Vincent Ogé

Vincent Ogé led the rising of free men of colour in Saint-Domingue in 1790 and was broken on the wheel for it, months before the slave revolution began. He was born into the free coloured planter class, wealthy and educated, sent to Bordeaux as a boy and later a merchant in Paris. He was not an abolitionist. What he wanted was the enforcement of the French National Assembly's ambiguous decree of March 1790 on colonial voting rights, which he read as granting political equality to free property-owning men of colour - people who owned plantations and enslaved people themselves, and who were excluded from office by the white colonists. He argued the case in Paris before the Society of the Friends of the Blacks, obtained nothing binding, bought arms in London and the United States and returned in October 1790. With Jean-Baptiste Chavannes he raised a few hundred men near Cap-Français, refused to arm the enslaved population, and was defeated within weeks. He fled to the Spanish side of the island and was handed back. In February 1791 he and Chavannes were publicly broken on the wheel at Cap-Français. The brutality of it destroyed any remaining trust between the colony's castes, and the general insurrection began that August. The National Assembly in Paris, hearing of the execution, granted political rights to free men of colour in May 1791 - the concession Oge had asked for, arriving after his death and too late to matter. His name is on the Haitian declaration of independence's list of martyrs, which is why he remains contested there: a man who died for the rights of a class that owned enslaved people, honoured by the state those enslaved people founded.

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