Free People of Colour and the Debate in Paris

The first struggle over rights in Saint-Domingue concerned free people of colour, who were often educated and propertied but faced legal discrimination. Julien Raimond lobbied the National Assembly in Paris for equal rights, while white planters, organised in the Club Massiac, resisted. In 1790 Vincent Ogé, a free man of colour who had been in Paris, returned to the colony and led a small armed rising to demand the rights he believed the Revolution promised. It failed, and he was executed in 1791.

His death shocked opinion in Paris. In May 1791 the assembly granted rights to free men of colour born of free parents, a limited measure, and on 4 April 1792 the Legislative Assembly extended full equality to all free people of colour. These debates showed how revolutionaries tried to separate the question of racial equality from the question of slavery, a separation that events would soon make impossible.