[3] In 1791, Saint Dominican Creoles began the French Revolution in Saint-Domingue; they incited a slave rebellion, aimed at the overthrow of the Bourbon Regime.

[3] He returned to Saint-Domingue with Charles Leclerc's expedition of 1802 as an officer of gendarmes, but he was arrested, sent back to France and imprisoned in the fortress of Belle Île.

Belley, standing, wears the uniform of a Convention member, with a tropical landscape behind him, and has a stylish relaxed pose, as favoured in many French political portraits of Revolutionary politicians.

[4] A drawing by Girodet for the portrait in ink and black chalk is in the Art Institute of Chicago, purchased with funds from the Joseph and Helen Regenstein Foundation in 1973.

[11] The portrait was used for the dust cover of Christopher Bayly's book The Birth of the Modern World 1780–1914: Global Connections and Comparisons (Oxford: Blackwell, 2004).