BOOK 
TWO
8 IN the weeks that followed the taking of the Bastille, a wave of violence known as the Great Fear swept across the French countryside. Rampaging mobs attacked châteaus and burned the papers recording their feudal obligations to the local nobles. In the process, they sometimes burned down the châteaus themselves. Some rampagers made the local lord offer them a feast as he watched his belongings go up in flames.
No one has ever fully explained these events, though many later put it down to the rumors spreading of a so-called famine pact between royal bureaucrats and noble speculators to hoard goods and manipulate prices while peasant children starved to death. Tens of millions of people were living on the edge of destitution, and even in normal times a peasant family could spend nearly half its income on bread; in a year of poor harvests, a spike in bread prices could raise that figure as high as 90 percent. The compiling of local complaint petitions that spring had raised expectations of an improvement in conditions. Instead, the summer had brought only more shortages—exacerbated by commodity speculation—and no help at all from the government, which had collapsed.
On the other hand, it would seem that, like many actions in the French Revolution, there was a backstory of opportunism: many of those burning feudal records were not the genuinely destitute but rather what we would now call small business people, using a moment of public disorder to reduce their tax burden. In the last years of the Ancien Régime, clever lawyers had encouraged their noble clients to mine their records for all sorts of fees they could charge the enterprising commoners who used their land. Commoners already paid the lion’s share of national taxes and, because of these old feudal records, they now also paid a whole host of other duties to their local nobles (who, further inspiring anger, were exempt from most national taxes). Like the American Revolution before it, the French Revolution began as a tax revolt, and there were even rumors that King Louis XVI himself authorized the burning sprees because he felt the taxes on his people were unjustly high.
Social conflict was fueled by mass confusion. All across France that summer, bells tolled to warn villages and towns of approaching brigands. Such roving criminal bands had long been a problem in the countryside, terrorizing travelers, villagers, and peasants alike. But fear far outpaced the actual threat. People whispered that noblemen had organized gangs of looters to harass the commoners. Few waited for proof before taking up arms. No one could really be sure who was a brigand and who was defending against one. When villagers armed themselves and went out to confront the supposed brigands, they were in turn taken for brigands by villagers in the next town over, who then rang their bells and went out armed to meet the brigands.
The bells also rang in Villers-Cotterêts, where the innkeeper Claude Labouret was responsible for the town’s defense. Labouret was one of many locals who had prospered over the past decades by serving the needs of the Orléans family and their hangers-on. The House of Orléans had brought not only debauchery and progressive politics to the town but also a brisk aristocratic tourist trade, especially for those who liked to hunt. The Retz Forest had the best hunting in France—stag, partridge, pheasant, and wild boar—and wealthy visitors built country places in the vicinity. (There was a brief family embarrassment in the early 1780s, when “Louis the Fat,” the father of the current Duke d’Orléans, grew so obese he could no longer mount a horse to lead the hunt and had to surrender that role to the next in line to the royal throne.) Around the Orléans château a number of inns and hotels had, over the past decades, also built up a thriving trade. Some local peasants who had served in the château—even, according to local lore, gathering up unfortunate debauchers who had passed out in the gutter after a wild night—set up as independent hotelmen. Claude Labouret was among the most successful.
Since Villers-Cotterêts was on the Paris-Soissons road, the town had good sources of Parisian news by coach and, this being a progressive town in a patriot province, the residents were early in forming a National Guard unit and pinning tricolor cockades on one another. But Claude Labouret was levelheaded enough to know his ragtag militia would be no use in defending the town, with its many fine houses and hotels, not to mention the Orléans château, if a mob of brigands actually descended. He was also concerned about the town’s granaries and the food in its marketplace. And so he sent for the dragoons.
ON August 15, twenty dragoons, clad in scarlet and white, their horses draped with the queen’s blazon, rode into the main square of Villers-Cotterêts. One in particular caught everyone’s eye: the remarkable black-skinned man nearly half a head taller than the rest, with broad, powerful shoulders. Though a private, he had the bearing of an officer in the saddle, as well as the high cheekbones, imposing brow, and almost disdainful look that would have made one sure he was an aristocrat if his uniform and coloring did not say otherwise.
“He was an object of curiosity and general admiration,” a descendant of one eyewitness would recall of the day Alex Dumas first rode into town.
