Until relatively recently, most historians shared the view that the French Revolution was directly responsible for the decline in French commercial fortunes that followed. This was especially true of the French Atlantic and its principal port cities. The last decades of the monarchy were looked back upon rather fondly as the peak years of prosperity, while the Revolution was associated with economic neglect and a damaging indifference to the interests of trade. It was a period when commercial values were decried, the mercantile classes were undermined, and France’s colonies were lost to war or revolt. For some of the earliest historians of the port cities, like the nineteenth-century chroniclers Aurélien Vivie and the abbé O’Reilly in Bordeaux, an anti-revolutionary, or anti-Jacobin, stance fitted well with their own political views and with their admiration for the work of commercial elites, and they did not hesitate to denounce the Revolution as the source of many of the woes of their own century.1 While more recent analyses may agree that the revolutionary years spelt disaster, they have been less assured in placing responsibility on the Revolution itself. War has come to be seen as more important than politics in explaining the damage inflicted on the Atlantic, while the role of anti-slavery propaganda (both from abroad and in France itself) has assumed greater significance in forming opinion and turning politicians against what they saw as an immoral trade. It was ‘the wars of the Revolution and Empire’, in the view of one leading historian, ‘the loss of the colonies, the development of an abolitionist morality and the slow elaboration of repressive laws to tackle the illegal slave trade’ that condemned it to an irreversible decline.2
The opinions of nineteenth-century historians reflected in large measure those of the cities’ merchants and commercial elites, who saw themselves as the victims of revolutionary prejudice and Parisian manipulation, and who did not hesitate to speak in apocalyptic terms of the crisis they faced. Any decline in the volume of trade would affect the commercial cities particularly severely, they warned, leaving their quays empty and their dockworkers idle. ‘If opinion on the colonies does not change,’ insisted the two deputies sent from La Rochelle to the National Assembly in 1792, ‘France’s trade will be completely lost.’ They added, rather plaintively, that a major cause of the current crisis lay in the ignorance of commerce that was shown by the Assembly itself. For, they maintained, ‘the people of Paris, and with them members of the National Assembly, have unfortunately no concept of the importance of these precious islands and of the part they play in establishing our national credit’.3
The merchants’ warning was stark: if Atlantic commerce flagged, the threat of misery and unemployment hung over entire communities, with the direst consequences for the poor and vulnerable. This warning was not new, but it became more strident as the Revolution approached. In 1788, for instance, the Chamber of commerce in Bordeaux had talked of the fragility of trading conditions and had expressed fears that the threatened loss of the city’s Parlement would have disastrous effects on the market in luxury goods. Theirs was a deeply conservative and paternalistic view of society, where everything depended on the expenditure of the most affluent. The rich built houses and initiated public works, they argued, and they kept the city’s economy vibrant by their consumption, providing the food and housing for ordinary working families. ‘As a result, the stonemason, the joiner, the carpenter, the locksmith, the blacksmith, the sculptor, the plasterer, the roofer are all kept in work; money circulates; and it keeps society alive.’4 With the decline of colonial trade, all this would be lost. A doom-laden pamphlet published in La Rochelle in 1789 pointed out that colonial commerce and local manufacturing were mutually interdependent, and that any reduction in colonial trade would inevitably affect communities in the interior, too. The decline of France’s colonies would entail the loss of markets for industrial manufactures and agricultural production across whole swathes of the country, and this would hit workers in communities far beyond the Atlantic littoral. The merchants of La Rochelle emphasized the importance to the wider economy not just of colonial traffic generally, but also, more controversially, of the slave trade.5 Without it, they implied, their cities would crumble, families would starve, and workers would be forced to migrate back to the countryside from which they had come. The booming Atlantic economy that had promoted their prosperity would die.
This was, needless to say, a gross exaggeration, made with the intention of spreading anxiety and alarm. But in all the Atlantic ports there was a shared sense of apprehension, a belief that the Revolution spelt the end of an era, heralding an uncertain future. Nowhere was this felt more deeply than in Nantes, where the economy was dangerously dependent on slaving and where the interests of family and commerce were often interlocked, whether in the commercial activities of the port or on the plantations of Saint-Domingue, creating frequent family entanglements between the people of Nantes and refugees fleeing from the Caribbean. Nantes simply could not ignore events in the Caribbean islands, so great was its dependence on trade in slaves and colonial produce. Before the Revolution, the West Indian trade had dominated mercantile life in the city, while after the Revolution the presence of refugees from the Caribbean was a constant reminder of the bonds that had tied the city to the Creoles and their economy. Many could not conceive of their city without the Atlantic trade, and when the Napoleonic Wars were finally over in 1815, Nantes merchants rushed to despatch their vessels to West Africa and to reopen trade routes with the Caribbean.6 Such over-dependence on one market and on a single form of commerce would prove also to be their undoing.
