Explicit threats of slave revolt were used in revolutionary assembly debates

Evidence

Raimond and Grégoire insisted that free people of color were the only ones capable of containing the slaves, and argued that granting them rights was in fact the best way to preserve slavery. But planters doubted their sincerity. Grégoire gave them reason to be suspicious. He demanded that slave owners look to the Declaration of the Rights of Man, and taunted them to “get themselves out of it if they could”; he caused an uproar in the National Assembly when he attacked planters for their cruelty both to freecoloreds and to their slaves; and he regularly invoked the possibility of slave revolt, reminding readers that all people had the right to insurrection against their oppressors. — Dubois, Laurent, Avengers of the New World_ The Story of…, 288

Categorization

• XREF: Grégoire invoking every people’s right to insurrection resonates with later-era arguments about natural rights and rebellion, and with the arc toward the actual slave revolution in this book. — connects to: General speech and assembly rights both enable and are shaped by demonstrations — Charles Tilly, Regimes and Repertoires, 1199