Law of 16 Pluviôse Year II

The Society of the Friends of the Blacks, founded by Brissot and Clavière in 1788, argued for abolition, but a measure proposed at the start of the Revolution was dropped under noble opposition and in 1790 the National Assembly affirmed its support for the continuation of slavery. Facing the slave rising of 1791 in Saint-Domingue and the British and Spanish invasions, the civil commissioners Sonthonax and Polverel decreed in June 1793 that slaves willing to fight under them would be freed; on 29 August Sonthonax abolished slavery in the north and on 31 October Polverel in the west and south. Both were abolitionists but had received no such orders from Paris, and Toussaint Louverture, then allied with the Spanish, doubted their sincerity. The Saint-Domingue deputies Dufay, Belley and Mills, sent by Sonthonax, were briefly arrested by his opponents but well received by the Convention, where they justified emancipation on practical and moral grounds. When Delacroix exclaimed that the Convention should not "dishonor itself by a long discussion", the law passed by acclamation: "The National Convention declares slavery abolished throughout all the colonies: consequently, it decrees that all men, without distinction of color, domiciliated in the colonies, are French citizens, and entitled to the enjoyment of all the rights secured by the Constitution." It was referred to the Committee of Public Safety for immediate measures of execution, and Danton declared, "today we proclaim it to the universe".

The Committee of Public Safety sent 1,200 troops to the West Indies, recaptured Guadeloupe from the British and their French royalist allies and used it as a base against the other islands. The law won the Black population of the region to the Republican side and may have influenced Toussaint's decision to switch from the Spanish to the French, though it is unclear whether he learned of it early enough. Martinique, where a royalist insurrection had begun in September 1793, was occupied by the British in 1794 and remained unaffected, and the colonial authorities of Isle de France and Réunion refused to implement the decree under pressure from local colonists. Where it was implemented, material conditions often did not change: in Guadeloupe the emancipated were restricted to the plantations by laws against vagrancy and were not paid the wages they were owed, and in Saint-Domingue Republican officials tried to maintain the plantation economy against the newly freed who wanted autonomy. Copies of the law and of the Declaration of the Rights of Man helped to spark slave revolts in Venezuela, Brazil, Jamaica and Cuba. After 18 Brumaire Napoleon was convinced by pro-slavery lobbyists; "I am for the whites, because I am white; I have no other reason, and this is the right one", he wrote to Truguet, and by the Law of 20 May 1802 he reinstated slavery and the slave trade in the colonies returned by the Treaty of Amiens. That law did not apply to Saint-Domingue, where slavery had already been abolished, but news of the restoration in Guadeloupe set off the new rising there and the failure of the Leclerc expedition.