11
The early years of the Revolution were years of lobbying and petitioning for the merchant communities of the French Atlantic as they tried to persuade the assemblies in Paris of the importance of Atlantic commerce and France’s continued presence in colonial markets. Much of their anxiety was focused on the slave trade and on the implications of revolutionary ideology for commercial prosperity. Many among them, as we have seen, were deeply pessimistic about what the future would hold, especially should revolutionary France become embroiled in another colonial war with England and the sea routes to the Americas be threatened. But these were worries for the future, and in the first years of the Revolution there seemed little reason for their doom-laden prognoses. Most merchants welcomed the abolition of company monopolies and the opening up of the Atlantic to free trade. Between 1789 and 1793, the port of Marseille handled around 3,000 merchant ships each year; before Saint-Domingue was lost, Bordeaux sent some 200 ships each year to the colonies; and in Nantes the number of vessels leaving for the Caribbean continued to rise, year on year.1 Indeed, in 1792 the port of Nantes recorded its highest levels of commercial activity and shipping movements, with some 230 vessels fitted out for the high seas.2 As yet, there was little to suggest that the revolutionary years would condemn the city to years of stagnation and decline.
Slaving ports continued to fit out voyages to West Africa during the first years of the Revolution, before slave violence and plantation burning destroyed the market for slaves. Captives continued to be taken from West Africa to the Caribbean, and the vast majority of them, around 90 per cent, were delivered for sale in Basse-Terre or Le Cap, where they were sold at a profit.3 We have very few accounts of individual voyages in these years, but the few ships’ logs that do survive give little hint of an impending crisis. Most voyages continued to follow the traditional route between the French coast, West Africa and Saint-Domingue, but some were more complex, with vessels remaining at sea for many months without regard for the changed political situation at home. A good instance is the Patriote, a slave ship fitted out by the Bordeaux firm of Journu frères, which left Bordeaux in 1788 on what turned out to be a long and gruelling voyage, under three different captains over a period of twenty-seven months. The voyage, as recorded in the ship’s journal de bord, was a sort of tour of France’s eighteenth-century empire. From France it sailed east into the Indian Ocean, calling at Pondichéry and the delta of the Ganges, apparently in defiance of the East India Company monopoly, before continuing to the Île Bourbon (Réunion) to load a cargo of slaves, whom it transported on a horribly long passage to the Caribbean, first calling at the Cape of Good Hope to take on food and water before continuing across the Atlantic to land at Martinique and finally at Saint-Domingue. The ship was battered by heavy seas that flooded the cargo deck, and the captives were afflicted by extreme cold in the southern African winter, factors which, when taken along with the number of weeks spent at sea, contributed to an unusually high death rate among the 216 Africans on board—28.5 per cent, which compared with an average of around 8 per cent for the 1790s, or 13.25 per cent for the entire period of the Atlantic slave trade. Scurvy was the major scourge on board, accounting for the deaths of forty-one of the sixty-one slaves who died on board. In contrast, and rather untypically for slaving voyages in the eighteenth century, the ship’s crew survived the voyage without loss, to return to Bordeaux in 1791.4
The early Revolution may even have helped expand Atlantic trade by opening up opportunities for independent merchants. But some were already expressing unease at the speed of growth and fears that the economic bubble would burst. One such was the young merchant Benoît Lacombe, who had moved to Bordeaux from his native Gaillac during the last years of the monarchy. Though, like others from the interior regions of the country, he had been attracted to the Atlantic coast by the promise of huge profits, Bordeaux’s very affluence aroused his anxiety that the city might have expanded too fast and that its wealth was built on fragile foundations. ‘Fragile’ was the word that came immediately to his mind when he talked of the merchant economy, a fragility that distinguished it from the towns and cities of the interior. Bordeaux, he believed, was ‘a proud colonial city’ that had grown too rapidly on the promise of future profits that might never materialize, and he contrasted this with what he took to be the substance of inland cities with a strong agricultural base. ‘The upland areas of the interior,’ he mused, ‘the Quercy, the Rouergue, the “mountains” all descend on the merchant city in search of the precious sacks of grain which their misery has made unobtainable.’ And he concluded with a strong and powerful image of Bordeaux when a food crisis struck home, of ‘the Atlantic city besieged by the men and women of the lands it had patiently controlled; what a strange world this is in times of crisis, as if the city had grown too big and had to answer for the state of dependency it had imposed on the entire region!’.5 Disillusioned, he decided to return to Gaillac and the commercial world he knew.
Lacombe was unusual in predicting disaster so early in the Revolution, for the threat was not immediately apparent. For the period of constitutional monarchy was also a period of peace, and, as the merchants of the west-coast ports immediately recognized, it was the maintenance of that peace that determined their fortunes. The first hostilities, it is true, the land war launched against Austria and Prussia, had little immediate effect on the Atlantic ports. What threatened to destroy their fortunes was the declaration of war on Britain in the spring of 1793, and the resumption of the long-standing naval conflict between the North Atlantic’s principal colonial powers, a war fought as much over colonies as it was over the balance of power in Europe. As with previous conflicts, it had the effect of disrupting established trade routes and reducing the profit margins on colonial commerce. And while there were particular threats to Atlantic merchant houses that stemmed from revolutionary or imperial policy—the impact of the General Maximum in 1794 and of the massive inflation of the assignat that followed, for example—these had only a temporary effect.6 It was the war at sea that disrupted the Atlantic shipping lanes and blocked off France’s traditional markets, cutting the Atlantic ports’ links with its most productive colonies. Saint-Domingue, of course, was lost to revolution as we have seen. But the Lesser Antilles were lost to war, as the British occupied Guadeloupe and held Martinique for eight years from 1794 to 1802. To make matters worse, in an attempt to stave off food shortages and to prevent the flight of capital, the French government placed restrictions on exports. French merchant houses found themselves deprived of their traditional markets, and though the Atlantic ports registered some recovery after 1795 by using neutral shipping from Denmark, the Hanseatic ports, and the United States, this did not provide a lasting solution to their woes.7 In so far as it is possible to separate the war from the regimes that waged it, we must conclude that it was the war with Britain that was principally responsible for their decline, ushering in a period of recession that lasted, with only short interruptions, until 1809.8
The war may have started in the name of revolutionary liberty, but its ideological character soon dimmed as a whole generation became embroiled in a conflict about power, colonies, and empire. The fighting continued through a succession of coalitions, first during the Directory, then under the Consulate and Empire, when the war dominated public policy and the economy, consuming ever-greater resources and concluding only with Napoleon’s defeat in 1814. Much of the country’s commercial and industrial production was diverted, yet again, to supporting the war economy, while the Atlantic coast was blockaded by the British in a counter-measure to Napoleon’s Continental System, preventing the import of the very colonial goods that had formed such a substantial part of French trade. The length and scale of the war was unprecedented, and the numbers of men called upon to fight were much higher than in previous campaigns, with the draining effect of annual conscriptions more and more resented. France was increasingly wearied by war and weakened by the continued diversion of resources to feed the war economy. But the experience was troublingly familiar. Between 1689 and 1815, Britain and France had fought each other in no fewer than eight wars, and had been at war for a total of fifty-six years; and these conflicts had increasingly focused on questions of trade and colonies.9 This was a sphere where Britain, with her strong naval tradition, was always at an advantage. It was an advantage that gave Britain the military and naval capacity to see off her rivals, and to expand her overseas empire at the expense of the French Crown.10 It was an advantage she would exploit fully in the French revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars.
