Jacques Pierre Brissot founded the Society of the Friends of the Blacks in Paris in early 1788. Although primarily operational in Paris, the society was very much an Atlantic organization. Through superficial examinations of the efforts of the Friends of the Blacks, scholars have categorized the French movement as based solely in the printed word and engagement through revolutionary assemblies. Taken in isolation from other Atlantic philanthropic activity, the movement appears diminutive, sporadic, and ineffectual. Yet, France granted rights to free people of color and abolished slavery – lasting from 1794 to 1802 – before England, the United States, and other countries deeply entangled in the Atlantic struggle over the status of peoples of African descent. The French movement was not a failure; it was part of a longer process of abolition. While late eighteenth-century efforts did not bring about the permanent end to slavery in the French Caribbean – something only achieved in 1848 – those like Brissot advocated for peoples of African descent during the French Revolution, laying the groundwork for the later success of the nineteenth-century abolitionists.

This chapter uses the financial records of the speculator Étienne Clavière to illustrate the normal workings of the eighteenth-century financial system and how that system came apart during the French Revolution, turning impunity into a political category. The 1780s witnessed a series of financial scandals and speculative bubbles, many of them organized by Clavière. These scandals delegitimized the last attempts to reform the old financial system, precipitating the outbreak of the French Revolution. Ensuing changes to the legal category of property rights, the issuing of the assignats in 1791, and the sequester of foreigners and foreign property under the Terror of 1793 broke the mechanisms of financial capitalism. The Terror, and especially the suspension of the Constitution of 1793 in favor of rule by penal code, marked the emergence of a new kind of purely political groups who existed outside the law, including various forms of financial criminals. The existence of a central bank in England meant that economic impunity became subordinated as a tool of political necessity; in France, economic impunity was coded as an enemy of political virtue. The Revolution was precipitated by financial scandals, tried to eliminate them, and ended up producing new ones.