Since there were no barracks in Villers-Cotterêts, the dragoons were billeted with the townsfolk. As the National Guard commandant, Labouret had first choice of which soldier he would host, and this was particularly convenient, since he owned a hotel. He invited the handsome black soldier who made such a favorable impression. The following night his daughter, Marie-Louise, wrote to her friend Julie Fortin:
Dear Julie—
The dragoons that we expected arrived the day before last at eleven in the morning. They were to be housed at the château and at the hunting lodge, our Lord had bidden Germain, but only the horses will be there for now and later the men, because for now, they are being generously received by one or another family in town. My father set his heart on taking in a man of color who belongs to the detachment. He is very nice. His name is Dumas. His companions say that it is not his real name.
He is said to be the son of a lord from Saint-Domingue or somewhere in those parts. He is as tall as Prevost, but he has better manners. You see, my dear and good Julie, he is a fine figure of a man.
The Labourets learned from his commanding officer that “Alexandre Dumas” was in fact Count Thomas-Alexandre Dumas Davy de la Pailleterie (if he had claimed his inheritance, he would technically have been a marquis by this point, since Antoine had died), and though the title might be legally disputed in Paris or Saint-Germain-en-Laye, in Villers-Cotterêts it made quite an impression. Though a masterly swordsman and equestrian, as they would see, he could also enchant Marie-Louise and her parents with stories of life in Saint-Domingue and descriptions of the Parisian theater, the amazing diversions of the Palais Royal. Here was a young man with breeding, bearing, intelligence, and a life of unbounded romance and exoticism. The entire family was beguiled. As for Marie-Louise, Dumas was the most dashing man she had ever laid eyes on.
Dumas lived for four months at the Hôtel de l’Ecu with the Labourets. They spoiled him and treated him like a beloved member of the family. They would learn that, despite his aristocratic training, he was a man of deep republican convictions and believed in the Revolution fervently.* This mattered a great deal to a commander of the National Guard in the summer of 1789. Indeed, if Dumas had not had such convictions, his noble background might have been a mark against him in a France where all previous distinctions were being upended.
ON the night of August 4, the National Assembly, in an attempt to halt the fires being set on thousands of estates, declared the total abolition of feudal rights in France. Patriot aristocrats voluntarily renounced their noble privileges and took advantage of the peasant uprisings to push for social reform far beyond what any peasant could have imagined. The Viscount de Noailles, victor at Yorktown and Alex Dumas’s old neighbor in Saint-Germain-en-Laye, was the first to renounce his privileges, calling for a universal income tax to accompany the end of feudal rights. The Duke de la Rochefoucauld-d’Enville, a cofounder of the Society of the Friends of the Blacks—the powerful French abolitionist society whose members included the cream of patriot nobility—rose with his fellow “friend of the Blacks,” the Marquis de Lafayette, to call for the Assembly to consider abolishing slavery before the night was through.†
French aristocrats had many reasons to voluntarily cast off their rights and privileges. In some ways the night of August 4 was the apotheosis of Enlightenment principles—a “moment of patriotic drunkenness,” as the Marquis de Ferrières put it—that allowed these nobles to put the ideals they’d been imbibing for two decades into practice at last. It was their chance to bring the most thrilling experience of their young manhood—fighting for revolution in America—home to France. In another way, though, these voluntary renunciations merely bowed to the inevitable: in practice, feudalism had long been on its way out in most parts of the kingdom. By voluntarily casting off their rights and taking on the mantle of commoners and freedmen, these nobles grabbed the reins of the Revolution and took control of its direction—for the moment.
By late August, “the representatives of the French people, formed into a National Assembly, considering ignorance, forgetfulness, or contempt of the rights of man to be the only causes of public misfortunes and the corruption of Governments, [had] resolved to set forth, in a solemn Declaration, the natural, unalienable and sacred rights of man.” These words were written by Lafayette, with the help of Thomas Jefferson, then serving as American ambassador in Paris, and formed the preamble to the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen, approved by the National Assembly in that tumultuous month. This greatest document of the French Revolution was a conscious homage to the American Declaration of Independence. It enumerated the rights article by article:
Article 1
Men are born and remain free and equal in rights. Social distinctions may be based only on considerations of the common good.
Article 2
The aim of all political association is the preservation of the natural and imprescriptible rights of Man. These rights are Liberty, Property, Safety, and Resistance to Oppression.
