L'administration de Jacmel en 1845

Maurice Lubin's L'administration de Jacmel en 1845 is too brief to truly provide an idea of Jacmel in the 1840s, but it certainly helps. Relying on surviving government documents and reports on receiving and expenditures of the arrondissement's administration, Lubin's short publication does suggest something of Jacmel's importance in Haiti at the time. For instance, Jacmel's revenue stream included about the equivalent of 6 million in foreign currency that was sent to the central administration in Port-au-Prince. Jacmel was also frequently visited by foreign ships in 1845, including two from Venezuela. The city's military received about 52 percent of expenses, with only one single primary school funded by the government. This sorry state of affairs, including the existence of only military hospitals and no government spending on health and sanitation, demonstrates the negative impact of Haiti's overly militarized administration. Indeed, the state could not even pay respectable salaries to some of the citizens who served in the armed forces yet died in indigence and their families could not cover the costs of their funerals. So, while there was prosperity from Jacmel's coffee economy and, perhaps, the cost of living was not yet so high, the government was still spending perhaps excessively in the military. This was so even after the final recognition of Haitian independence by France, though the Western powers could still have invaded the island, necessitating a strong military.