Opportunist or Patriot? Julien Raimond (1744 – 1801) and the Haitian Revolution John D. Garrigus This paper examines the virtually unknown biography of Julien Raimond, a wealthy indigo planter of one-quarter African descent who became the leading advocate of racial reforms in Paris during the French Revolution. The article explores Raimond’s identity before and during the Revolution, challenging his historical reputation as a political conservative whose actions were primarily motivated by financial self-interest. After Toussaint Louverture, the most important Caribbean-born actor in the Haitian Revolution was Julien Raimond, a free-coloured planter whose proposals for racial reform destabilized Saint-Domingue’s slave regime in 1791. 1 Yet in 2004, Raimond’s career was scarcely evoked in commemorations of the Haitian Revolution’s bicenten- nial. 2 One reason for this is that military figures dominate Haiti’s Revolutionary pantheon and Raimond, often mistakenly described as a ‘mulatto lawyer’, 3 was no soldier. But Raimond’s reputation as a hypocrite is at the core of his obscurity. In the early 1790s he argued that free men of colour like himself were indebted to Revolutionary France for recognizing their citizenship. In an influential 1793 pamphlet about Saint- Domingue’s rebel slaves, he maintained that these men and women, too, should only be free when they had paid their debt to France. Yet in 1800, when Raimond helped Toussaint Louverture write an autonomous constitution for the colony, he himself owed huge debts – financial, not metaphoric – to French creditors. Historians, like contemporaries, concluded that Raimond’s attempts to rebuild his colonial fortune had trumped his loyalty to France. Whatever his failings, Raimond’s neglected career illuminates the story of the Haitian Revolution in four essential ways. First, his pre-revolutionary biography Slavery and Abolition Vol. 28, No. 1, April 2007, pp. 1–21 John D. Garrigus is Associate Professor of History at the University of Texas at Arlington. Correspondence to: John D. Garrigus, Department of History, University of Texas at Arlington, Box 19529, 601 S. Nedderman Drive, 201 University Hall, Arlington, TX 76019, USA. Email: garrigus@uta.edu. ISSN 0144-039X print/1743-9523 online/07/010001–21 DOI: 10.1080/01440390701269731 # 2007 Taylor & Francis