Other important ones included Article 6, assuring that all citizens, being equal, “shall be equally eligible to all high offices, public positions and employments, according to their ability, and without other distinction than that of their virtues and talents.” And Article 9 prohibited torture: “As every man is presumed innocent until he has been declared guilty, if it should be considered necessary to arrest him, any undue harshness that is not required to secure his person must be severely curbed by Law.”
The Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen was a heady achievement, but it was followed by that year’s October Days, when a mob of furious women marched on Versailles to avenge an insult a royal officer had supposedly made against “the Nation.” Such mobs—which became emblematic of the violence of the Revolution as it broke down all conventions, even those of gender—were driven as much by bread shortages as anything else. This mob stormed through the palace, furiously shouting for Marie-Antoinette: “Where is that villain? We need her guts to make cockades! No, first we’ve got to burn her alive and fricassee her liver!” The queen fled through a secret passageway leading from the king’s chamber but ran into a locked door and, for many terrifying minutes, stood pounding on it—the king had gone to save their children—until finally some National Guard troops came to her rescue. The mob returned to Paris with huge carts full of flour and grain, along with the heads of two bodyguards on pikes—men who had been unfortunate enough to stand between them and the royals.
The National Guard forced the king and queen to accompany them back to Paris as their virtual prisoners. Thanks to some fancy intervention by General Lafayette at the head of the Paris National Guard, the royals were not murdered but rather recast—tenuously—as people’s monarchs, who would henceforth reign in the people’s capital.
The monarch-prisoners were moved into the Tuileries Palace, which had not been used as a royal residence for more than a century. Since Versailles’s construction, this palace in central Paris had been used as office space and even, occasionally, as a performance space for the Comédie-Française and other theatrical companies. Now it was revived as a setting for the monarchy, and Versailles lay abandoned, the ghost palace of the Revolution.
The National Assembly also relocated to the Tuileries, installing itself in the Manège—the cavernous indoor riding hall where Thomas-Alexandre had taken his lessons; it was the only building in Paris big enough to hold upward of a thousand deputies, along with the members of the public who would come to observe their proceedings. (Jefferson worried about the size of the body, writing in a letter to Tom Paine, “I have always been afraid their numbers might lead to confusion. Twelve hundred men in one room are too many.”) The hall’s strange, narrow design, with tiered seating on both sides, caused the deputies to divide themselves according to their political opinions: radicals to the left of the Assembly’s president, conservatives to his right, the origin of the political terms “left” and “right.”
Days after the Manège opened for business, it received a delegation of free men of color who came to petition for the right to serve as representatives in the colonial legislature as well as the National Assembly. They had on their side the Society of the Friends of the Blacks and the principles expressed by the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen. On the other side of the aisle, rich colonial planters created the “Club Massiac” to oppose the extension of rights to blacks, arguing that it would be “the terror of the colonists” and the ruin of France. Charles de Lameth, one Friend who also owned vast plantations on Saint-Domingue, declared that he preferred “to lose everything rather than mistake the principles that justice, humanity and eternal truth have consecrated.”
But the National Assembly was no legislature in any ordinary sense. Rather, it was a sort of meeting ground for the clubs, those odd political bodies that had sprung up during the Estates-General and for the next five years would wield the real power in France. The largest and most prominent was the Jacobin Club.
At first, the Jacobin Club was not the most radical club. It was known for its lively, collegial debates and for attracting diverse and prominent revolutionaries to its ranks. Though it would one day command the loyalty of the Paris “street,” its initial membership was largely professional and bourgeois, mainly because it charged hefty subscription fees to join. The Duke d’Orléans’s son Louis-Philippe—who in the nineteenth century would become king of France—joined; so did the Viscount de Noailles.
The Jacobins debated revolutionary issues among themselves, then took their impressive collective brainpower to the immense chamber of the Tuileries riding academy to argue them with deputies from the other clubs. Any issue—from the future of women’s rights to the conferring of vending permits—could be the subject of fiery altercation. This is what constituted French democracy in the fall of 1789—fierce, idealistic conversations about how to impose universal ideals and fairness in society. But even as the deputies were having these lofty debates, courts were adjourning, government offices were shutting down, schools were closing. Many government officials simply gave up and went home, and the parlements and other judicial organs folded, many never to reconvene. (The parlement courts were suspended and then officially abolished in 1790 as part of the introduction of an entirely new judicial system.) The right to vote was given to all “active citizens”: men over twenty-five who were French or had “become French,” whose residency had been established for at least a year, and who paid a sum worth the value of three days’ labor. Despite the vociferous objections of a few deputies, women were not considered active citizens.