Britain had more warships than France, at times in the ratio of three to one; the Royal Navy kept a higher proportion of them at sea; and crucially, Britain had a much larger pool of skilled seamen that she could call upon in time of war.11 During the eighteenth century Britain had won almost all her sea battles with France, largely through a wider tax base and a fiscal state which the French monarchy could not match, allowing the British government far more freedom in raising revenue to rearm or to recruit additional troops for war.12 As a consequence, it was generally France’s merchant marine that suffered more grievously from attack and arrest, and the ports that serviced it that were threatened with decline. Indeed, the only Atlantic ports that derived any material benefit from war were those where the navy was berthed, Brest and Rochefort, to which sailors from across Brittany and the west of France were drafted to defend the coasts and civilians were recruited to provide services for the navy. For Brest in particular, the resumption of war was seen as a rare moment of economic opportunity, for its history across the long eighteenth century had been one of slow decline. In the words of the civil engineer reporting on the condition of Brest in 1784, ‘The war is the only time when it is prosperous. Whereas the provinces groan under the weight of the burden on civilians, Brest is enriched and embellished through the arrival of those who flock there as crewmen on its many ships.’13 Farther south, Rochefort would also benefit from an increase in naval investment during the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars, though to a lesser degree than either Brest or its Mediterranean counterpart, Toulon.
Trading ports enjoyed no such benefits. Across most of the Atlantic ports the impact of the war was both savage and immediate, as their trade lines with America were cut and bans were placed on goods imported from France. It was not only Atlantic trade that was affected: at certain moments trade within Europe was also interrupted, most notably between 1792 and 1795, when hostilities with Prussia prevented French vessels from trading with the Baltic. Similarly, when a peace was signed in 1795, there was an immediate resurgence of trade and growth in commercial profits, but this proved short-lived, as within a few years Britain would impose a continental blockade and shipping movements were again halted. The wine trade from Bordeaux and brandy exports from La Rochelle were among the businesses badly affected, with the consequence it was not only the coastline that suffered and much of the rural hinterland was condemned to recession, too. The effect on individual firms varied wildly. Some merchants ceased trading altogether, and did not resume their affairs when market conditions improved. In Bordeaux, we know of seventeen firms for whom closure was definitive, the merchants retiring to their country estates or investing in national lands to guarantee an income in their old age. Many others ceased trading in 1793, only to start up again when an opportunity presented itself.14 In La Rochelle, for instance, as soon as the peace was signed with Prussia, trade with the Baltic resumed, and the merchants profited from it to amass capital with which to protect their investments against future calamities. In many cases, they used the money to buy new ships or to convert their existing vessels for use as privateers.15 Bordeaux’s merchants, too, rushed to renew commercial alliances with firms in northern Germany and Scandinavia, and the wine trade which had been savagely hit by the war in Europe was able to recover. In 1797, Bordeaux was once again exporting wine to the value of 14 million livres, and two years later exports reached more than 26 million livres, a figure close to the record established in 1773. Some of it even reached the British market, as neither country was inclined to end a trade which both saw as advantageous. Everyone, it seemed, was keen to resume their old, profitable ways when opportunity beckoned.16
The war at sea resulted in a hugely reduced volume of traffic to France’s Caribbean colonies, and it was this, and the loss of the entrepôt trade that they had enjoyed for much of the century, that inflicted the most lasting damage on the west-coast ports. With the shipping lanes alive with enemy vessels and privateers, the transatlantic crossing had suddenly become much more perilous, the need to take shelter in less hospitable waters more frequent, and the risks of capture or loss correspondingly increased. These dangers deterred all but the most adventurous, including many who preferred to sail uninsured rather than pay the greatly inflated war rates for insurance cover. The insurance registers for the port of Bordeaux show the extent of the decline, showing 1086 entries in 1791, and a very similar number in 1792—here some pages of the register have been torn out—before declining during 1793 to relatively paltry figures. During the three months of the federalist crisis in the city, for instance, between July and September 1793, only twenty-three ship-owners paid to insure their vessels.17 In part, this reflected a dramatic reduction in the number of ships setting sail for the Antilles, which was common to all the Atlantic ports following the declaration of war. But it also illustrates the exceptional costs that fell on those merchants who did continue to insure their ships and their cargoes, costs that were themselves a deterrent to investment in further cargoes. The years from 1793 to 1795 were years of despair for many in the merchant community.
Even the periods spent off-shore, in the roads off the Garonne estuary, incurred a charge, usually around 1.25 per cent of the cargo’s value. But it was the rates charged to insure vessels on the high seas that fluctuated most wildly. Against the risk of damage through storms and currents—what the insurers termed ‘risques de mer’—the premium by the summer of 1793 had risen to around 4.25 per cent of the sum insured, and by September merchants were being charged around 5.25 per cent to insure journeys to Cayenne or Port-au-Prince, or to Mauritius in the Indian Ocean. Voyages to the United States continued to command a rate of 4.25 per cent, though return trips, when ships were heavy with rich colonial produce, could cost more: François Bonnaffé paid 7.25 per cent for a journey from New Orleans to Bordeaux in early August. In these months, anyone venturing out to sea was seen as an insurance risk, and even the short trip down the coast from Nantes to Bordeaux was not cheap: 1.75 per cent in July, 2.75 per cent a month later. These sums did not cover the much greater risks of losses through war. A merchant seeking insurance against war loss only was charged a premium of 15.25 per cent; for a comprehensive ‘tous risques’ policy the cost was routinely around a fifth of the total sum insured, with 20.25 per cent quoted for both the Caribbean islands and the Indian Ocean. Even on the supposedly safer crossing from Philadelphia to Bordeaux, an all-risk policy could cost 15.25 per cent by late July.18 For some these rates represented an unsustainable cost, a drain on their company’s resources which they could not afford. They were a poignant reminder of the threats that all faced with every voyage they undertook.