In the other ports, the dependence on slaving and the Caribbean was less intense. In Bordeaux, for instance, the city’s prosperity was spread across a wider range of commercial activities: slaving, of course, in the form of the triangular trade with West Africa and the Caribbean; but also direct trade with the West Indian islands, voyages to India and the East Indies, a valuable entrepôt trade in colonial produce with other parts of Europe, and wine exports to Britain and the Baltic. This gave the city greater flexibility in the face of crisis, and Bordeaux merchants showed more initiative in seeking out new markets in the nineteenth century. But the extent of its economic resilience can easily be overstated. Over the course of the eighteenth century, a series of naval wars had repeatedly threatened Bordeaux’s prosperity, and from 1792 France would again be involved in nearly a quarter-century of warfare. François Crouzet is surely right to underline the fragility of the city’s prosperity and the critical importance of keeping open Bordeaux’s shipping lanes to the Caribbean. It was based upon structures that invited the jealousy of other European powers and could easily be undermined by war. ‘Given the weakness of the French Empire,’ he writes, ‘an accidental and artificial creation to which public opinion remained largely indifferent, which was not supported by adequate maritime strength and whose economy was tied to the vicious practice of slavery, Bordeaux’s prosperity was fragile.’7 It is a truth that had already been exposed by the Seven Years’ War and would be again, though to a lesser degree, in the later 1770s with the war over American independence.
If the claim that the Revolution and the loss of Saint-Domingue would lead to the ‘death’ of the French Atlantic was a cry of distress, an outraged wail by the cities’ merchant elites for more support and understanding, their fears for the future were not ungrounded. The ports did not, of course, die, but the Revolutionary and Napoleonic years went far to destroy France’s Atlantic empire and signalled a terminal decline in her Atlantic trade. If the Seven Years’ War had resulted in the loss of Canada, the wars of the French Revolution and Empire effectively ended France’s presence as a major imperial power in the Atlantic world with revolution in Saint-Domingue and the sale of Louisiana to the United States. A new imperial age would, of course, beckon following the colonization of Algeria in 1830, but it was very different in kind and in geographical impact. Marseille was better placed to profit from the opening up of North Africa; and if Bordeaux’s merchants showed some initiative in developing trading links with Africa, the Levant, and the Indian Ocean, the confidence that had inspired an earlier generation had largely evaporated. Some of the port cities sought to industrialize to provide a different kind of employment, especially Marseille and Le Havre, which could turn to a rich and populous hinterland; others, most notably Bordeaux, failed to respond to the challenge of industrialization and increasingly looked back nostalgically on the golden age of colonial trade. From 1823, Marseille’s port activity surpassed Bordeaux’s, and after 1829 Le Havre, benefiting from its proximity to Paris, had overtaken it as France’s principal colonial port. By 1826, indeed, Bordeaux had fallen to fourth among the country’s colonial ports, and a mood of pessimism had set in.8
In this context, the response of the city’s merchant community to France’s second abolition of slavery in 1848 was surely eloquent: it was to question the wisdom of the measure, to express the hope that nothing would disturb public order in Martinique, and to plead for financial compensation from the government.9 They had little enthusiasm for abolition, and saw it as another potential assault on their profitability, an unwanted attack on some of their principal markets and a blow to their economic recovery. And though the city would go on to benefit from the general growth of trade and prosperity that marked the Second Empire, it did not recover its place as a leading commercial port. The number of ships trading out of the Garonne declined, as the sailing ships that were engaged in overseas commerce aged and were not replaced. The sugar refineries closed down, and coastal shipping declined. Only towards the end of the century, with the colonization of Senegal and the opening up of Indochina, did Bordeaux’s fortunes show some belated sign of revival.10
