It was a counter-revolutionary club composed of slave owning planters from the French Antilles with the purpose of promoting their interests in the French parliament, particularly in regards to the issue of slavery, and to lobby against the implementation of the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen and the abolition of slavery in the colonies, while also working against the abolitionist Society of the Friends of the Blacks.
In his Monday session of 8 March 1790, Sieur Barnave, rapporteur of the Colonial Committee, read a report on the work of this committee, then submitted to the Assembly a draft decree whose preamble declared that: "Considering the colonies as a part of the French empire and desiring them to enjoy the happy regeneration which has taken place there, she however never intended to include them in the Constitution which she decreed for the kingdom, and to subject them to laws which could be incompatible with their local conveniences or particulars”.
Based on the demographic weight of Saint-Domingue, including slaves, the delegation claimed to obtain twenty seats in the Estates General.
After the slave revolt of 1791 (Haitian Revolution), many planters fled the island and formed French refugee communities of Saint-Domingue in America, especially in the southern parts of the United States, where the center of gravity of the settler lobby moved.
384 Déborah Liébart, Un groupe de pression contre-révolutionnaire: le club Massiac sous la Constituante [A counter-revolutionary pressure group: the Massiac club under the Constituent Assembly], Annales historiques de la révolution française [Historical Annals of the French Revolution], Paris, October–December 2008, p. 29–50