The premiums charged were a faithful reflection of the levels of risk, as each voyage became a gamble against ever-worsening odds. Many merchants, including a number of the most prominent commercial houses in the port, deemed the risk too great, turning instead to safer forms of investment as they saw out the war years. Or else they sought to share the risk among themselves, small groups from within the business community banding together to fit out their ships collectively, or luring investors by offering shares in the venture on the financial markets of Paris or Bordeaux.19 Merchants were increasingly forced to look for other expedients as they laid up or sold their Atlantic vessels, some turning from long-distance commerce to European trade, and from carrying colonial produce to trading in wine, timber, or textiles within Europe. Or they invested in other ventures entirely. These were years where some of the established merchant community preferred to sink their capital in property: in town houses, of course, but also in land, especially in the better vineyards and country estates. More commonly, they balanced their activity, as they had always done, investing alike in land, real estate, commerce, and privateering. They remained largely averse to risk, and were attracted by those investments that promised returns. In the context of war, land purchase was simply another form of investment.20
Most spectacularly, real estate sales to merchants in Bordeaux and its suburbs during 1798 and 1799 rose to three times their previous level in what can only be seen as a huge speculative bubble.21 The profits of the slave trade were used to shore up family properties and to purchase land and buildings, which often came on to the market at attractive rates because of the government’s policy on biens nationaux. The homes of émigré nobles and convicted counter-revolutionaries joined abbeys and religious houses on a suddenly inflated property market where superb properties could be acquired cheaply, and at a time when the very act of purchasing such properties might be taken as a sign of patriotism.22 It was not just the slaving ports, but much of the interior, regions like the Médoc, Poitou, and Anjou, where biens nationaux were bought up by merchants who had accumulated savings from the profits of trade. Not all, of course, were in a position to do so: mercantile fortunes differed hugely. Some of the oldest merchant houses sustained significant losses in these years, like Bouteiller, Chaurand, and Louis Drouin in Nantes, who between them lost nearly 24 million livres. But others made money during the Revolution and seized the opportunity to establish a presence on the Atlantic waterfront.23
They were the exceptions. Reports emanating from France’s port cities during the revolutionary years were almost universally gloomy, portraying the war as an eternal evil from which there seemed to be no escape. No port was spared. As the Journal du Commerce de Bordeaux lamented in 1799, the misery of their merchants was widely shared, and the correspondence they received from other ports only confirmed their own experience. They were afflicted by losses and economic threats on all sides—‘the general shortage of currency, the bankruptcy of many commercial houses, among them some of the most distinguished, the trouble caused by the British navy in all our dealings with foreign parts’.24 The municipal authorities in La Rochelle concurred, and claimed that in 1799, after six years of war, their town ‘now offers the frightening spectacle of human misery’.25 In 1802, the commerce commission in La Rochelle added some explanation and, while expressing relief that the spectre of war had been removed, it reflected on the damage that had been done to its commercial capacity during the previous ten years. Tariffs were hindering growth, it claimed, while French merchants faced ‘usurious’ rates of interest at a time when their foreign competitors, in Britain and the Netherlands, did not. France’s banking system was, the report insisted, uncompetitive and too inflexible to promote trade. Markets had been lost that would be difficult to recover. Most damaging, however, was the loss of Saint-Domingue, which had skewed colonial trade with the Caribbean in Britain’s favour and deprived the French Atlantic of its principal resource. The merchant community wanted an end to what they condemned as the ‘demagogy’ of the republic on human rights and slavery, and pressed for government intervention to salvage something from the ‘disaster’ of Haitian independence.26 As traders, they believed that they faced possible obliteration, a fear that would prove unduly alarmist. But their losses were real enough. And if Bordeaux, Le Havre, and Marseille managed to retain at least a proportion of their pre-war commerce through a quarter of a century of war, some of the smaller ports lost more. La Rochelle, in particular, ceased to play a major part in the national economy.27
Just as they had in previous wars, merchants turned to a variety of expedients to survive. Perhaps the most common of these was the use of neutral flags, since French commercial shipping was more exposed to arrest and seizure, and trading in the name of a neutral nation in wartime had a long-established and respected pedigree. During the War of American Independence, when the thirteen colonies had severed their ties with Britain, American ships had started trading with French ports to find a market for tobacco and to import the arms and manufactured goods they required for the war effort. Although the Americans returned to Britain when the war was over—they were deterred by France’s policy on state monopolies and by the poor credit facilities on offer compared to London—commercial networks had been established that could be called upon again after 1793.28 The declaration of war resulted in a revolution in the terms of trade, with first Britain, then France, abandoning their monopoly of colonial trade—in France’s case, the long-contested Exclusif—and opening colonial ports to neutral shipping, in particular to American vessels which were best placed to profit from these markets and were eager to develop trade links with Europe’s colonies.
France also encouraged direct trade by neutral shipping, and by this means kept the Atlantic open and Europe supplied with colonial goods even in the darkest years of the British blockade. Between 1795 and 1815, the pilots’ register in Philadelphia lists 226 ships arriving from Bordeaux alone.29 Whereas the Royal Navy would routinely intercept French ships on the high seas, neutrals bringing goods into French ports were seldom troubled. British warships were more interested in seizing rich cargoes from the Indies than they were in the strict implementation of a Continental blockade; starving France into surrender was not a top priority.30 Similarly, the Revolution’s expedient of creating agences commerciales in the west-coast ports did little to expand French trade, concentrating instead on keeping the sea lanes open and maintaining a supply of foodstuffs to the population through the use of neutral vessels.31
The opening of the Atlantic to neutrals provided an enormous boost to the eastern seaboard of the United States; and for some French merchants, those willing to take risks in wartime conditions or able to produce false papers and sail under a neutral flag, the profit on a transatlantic voyage could be tempting. But the regulations on neutral status raised other problems for the trading community. How much should it cost French merchants to acquire neutral status? Which ports had they the right to enter as neutrals? What forms of trade were available to them? And, most important of all, how far would their neutrality be recognized and respected by third parties? These were among the questions that exercised French merchants during the war years, and when peace was temporarily restored in 1801 by the treaty of Amiens, and the commercial ports were asked to advise the government on the measures that would be necessary to revive the economy, these were among the issues they most frequently raised. The answers they provided were often deeply conservative as they sought to reassert rights which the Revolution had swept away. So, alongside proposals to re-establish tariffs on foreign imports and foreign shipping entering France, the newly re-established Chamber of commerce in Nantes sought advice on the future status of French ships which had been sailing as neutrals during the war years and whose captains had been obliged to pay a substantial sum for the privilege. The merchants were not pressing for innovation. They wanted to reintegrate their vessels into the French merchant fleet, and they asked for the return of the money they had paid. After the forced internationalization of the market that had come with war, they were eager to re-establish control and to reclaim exclusive access to colonial markets.32
Another expedient, to which reference has already been made, was privateering. With the conditions for legitimate trading so difficult, a possible route to profit, as in previous wars, lay in fitting out vessels as corsairs and mounting attacks on English merchantmen returning from the Caribbean. The French government explicitly encouraged privateering, reminding merchants on the eve of war in 1793 that it was not forbidden by any law, adding that, if hostilities broke out with any other European power, then ‘every French citizen is free to do whatever his patriotism suggests is appropriate’.33 In 1795 the Committee of Public Safety went further, specifically informing merchant firms that, given British naval superiority and the inability of the French navy to provide protection, they should think positively about arming corsairs. And so, in time-honoured fashion, many responded by applying for the lettres de marque that would give them legal protection for activities that otherwise risked being classed as piracy.34 But engaging in la course was not cheap, whether the captain simply armed his ship for a hazardous voyage to the Americas or, as was more usual, lurked in waters closer to home in the hope of surprising some English merchantman returning laden from the colonies. The ship-owner had to provide a caution in case of illegal captures that he would have to make good. There were extra costs involved in arming and fitting out the ship, and in employing additional crewmen to man the cannon and confront boarding parties.
