He can then such famous names as Condo Se, Montesquieu, and Rousseau, and even the aforementioned critics of slavery, Rein-Arnaut and Diderot. In fact, Arguis-Salah Monang, the Enlightenment and the French Revolution in helped spawn, were only possible in the first place because of the French colonial empire. The wealth it generated gave a class of intellectuals enough autonomy and ambition that they were able to envision overthrowing their own masters. As so often, C. L. R. James got to this insight first. Already in 1938, he noted that, the slave trade and slavery were the economic basis of the French Revolution. Another one of his nice aphorisms captures the way self-interest limited the French intelligentsia's willingness to act against slavery, the bourgeois put the rights of man in their pockets whenever the colonial question came up. Then too, there's the fact that the right to property was itself a fundamental Enlightenment value, and that right was of course constantly emphasized by the slave owners. They met every attempt to curtail their brutality by insisting upon their sacred right to dispose of their possessions as they wished, the possessions, in this case being other humans. But perhaps this is no reason to dismiss the importance of the Enlightenment for the uprising in Saint-Domingue. To the contrary, the hypocrisy of European thinkers might lead us to conclude that it was only in the Haitian Revolution that the values at stake in the French Revolution were truly embraced. As Salaamulang memorably puts it, Louverture settled the question, not the Enlightenment, Desalines, not Napoleon. And we can perhaps go even further if we accept with some scholars that the events in Haiti influenced the development of European thought, and not just the other way around. It seems clear at least that the revolutionaries in France were pushed towards applying their own ideas to the topic of race, precisely by seeing what happened in the Caribbean. Officially opposed as they were to all tyranny and aristocracy, they found it increasingly uncomfortable to support an aristocracy of the skin.