Out of a system where all administrative positions were appointed or bought sprang a system where nearly every position—down to the lowest level, practically to the file clerks—would be elected. Nearly a million positions now needed to be filled, and though the government was still broke, hundreds of thousands volunteered for service. Despite the economic crisis and the continuing shortages, and although nobody was really in charge, the entire country seemed to pull together and run on the fumes of enthusiasm.
AT the Hôtel de l’Ecu in Villers-Cotterêts, Marie-Louise had been confirmed early on in her first impressions of the handsome soldier who was taking shelter under her roof.
Three years in the army, living in the rugged garrison town of Laon, with its medieval air and eternal silent vistas, had changed Dumas. He had a cavalryman’s swagger and the convictions of a republican revolutionary. If in Laon Alex had lived in a world where time stood still, he’d ridden from its gates into a world where time had accelerated—where changes that might have taken decades, or even centuries, were happening over weeks or days.
It must have been with some trepidation that he approached Monsieur Labouret to ask for his daughter’s hand. But Monsieur Labouret responded positively to Dumas’s proposal. Here, in this provincial place—as in the French army, too—race actually appears to have been a nonissue. Dumas’s whole picaresque life so far belied the idea that fortune could be determined at birth. The tricolor cockade pinned to both his and his future father-in-law’s hats told that it was a new day, when all men would be equal before the law.
On December 6, Alexandre Dumas and Marie-Louise Labouret were engaged. Claude Labouret had a single request: that they postpone the wedding until Dumas had been promoted to sergeant. This could also have been a father’s test of a suitor’s fidelity, to be sure he’d remain loyal once he was away in the wide world, among all the other women he was bound to meet.
Ten days later, Dumas and the Sixth Dragoons rode out of Villers-Cotterêts to do their duty and find their place in the Revolution. Surely Claude Labouret had doubts about how long it might take Dumas to make sergeant. But he could not have imagined how far his request would be surpassed.
THE summer of 1790 was the second—and sunniest—of the Revolution, metaphorically anyway; in fact, it rained a lot. It was a summer of nonstop public parties and festivals celebrating the momentous changes under way in the country, feted at mass banquets and galas nationwide. The largest of these took place in Paris on July 14—the first anniversary of the fall of the Bastille—on the Champ de Mars, the “Field of Mars,” named for the Roman god of war because it was a military parade ground. (It is now a public park accommodating armies of tourists visiting the Eiffel Tower.) The government declared the day the Fête de la Fédération.
In preparation for the event, thousands of volunteers of all social classes donated their labor, joining more than twelve thousand hired workers, to prepare the field to accommodate the hundreds of thousands of expected revelers. They created the world’s longest set of bleachers, out of compressed earth. (The earthen tiers were so well built that they lasted until the mid-nineteenth century.) The volunteers built an ornate triumphal arch at one end. This orgy of labor culminated in what was dubbed the Day of Wheelbarrows, on July 13, when the final preparations for the events were made. By now, the former military practice grounds had been transformed into a stadium of pharaonic proportions.
On July 14, under a driving rain, before hundreds of thousands of people, Bishop Talleyrand stood at a specially erected “Altar of the Nation” to bless the assemblage. A massive orchestra played a religious hymn arranged for military instruments. Both bishop and altar were symbolic of a melding of state and religion that was already becoming one of the Revolution’s hallmarks. On the side of the altar was inscribed:
The Nation, the Law, the King
The Nation, which is you
The Law, which is also you
The King, who is the guardian of the Law
General Lafayette, still the hero of the American Revolution, swore an oath and was followed by King Louis himself. For the first time Louis used his new title, “King of the French”—not “King of France”—thus symbolizing his duty to the people. His sworn oath was “to employ all the power delegated to me by the Constitution to uphold the decrees of the National Assembly.” A cry went up from the crowd, pronouncing the theme of the summer: “Frenchmen, we are free, we are brothers! Long live the nation, the law, and the king!”
Banners from National Guard regiments around France colored the field, and amid them all flew the first American flag ever displayed outside the United States—carried by a U.S. delegation led by John Paul Jones and Tom Paine.
