The French National Assembly evaded all debate on slavery despite revolutionary rhetoric

Evidence

It was a powerful statement about the limits of democracy in the colonies, and the hypocrisy of the white delegates who purported to represent a population they held in subjugation. But the colonial delegates and many others in the National Assembly had little desire to open up a discussion on the morality of slavery. … During the night of August 4, as representatives from the aristocracy and the clergy stepped forward to give up the privileges that separated them from other citizens, one delegate brought up the question of the ultimate form of privilege—the owning of slaves—but his intervention garnered little enthusiasm. — Dubois, Laurent, Avengers of the New World_ The Story of…, 263

Categorization

• XREF: Links to the broader pattern of revolutionary France’s colonial hypocrisy, echoable against the American founding’s slavery compromises in the reader’s knowledge of revolutionary Atlantic history.
• QUESTION: Olympe de Gouges’s antislavery play being heckled off after three nights — a vivid foreshadow worth chasing: how did her feminism and abolitionism converge later against the Assembly?