There were more physical challenges, too. The vessel itself might easily be lost; indeed, a high percentage of corsairs were lost on their maiden voyage from port. The crew were risking their lives when they signed on, and they had a right to their reward, which in La Rochelle was customarily the equivalent of one-third of the overall profit from the voyage. These profits could be high, as privateers were often at sea for only a few months, lying in wait for English ships laden with cotton, spices, or indigo as they returned from Jamaica or India. But of course there was no guarantee of a financial return; the Royal Navy was vigilant, and they might face patrols along the French coastline. Skills of seamanship were required to avert danger, as ships were lost on offshore rocks as much as they were captured in the Atlantic sea lanes. A merchant had to be reasonably confident, and have adequate reserves, before he would risk everything on privateering. Patriotism was never going to supply sufficient motivation; for the merchant, as for the ship’s crew, a privateering voyage was primarily an act of speculation, a game of poker in a very uncertain market.35
That so many merchants were tempted by privateering shows how desperate they had become, how the sort of gamble to which most of them were temperamentally averse had turned into a necessity if they were to stay in business. But the various ports reacted very differently, embracing privateering with more or less enthusiasm. In some, like La Rochelle, merchants shied away from risk, while in others, notably Saint-Malo, history and maritime tradition were tightly linked to privateering. Saint-Malo played little part in slaving or in colonial trade; its main strength was in fishing, its seamen skilled in manoeuvring small craft at speed, which made them well suited to the rigours of la course. With the Channel increasingly under British control, many Malouins saw privateering as the only way open to them to earn a livelihood at sea, and between 1793 and 1800 they are reckoned to have earned a profit of several million francs.36 Out of 722 French corsairs registered between 1796 and 1801, La Rochelle fitted out only twelve, which did little to enhance the performance of the port. In contrast, privateers clustered in ports close to international borders, like Dunkirk in the north or Bayonne, close to the Spanish frontier, which sent out thirty-five vessels in 1798 and a further twenty-four the following year. Bordeaux, too, had merchants prepared to take the risk of fitting out their ships for war—a total of 163 of them between 1796 and the return of peace after Amiens in 1801.37 And in Nantes, where the collapse of the slave trade gave privateering a short-term boost, 132 ships were fitted out for la course in these years, though this did little to restore the port’s fortunes. Nantes remained largely becalmed, with the consequence that by 1802 its international profile had been largely lost. From being a flourishing entrepôt for colonial produce, Nantes was reduced to exporting regional goods from Brittany and the Pays de Loire, textiles and leather hides, wine, butter, and honey.38 Bordeaux, too, was increasingly engaged in regional rather than global trading.
The accounts of foreign merchants, diplomats, and visitors to the Atlantic ports leave little to the imagination. When the Hamburg merchant Philippe-André Nemnich landed at Bordeaux in 1809, he was aghast at the scene of desolation that confronted him, a vista of deserted quays and silent streets, in a city where nothing moved.39 But he provided few details. The American consul in Bordeaux, also writing in 1809, was more forthcoming about the state of decay. There was, he said ‘nothing but despair and misery’ in trading circles, before continuing: ‘Grass is growing in the streets of this city. Its beautiful port is deserted except for two Marblehead fishing schooners and three or four empty vessels which swing on the tide.’40 One traveller who did leave a substantial record of his stay was the German pastor Lorenz Meyer, who undertook the overland journey from Paris to Bordeaux in the summer of 1801. The buildings still stood, proud and solid, along the quays from the Chapeau-Rouge to the Chartrons. The port continued to be busy with shipping, he noted, but with foreign ships importing their produce, not the Bordeaux fleet that had once dominated the commerce of the city. His impressions were necessarily clouded by the rapid decline of trade, the number of merchant houses that had been ruined or forced out of business, the smell of decline on every side. Meyer does not hide his sense of loss. ‘The antique splendour of Bordeaux is no more,’ he lamented; ‘It is clear wherever you look. The Stock Exchange is still thronged with merchants but most of them are just there out of habit. Business is rare. The internal trade in wine is the only one not to have disappeared.’ This is largely, he suggests, because wine merchants can diversify their activities and sell other products to eke out their business. This war, he inferred, had not been like the earlier wars of the eighteenth century, from which the ports had rapidly recovered. Once-proud négociants and ships’ captains now avoided ruin by seeking out cargoes of fruit to supplement their income. His voice is tinged with regret as he poses the question, rhetorically and with a touch of disdain, ‘in former times, who would have gone out of their way to get commission on the sale of plums?’41 Who, indeed? But now, he infers, the situation has changed. France’s wealth and prosperity are under threat. The values that had sustained economic growth are no longer respected by the new political class. Who, he implies, has any choice but to survive as best he can in a world where trade and commercial well-being have been sacrificed to revolution and war?
