Le Cap. Ogé and Chavannes condemned and executed.

After these events there was a glimmer of calm in the colony. The trial of Ogé and Chavannes was prepared during the months of January and February 1791. In vain they asked for a defender. On 23 February 1791 they were condemned by the superior council of Le Cap, without having been heard, to be broken on the wheel, as guilty of the crime of rebellion.

The Assembly of the North had the barbarity to insult their misfortune by ordering that they should not be executed in the square reserved for the punishment of white criminals, so that a scaffold which until then had seen flow only the blood of a pure and sovereign race should not be defiled by impure blood…..

On the day of the execution (23 February 1791) the condemned men, led before the church barefoot and bareheaded, in their shirts, the rope about their necks, each carrying a wax torch, amid an immense crowd, declared on their knees that they repented of the crime they had committed and asked God’s pardon for it.(c)

In the center of the parade ground stood a scaffold topped by two wheels. The executioners bound them to it with their faces turned toward the sky, and with repeated blows of iron bars broke their thighs, their legs, their arms and their backs. Calm and resigned, they uttered no complaint.