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Centered on the Mascarene Islands as a positive alternative to the American colonies, the “colonial” writings of Bernardin de Saint-Pierre coincide with many of the themes in the work of the historian Claude Wanquet. Starting from both the rather negative experience recounted in Voyage à l’île de France, and the compensatory pastoral reverie of Paul et Virginie, the adventurous traveler, now a famous writer, intervened at the beginning of the Revolution in the public debate. With Vœux d’un solitaire and its Suite… he adopted a “gradualist” and conciliatory point of view on the abolition of slavery and the colonial question. After the fall of the monarchy, it was a strange utopia of envisioning a “way out of slavery” through slavery itself that Bernardin de Saint Pierre proposed in different drafts until the end of 1796. Their later abandonment reflects the failure of the counter-model of the Mascarene Islands, and the impossibility of ending servitude without abolishing it, risking a conflict between metropolitan France and its colonies.