Julien Raimond - Laws

Laws

On 15 May 1791, the French legislature passed racial reforms urged by Raimond giving wealthy free-born men of color the right to vote in the colonies. But White colonists' resistance to this change provoked civil war in Saint-Domingue. The fragmentation of colonial society that occurred as a result of these racial disputes exacerbated tensions, leading to August 1791 when slaves organized the massive revolt that eventually became the Haïtian Revolution.

Raimond published about two dozen political pamphlets in France. One piece entitled Observations on the Origin and Progression of the White Colonists’ Prejudice against Men of Color, attempts to describe the racial history of the prejudice on the small island for the purpose of garnering sympathies from the National Assembly. In other works, he lays out plans for the gradual emancipation of France's colonial slaves. His projects were surpassed when France's Commissioner Léger-Félicité Sonthonax recognized the freedom of the rebels before Raimond's plans were put into action. Raimond eventually returned twice to Saint-Domingue, once with Sonthonax himself, as an agent of the Revolutionary government, helping re-establish the plantation system after the end of slavery. Though a long advocate of loyalty to France, Raimond ultimately allied with Toussaint L'Ouverture and was one of 10 men who served on a committee that wrote a self-governing Constitution for Saint-Domingue in 1801. Raimond died shortly after the document was published.