In Nantes, the sense of decay was greater and more enduring, reflecting the over-dependence of the Quai de la Fosse on the Caribbean and on slaving. The economy of the city, and with it the economies of the smaller ports and towns of the Loire estuary, had been built on the slave trade and on the industries that had filled the holds of the slave ships with the textiles and other manufactured goods needed to trade with African kings and other traffickers. There had been little attempt to diversify the city’s economy, a task for which the merchants and ship-owners showed no appetite. In the years after 1815, they appealed for government help and too often wallowed in nostalgia for better times. Innovation and reconversion were called for if the city was to flourish in the new industrial world of the nineteenth century. But the commercial elite showed only limited enterprise, with many continuing to associate mercantile wealth with the slave trade. The old merchant families continued to dominate social and economic life in Nantes, resisting change in all its forms, and preventing newcomers to the city from embracing economic diversity. As unchallenged leaders of civic life, they discouraged innovation, their ideas mired in the previous century, and their continued social dominance meant that the whole city had little choice but to stagnate, too.11
The extent of the city’s economic decline was clear to all, not least to the merchants themselves, who came to see the nineteenth century as a period of lost opportunity. When, in 1928, the city’s Chamber of commerce invited the president of its colonial sub-committee to speak on the subject of Nantes’ achievement as a colonial port, he could only contrast the glittering success of the eighteenth century with the misery of the nineteenth, when the sense of decay was so marked that ‘it was impossible to avoid the fear that Nantes faced an irreversible decline’. The city’s colonial trade had suffered, he claimed, from ‘a long and dangerous illness that was brought on by a brusque economic change for which it was in no way prepared’. Even the civic improvements and public works authorized at the end of the nineteenth century had done very little to halt the reversal of its fortunes. Nantes, he now recognized, had taken some very bad strategic decisions. It had remained fixated by the Antilles, and had sought to revive the Caribbean trade at a time when Saint-Domingue was already lost and the slave trade in terminal decline. That could be ascribed to nostalgia for the past and exaggerated conservatism. But the city’s problems had not ended there. The century after 1815 had seen a revolution in shipping, with iron-hulled steamships replacing the smaller sailing vessels on the Atlantic, a challenge which Nantes had done nothing to meet, assuming that the Loire, with its shallows and sandbanks, was unable to adapt to the requirements of the age of steam. Commerce had moved elsewhere, and, with the development of sugar beet in the plains of the north and east, demand for the principal product of the Antilles, cane sugar, had fallen away. A mood of pessimism had swept the port. It had seemed, the president concluded, ‘that the city had no choice but to die from the effects of these economic changes’, a view that persisted until the turn of the twentieth century.12
But this is not just an economic story, or one of political neglect by a government in the throes of revolution. It is also a tale of moral ambivalence, of a trading community that felt isolated and abandoned in a world where the slave trade had come under increasing attack, and where ideas of liberty and humanity were seen by many to conflict with the economic ambitions of shippers and merchants. Even in the 1780s, humanitarian voices were being raised against the slave trade, demanding its abolition in the name of the rights of man. The French Revolution brought this conflict to a head, spreading humanist ideas not only in Europe, but in the colonies, too, where France responded to slave insurrections by introducing reforms, culminating in 1794 in the abolition, at least temporarily, of both the slave trade and the institution of slavery. And though Napoleon restored slavery to France’s colonial possessions in 1802, others took action that changed the moral landscape. Across the Anglo-Saxon world, campaigns for abolition grew in intensity, both in the press and in parliament, leading to the outlawing of the slave trade in Britain in 1807 and in the United States in the following year. In the eyes of many abolitionists, indeed, anti-slavery was the defining moral issue of the day, one that France simply could not ignore. Slaving was widely seen as dishonourable, and, encouraged by the success of the British abolition movements, liberals across Europe pressed with increasing urgency for the trade in African slaves to be banned. In France they would receive encouragement from the government, especially from the July Monarchy, and in 1834 a Société francaise pour l’abolition de l’esclavage was founded, publishing a strongly abolitionist periodical and bringing together such leading intellectuals as Lamartine, Odilon Barrot, de Tocqueville, and Victor Schœlcher to form the nucleus of a new pressure group for abolition.13 In 1848, following another French revolution and more than half a century after the first act of abolition, the slave trade was finally abolished across the French Atlantic, a move that was hailed in France as a victory for republican ideals, the triumph of a liberal and generous French republic.