There is little reason to doubt that the years from 1790 to 1815 spelt decline not only for many Atlantic merchants but also for the wider communities whose livelihoods they supported. As Jean-Pierre Poussou has pointed out, trade was essentially an urban activity, and it was the cities that suffered most critically during the Revolution and Empire. Cities that had acted as a magnet for the populations of surrounding regions for much of the eighteenth century saw migration cease as the Revolution ushered in an era of population decline and economic retrenchment: between 1790 and 1801 the population of Paris fell from 620,000 inhabitants to fewer than 550,000; of Lyon from 150,000 to around 102,000; of Bordeaux from 120,000 to 93,000.42 And for those left in the cities, not least the Atlantic ports, unemployment soared as local industries contracted and closed. The 1811 industrial enquiry on Bordeaux shows the extent of the city’s decline. Whereas in 1790 there had been thirty sugar refineries, by 1811 there were only nine, and they employed only fifty workers compared to 450 on the eve of the Revolution. It was the same story in the rope works, where the number of factories was halved and the workforce cut from 900 in 1790 to only forty. The story in Nantes was similar. The manufacture of highly coloured indiennages, the textiles so prized by African traders, which had employed 2,000 workers in 1792, provided work for only 270 in 1799. With the return of peace in 1801, prosperity briefly returned, with five works employing 1,300 people; but again the boom was cut short by the resumption of war. In 1806 the three factories that were still open provided employment for only 160 workers, and by 1812 only two mills and thirty workers remained. Cotton-printing, a trade that had been sustained by African markets during the boom years of slaving, had been almost completely wiped out.43 In Bordeaux’s hinterland, winegrowing was also hard hit by the blockade and the loss of luxury markets that resulted from Napoleon’s Continental System. In November 1811, a Chamber of commerce report claimed that of the 10,000 workers receiving assistance at home, the majority were men who had formerly been employed in the vineyards and bottling plants.44 So much of the local economy was dependent on the Atlantic that, after years of blockade, industrial activity was largely at a standstill and the entire city was affected. It was the port workers and industrial workers, not the merchants, who were the principal sufferers.45
The brief respite in the war that followed the Peace of Amiens allowed a few Atlantic merchants to retrace their steps and rediscover the world they had lost. Without fear of seizure and the loss of valuable cargoes, they could dream of resuming former practices and exploiting colonial markets again. It was perhaps the only moment since the first declaration of hostilities when traders could hope to recover some of the commerce they had lost to Britain, and when, conservative as ever, some tried to reopen the triangular trade with Africa and the Caribbean on which their profits had once depended. The spring of 1802 held out new hope: in March the peace treaty was signed that returned to France her former colony in Martinique, and, two months later, Napoleon authorized both slavery and French participation in the slave trade. Presented with the opportunity to resume slaving, some could not resist, and a new spirit of optimism swept the Atlantic cities. In the ten months following legalization, vessels sailed for Africa from almost all the Atlantic ports (Nantes, Bordeaux, Le Havre, and Honfleur, as well as Marseille, were all involved); twelve ships were despatched from Nantes alone.46 But the most precious prize, Saint-Domingue, was not reconquered, and that loss overshadowed any other gains. French merchants fitting out slave voyages had to choose between selling their cargo in Martinique and heading for an international market they imperfectly understood in Havana or Buenos Aires.
They also had to trade in unpredictable market conditions, for though France was temporarily at peace, the owners, merchants and investors in a slave voyage were conscious of the fragility of that peace and of the preparations that were already being made on both sides of the Channel for war. There was, it is true, less competition in the Atlantic slave lanes, as the number of slavers plying the waters from Africa to the Caribbean had fallen in the war years. But profits were not assured, as the voyage of the Nantes slave ship La Bonne Mère in 1802–3 shows. At first glance, this may seem strange, since in many ways it could be seen as an exemplary voyage. The ship left the Loire estuary in good weather, reached Bonny on the African coast after only fifty-five days, completed its trade with local merchants in a further fifty days without falling prey to fever or disease, and set sail again before the West African climate took its toll on the crew. They embarked a cargo of around 300 Ibos, and again benefited from a short crossing time of no more than six weeks, the minimum for the Middle Passage. The slaves survived the voyage, and 298 captives were duly sold to planters in Martinique. The sums raised by the sales were then invested in colonial produce and the Bonne Mère was able to return unharmed to the French coast, the last ship to reach Nantes before the resumption of the war at sea.
On paper this might seem to have been excellent business, but the reality was rather different. At the planning stage the merchant fitting out the voyage, Mathurin Trottier, had had great difficulty in attracting investors, and had had to turn to Paris to raise the capital needed to buy and crew the ship. The price of the slaves in Martinique and the exchange rate for colonial currency both fell below their expectations, whereas the insurance rates quoted in the colonies for the return voyage were higher. But most damaging of all was the reception they found on their return, with long days spent in the roads waiting while their cargo was signed off by customs, and poor demand for colonial goods once they had entered port at Nantes. The mouth-watering profits they had predicted in their prospectus could not be realized. Indeed, Eric Saugera estimates that the voyage may just have broken even, or at best returned a very modest profit.47 But these were the post-war trading conditions to which they had to acclimatize. The golden era of the pre-war years was no more than a distant memory.
With the resumption of war with Britain, the Atlantic ports were plunged once again into a new and more desperate phase of uncertainty. The economic prospects were again threatened by Napoleon’s Continental System and by the British response, the Orders in Council, blockading the coast of Continental Europe and forbidding any neutral ships from moving between ports controlled by the Empire. The Milan and Berlin Decrees of 1806 and 1807 had the effect of distorting commerce, just as the combined effects of British, French, and American trade policies damaged the Atlantic economy by asphyxiating trading links and dislocating industrial activities linked to Atlantic trade.48 This did not mean, of course, that all trade ceased; neither government required that, or considered it desirable, and the blockade was routinely breached. Indeed, from 1810 onwards Napoleon issued navigation licences that sanctioned trade in certain colonial goods, with the specific goal of reviving a flagging commerce. But customary trade patterns were disrupted, and even coastal shipping (cabotage) suffered. More of Bordeaux’s wines were transported overland, while the trade in salt, extracted from the marshes along the Atlantic coast and traditionally shipped through Nantes, was similarly disrupted. The salt, exported across Europe, especially to Belgium, Holland, the Hanseatic ports, and Italy, was customarily carried by sea, but with the war and the British blockade, sea routes were impeded, and the bulk of the salt was carried, at far greater expense, through the interior, on barges and river boats. For boatmen on the Loire it brought a rare explosion of activity, with the consequence that, long into the nineteenth century, the period between 1805 and 1814 was talked of as a golden age.49 But for the merchants and seamen of Nantes, the collapse of cabotage represented yet another attack on their prosperity, another symptom of the port’s decline.
