Sanité Bélair

Suzanne Bélair, called Sanité, was born free in Verrettes, Saint-Domingue, in 1781. She married Charles Bélair — Toussaint Louverture's nephew and a brigadier general in the revolutionary army — and accompanied him on every campaign through the 1790s. By 1795 she held the rank of lieutenant in her own right, and by 1802 she had been promoted to commandant.

In May 1802, after the French Leclerc expedition arrived to restore slavery and capture Toussaint, Sanité and Charles Bélair rejoined the rebellion. They led a guerrilla unit in the Artibonite valley. Captured by the French in early October 1802, the two were brought to Cap-Français for trial.

Charles was offered the firing squad — a soldier's death — as a courtesy. Sanité, as a woman, was to be hanged. She refused. She demanded the firing squad and the right to die alongside her husband. The French commander Donatien-Marie-Joseph de Vimeur acceded.

She was twenty-one years old.

On the fifth of October 1802 the Bélairs were brought to the Place d'Armes in Cap-Français. Sanité Bélair faced the firing squad without a blindfold. She refused to kneel. She called out, in French, "Viv libète, anba l'esklavaj" — "Long live freedom, down with slavery." The volley followed.

She is depicted on the ten-gourde note of the Haitian currency since 2004. Her case is among the earliest documented examples of women's combatant rank in any modern military.

She is honored here as the lieutenant who, at twenty-one, refused the rope and demanded the rifles.