PART THREE
12
The peace which the merchant community had for so long craved was sealed in the spring of 1814 when Napoleon’s desperate last stand against the Allies failed and France fell to a pincer attack from the east and from across the Pyrenees. Napoleon did not cede his throne without a defiant struggle, but, despite a heroic final resistance as Austrian, Prussian, and Russian forces invaded eastern France, superior numbers prevailed, and by the end of March the Allies were at the gates of Paris. His attempts to negotiate terms were rejected, as the other European leaders had convinced themselves that peace was unsustainable as long as Napoleon remained in power, and it was his marshals who took the decision to surrender, convinced that the only alternative was to invite a siege that would bring about the destruction of their capital city. Marmont, in particular, was convinced that the army, defeated and exhausted, was incapable of fighting another campaign, and that further resistance was fruitless; it was he, not the Emperor, who ordered the surrender of Paris. Other close advisors agreed, with marshals Ney, Lefebvre, and Oudinot refusing to march on Paris and expressing themselves unprepared to fire on the people of the city. Napoleon’s brother Joseph took charge of the Emperor’s young son, ordering the Empress to escort him out of Paris to safety. Within days they were on their way to Austria, a move that effectively removed any chance that the Allies would accede to Napoleon’s request and allow him to assume the imperial throne.1 There was to be no compromise with the Empire. Napoleon was exiled to Elba and, the Allies hoped, was thus condemned to leave the European stage for good. Louis XVIII returned from exile in England to assume his throne, and a large part of Napoleon’s army was paid off or placed on demi-solde. France accepted the consequences of military defeat; her future, and the terms of the peace settlement, now lay with the Allied powers meeting at Vienna.
Before Paris fell, however, Bordeaux, Bayonne and other towns along the Atlantic coast were already in Allied hands. Even before Napoleon fought his desperate rearguard action in the east, in the Campagne de France, the south-west had been invaded by British troops from the Iberian Peninsula, who had pushed a dispirited French army back across the Pyrenees and on to French soil. By the final weeks of 1813, the war on the Spanish front was effectively over, when Wellington scattered the remaining French forces and crossed the Bidassoa into south-western France. The British faced little armed resistance, other than in the Basque country, where local people, in time-honoured fashion, came to the defence of their communities and their valleys. Elsewhere, war weariness combined with economic neglect to turn many against the regime, and nowhere more so than in Bordeaux itself, where public apathy towards Napoleon often gave way to open hostility, and where, as defeat and humiliation loomed, desertion rates among the troops reached record levels. The royalist Edmond Géraud noted in January 1814 that in Bordeaux alone, some 500–600 soldiers had deserted in the previous three days, as a trickle had turned into a flood and young men sought safety in the anonymity of the city. The population, he believed, was complicit. In his view, and that of many on the royalist right, Bordeaux was ‘tormented by a sense of grievance as profound as it was legitimate’.2 It was a grievance born, of course, of economic decline and a sense that it had been abandoned by the imperial regime. It was strengthened by the undoubted desire of large sectors of the population for the return of peace; but there was an ideological element, too. Critically, public opinion in the city was by 1814 hostile to Napoleon and there were substantial royalist cells among the commercial elite. In short, Bordeaux was already prepared to welcome a Bourbon restoration.
The Allied force that set out towards the city was modest in size: some 6,000 men, in part drawn from Portuguese units in the British army, under a British commander, William Beresford. It was clear that they expected little resistance, for initial discussions with the city authorities had been held, and that they had no intention of laying siege to Bordeaux or of taking it by storm.3 Indeed, when the soldiers approached the city gates, they encountered no military resistance. Famously, or perhaps infamously, Bordeaux’s mayor, Jean-Baptiste Lynch, seemed only too eager, on 12 March 1814, to hand over the keys of the city to Beresford, declaring his loyalty to the royal cause and ostentatiously ripping off his tricolour sash to replace it with a white, Bourbon one, before welcoming the King’s nephew, the Duc d’Angoulême, and his monarchist supporters into Bordeaux.4 Lynch, himself a wealthy merchant in the Chartrons, openly sympathized with the royalist cause, and had agreed to prepare the way for a Bourbon succession. For some in Bordeaux it seemed an extreme and politically unpalatable position, conjuring up as it did memories of noble privilege and the injustices of the Ancien Régime. But the years of decay and commercial decline had sapped support for the Empire, while Napoleonic exactions and requisitions for the army had drained the municipal coffers. City budgets had been slashed and their resources seized for the Treasury; in the last eight years of the Empire, declared an anonymous pamphlet in 1816, ‘communes had been forced to hold their inhabitants to ransom by requisitions of every kind, the final convulsion of a government expiring as a result of mortal wounds it had inflicted on itself’.5 Though support from the city’s workers for the Restoration was far from assured, the merchant elite, whether out of commitment or self-interest, largely rallied to the royalist cause. Lynch’s betrayal—as those remaining loyal to Napoleon unfailingly saw it—did not come as a shock, and it did nothing to undermine his reputation in the merchant community.