Over the past half-century, the way in which Atlantic history has been discussed and written has undergone a radical transformation, most critically in Britain and the United States, and since the 1980s that change has affected French historiography, too. When I first stayed in Bordeaux, during yet another revolution in 1968, there was little interest in the slave trade or in its role in the city’s history. Bordeaux’s eighteenth-century prosperity was discussed in economic terms, seen through the lens of merchant papers and admiralty records, and the last years of the Ancien Régime were quite unapologetically categorized as the city’s golden age, an era of prosperity that had been brought to an abrupt and unfortunate end by the Revolution. ‘So much has been written on the eighteenth century as Bordeaux’s golden age,’ Paul Butel and Jean-Pierre Poussou write when opening their book on everyday life in the city, ‘that we hesitate to take up the idea yet again. However, how can we do otherwise since it is such an evident truth?’14 Of course they were right in many ways: it was a golden age in wealth, urban planning, culture, and good taste. But of the slavery on which these were built there was scarcely a mention; and where the slave trade was talked about, it was presented as another option for merchants in quest of profit, an example of enterprise and risk-taking, an option little different from trading in wine, or spices, or sugar, one that could be alluded to without any sense of moral ambiguity. This was how the merchants themselves saw it, and for years historians saw no reason to differ. In this, they reflected the public opinion of the time and the city’s collective memory of the eighteenth century as presented in school textbooks and in displays in its museums and art galleries. In the Musée d’Aquitaine, for instance, the region’s principal historical museum, little space was devoted to the slave trade, and there was no sense that this was an aspect of Bordeaux’s past that required elaboration and explanation to successive generations. In this respect, Bordeaux was in no sense unique. Across France, it would be the later 1990s and the early years of the present century before the slave trade would feature prominently in the public history of Nantes, Bordeaux, Le Havre, or La Rochelle.15
The study of the Atlantic, and of slavery and the slave trade in particular, came late to France, where the emphasis on national historiography remained largely intact until the last years of the twentieth century. France’s historical memory has seldom given more than a glancing nod to her colonial past or to the impact of her history as a colonial power on French domestic developments. In this respect, the volumes of Pierre Nora’s monumental collective work on Les lieux de mémoire offer a well-nigh perfect illustration, with just a single chapter devoted to any aspect of France’s colonial past—not to the experience of slavery or the economics of the slave trade, but to the Colonial Exhibition in Paris in 1931.16 In turn, Jacques Godechot’s discussion of the Age of Revolutions in the 1960s, while it compared revolutionary movements on both sides of the Atlantic, refused to accept that there was anything to consider beyond two great political revolutions, in the United States and France: there was nothing here on Haiti, or on Africa, or the idea of an Atlantic world that brought the continents together.17 Indeed, the very notion of an Atlantic world as a single integrated whole, which made such an impression on Anglo-Saxon historians of the eighteenth century—whether American historians of the Haitian Revolution or British scholars working on the British Empire—was slow to take root. In the United States, the first signs of interest in the Haitian Revolution as a subject of scholarship date from the 1940s, with a number of works examining the effects of the revolution on both whites and blacks, as well as the impact of events in Haiti in the United States itself.18 Perhaps because immigration from Africa and the Antilles was not yet a political question of immediate urgency in France, or perhaps because of France’s troubled relations with its colonies in the post-war years, these issues were largely passed over in French school textbooks and were not the subject of any sustained research in French universities until a generation later.19 The ‘Atlantic World’ was not yet a recognized field of French historical research.
The change, when it came, was dramatic, reflecting social and cultural concerns in France today, not least the arrival of large number of immigrants from West Africa and the Francophone Caribbean in the years after 1945, and the greater awareness of issues of race and ethnicity that has resulted. It is also a symptom of greater self-awareness on the part of Caribbean and Afro-American scholars and of a greater militancy among members of the immigrant communities themselves.20 This change has shown itself in many different ways, ranging from demands that their heritage be recognized to claims for financial reparation, and it is also reflected in an upsurge of historical interest in questions of race in France’s empire.21 The history of the French Revolution has been transformed by transnational methodologies, as historians have turned away from analysing France in isolation and have sought to place it in a western, Atlantic, or world context.22 This in turn has brought the Revolution in Saint-Domingue and its impact on colonized communities across the Atlantic world into much sharper focus. Unlike in the earlier period, events in Haiti are no longer considered a mere codicil to events in Paris, or treated as a response to European ideas; the Haitian Revolution is now seen as a central part of an Age of Revolutions, which, for many in Central and Latin America, would have more immediacy and greater significance than the French Revolution itself. In Ada Ferrer’s words, ‘the events that shook Saint-Domingue from 1791 to 1804 converted Europe’s most profitable colony into an independent nation ruled by former slaves and their descendants.’ Its geographic position was critical, and race was now considered central to an international age of revolutions. For ‘this new society, born of a process never before contemplated, lay right in the middle of the Caribbean Sea, a short sail from islands ruled by European governors and inhabited, sometimes overwhelmingly, by enslaved Africans’.23 Its birth was a seminal event across the Atlantic world, spreading fear and racial intolerance among many settler societies, offering hope and inspiration to Africans as much as to the enslaved peoples of South America and the Caribbean.
