Chapter 5 connects efforts to reinvent to French colonial empire between the Seven Years War and the French Revolution explored in the previous chapters to the development of a republican imperial agenda during the French Revolution. Showing how it was initially the French abolitionist society, the société des amis des noirs, who carried forward earlier arguments about the value of free labour over slave labour, colonial integration over exploitation, and arguments for the creation of new colonies in Africa, the chapter discloses that it was only after slave rebellions in the Caribbean, revolutionary warfare, and terror secured the decree to abolish slavery throughout the French colonial empire in 1794, that a genuine commitment to thoroughgoing imperial innovation materialised. With the Constitution of the Year III, the French Republic integrated the colonies into the metropole as overseas departments. Shortly after, the Directory embraced the proposal to create new colonies in Africa based on a mission to civilise. Despite Napoleon’s restoration of the plantation complex in the Îles du Vent, the chapter reveals that political economists and stakeholders of colonial empire continued to promote colonial integration and African expansion into the nineteenth century.