Julien Fédon

Julien Fédon was a French-speaking Grenadian landowner and revolutionary leader who led the uprising against British rule known as Fédon’s Rebellion from 1795 to 1796. Influenced by the wider age of Atlantic revolution, his forces drew support from free people of colour, French republicans and enslaved people. The rebellion was defeated, but Fédon was never captured and his ultimate fate is uncertain.

Fédon’s forces captured much of Grenada’s interior and executed several British prisoners, including the governor, but British reinforcements gradually retook the island’s strongholds. The final rebel positions collapsed in 1796. Fédon disappeared and was never conclusively identified among the dead or captured, allowing later tradition to preserve uncertainty over whether he escaped the island.

In Timothy Ashby’s Desperate Valour, Operating under cover among New Orleans’s free Black militia, he becomes entangled with a local agent and with Julien Fédon, the revolutionary leader whose conflict with Chart began in Grenada. In Timothy Ashby’s Ranger, Fédon’s Rebellion overturns the plantation order before his execution, yet Chart’s refusal to participate in the killing of British colonists places him in danger from the rebels as well.