It is my contention in this book that the history of France’s Atlantic ports can no longer be told in isolation from the rest of the Atlantic world. The influence of Bordeaux, or La Rochelle, or Nantes, spread far beyond the west and south-west of France. The towns and cities of the Atlantic region contributed hugely to populating the New World. Large numbers of emigrants flocked to the Americas from all over the West, from Normandy, Brittany, the Pays de Loire, Gascony, Guyenne, and the Basque country. They came as naval officers and colonial administrators, merchants and traders, ships’ captains and privateers, and, in increasing numbers, as seamen on slave ships. Many settled in the Caribbean, committing their futures to the Americas and describing themselves as ‘American’ in official documents and despatches. Men from the region owned slaves, managed sugar plantations, and established trading companies in the Americas from Nova Scotia and Quebec in the north to Martinique, Guadeloupe, Saint-Domingue, and French Guyana in the south. They developed a different lifestyle from the family members they left behind, different aspirations, and more of a frontier mentality. They saw racial difference in a different way, too, in a society where, despite social and legal barriers, those of white and black skin mixed surprisingly freely and where mixed-race children grew up to be free men and women and formed what John Garrigus has called ‘the largest, wealthiest and most self-confident free population of African descent in the Americas’.24 The French Atlantic was not limited to one hemisphere or to France alone. It was a unitary world, held together by common interests and shared outlooks; and in the Revolutionary years it was a political world, too, whose history was influenced by events and pressure groups on both sides of the Atlantic. For many of their inhabitants this was the world to which they felt that they most intimately belonged as they looked increasingly outward from these shores, to the ocean, to France’s colonial possessions, above all to the Americas, rather than looking inwards to the towns and villages of the surrounding countryside. This was their identity, and they made no attempt to dissociate from it.
The port cities could not escape from the political influence of the colonies. Slave insurrections in the Caribbean had as much impact on their everyday existence as did republican politics at home or royalist insurrections on their doorstep. Questions of slavery and anti-slavery were not just the subject of abstract debate; they were burning issues that redirected their trade, threatened their investments, and left families scattered across the western hemisphere. In the entangled world of the Atlantic, the close interplay between France and its Caribbean colonies was of critical importance, with the repeated violence in Saint-Domingue affecting the west-coast ports just as much as political decisions taken in Nantes or in Paris defined life in Port-au-Prince or Le Cap. Colonialism was a two-way process. War, revolution and the moral uncertainty over the slave trade—three recurring themes in this book—were the principal elements in a crisis that would destroy France’s Atlantic empire, as ships were laid up, firms faced bankruptcy, and colonists fled back to France or moved on to other outposts of the Atlantic world.
With this book, I have sought to write a transnational history as much as a French one, and to follow the traders and merchants of France’s Atlantic ports across the ocean, using sources from both sides of the Atlantic (though not, unfortunately, from Haiti itself, where little of archival interest remains). Wherever possible, I have used individual memoirs and testimonies to illustrate what the crisis meant to contemporaries and to show the levels of panic and moral uncertainty that it caused. I have also sought to integrate much of the recent research on slavery, the slave trade, and the public memory of slavery that has been so influential on both sides of the Atlantic, and to bring recent Francophone research to the attention of English-speaking readers. The result, I hope, will be seen as a contribution to the history of the Age of Revolutions that places the Atlantic ports of France in their wider international context and explains the crisis they faced not just at home but across the wider Atlantic world.
1 Aurélien Vivie, Histoire de la Terreur à Bordeaux (2 vols, Bordeaux: Feret et fils, 1877); Patrice-John O’Reilly, Histoire complète de Bordeaux (6 vols, Bordeaux: J. Delmas, 1857–8).
