Vincent Ogé
| Vincent Ogé | |
|---|---|
Vincent Ogé c.1790
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| Born | c,1755 Dondon, Saint-Domingue (Haiti) |
| Died |
6 February 1791 Cap-Français |
| Known for | Rebellion Leader |
Vincent Ogé (French pronunciation: [oʒe]; c.1755–1791) was a wealthy free man of mixed race descent and the instigator of a revolt against white colonial authority in French Saint-Domingue that lasted from October to December 1790 in the area outside Cap-Français, the colony's main city. The Ogé revolt of 1790 foretold the massive slave uprising of August 1791 that began the Haitian Revolution.
Ogé was a wealthy and educated free man of colour born in Dondon, Saint-Domingue, of one-quarter African descent and three-quarters French ancestry (a "quadroon"). He was the third son of Jacques Ogé, a white man and Jacqueline Ossé, a free woman of color. With eight children, the Ogé family was large, and Vincent is often confused with his older brother Jacques, who was also involved in what as known as the Ogé revolt. The family owned a coffee plantation in Dondon parish and his mother later held a contract to supply meat to the town's butchers. Educated in Bordeaux, Ogé returned to work with his uncle and namesake Vincent Ogé, a merchant in the major colonial city of Cap-Français (today's Cap-Haïtien). Vincent Ogé jeune (the younger), as he was called for most of his life, eventually took over his uncle's business. He leased valuable urban properties, traded coffee and imported French products to the colony.
In 1789 he was in Paris on business when the French Revolution broke out. By August of that year he had approached a group of colonial planters living in Paris to propose changing racial laws in the colony that discriminated against light-skinned men regardless of their wealth and education. Independently Julien Raimond, from a similar background in Saint-Domingue, spoke to the group of planters about the same time. When the planters (called grands blancs) rebuffed their ideas, Ogé and Raimond began to attend meetings in Paris of a group of headed by Étienne Dejoly, a white lawyer. He was a member of the Society of the Friends of the Blacks (Société des Amis des Noirs), an anti-slavery society founded in 1788 in Paris by Jacques Pierre Brissot.
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