For a brief period, Napoleon’s loosening of trade restrictions appeared to bear fruit, and the years from 1810 to 1812 saw a temporary upturn in both colonial trade and the ancillary industries that depended on it. In Nantes, indeed, the tonnage of ships entering the port equalled and even briefly exceeded the levels that had been reached before the war. But it proved to be a short interlude in an otherwise depressing story of stagnation, before the final years of the Empire were once again marked by recession. The principal problem for European shipping now lay in the disruption to trade caused by the war in the Baltic and the Hanseatic ports. This was no longer a direct consequence of the Continental System, since after 1812 many of Napoleon’s former allies ceased to ban trade with Britain, thus weakening Napoleon’s hand in his trade war with London.50 And at around the same time—in June 1812—Castlereagh, who had assumed control of Britain’s foreign policy, revoked the Orders in Council which Canning had introduced in 1807.51 But if the blockade and counter-blockade were over, the long years of war had taken their toll, with the consequence that economic activity remained sluggish. Maritime tonnage had fallen away, as had tax receipts, which affected the ports’ prosperity in a different way. Nantes, for instance, which had handled 237,000 tons of cargo in 1790, registered only 147,000 tons in 1816.52 And where Bordeaux had recorded tax revenues of 1,700,000 francs in 1809, this figure had fallen to 1,400,000 francs four years later.53 Recovery would not occur quickly, and those observers who commented on the run-down appearance of their docks and harbours in the later years of the Empire were simply acknowledging the material impact of years of decline.
With the advantage of hindsight, we can see that war and the Continental blockade wreaked real damage on the Atlantic economy, though at the time the French government promoted the policy as beneficial to trade and pointed to French commercial success. It was presented as a form of protectionism, keeping British and British colonial products out of Continental markets and preserving them for French merchants and French vessels. And for some at least in the west-coast ports, it restored something of the monopoly position they had enjoyed with the Exclusif, especially once the government began to issue licences and authorize trading voyages. But few were truly satisfied: the volume of trade was reduced, and the paperwork that was imposed on merchant houses was hugely resented. It would be difficult to guess this, however, from a cursory reading of the public addresses by mayors and chambers of commerce in the Napoleonic period. Public ceremonial was lavish, and expressions of approval for the Imperial regime beguilingly uncritical. In Nantes, the new festival of Saint-Napoleon—introduced in 1806—was celebrated with due éclat, with the official documents showing how the day was to be celebrated, with a religious ceremony in the churches, but also with a show of public adulation for the Emperor, along with a mixture of illuminations, wine, and dancing that ensured a decent level of popular participation.54 Expressions of gratitude and admiration were, of course, to be expected, and no city could afford to forget the debt it owed to the Emperor. Nantes was happy to oblige, the show of public enthusiasm reaching its apogee in 1808 when Napoleon visited the city. The city authorities organized a lavish reception, with a guard of honour provided from among the wealthiest merchants in the port. There was no public hint of dissent.
Expressing criticism of the government was discouraged, which makes it impossible to deduce with any certainty what the majority of merchants in France’s west-coast ports really thought of the Continental System. Even the most guarded criticism had to be expressed cautiously and respectfully, and in carefully coded language. So when in 1808 the newly reconstituted Chamber of commerce of Bordeaux petitioned the Emperor to amend his commercial policy, it proceeded cautiously. First, it was careful to lavish praise on Napoleon and on the wisdom of his Continental System.55 His policy had been just what France had needed to counter British pretensions, it declared, and the counter-measures adopted by Britain had attracted just reprisals. But—and here the chamber chose its words carefully—prolonging any further the measures outlined in the Berlin and Milan decrees might now be counter-productive, since neutrals, especially the Americans, had been frightened by the British into staying away, and French trade was languishing. So now was perhaps the time to show a little flexibility. The chamber insisted that it was not criticizing the Emperor’s policy, nor in any way working to Britain’s benefit. But his goal had surely been achieved, and it could be useful to France if the measure were to be reversed, if only as a short-term measure. It asked Napoleon to consider giving neutral shipping permission to ‘come to France either in ballast, or bringing goods and merchandise from the Americas’, and to do so without fear of arrest. They could then take on French cargoes in the Atlantic ports and take ‘our wines, our spirits, our manufactures of all kinds’ across the oceans, where they could tell others of the prosperity of France and ‘the justice which they have obtained from Your Majesty’. It was a carefully crafted document, half mission statement, half eulogy, and it made its point clearly. Any benefits that might have been derived from the Continental System belonged in the past, and it was time to get back to the business of attracting and maximizing France’s overseas commerce.56 Others concurred. In August of the same year, the city of Nantes urged the Emperor to cease maritime hostilities, since ‘peace on the high seas is the greatest encouragement that the commerce of our city can be accorded’.57
In correspondence with the chambers of commerce of the maritime cities, Napoleon and his ministers were careful to hold out the hope of future prosperity and to emphasize the government’s determination to see them restored to their former commercial glory. From 1807 onwards, measures were taken to encourage merchants to risk sending their vessels to the Americas, holding out the promise of a degree of government intervention and protection. Blame was repeatedly attributed to the British and their desire to destroy French shipping, to destroy the prosperity of other nations to ensure their own; and Napoleon was quick to condemn those French merchants who collaborated with Britain and ‘sacrificed the independence of their nation by shamefully accepting British sovereignty and sailing under a British licence’.58 He wanted to encourage privateering in the western ports of France, but he was careful to warn against abuse, insisting that crews must be carefully checked and fearful lest the port cities become havens for deserters from naval service.59 In the Emperor’s eyes, nothing could take precedence over the war effort, and when he did intervene in favour of the merchant interest, there was usually a strategic purpose behind that intervention. In April 1808, for instance, fifteen commercial voyages were authorized to sail from Bordeaux to France’s colonies in Martinique, Guadeloupe, and Cayenne. Nothing was left to chance. Vessels required permission to trade, their size and destination were registered, their crews approved, and all had to sail armed. If a merchant requested a military presence on board to defend the ship in the event of attack, this, too, was granted. In return, the government offered an incentive by taking a share of the risk: each merchant was required to split his venture into a stipulated number of shares, and the state would use its sinking fund to invest directly, taking up to a third of the shares to a maximum value of 60,000 francs. The merchants may not have appreciated state direction of commerce, but in these difficult circumstances it was seen as a way of reviving colonial trade.60 They were in no position to protest.