Then came feasting and public balls that went on for days and nights with performances by thousands of actors, opera singers, and musicians. Huge banquets took place around the city where members of different classes and political factions broke bread together. (They passed out their leftovers to thousands of eager Parisian poor; the underclass was not actually invited to dine with them.) Many individual Parisians were moved to demonstrate their fraternal enthusiasm by inviting visitors to stay at their homes and share their tables. That July, the revolutionary dream seemed momentarily to be coming true, with people of every class and background joining in celebration. As extraordinary as everything else about the day was Louis’s apparent enthusiasm for it. He permitted National Guards from all over the country to browse his library and stroll in his botanical gardens; a week before the Fête, he showed up at the Champ de Mars in person to inspect the progress of the preparations. Instead of a prisoner of the Revolution, in the summer of 1790 Louis was an active participant in it. This was not to last.
THE previous summer, even before the Bastille had fallen, Louis’s younger brother, Charles, escaped the country and took refuge in the territory of his father-in-law, the king of Piedmont-Sardinia. Piedmont-Sardinia, lying on France’s southeast border and controlled by the House of Savoy, was the most powerful of the many small kingdoms that would eventually become modern Italy; its territories included rich, important cities like Milan, much of the French Alps, and also parts of modern France, including Nice. Over the next few years, hundreds of thousands of aristocratic émigrés—this is the origin of the word—would arrive in Piedmont-Sardinia and neighboring monarchic states, eager to raise a counterrevolutionary force to restore order in France. But the émigrés had no power without the backing of a European state with an army. And their appeals for help from the great powers largely fell on deaf ears.
No matter what sympathy they felt personally for Louis and the Bourbons, none of the European states yet saw any compelling reason to intervene in France’s internal affairs. Most thought that, according to traditional balance-of-power politics, France’s weakness would be their own strength. The idea that the Revolution might cross international borders and threaten their own cozy monarchies did not occur to them. Even that arch-opponent of the French Revolution Edmund Burke believed the French had “done their business for us as rivals, in a way which twenty Ramilies or Blenheims could never have done”—that is, had weakened their own country’s ability to project power more than any defeat on the battlefield had ever done. No one yet conceived that a state “weakened by revolution” could pose a serious military threat to its neighbors. The idea that revolution might actually make a state stronger was not even considered.
France’s archrival England was certainly not inclined to help the Bourbons, and while British politicians on the left praised the Revolution, others expressed undisguised schadenfreude about Louis XVI’s plight. It served him right for supporting the American Revolution—that its ideology had come back to bite him showed that God was Protestant. Preoccupied in eastern Europe, neither Russia nor Prussia showed any interest in intervening. Spain was too weak to act alone or to lead a coalition, as were smaller monarchies like Piedmont-Sardinia. These states would take in émigrés but were not about to launch an attack on revolutionary France.
Louis’s last, best hope for help was his wife’s brother, Emperor Leopold of Austria. After Louis himself, Leopold was the most powerful monarch in Europe. In the eighteenth century, Austrian territory still made up the bulk of the “Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation”—a vast multilingual conglomeration of states that traced its origins to the high Middle Ages and included some of the wealthiest parts of modern Germany and Italy, as well as other territories in both eastern and western Europe. In fact, many of these principalities were along the French border, and while Vienna did not directly control them, it had a close alliance with their rulers, as was the case with Piedmont-Sardinia. This long frontier was one reason the French and Austrians had fought so many wars over the last several centuries. But since the 1750s, and the marriage between Louis and Marie-Antoinette, Austria and France had been in an uneasy alliance. If there was any monarch who should have come to King Louis’s aid, it was Leopold. The Austrian emperor, however, also bowed out of attacking France. Like the other European powers, Austria was shaken by the Revolution and feared it would spread, while also being happy to see France, that perpetual boss of European affairs, knocked down a peg or two.
In the late spring of 1791, after a year of growing frustration and isolation in the Tuileries, the royal family decided to flee to the border of the Austrian Netherlands—the modern country of Belgium—where they believed that Emperor Leopold could protect them, and perhaps even launch their restoration to full power. Louis also held the delusional belief that once he was out of the Parisian hotbed of revolutionary extremism, his people would embrace him. On the night of June 20, the king, in a coach and disguised as either a valet or a merchant traveling with his family—the story is told both ways—made his “flight to Varennes.” There his identity was discovered, because he stopped the entourage to dine and the man serving him got suspicious: he supposedly checked the king’s face against the image on a coin or banknote and called the guards to arrest him. (Many accounts of this in the popular press lampooned the king’s gluttony, saying that he’d been too hungry to make it to the border without stopping for a snack.) The king and his entourage were arrested and returned to the Tuileries Palace under guard.
