Jean-Baptiste Belley

Jean-Baptiste Belley was born around 1746, reportedly on Gorée Island off the coast of Senegal, and was enslaved and transported to Saint-Domingue, where he purchased his own freedom before the outbreak of the Haitian Revolution and went on to serve as a soldier in the colony's militia.

Belley fought in the Haitian Revolution and, following the French Republic's 1794 decree abolishing slavery in its colonies, was elected as one of Saint-Domingue's representatives to the French National Convention in Paris, becoming the first Black deputy ever to serve in a French legislative body.

Belley sat in the Convention alongside fellow Saint-Domingue deputies and became an outspoken advocate for the rights of formerly enslaved people, using his position to defend the abolition of slavery against efforts to reverse it as political currents in France shifted.

In 1797 Belley was immortalised in a celebrated portrait by French painter Anne-Louis Girodet, depicting him in the uniform of a French Republican deputy leaning against a bust of the abolitionist philosopher Guillaume-Thomas Raynal, an image that remains one of the most significant visual representations of a Black political figure from the era.

When Napoleon Bonaparte moved to restore slavery in France's colonies in 1802, Belley was arrested and imprisoned, and he died in captivity in France in 1805; he is remembered as a pioneering figure whose election to the French National Convention represented a landmark, if ultimately reversed, moment of Black political representation in the history of the French Republic.