economy, or economic science, became excessively mathematized and theorized and moved away from the