The king had, in fleeing, publicly spurned the Revolution, but most revolutionaries were still not ready to spurn him and be without a monarch. The government crafted a cover story to explain Louis’s flight—the royal family had been kidnapped by counterrevolutionaries, who were to use them as pawns in a complex plot, until the patriots happily discovered the plot and liberated the royals. Nobody believed it for a second. Before fleeing, the king had left an angry denunciation of the Revolution behind at the Tuileries Palace. A petition was drafted denouncing Louis as a lying traitor and demanding that he make his attempted abdication formal. On July 17, a score of demonstrators brought their petition to the Champ de Mars, where a year earlier Parisians had come together harmoniously, in far greater numbers, in the Fête de la Fédération.
What happened next has always been disputed. (If a crowd of thousands can obscure the truth behind mayhem caught on video at a rock concert today, how much more obscure must things have been before there were cameras of any kind?) It seems clear that angry shouting, then pushing, broke out in the crowd. Some would later say that the entire event had been infiltrated by foreign conspirators—or the ever-useful “brigands”—who had lured Parisians there to do them harm. Supporters of the petition would say that the violence arose from a royal plot to destroy republicanism.
One thing is certain: the political throng on the field suddenly found itself joined by military units, mostly National Guardsmen, streaming in from all directions. At Lafayette’s importuning, the government had declared martial law: the factions denouncing the king as a traitor were being answered by an ugly mood in the street, and the constitutional monarchy was looking increasingly fragile.
Alex Dumas and the Sixth Dragoons also rode onto the field. Policing public events was one of their jobs, and they were good at it. They knew how to keep their cool in such situations better than regular soldiers. They were armed with their usual sabers and short muskets but also light cannons.
General Lafayette, commanding the Paris National Guard, rode in on his white horse. The “hero of two worlds” ordered the rioters to calm down and go home, in his self-important, involuntarily aristocratic manner. The crowd jeered and threw rocks at his guardsmen.
Seeing his orders emphatically disobeyed, Lafayette commanded the National Guard to fire, either above the heads of the crowd or—as some reports claim—directly into it. In one version, the mob attacks the guardsmen, causing them to panic, and they fire mostly to protect themselves. In any event, the day became known as the Champ de Mars Massacre. The number of dead is uncertain: the estimates range from twelve to around fifty. But such violence from the revolutionary government was at that point shocking: the guillotine had yet to make its debut on the political stage.
Soon, though, the July 1791 violence would be overshadowed by revolutionary killing on an unimaginable scale. If in July 1790 the Champ de Mars Fête symbolized where the Revolution had come from, the Champ de Mars Massacre of July 1791 symbolized its future. By the spring of 1794, when the Revolution had turned to the bloody period called the Terror, Alex Dumas would be threatened with the guillotine for his mere presence on the field that day. By then, however, the association with a previous government, in any capacity, could be grounds for immediate execution.
* Republicanism was an ideology—radical in the eighteenth century—that opposed the divine right of kings and favored representative government based on a constitution, elected leadership, and a free, responsible citizenry. It was not only about liberty and personal freedom, but also duty and sacrifice to the nation. The French republicans looked back more than two thousand years for their model, writing speeches, giving plays, and making art that glorified the ancient republics of Greece and Rome. But they also glorified the ancient “Frenchness” of the Celts and Franks. They considered more recent French history to be a period of dissolution and decline in the nation’s moral character, brought on because the formerly free French citizen-warriors had become decadent “subjects” of a falsely deified king.
† Along with La Rochefoucauld and Lafayette, some of the Enlightenment’s leading lights—Brissot, Condorcet, Grégoire, Mirabeau, Raynal, and Volney, to name the most illustrious—would become members of this French “abolitionist international.” Incredibly, it would meet its goal of ending slavery after only six years of activism. The group would then operate as a sort of think tank, planning a post-slave economy for the colonies. During the Revolution, its mostly white membership would also include almost every major black and mixed-race activist in Paris.