Julien Raimond
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Julien Raimond (1744–1801) was a Saint Dominican indigo planter in the French colony of Saint-Domingue, now the Republic of Haiti, who became a leader in its revolution and the formation of Haiti.
He was born a free man of color; the son of a French colonist and a colored mother born to a planter in the isolated Sud province of the colony. His mother, Marie Bagasse, was significantly wealthier and more educated than his father, Pierre Raimond, providing an economic incentive for their interracial marriage. Raimond was a slave owner, as many free people of color from the colony were. He owned over 100 slaves by the 1780s and was one of the wealthiest men in his racial class in the colony. But he is most famous for challenging the French government to reform racially discriminatory laws against free people of color in Saint-Domingue. He worked alongside leaders such as Toussaint L'Ouverture to help shape the 1801 Constitution of Saint-Domingue (Haiti)[1]. In 1785 he moved to France to pursue this quest at the French Colonial Ministry.
The outbreak of the French Revolution in 1789, in particular the publication of the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen, prompted Raimond to take his case before the National Constituent Assembly. In December 1789, Raimond and other representatives of free people of color presented “Supplique et pétition des citoyens de couleur des isles et colonies françoises” [2] to the French National Assembly, arguing that colonial assemblies failed to adequately represent free people of color. Working with Vincent Ogé, Henri Grégoire and the Society of the Friends of the Blacks (of which he was eventually elected leader), Raimond succeeded in making the question of equal rights for free people of color into the leading colonial question before the National Assembly in 1790 and 1791.
