Julien Raimond

1744–1801 ○ Natural causes

Indigo planter who led the free coloured campaign for equal rights in Paris and helped draft the 1801 Constitution of Saint-Domingue

Born a free man of colour in southern Saint-Domingue to a French colonist and a coloured mother, he was an indigo planter with over 100 slaves by the 1780s. In 1785 he went to France to press the Colonial Ministry to reform the laws against free people of colour, and in December 1789 he and others petitioned the National Constituent Assembly. With Vincent Ogé, Henri Grégoire and the Society of the Friends of the Blacks, which later elected him its leader, he made their equal rights the leading colonial question of 1790–1791 and won the decree of 15 May 1791. His plans for gradual emancipation were overtaken when Sonthonax freed the rebels. Back in Saint-Domingue as a government agent, once with Sonthonax, he helped re-establish the plantations, and he sat on the ten-man committee that wrote Toussaint Louverture's Constitution of 1801, dying soon after it was published.