Polish-Haitians – Descendants of the Napoleonic Polish Legions

Thanks to one of my friends, I’ve learned that there’s a little-known historical footnote to Napoleon and the Polish Legions (see January 25, 2024 blog post).

In the late 18th century, Saint-Domingue or Santo Domingo (which occupied the western half of the Caribbean island of Hispaniola, roughly the location of Haiti today) was one of the richest of the French colonies in the New World—its sugar and coffee fields, worked by black slaves, produced roughly half the sugar and coffee consumed in Europe and the Americas.

The ferment of the French Revolution, with its adoption of the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen in 1789, helped fuel several years of rebellion and civil war in Saint-Domingue beginning in about 1791.

In 1802, Napoleon sent some 31,000 troops to Saint-Domingue to re-establish French control over the island. Napoleon’s forces included units of the Polish Legions under the half-black Polish General Władysław Jabłonowski. Unfortunately, Jabłonowski died of yellow fever shortly after arriving in the islands, as did a number of the French and Polish soldiers.

As the fighting evolved, many of the Polish soldiers found that their sympathies lay with the slaves, who were rebelling to secure their freedom. These Poles fought for the French without enthusiasm—and even switched sides altogether to fight against the French. By the end of 1803, the French were defeated. On January 1, 1804, the former French colony declared its independence and changed its name to Haiti.

After the fighting was over, about 400 of the Polish soldiers decided to stay in Haiti.

The first ruler of the newly independent Haiti, Jean-Jacques Dessalines, called Poles “the white Negroes of Europe” (considered a great compliment at the time). While the Haitian constitution prohibited white people from living in or owning land in Haiti, this did not apply to Poles. Dessalines granted Haitian citizenship to the Poles who stayed.

The village of Cazale became, and to this day remains, the main center of Polonia in Haiti. Click here for an excellent article about the Poles in Haiti, titled “The 9th Generation of Poles…in Haiti.”

The Polish Museum of America in Chicago did an event about the Cazale and its Polish-Haitian community in October 2019.