Secretary-General of the Haitian government under Jean-Pierre Boyer and one of the most consequential administrators of the post-independence period.
Inginac was the first Haitian official Mackau met on Haitian soil (July 4, 1825), and served as one of Boyer's three commissioners for the indemnity negotiations before Boyer overrode the commissioners' resistance to pure acceptance. He co-authored the ceremonial programme for the July 11, 1825 ratification, delivered the toast to Charles X, and received a reciprocal toast from Admiral Jurien — performing public gratitude toward France under military duress. Earlier in his career, his property-title audit in the South triggered the officers' conspiracy against Dessalines in 1806. He also conducted diplomatic correspondence with John Quincy Adams in 1823, arguing for U. S. recognition of Haiti on the basis of revolutionary solidarity.
In the ScholarshipHow historians have read this figure.
How historians and scholars have interpreted this figure across different analytical traditions.
Trouillot's Haiti: State Against Nation provides the framework for understanding B. Inginac's career as Secretary-General of Haiti under Boyer — a figure who embodied the post-independence state's administrative apparatus at the moment it was building the extractive institutional architecture that Trouillot argues defined Haitian state-society relations for 150 years. Inginac's role in the Boyer administration, including his involvement in the 1825 indemnity negotiations and the 1826 Code Rural, places him at the center of the decisions that subordinated the peasant majority to the state's fiscal demands. Trouillot's state-against-nation thesis allows us to read Inginac not as a bureaucratic anomaly but as a representative of the post-independence elite's project: a state that proclaimed sovereignty while delivering the peasantry to debt and coerced labor.
Inginac's career as Secretary-General places him at the center of the Boyer administration's construction of the extractive state — the institutional architecture that Trouillot argues defined Haitian state-society relations for 150 years.
TimelineAcross the historical record.
- 1818
Secretary-General of the Haitian Government
Chief administrative officer under Boyer; central Haitian interlocutor in the 1825 French recognition negotiation.