No powerful legal imagining accompanied the colonial ventures of the French old regime, with exploitation of New World resources initiated and controlled by state officials. But operations were badly resourced and conducted by private adventurers and representatives of noble families interested in influence back home. Profits from colonial expansion were to be shared between Paris and powerful interests in the French maritime provinces. Although the Atlantic settlements were legally imagined as overseas parts of the realm, governed by the customs of Paris, in practice, metropolitan control remained weak. Profits from the most lucrative colony, Saint-Domingue, were received from chattel slavery legally organised under the Code noir (1685). Few French lawyers or intellectuals discussed slavery; the Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen (1789) remained silent about it. The slave revolution of 1791 was largely autonomous, eventually pushing the National Assembly to issue an emancipation decree. After the failure of Napoleon’s effort to recapture the island, Haiti declared independence in 1804. But the first decolonised state remained an international pariah.