Some in the city were committed royalists who had lived through the revolutionary and imperial era in the hope of seeing a king restored to the French throne, men who had never accepted the legitimacy of the Empire and who had nurtured contacts with royalist agents in London over many years.6 For them 12 March was a glorious moment, one that justified their faith and their commitment to the cause of counterrevolution, a commitment which they traced back to the first royalist gatherings in Bordeaux in the early 1790s. A rapid succession of royalist clubs had followed, both before and immediately after the Terror, when counter-revolutionaries felt it was safe to meet in clandestine gatherings, with names like the Société de Belleville, the Société du Gouvernement, or the Institut Philanthropique, where those opposed to the republic and Empire could network and plot together. The last of these, the Institut Philanthropique, was by far the most effective and the most enduring. Established in 1796 at the behest of the Comte d’Artois to coordinate royalist political activity in the south-west, it survived the Directorial years and the intense policing of the Empire, though it was temporarily suspended and reformed in 1801, 1803, 1806, and 1809.7 Merchants were prominent among its members, many embittered by the experience of revolutionary violence and eager to see prosperity return, as one of their number, J.-S. Rollac, would explain in a pamphlet he published in 1816.8 The Institute was well organized, he claimed, and that organization was key to its success. It had a small inner council that remained secret, a larger general council, and branches in the three arrondissements of the city. It issued a prospectus; planned operations to undermine the Empire; and established workshops to make arms and cartridges. Rollac openly boasted that royalists in the city had recruited a small army, under the command of another merchant, Papin. He was also eager to emphasize his own part in the enterprise. He had bought gunpowder pretending that it was for export, and had stored it in his vast cellars, where the military units were reviewed; he had taken great personal risks; and it was in his house that receptions were held and oaths of loyalty taken to Louis XVIII. He considered it an honour, he said, to have been involved in every one of the royalist societies that had been established during these years, and was proud of the work he had done for the monarchy.9
Rollac’s enthusiasm for monarchy was not, of course, shared by all. Indeed, among the Atlantic ports Bordeaux was alone in declaring openly for Louis XVIII in this manner, and even here Lynch’s actions spread confusion and division in the days that followed. The city authorities were assailed by doubt, with a number of municipal officials tendering their resignations, among them some of the richest merchants in the port. For the approach of the municipal authorities was not universally admired in the city, and there were many who saw it as treasonable. Lynch had hailed as liberators the troops of a foreign power still at war with France’s legitimate government, even if he claimed to do so in the name of Louis XVIII.10 Among those who retained any loyalty to Napoleon and who saw themselves as patriotic Frenchmen, this would always be a step too far. What was universally welcomed, on the other hand, even by opponents of the Bourbons, was the return of peace for which many had craved for so long. Peace spelt commercial opportunity, and for many that meant a resumption of the trade they had previously conducted, be that in wine or flour, colonial produce or slaves. Suddenly merchant houses that had disappeared from the quayside were reformed and families that had seemingly stopped trading threw themselves once more into commercial ventures. ‘This country,’ said the Prefect of the Loire-Inférieure in Nantes, speaking of the west of France, ‘needs only the assurance of peace and it will resume its commercial ties.’11 This was clearly what many looked to the King to provide, with the consequence that most merchants rallied to Louis XVIII without demur. They were not alone. In 1814 Bordeaux indulged in a brief show of unity, as the law and the professions, Atlantic commerce and the wine trade all seemed united in their support of the Bourbon cause. If only for a brief moment, Bordeaux seemed to take a shared pride in the part it had played in Napoleon’s downfall and in its reputation as ‘the city of 12 March’.12
