Jean-Baptiste Belley, member of the National Convention

In February 1794 the French Revolutionary Convention voted to abolish slavery across the colonies, and among the deputies who backed it was Jean-Baptiste Belley, born in Senegal, sold as a child into slavery in Saint-Domingue, and freed before the island sent him to Paris. Girodet painted him three years later in the blue coat and tricolour sash of a deputy, one elbow resting on a marble bust of Raynal, the writer whose books had attacked the slave trade. It was a rare thing for its moment, a life-size European portrait giving a Black lawmaker this kind of ease and command. And the timing turned bitter fast. Within five years Napoleon would reimpose slavery in the French colonies, undoing the very law Belley had come to Paris to defend.