History of the Girondists, Volume I / Personal Memoirs of the Patriots of the French Revolution

by Alphonse de Lamartine

The men of colour had all the vices of parvenus of liberty. But when they perceived that the whites despised them as a mingled race, that the Revolution had not effaced the tinge of their skin, and the injurious prejudices which were attached to their colour; when they in vain claimed for themselves the exercise of civil rights, which the colonists opposed, they passed with the impetuosity and levity of their conduct from one passion to another, from one party to the other, and made common cause with the oppressed race. Their habits of command, fortune, intelligence, energy, boldness, naturally pointed them out as the leaders of the blacks. They fraternised with them, they became popular amongst the blacks, from the very tinge of skin for which they had recently blushed, when in company with the whites. They secretly fomented the germs of insurrection at the nightly meetings of the slaves. They kept up a clandestine correspondence with the friends of the blacks in Paris. They spread widely in the huts, speeches and papers from Paris, which instructed the colonists in their duties and informed the slaves of their indefeasible rights. The rights of man, commented upon by vengeance, became the catechism of all dwellings.

The whites trembled; terror urged them to violence. The blood of the mulatto Ogé and his accomplices, shed by M. de Blanchelande, governor of San Domingo and the colonial council, sowed every where despair and conspiracy.

X.

Ogé, deputed to Paris by the men of colour to assert their rights in the Constituent Assembly, had become known to Brissot, Raynal, Grégoire, and was affiliated with them to the Society of the Friends of the Blacks. Passing thence into England, he became known to the admirable philanthropist, Clarkson. Clarkson and his friend at this time were pleading the cause of the emancipation of the negroes: they were the first apostles of that religion of humanity who believed that they could not raise their hands purely towards God, so long as those hands retained a link of that chain which holds a race of human beings in degradation and in slavery. The association with these men of worth expanded Ogé's mind. He had come to Europe only to defend the interest of the mulattoes; he now took up with warmth the more liberal and holy cause of all the blacks; he devoted himself to the liberty of all his brethren. He returned to France, and became very intimate with Barnave; he entreated the Constituent Assembly to apply the principles of liberty to the colonies, and not to make any exception to Divine law, by leaving the slaves to their masters; excited and irritated by the hesitation of the committee, who withdrew with one hand what it gave with the other, he declared that if justice could not suffice for their cause, he would appeal to force. Barnave had said, "Perish the colonies rather than a principle!" The men of the 14th of July had no right to condemn, in the heart of Ogé, that revolt which was their own title to independence. We may believe that the secret wishes of the friends of the blacks followed Ogé, who returned to San Domingo. He found there the rights of men of colour and the principles of liberty of the blacks more denied and more profaned than ever. He raised the standard of insurrection, but with the forms and rights of legality. At the head of a body of two hundred men of colour, he demanded the promulgation in the colonies of the decrees of the National Assembly, despotically delayed until that time. He wrote to the military commandant at the Cape, "We require the proclamation of the law which makes us free citizens. If you oppose this, we will repair to Leogane, we will nominate electors, and repel force by force. The pride of the colonists revolts at sitting beside us: was the pride of the nobility and clergy consulted when the equality of citizens was proclaimed in France?"

The government replied to this eloquent demand for liberty by sending a body of troops to disperse the persons assembled, and Ogé drove them back.

XI.

A larger body of troops being despatched, they contrived, after a desperate resistance, to disperse the mulattoes. Ogé escaped, and found refuge in the Spanish part of the island. A price was set upon his head. M. de Blanchelande in his proclamations imputed it as a crime to him that he had claimed the rights of nature in the name of the Assembly, which had so loudly proclaimed the rights of the citizen. They applied to the Spanish authorities to surrender this Spartacus, equally dangerous to the safety of the whites in both countries. Ogé was delivered up to the French by the Spaniards, and sent for trial to the Cape. His trial was protracted for two months, in order to afford time to cut asunder all the threads of the plot of independence, and intimidate his accomplices. The whites, in great excitement, complained of these delays, and demanded his head with loud vociferations. The judges condemned him to death for a crime which in the mother-country had constituted the glory of La Fayette and Mirabeau.

He underwent torture in his dungeon. The rights of his race, centred and persecuted in him, raised his soul above the torments of his executioners. "Give up all hope," he exclaimed, with unflinching daring; "give up all hope of extracting from me the name of even one of my accomplices. My accomplices are everywhere where the heart of a man is raised against the oppressors of men." From that moment he pronounced but two words, which sounded like a remorse in the ears of his persecutors—Liberty! Equality! He walked composedly to his death; listened with indignation to the sentence which condemned him to the lingering and infamous death of the vilest criminals. "What!" he exclaimed; "do you confound me with criminals because I have desired to restore to my fellow-creatures the rights and titles of men which I feel in myself! Well! you have my blood, but an avenger will arise from it!" He died on the wheel, and his mutilated carcase was left on the highway. This heroic death reached even to the National Assembly, and gave rise to various opinions. "He deserved it," said Malouet; "Ogé was a criminal and an assassin." "If Ogé be guilty," replied Grégoire, "so are we all; if he who claimed liberty for his brothers perished justly on the scaffold, then all Frenchmen who resemble us should mount there also."

XII.

Ogé's blood bubbled silently in the hearts of all the mulatto race. They swore to avenge him. The blacks were an army all ready for the massacre; the signal was given to them by the men of colour. In one night 60,000 slaves, armed with torches and their working tools, burnt down all their masters' houses in a circuit of six leagues round the Cape. The whites were murdered; women, children, old men—nothing escaped the long-repressed fury of the blacks. It was the annihilation of one race by the other. The bleeding heads of the whites, carried on the tops of sugar canes, were the standards which guided these hordes, not to combat, but to carnage. The outrages of so many centuries, committed by the whites on the blacks, were avenged in one night. A rivalry of cruelty seemed to arise between the two colours. The negroes imitated the tortures so long used upon them, and invented new ones. If certain noble and faithful slaves placed themselves between their old masters and death, they were sacrificed together. Gratitude and pity are virtues which civil war never recognises. Colour was a sentence of death without exception of persons; the war was between the races, and no longer between men. The one must perish for the other to live! Since justice could not make itself understood by them, there was nothing but death left for them. Every gift of life to a white was a treason which would cost a black man's life. The negroes had no longer any pity: they were men no longer, they were no longer a people, but a destroying element which spread over the land, annihilating every thing.