Antoine Barnave

Dubois's Avengers of the New World situates Barnave within the National Assembly's colonial debates as a figure whose intellectual inconsistency — revolutionary at home, proslavery in the colonies — illuminates the limits of the Rights of Man framework when applied to a slave society. Dubois reads the Comité colonial's position, which Barnave anchored, as a defense of the colonial order that the colony's enslaved and free-colored inhabitants would ultimately dismantle by force precisely because the metropolitan political system could not reform it through parliamentary means. Barnave's career in Dubois's account is a case study in how the revolutionary vocabulary of rights could be instrumentalized to defend the very hierarchy it nominally opposed — producing the contradictions that made the Haitian Revolution not just possible but necessary.

Barnave's career demonstrates how the Rights of Man vocabulary could be instrumentalized to defend colonial slavery — making the Haitian Revolution necessary precisely because metropolitan reform was structurally impossible.

Garrigus's Before Haiti engages Antoine Barnave as one of the key figures in the French Revolutionary debates over colonial policy — specifically his leadership of the Comité colonial's defense of planter interests against both the free-colored rights movement and the abolitionist Société des Amis des Noirs. Barnave's position crystallizes the structural contradiction Garrigus identifies at the heart of French Revolutionary colonialism: a Girondin who championed liberty in France while defending the slave-plantation system in the colonies, on the grounds that colonial commerce was indispensable to French national prosperity. Garrigus uses Barnave to show how the free-colored cause was caught between a metropolitan abolitionism too radical for the planters and a colonial reformism too timid for the free-colored community — and how the National Assembly's colonial debates produced a political settlement that satisfied no one and opened the space for armed mobilization.

Barnave's defense of planter interests against free-colored rights crystallizes the structural contradiction of French Revolutionary colonialism — liberty in France, slavery in the colonies, on the grounds of commercial necessity.