This is not to say that they liked the imperial regime, or that the west-coast cities had any deep political commitment to Napoleon or the Empire. When the Continental System was introduced, the decree was received in relative silence; there was certainly no concerted response from the Atlantic ports, nothing beyond the formulaic statements of loyalty which were well-nigh obligatory and which offered little proof of genuine commitment. Indeed, much of the support they lent to the Empire would appear to have been conditional, a sort of tolerance that reflected their relief after the turbulence of the revolutionary years and was predicated on their capacity to renew their commercial activities. For some, Napoleon’s willingness to reintroduce slaving to France’s remaining colonial possessions was cause for celebration. For others, the measures he took to fund strategic voyages and to expand wine-growing in the south-west were evidence of a welcome entrepreneurialism. But their effect was limited. These measures did little to restore merchants’ commercial fortunes, and by 1808 the tightening of the blockade and the extension of the war into Spain persuaded many that once again their interests were being sacrificed in the cause of military glory.
For evidence of genuine merchant opinion, it is necessary to wait until after Napoleon fell in 1814 and the Bourbons were restored to the throne, when they felt they could speak more freely about the effects of the Empire on their trade. Of course, they might have been tempted to exaggerate in the hope of currying favour with the new regime. But the tone is unmistakable as, in a series of addresses, they expressed their relief and gratitude that the Bourbons had returned and peace been restored, appreciation, too, that the restrictions imposed on commercial activity under the Empire could finally be relaxed. For behind the various expressions of joy, whether addressed to Louis XVIII, to the provisional government in Paris, or to the Duc d’Angoulême in Bordeaux, there was a common thread of argument and a shared pleasure that the fighting was finally over and trade could be conducted under peacetime rules. It may indeed be the case that it was the return of peace that was most warmly welcomed, more even than the change of dynasty; for the merchants repeatedly described Napoleon’s commercial policies as a calamity for their cities, and one from which they were eager to recover. Trade, they said, had for too long been subject to ‘a false policy’ and tormented by ‘bizarre and destructive systems’ which had led to depression and a sense of helplessness. Even the licences which had been issued in the later years of the Empire had been a ‘dismal present’ offered by a tax regime for which ‘trade was the instrument and the dupe’. The high duties had left merchants with large quantities of colonial produce that they had found to be unsellable and had therefore left them with still higher losses. They of course welcomed the reductions that were decreed after the return of the Bourbons; but for some they had come too late. ‘Entire fortunes have been wiped out,’ they complained, ‘and others have been dangerously undermined.’ Even after the fall of the Empire, some were still asking for compensation for the losses they had incurred.61
But the war was over, and Napoleon, with his repeated demands for further conflict and his abiding hatred of England and her colonial wealth, was, they believed, consigned to history. This more than anything explains their relief as they looked forward to the post-war era, however much their horizons were now limited by the losses of the war years. But at least many in the merchant community began to feel a degree of optimism. The ‘ocean’, as a joint address by the Chamber and Tribunal of Commerce of La Rochelle expressed it, ‘was no longer closed off to them’. And that in itself was enough to make men who had had little reason to see themselves as fervent royalists before the Revolution feel no qualms about celebrating Napoleon’s downfall or welcoming the new government with expressions of undisguised joy. They believed, they said, that the years of stagnation would now be over, and they therefore ‘blessed Providence, thanked the Senate and Government, and voiced their admiration for the sovereign and their joy that the throne of the Bourbons had been restored to the legitimate King’.62 But the spring of 1814 would prove to be a rare moment of hope, before realism and disillusion set in again.
1 Philippe Haudrère, ‘La Révolution de 1789 et la flotte de commerce française’, Académie de Marine, communications et mémoires, 1989/3, 47; Karine Audran, ‘Les armements de Nantes et Saint-Malo sous la Révolution, le Consulat et l’Empire’, in Silvia Marzagalli and Bruno Marnot (eds), Guerre et économie dans l’espace atlantique du 16e au 20e siècle (Bordeaux: Presses Universitaires de Bordeaux, 2006), 256.
2 Olivier Pétré-Grenouilleau, Nantes: histoire et géographie contemporaine, 128.
3 Nathalie Touzeau, ‘Étude des expéditions négrières nantaises sous la Révolution Française au temps des Droits de l’Homme’ (2 vols, mémoire de maîtrise, Université de Nantes, 1993), vol. 2, 10.
4 Joël Gosnave, ‘Une expédition négrière bordelaise à la fin du 18e siècle, étude du journal de bord du Patriote (1788–1791)’, Revue historique de Bordeaux et du département de la Gironde, 3e série, 17 (2011), 67–91.
5 Joël Cornette, Un révolutionnaire ordinaire: Benoît Lacombe, négociant, 1759–1819 (Paris: Champ Vallon, 1986), 180.
6 Florin Aftalion, The French Revolution. An Economic Interpretation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 76–85.
7 Gardey, Négociants et marchands de Bordeaux, 225–6.
8 Pétré-Grenouilleau, Nantes: histoire et géographie contemporaine, 128.
9 François Crouzet, ‘The Second Hundred Years War: some reflections’, French History, 10 (1996), 432–50.
10 François Crouzet, De la supériorité de l’Angleterre sur la France: l’économie et l’imaginaire, 18e–20e siècle (Paris: Perrin, 1985), passim.
11 Jean Meyer and John Bromley, ‘The Second Hundred Years War’, in Douglas Johnson, François Bédarida, and François Crouzet (eds), Britain and France: Ten Centuries (Folkestone: Dawson, 1980), 164–9.
12 Patrick O’Brien, ‘The nature and historical evolution of an exceptional fiscal state and its possible significance for the precocious commercialization and industrialization of the British economy from Cromwell to Nelson’, Economic History Review, 64 (2011), 408–46.
13 Gérard Le Bouëdec, ‘La Bretagne et la guerre: ruptures et modèles de développement économique maritime (15e – début 20e siècles)’, in Marzagalli and Marnot, Guerre et économie dans l’espace atlantique, 218.
14 Gardey, Négociants et marchands de Bordeaux, 232–4.
15 Nicole Charbonnel, Commerce et course sous la Révolution et le Consulat à La Rochelle: autour de deux armateurs, les frères Thomas et Pierre-Antoine Chegaray (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1977), 5.
16 François Crouzet, ‘Bilan de faillite’, in Pariset (ed.), Bordeaux au 18e siècle, 493–4.
17 Bibl. Mun. Bordeaux, MSS 1570, 1582, insurance registers of the port of Bordeaux, 1791–3.
18 Bibl. Mun. Bordeaux, MS 1570, insurance register of the port of Bordeaux, entries for July–September 1793.
19 Jean-Pierre Poussou, ‘Les activités commerciales des villes françaises de 1789 à 1815’, Histoire, Économie et Société, 1 (1993), 106.
20 Paul Butel, ‘Revolution and the Urban Economy’, in Alan Forrest and Peter Jones (eds), Reshaping France: Town, Country and Region during the French Revolution (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1991), 46.
