The legislative assembly, on Barnave’s motion, repealed the decrees of 8 March and 15 May and returned the freedmen to the mercy of the colonial assemblies.

Meanwhile the intrigues of the club Massiac, which had prevented the official dispatch of the decree of 15 May, ended by obtaining something better than that, by sowing terror through treacherous writings which predicted nothing less than disorder and confusion beyond the Atlantic, and the ruin and annihilation of the commerce of the mother country; the chambers of commerce above all were stirred, agitated by various sentiments, for while that of Le Havre expressed the wish to see this decree repealed, that of Bordeaux asked for its maintenance (1). The legislative assembly, amid these cross-currents, passed on 24 September, on the motion of Barnave, a new decree which repealed both the decree of 15 May and that of 8 March, and in effect returned the fate of the unhappy freedmen to the mercy of the colonial assemblies. Terror had been so skillfully spread in the assembly that the voices of Pétion, of Grégoire and of Robespierre remained powerless. And it is at the very moment when the assembly sacrificed justice to prejudice, and made arbiters in the colonial question of those who should have been regarded only as parties, that the victors of Pernier were concluding with the fourteen parishes of the West a treaty of peace, intended at last to restore to the colony its former splendor!