2 Olivier Pétré-Grenouilleau, ‘Pour une étude du milieu maritime nantais entre les fins 18e et 19e siècles’, Enquêtes et documents 17 (1990), 52.
3 Brice Martinetti, Les négociants de La Rochelle au 18e siècle (Rennes: Presses Universitaires de Rennes, 2013), 251.
4 AD Gironde, Fonds Bigot 8J 703, Chambre de Commerce de Bordeaux, ‘Tableau alarmant de la ville de Bordeaux, par un négociant’ (Neufchâtel, 1788).
5 BM La Rochelle, 11877c, ‘Précis sur l’importance des colonies, et sur la servitude des noirs, suivi d’observations sur la traite des Noirs’ (La Rochelle, 1789).
6 Tangi Villerbu, ‘Réseaux marchands et chaînes migratoires entre Nantes et la vallée du Mississippi, fin 18e - début 19e siècle’, in Virginie Chaillou-Atrous, Jean-François Klein, and Antoine Resche (eds), Les négociants européens et le monde: histoire d’une mise en connexion (Rennes: Presses Universitaires de Rennes, 2016), 64.
7 François Crouzet, ‘La conjoncture bordelaise’, in François-Georges Pariset (ed.), Bordeaux au 18e siècle (Bordeaux: Fédération historique du Sud-Ouest, 1968), 323.
8 André Tudesq, ‘La Restauration, renaissance et déceptions’, in Louis Desgraves and Georges Dupeux (eds), Bordeaux au 19e siècle (Bordeaux: Fédération historique du Sud-Ouest, 1969), 52.
9 Christelle Lozère, Bordeaux colonial, 1850–1940 (Bordeaux: Éditions Sud-Ouest, 2007), 15.
10 Pierre Guillaume, ‘L’économie sous le Second Empire’, in Desgraves and Dupeux (eds), Bordeaux au 19e siècle, 197–208.
11 Olivier Pétré-Grenouilleau, Nantes au temps de la traite des Noirs (Paris: Hachette, 1998), 234.
12 Delpuech, ‘Nantes port colonial’, in Didier Guyvarc’h, ‘La construction de la mémoire d’une ville: Nantes, 1914–1992’ (thèse de doctorat, Université de Rennes-2, 1994), 639–40.
13 Bibliothèque Nationale, Société française pour l’abolition de l’esclavage, 1–19 (1835–42).
14 Paul Butel and Jean-Pierre Poussou, La vie quotidienne à Bordeaux au 18e siècle (Paris: Hachette, 1980), 9.
15 Renaud Hourcade, Les ports négriers face à leur histoire. Politiques de la mémoire à Nantes, Bordeaux et Liverpool (Paris: Dalloz, 2014), 409–60.
16 Pierre Nora (ed.), Les Lieux de mémoire (7 vols, Paris: Gallimard, 1997), vol. 1, 493–515.
17 Jacques Godechot, Les révolutions (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1963).
18 Alyssa Goldstein Sepinwall, ‘Atlantic amnesia? French historians, the Haitian Revolution and the 2004–06 CAPES exam’, Proceedings of the Western Society for French History, 2006, 301–4.
19 Cécile Vidal, ‘The Reluctance of French Historians to Address Atlantic History’, Southern Quarterly, 43: 4 (2006), 153–90.
20 Françoise Vergès, ‘Les troubles de la mémoire: traite négrière, esclavage et écriture de l’histoire’, Cahiers d’études africaines, 45, cahier 179/180, Esclavage moderne ou modernité d’esclavage? (2005), 1143–78.
21 David Armitage and Sanjay Subrahmanyam (eds), The Age of Revolutions in Global Context, c. 1760–1840 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), passim.
22 Frédéric Régent, ‘Revolution in France, revolutions in the Caribbean’, in Alan Forrest and Matthias Middell (eds), The Routledge Companion to the French Revolution in World History (London: Routledge, 2016), 61–76.
23 Ada Ferrer, ‘Speaking of Haiti: Slavery, Revolution and Freedom in Cuban Slave Testimony’, in David Patrick Geggus and Norman Fiering (eds), The World of the Haitian Revolution (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2009), 223.
24 John D. Garrigus, ‘“Sons of the Same Father”: Gender, Race and Citizenship in French Saint-Domingue, 1760–92’, in Christine Adams, Jack R. Censer, and Lisa Jane Graham (eds), Visions and Revisions of Eighteenth-century France (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1997), 137.
