The taking of the Bastille on July 14th had done more than intimidate the King and the Court. It had frightened the bourgeoisie, who hastened to form a National Guard, strictly excluding the poor. But the bourgeoisie hastened also to profit by the blow against the monarchy. It drew up the Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen, claiming that all men were born free and equal, and abolishing the caste distinctions of feudalism for ever. The Constituent voted the final draft almost unanimously, but the King would not sign and secretly prepared the counter-revolution. News of this reached Paris and the masses, chiefly the women, marched to Versailles. Still trusting in the King, they brought him to Paris (away, as they thought, from his evil counsellors) and the Assembly came with him. Beaten again, and again not by the bourgeoisie but by the people, the King signed. This was early in October and a fortnight later, on October 22nd, the Mulattoes appeared at the bar of a House still echoing with the famous declaration, and claimed the Rights of Man. The bourgeoisie did not know what to do, did not know what to say. Raimond, the leader, was a distinguished Parisian lawyer, Ogé was a member of the Friends of the Negro and a friend of the Abbé Grégoire, Brissot, the Marquis de Condorcet, and all that brilliant band. Such were his talents that it was said of him that there was no position to which he could not aspire. How could an Assembly which had just passed the Rights of Man refuse to relieve these men from the injustices under which they suffered? They based their claim not only on abstract grounds but on their wealth, and offered six millions as security for the National Debt. It was an unanswerable case, and the president gave them his cordial if careful welcome. But the colonists in Paris would have none of it. They threatened the bourgeoisie with the spectre of a slave revolt on the one hand and their own independence on the other, and the maritime bourgeois, frightened for their millions of investments and their trade, went red in the face and put the Rights of Man in their pockets whenever the colonial question came up. [...]

On the other side were the radicals, humanitarians and philosophers, the intellectuals of the day, led by the Friends of the Negro. Looked upon as dreamers and unpractical men, the solution they proposed, rights to Mulattoes and gradual abolition of slavery, would have best served the interests of France, and, as time proved, the interests of the colonists themselves. But when did property ever listen to reason except when cowed by violence? Against the wealth, the connections and the unscrupulous intrigues of the vested interests, even the radical propagandists were helpless. Their strength was in the masses, and the Paris masses were not yet interested in the colonial question, though they gave a general support to the demands of the Mulattoes.