The Haitian Revolution Builds

In October 1790, the wealthy mulatto Vincent Ogé and Jean-Baptiste Chavannes started an uprising, also known as the Mulatto Revolt. It was crushed with the quickness and at the end of November 1790, Oge was captured.

Check this event in the timeline of the French Revolutionary Wars.

On May 11, 1791, before the National Constituent Assembly, Lafayette spoke in favor of abolition of the slave trade.

Check this event in the timeline of the French Revolution.

On May 13, 1791, the National Constituent Assembly decreed the continuation of slavery, at the discretion of the colonists.

Check this event in the timeline of the French Revolution.

The law of April 4, 1792, concerning the French colonies, decreed that "Men of color and free negroes are admitted to vote in every parish assemblies, and are eligible to all places."

But on Saint Domingue this law was largely ignored.

To address this issue, France sent a commission of three representatives, Léger-Félicité Sonthonax, Etienne Polverel and Jean-Antoine Ailhaux (or Ailhaud).

On August 29, 1793, Sonthonax declared the emancipation of the slaves.

But apparently, Sonthonax soon tried to abuse his power for his own gain, and in 1797, Toussaint sent him home.

On February 3, 1794, a committee from Saint Domingue (Louis-Pierre Dufay de la Tour, white, Jean-Baptiste Mills, of mixed race, and Jean-Baptiste Belley, black) is allowed before the Convention at Paris.

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At this occasion, the deputy of Eure-et-Loir, Jean-Francois Lacroix, asked for permission to get emotional:

Since a long time, the Assembly wanted at its bosom men of color, who were oppressed for so many years. Today, it has two. I ask that their introduction is marked by the fraternal embrace of the president.

Everyone cheered, the three deputies from Saint Domingue approached the president of the National Convention, Marc Guillaume Vadier. Put on the spot, Vadier received the deputies with a fraternal kiss, after which the meeting hall again applauded and cheered.

Under applause and shouts of Vive la république! Vive la Convention! Vive la Montagne! the two deputies of color are successively embraced by all members of the Convention.

The very next day, February 4, 1794, Dufay spoke before the Convention and described the oppression, the humiliation, and the horror of the condition of the slaves at Saint Domingue.

Dufay's speech was followed by Georges Danton's remarks, who under applause called for "universal freedom."

Then, the Convention decreed the abolition of slavery.

On February 6, 1794, Dufay wrapped it up with a speech, noting that the citizens of color ARE the people, in fact, they are the REAL sans-culottes.

Napoleon came to power and, in January 1802, he sent his brother-in-law, Charles Leclerc, and 23,000 French troops to end the revolution. Traveling with Leclerc was his wife, Pauline Bonaparte, Napoleon's younger sister.

Leclerc arrested Toussaint and shipped him to France, where, at Fort-de-Joux, he died in April 1803.

Leclerc himself had already died of yellow fever on November 2, 1802.

On January 1, 1804, Saint Domingue declares its independence and takes the name Haiti.

After the first abolition of slavery in 1794, slavery was finally completely abolished on April 27, 1848.

Whereas slavery is an attack on human dignity,
destroying the free agency of man,
removing the principle natural right and obligation,
being a flagrant violation of the Republican dogma: Liberty, Equality, Fraternity,
it is declared that slavery
is completely abolished in all French colonies and possessions.

And here is the key moment of the Haitian Revolution:

According to the Summary of the Main Measures Proposed by France in Aid of Haiti's Reconstruction Communiqué Issued by the Presidency of the Republic, issued at Paris on February 27, 2010:

this portrays the historic meeting between the leader of the Santo Domingo mulattos, Alexandre Pétion, and the black General Jean-Jacques Dessalines, Toussaint Louverture's lieutenant.

In November 1802, the two officers sealed an alliance to chase out the French troops shortly after Bonaparte's decision to restore slavery.

The picture was damaged in the collapse of the National Palace, salvaged from the rubble by a French team and has since been stored on the site of the French embassy.

The painter was born in Guadeloupe. His father was a white settler, in fact he was the public prosecutor in Guadeloupe, his mother was a freed black slave from Guadeloupe.

And according to Nathalie Jolivert ...

... The painting celebrates the union of Black and Mulatto slaves against Napoleon’s army by staging upfront the Haitian Independence heroes Jean-Jacques Dessalines and Alexandre Pétion.

Oath of the Ancestors not only eternalizes the collaboration that has defeated the imperialists' strategy to "divide and conquer" but it also symbolizes the complicated relationship between an emancipated people and its former authority figure, by showing in prominence a White figure acknowledging the sacred moment.

