Ogé and Chavanne were executed at the Cap after torture, Chavanne’s limbs broken with a club.

On the day of this procession, so minutely and so mournfully described (25 February 1791), all the troops were on their feet and the white population was in an uproar. And while the Conseil Supérieur and the Assemblée provinciale, presided over by Chesnau de la Mégrière (1), attended in a body this dreadful hecatomb, the Black people and the *mulâtres*, consternated, shut up or confined to their dwellings, swallowed their tears and their anger and invoked the vengeance of heaven. They groaned above all at being able to do nothing for the deliverance of the two heroes; for they had been partially disarmed from the first days of the month.

When the funeral cortege had halted before the threshold of the church, Chavanne refused to kneel and to ask pardon of the nation, the law and the king (2). In what, then, had he outraged the nation, the law and the king? Was it a crime to seek to recover the imprescriptible rights that all men hold from nature? Although his limbs were already broken by the tortures of the question, he mounted the scaffold with firmness; and when the executioner broke his arms and legs with blows of a club, no complaint escaped from that energetic soul, no cry from that manly chest; he only uttered curses against his assassins and addressed invocations against them to the avenging furies. Less strongly constituted, Ogé shed tears as he made his way to the place of execution: so young to depart from life, without having been able to realize the philanthropic projects that he bore in his heart! broken above all by dreadful trials beyond his physical strength, he had lost all courage, all resignation. The death of the one and of the other proves once more that there is no more progress without a martyr than there is birth without pain.