21 Paul Butel, ‘Crise et mutation de l’activité économique à Bordeaux sous le Consulat et l’Empire’, Annales historiques de la Révolution française, 199 (1970), 113.
22 Silvia Marzagalli, Les boulevards de la fraude: le négoce maritime et le Blocus Continental, 1806–13 (Lille: Presses Universitaires du Septentrion, 1999), 260–2.
23 Olivier Pétré-Grenouilleau, L’argent de la traite. Milieu négrier, capitalisme et développement: un modèle (Paris: Aubier, 1996), 177.
24 Gardey, Négociants et marchands de Bordeaux, 228.
25 Philippe David, Un port de l’océan sous le Directoire: La Rochelle, 1796–1799 (La Rochelle: Pijollet, 1955), 166.
26 BM La Rochelle, 2662B, ‘Mémoire de la Commission de Commerce de La Rochelle, en réponse aux Questions du Ministre de l’Intérieur, par sa lettre du 1er frimaire X’.
27 John G. Clark, La Rochelle and the Atlantic Economy during the Eighteenth Century (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1981), 225.
28 Silvia Marzagalli, ‘La mise en place d’un réseau commercial et marchand: Bordeaux et les États-Unis à la fin du 18e siècle’, in Damien Coulon (ed.), Réseaux marchands et réseaux de commerce: concepts récents, réalités historiques du Moyen Âge au 19e siècle (Strasbourg: Presses Universitaires de Strasbourg, 2010), 92–5.
29 Silvia Marzagalli, Bordeaux et les États-Unis. Politique et stratégies négociantes dans la genèse d’un réseau commercial (Geneva: Droz, 2015), 171.
30 Pierrick Pourchasse, ‘Speculations and Embargoes on the Grain Trade at the Time of the Revolutionary Wars, 1792–95’, in Katherine B. Aaslestad and Johan Joor (eds), Revisiting Napoleon’s Continental System. Local, Regional and European Experiences (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015), 75–9.
31 Gérard Le Bouëdec, ‘Les négociants lorientais, 1740–1900’, in Silvia Marzagalli and Hubert Bonin (eds), Négoce, ports et océans, 16e–20e siècles (Bordeaux: Presses Universitaires de Bordeaux, 2000), 105.
32 AD Loire-Atlantique, 1 ET C3*, Chambre de Commerce de Nantes, minutes of meetings of 30 ventôse XI and 7 ventôse XII.
33 Charbonnel, Commerce et course, 57.
34 Forrest, The Revolution in Provincial France: Aquitaine, 256–8.
35 Charbonnel, Commerce et course, 68–70.
36 Karine Audran, ‘Les armements de Nantes et Saint-Malo sous la Révolution, le Consulat et l’Empire: crise ou transition?’, in Marzagalli and Marnot, Guerre et économie dans l’espace atlantique, 256–9.
37 Paul Butel, ‘L’armement en course à Bordeaux sous la Révolution et l’Empire’, Revue historique de Bordeaux et du département de la Gironde, NS 15 (1966), 54.
38 Pétré-Grenouilleau, Nantes, 129.
39 Odette Viennet, Une enquête économique dans la France impériale: le voyage du hambourgeois Philippe-André Nemnich, 1809 (Paris: Plon, 1947), 84–95; Patrick Crowhurst, The French War on Trade: Privateering, 1793–1815 (Aldershot: Scolar Press, 1989), 20.
40 Crouzet, ‘Wars, blockade and economic change in Europe’, 571n.
41 Maurice Meaudre de Lapouyade, ‘Impressions d’un Allemand à Bordeaux en 1801’, Revue historique de Bordeaux, 5 (1912), 169–70.
42 Jean-Pierre Poussou, ‘Révolution de 1789. Guerres et croissance économique’, Revue économique, 40, 6 (1989), 176.
43 Guicheteau, La Révolution des ouvriers nantais, 77.
44 Butel, ‘Crise et mutation de l’activité économique à Bordeaux sous le Consulat et l’Empire’, 199 (1970), 122–5.
45 Marzagalli, Les boulevards de la fraude, 14–16.
46 Éric Saugera, ‘Une expédition nantaise sous le Consulat: la Bonne-Mère, armement Trottier, 1802–03’, Enquêtes et documents, CRHMA Université de Nantes, 13 (1987), 38.
47 Ibid., 33–66.
48 Crouzet, ‘Bilan de faillite’, 499–500.
49 Emmanuel Brouard, ‘Le Premier Empire, âge d’or du commerce du sel à Nantes et sur la Loire’, Annales historiques de la Révolution Française, 390 (2017), 25–50.
50 Silvia Marzagalli, ‘The Continental System: a view from the sea’, in Aaslestad and Joor (eds), Revisiting Napoleon’s Continental System, 86.
51 Aleksandr Orlov, ‘Russia and Britain in international relations in the period 1807–1812’, in Janet M. Hartley, Paul Keenan, and Dominic Lieven (eds), Russia and the Napoleonic Wars (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015), 85–7.
52 Pétré-Grenouilleau, Nantes, 128.
53 Laurent Coste, ‘Bordeaux et la restauration des Bourbons’, Annales du Midi, 105 (1993), 28–9.
54 AD Loire-Atlantique, 1 M 194, dossier of addresses from local mayors and programmes for the fête, 1806–7.
55 Alan Forrest, ‘Experiencing the Continental System in the cities of the French Atlantic’, in Aaslestad and Joor (eds), Revisiting Napoleon’s Continental System, 215–16.
56 AN, AF IV 1307, petition of the Chamber of commerce of Bordeaux to the Emperor, 21 April 1808.
57 AN, AF IV 1307, petition of City of Nantes to the Emperor, 8 August 1808.
58 AD Charente-Maritime, 41 ETP 1, letter from Minister of Interior to Chamber of commerce of La Rochelle, 24 December 1807.
59 AD Charente-Maritime, 41 ETP 1, letter from Minister of the Marine to Chamber of commerce of La Rochelle, 10 July 1809.
60 AD Charente-Maritime, 41 ETP 1, letters from Minister of the Interior to the Chamber of commerce of La Rochelle, 9 November, 29 November, and 27 December 1810.
61 AD Charente-Maritime, 41 ETP 231, folios 153–7, addresses of the chamber of Commerce of La Rochelle, 14 April, 18 April, 5 May, and 10 May 1814.
62 AD Charente-Maritime, 41 ETP 231, folio 153, joint address of the Chamber of commerce and the Tribunal of Commerce of La Rochelle, 14 April 1814.