Saint-Georges was born on Christmas Day, 1745, in the French colony of Guadeloupe, on the sugar plantation named Saint-Robert, belonging to his father, Georges de Bologne de Saint-Georges. By then, the de Bolognes had long been marked by familial diversity, so much so that they defied strict ethnic or national identification. Like so many migrant families from a Europe torn by religion, they had fled persecution time and again and, despite their eighteenthcentury surname, were no more native-born French than their enslaved Africans. Following the Siege of La Rochelle (1628) that quashed Protestant resistance in western France, the Protestant patriarch of the Guadeloupe line, Louis de Bologne (1605-1664), fled to the Dutch Republic, where the family name became 'van Bolongien'. With the Union of Utrecht (1579), the Dutch Republic embraced multiconfessionalism as a basic organizing principle of the State and, thenceforth, became a haven for a diversity of religious refugees from across Europe. In Rotterdam, Louis married a Dutch woman and had two sons, Willem (1631-1670) and Pieter (1645-1721). The influx of religious refugees to the Dutch Republic, including wealthy Sephardic Jews, helped finance and stimulate overseas expansion. By 1630, the Dutch Republic controlled most of northern Brazil, paradoxically expanding the slave trade as well as tolerance and freedom consciousness across the Atlantic. This made the colony attractive to religious 'others' fleeing Europe, and the van Bolongiens were among the many  
who immigrated to the Pernambuco region of north-eastern Brazil in the mid1630s. There, even Indigenous populations and enslaved Africans were left to their own religious beliefs.