Acknowledgements
If I am returning in this book to the Atlantic coast of France, it is with a very different purpose and in a different spirit from my earlier ventures into its history, when my concern was to study the French Revolution as it affected the towns and communities of the south-west. Then my focus was on revolutionary politics and the faction-fighting it embraced, the social divisions within the cities, and the different meanings of republicanism in Paris and the provinces. Commerce played a part, of course. Cities like Bordeaux, Nantes, and La Rochelle found themselves increasingly isolated, accused of egotism for their commercial ambitions, for facing out to the Atlantic rather than inwards towards their agricultural hinterland. It is their role in that global Atlantic world that is my subject here, and it has led me in turn to look out from France to the Americas and France’s Caribbean colonies, and to engage with the overarching subject of the slave trade. In doing this I have incurred innumerable debts to friends and colleagues, editors, and readers, which it is a pleasure to acknowledge here.
First and foremost, I wish to thank the three research bodies, in three countries, which have seen fit to support this project at various stages of its development. In France, I was fortunate to enjoy a visiting fellowship at the Institut d’Études Avancées in Nantes, in the spring of 2011, which both allowed me to delve into the archives of Nantes and the Loire-Atlantique, and provided the stimulation and intellectual challenge of a highly diverse community of scholars. To the successive directors of the Institute, Alain Supiot and Samuel Jubé, and to the fellows with whom I had the pleasure to work, I remain deeply grateful. Here in Britain, the Leverhulme Trust awarded me an Emeritus Fellowship (number EM-2015-040) between 2015 and 2017 that enabled me to travel to libraries and archives in France and the United States, and to follow the emigrants from France and Saint-Domingue on their peregrinations across the Atlantic world. Without that support, the later chapters of this book could not have been written. And during the last year, when the greater part of this book was written, I have held a professorship at the State Academic University for the Humanities in Moscow (GAUGN), leading a research group studying responses to French revolutionary ideas in regions of traditional culture in Europe and beyond, supported by a grant from the Ministry of Education and Science of the Russian Federation (number N 14.Z50.31.0045). For their friendship and intellectual stimulation I should like to thank all my colleagues on this project, especially Alexander Tchoudinov and Nikolay Promyslov; they have played a vital part in bringing this book to completion.
To librarians and archivists on both sides of the Atlantic I am indebted for their help and professionalism during what were often ridiculously fleeting visits to their holdings. With their assistance I was able to gain access to private papers in the Archives Nationales (originally in Paris, now at Pierrefitte) and in departmental archives in Bordeaux, Nantes, Rouen, and La Rochelle; to the Chamber of Commerce archive in Marseille; and to the diplomatic papers of the Ministère des Affaires Étrangères, also in Nantes. In the Historic New Orleans Collection I was given access to the Ste-Gême Family Papers, and in the American Philosophical Society in Philadelphia to the Stephen Girard Papers, both of which proved valuable for the history of refugees from Saint-Domingue to the United States; I also found useful material in the holdings of the Library Company of Philadelphia, Tulane University, and the College of Charleston. There have been notable acts of kindness, too. In Basse-Terre in Guadeloupe, the archivist not only opened up the archive to me; she also provided accommodation in an adjoining apartment. Rather closer to home, research for the book leant heavily on the resources of the British Library; I owe an especial debt to the staff of its Reading Room in Boston Spa who have been endlessly patient in tracking down the books and articles I requested.
In the course of research for this book, I have received advice and inspiration from a wide range of fellow historians. In York, I had the good fortune to be able to discuss abolition and the Atlantic slave trade with James Walvin and the historical memory of the slaving with Geoff Cubitt, while Christian Høgsbjerg has proved a tireless guide to the works of C.L.R. James. Jonathan Dalby, who since his move to the History Department at Mona several decades ago has become a specialist in Jamaican history, was a valuable guide in the early stages of the research to materials in the British West Indies. Matt Childs, David Geggus, Nathalie Dessens, and Cécile Vidal all helped me to navigate through sources in the United States; Jeremy Popkin discussed his work on France and her colonies; while Syrine Farhat gave me access to some of her own findings on French colons who ended their Caribbean saga in Charleston, South Carolina. In France, I benefited from long discussions on revolution, slavery, and the economy of the Atlantic ports with numerous colleagues, among them I would give special mention to Marcel Dorigny, Éric Saunier, Frédéric Régent, Manuel Covo, Samuel Guicheteau, Pierrick Pourchasse, and Yannick Lemarchand, each of whom brought an individual approach and an enviable knowledge to the table—as well as, many years before, Paul Butel in Bordeaux, in so many ways the pioneer of Atlantic history in France.
