Sanité Bélair: Lieutenant of the Haitian Revolution

Sanité Bélair was twenty-one when French soldiers led her to her execution at Cap-Français in October 1802. According to the accounts that have come down to us, she refused the blindfold. Two centuries later, Haiti put her face on its ten-gourde note.

Early life

Suzanne "Sanité" Bélair was born in 1781 in Verrettes, in the Artibonite region of French Saint-Domingue, the most profitable slave colony in the world. She was born free, an affranchie. That gave her a legal standing hundreds of thousands of enslaved Africans around her did not have. It did not protect her from the colony's racial order.

A soldier of the revolution

In 1796 she married Charles Bélair, a nephew of Toussaint Louverture who became a brigadier general. Sanité did not just follow the army. She served in it. She rose from sergeant to lieutenant, which put her among the few women to hold rank in the revolutionary forces. Contemporaries called her "the tigress."

The war against Leclerc

In 1802, Napoleon sent General Charles Leclerc with a large expedition to retake the colony and, as many feared, to bring back slavery. Toussaint was captured in June and shipped to France. Charles and Sanité Bélair took up arms in the Artibonite. A French column under Faustin Répussard launched a surprise attack and captured Sanité; Charles gave himself up so he would not be separated from her. Within six hours of their arrival at Le Cap, a French military commission condemned them both.

Charles was shot. Sanité, as a woman, was sentenced to beheading. Accounts say she demanded to die like a soldier, as her husband had, and was shot instead. She refused the blindfold.

Legacy

Fourteen months later, on January 1, 1804, Jean-Jacques Dessalines declared Haiti's independence. Sanité Bélair did not live to see the first free Black republic in the Americas. She is remembered, along with women such as Cécile Fatiman and Marie-Jeanne Lamartinière, as proof that women fought in the Haitian Revolution and did not only support it. In 2004, the bicentennial year, Haiti honored her on the ten-gourde banknote.