...

From the way the Oath of Our Ancestors was smuggled out of France into Haïti’s Catholic cathedral in 1822, to its present restoration in France after it was buried under the Haitian Presidential Palace during the earthquake of January 12, 2010, Lethiere's piece captures a meaningful moment in history, which remains relevant to many aspects of our evolving world of freedom.

Here is more about Nathalie Jolivert

This is an excerpt from the Daily Chronicle, article from February 16, 2010:

French military rescue workers standing by the painting Serment des Ancetres
(Oath of the Ancestors), by Guillaume Guillon Lethiere,
at the presidential palace in Port au Prince, Haiti.

France's Culture Minister says Louvre art restoration experts will repair the 1822
painting found in the rubble of the Caribbean country's presidential palace.
The painting depicts a meeting between two of the fathers of Haitian independence. Haiti won its independence in an 1804 slave revolt against France,
defeating Napoleon's forces. (AP photo)

Here you can read the entire article.

Here is an excerpt from an article published by the Library of Congress:

The National Assembly in Paris required the white Colonial Assembly to grant suffrage to the landed and tax-paying gens de couleur. (The white colonists had had a history of ignoring French efforts to improve the lot of the black and the mulatto populations.) The Assembly refused, leading to the first mulatto rebellion in Saint-Domingue. The rebellion, led by Vincent Ogé in 1790, failed when the white militia reinforced itself with a corps of black volunteers. (The white elite was constantly prepared to use racial tension between blacks and mulattoes to advantage.) Ogé's rebellion was a sign of broader unrest in Saint-Domingue.

A slave rebellion of 1791 finally toppled the colony. Launched in August of that year, the revolt represented the culmination of a protracted conspiracy among black leaders. According to accounts of the rebellion that have been told through the years, François-Dominique Toussaint Louverture helped plot the uprising, although this claim has never been substantiated. Among the rebellion's leaders were Boukman, a maroon and voodoo houngan (priest); Georges Biassou, who later made Toussaint his aide; Jean-François, who subsequently commanded forces, along with Biassou and Toussaint, under the Spanish flag; and Jeannot, the bloodthirstiest of them all. These leaders sealed their compact with a voodoo ceremony conducted by Boukman in the Bois Cayman (Alligator Woods) in early August 1791. On August 22, a little more than a week after the ceremony, the uprising of their black followers began.

The carnage that the slaves wreaked in northern settlements, such as Acul, Limbé, Flaville, and Le Normand, revealed the simmering fury of an oppressed people. The bands of slaves slaughtered every white person they encountered. As their standard, they carried a pike with the carcass of an impaled white baby. Accounts of the rebellion describe widespread torching of property, fields, factories, and anything else that belonged to, or served, slaveholders. The inferno is said to have burned almost continuously for months.

News of the slaves' uprising quickly reached Cap Français. Reprisals against nonwhites were swift and every bit as brutal as the atrocities committed by the slaves. Although outnumbered, the inhabitants of Le Cap (the local diminutive for Cap Français) were well-armed and prepared to defend themselves against the tens of thousands of blacks who descended upon the port city. Despite their voodoo-inspired heroism, the ex-slaves fell in large numbers to the colonists' firepower and were forced to withdraw. The rebellion left an estimated 10,000 blacks and 2,000 whites dead and more than 1,000 plantations sacked and razed.

Even though it failed, the slave rebellion at Cap Français set in motion events that culminated in the Haitian Revolution. Mulatto forces under the capable leadership of André Rigaud, Alexandre Pétion, and others clashed with white militiamen in the west and the south (where, once again, whites recruited black slaves to their cause). Sympathy with the Republican cause in France inspired the mulattoes. Sentiment in the National Assembly vacillated, but it finally favored the enfranchisement of gens de couleur and the enforcement of equal rights. Whites, who had had little respect for royal governance in the past, now rallied behind the Bourbons and rejected the radical egalitarian notions of the French revolutionaries. Commissioners from the French Republic, dispatched in 1792 to Saint-Domingue, pledged their limited support to the gens de couleur in the midst of an increasingly anarchic situation. In various regions of the colony, black slaves rebelled against white colonists, mulattoes battled white levies, and black royalists opposed both whites and mulattoes. Foreign interventionists found these unstable conditions irresistible; Spanish and British involvement in the unrest in Saint-Domingue opened yet another chapter in the revolution.
 

See also

1700-1800 World Map Slave Trade

And here is more about Haiti.