If this work is about the place of the Atlantic ports in global history, it is also about the memory of the slave trade in the cities which most profited from it, a memory that is still evolving in the early decades of our own century. Again, my analysis owes much to others who have gone before, as well as to the current mania in France for commemoration and avowal. In Nantes, the publications of the Anneaux de la Mémoire have done much to keep the memory—and public consciousness—alive since their inaugural exhibition in 1992. The museums of the main slaving cities all have permanent displays on the slave trade, and they were happy to answer my questions: in the Musée du Nouveau Monde in La Rochelle, the Musée d’Aquitaine in Bordeaux, and especially the Château des Ducs de Bretagne in Nantes, where Bertrand Guillet and Krystel Gualde did everything possible to facilitate my work. It was most instructive to be able to compare their displays with those in Liverpool and Bristol; while my thoughts on the role of memory were sharpened by working with Étienne François and Karen Hagemann on a volume devoted to war memories of the Napoleonic Wars, as well as with Leighton James and Catriona Kennedy on a research project here in York. As always, it is valuable to be able to discuss with others at workshops and conferences, and I would like to thank those who have invited me to present sections of the book as research in progress: they include, most notably, Matthias Middell and Megan Maruschke in Leipzig, Rafe Blaufarb in Tallahassee, and Timothy Tackett at Irvine. A special word of thanks is due to Ibrahima Thioub, who was a Fellow at the IEA during my time in Nantes, for organizing an excellent short conference in Dakar in 2014 comparing European and African memories—such as they are—of the eighteenth-century slave trade.
At the Press, I have been exceptionally fortunate to have had the most understanding of editors in Cathryn Steele, who kept faith in this project as deadlines came and went and even connived at my desertion to allow me to write a volume on the memories of Waterloo for the bicentenary in 2015. An author remembers such things with gratitude. I would also like to thank the art department at OUP, who have done such an excellent job in redrawing the maps, and the anonymous readers for their acute and very supportive remarks: the book is, I am sure, much better for them. My thanks also go to Michael Broers, who has consistently offered encouragement through sometimes difficult times of his own; and to Godfrey Rogers and Jane Dougherty, who have contrived over the years to make me feel that I still belong in Bordeaux. The book is dedicated to Rosemary and Marianne, who, in York and in London, have somehow survived through it all.
York
March 2019
List of Maps
1.France’s American Territories in the Eighteenth Century
(Gilles Havard/Cécile Vidal, Histoire de l’Amérique française, 14)
2.The Ports and River Systems of France in 1789
(Cahiers des Anneaux de la Mémoire, 10, 2007, 20)
3.The French Transatlantic Slave Trade in the long eighteenth century, 1643–1831
(Eltis/Richardson, map 19, p. 33)
4.The Illegal Slave Trade: Slave Voyages from Nantes, 1813–1841
(Eltis/Richardson, map 45, p. 75)
5.The Illegal Slave Trade: Slave Voyages from Bordeaux, 1808–1837
(Eltis/Richardson, map 44, p. 73)
6.The ports of Saint-Domingue and their exports in the later eighteenth century
(Paul Butel, Histoire des Antilles françaises, 17e – 20e siècle, 400)
Map 1 France’s American Territories in the Eighteenth Century
(Gilles Havard/Cécile Vidal, Histoire de l’Amérique française, 14)
Map 2 The Ports and River Systems of France in 1789
(Cahiers des Anneaux de la Mémoire, 10, 2007, 20)
Map 3 The French Transatlantic Slave Trade in the long eighteenth century, 1643–1831
(Eltis/Richardson, map 19, p. 33)
Map 4 The Illegal Slave Trade: Slave Voyages from Nantes, 1813–1841
(Eltis/Richardson, map 45, p. 75)
Map 5 The Illegal Slave Trade: Slave Voyages from Bordeaux, 1808–1837
(Eltis/Richardson, map 44, p. 73)
Map 6 The ports of Saint-Domingue and their exports in the later eighteenth century.
(Paul Butel, Histoire des Antilles françaises, 17e – 20e siècle, 400)