Thermidor, slavery, and the affaire des colonies

The Thermidorian Convention repealed most of the radical social legislation passed prior to the overthrow of Robespierre, especially if it involved challenges to the right of property. Surprisingly, however, the Thermidorians maintained the Montagnard Convention's decision to abolish slavery and grant citizenship rights to the black populations of the French Caribbean colonies. "It is the one act of justice that tyranny had you pass," the conservative spokesman François Antoine Boissy d'Anglas told his colleagues. The Thermidorians thus inaugurated a tradition of republican imperialism that would continue until the mid-twentieth century. The Thermidorians' support of abolitionism was partly pragmatic-by the end of 1794 France's chances of defending the colonies of Saint-Domingue and Guadeloupe against the British depended on armies of former slaves-but it also reflected the fact that many of the Thermidorians had sympathized with Brissot's campaign against racial hierarchy.