Of course, the Bourbon Restoration would not be achieved without setbacks, most notably when Napoleon returned from Elba in the spring of 1815, forcing out the Bourbons and reclaiming his imperial throne during the Hundred Days. The return of the Empire brought the return of war and commercial uncertainty, neither of which was welcome to the merchant elites, and Napoleon’s appointment of Bertrand Clausel, a Napoleonic marshal who had distinguished himself as a commander in the Peninsula, as governor in Bordeaux inspired little confidence. He was coldly received, the lack of passion shown by the populace in marked contrast to the fervour they exhibited in their reception of the Duc d’Angoulême, and particularly the Duchess, the daughter of Louis XVI. Clausel did not endear himself to the people by threatening the local authorities with conscription as a punishment for what he regarded as the ‘malevolence’ of the population, which served to unite all classes of society against him. He remained in post for a month after Napoleon’s second abdication, refusing to compromise with royalists and stepping up measures against returning émigrés; and few expressed regret when he finally departed.13 In July 1815, the new prefect, the count of Tournon, wrote to a friend that ‘the execration of Bonaparte has been stronger here than elsewhere; it is shared by all social classes, and little girls dance in the streets singing anti-Napoleonic songs’.14 The Hundred Days had been an unwelcome interlude in a world where commerce and economic recovery were always a higher priority than political loyalties, and where Napoleon’s Empire was seen as incompatible with the future maintenance of peace.
There were political niceties to be observed, too, in a climate where any suspicion of loyalty to Napoleon might unleash a police investigation and possible prosecution. All the Atlantic ports were subject to close surveillance in 1815, as they were seen as a likely escape route for Bonapartists hoping to flee France and settle in the New World. Paintings, prints, and etchings suddenly acquired a new sensitivity as the authorities sought to purge any association with the Empire, any suggestion of loyalty to the revolutionary or Napoleonic regime. In Nantes, the Chamber of commerce demonstrated the extent of this sensitivity in early December when it had to decide whether to accept a present of a silver vase from the city’s mayor. The vase had been given to the mayor by the commander of the British naval station that had had responsibility for naval vessels cruising off the Atlantic coast, as a mark of his personal appreciation when the British squadron was finally withdrawn. The Chamber was uncertain how to respond, some members insisting that the gift was personal to the mayor and should remain in his possession, others arguing that they should accept it as a reminder of ‘one of the most glorious periods in the history of the city hall’. They were clearly embarrassed by the offer and uncertain how it would be most politic to respond.15 On the following day, the special police commissioner sent to the city turned their attention to another source of suspicion, as he had heard that a number of paintings commemorating Napoleon’s visit to Nantes were still held in the Bourse, and he demanded an explanation. The Chamber, perhaps fortunately, had an answer that was timely and politically correct. The paintings had been loaded into chests and sent on a cargo vessel, the Tennessee, to be sold at auction in Philadelphia; any money raised would be profit to the Chamber, which would put it towards the cost of the innumerable repairs to the building made necessary by the previous years of neglect. The Chamber could take pride in the fact that it had not only rid itself of any lingering association with the Empire, but had a keen sense of the paintings’ monetary worth. It was not going to indulge in gesture politics by ripping or burning them, preferring to realize their financial value and turn them into a useful investment for the city.16 Though this may seem a minor incident in the context of momentous political change, it is a reminder of the extreme sensitivity of all sides during the Bourbon Restoration.
The Hundred Days had also put in jeopardy the peace terms which the Allies were prepared to offer and the place the country would enjoy in the ensuing world order, and this had worrying implications for the Atlantic ports. France, it could be argued, had been treated generously in the original Treaty of Fontainebleau in April 1814 and the Peace of Paris which followed on 30 May. It left France with slightly more territory and 600,000 more inhabitants than she had had before the war; and, crucially, it returned to France most of the overseas colonies which she had lost to Britain, providing the basis for commerce in colonial produce. In the Caribbean, indeed, Britain kept only two small islands, Tobago and St Lucia, while France recovered her East Indian islands to add to her Caribbean possessions in Martinique, Guadeloupe, and Guyana.17 After Waterloo the terms imposed at Vienna on France within Europe were more severe, but the colonial settlement was left largely intact. For the Atlantic port cities, that in itself represented a considerable diplomatic victory.
But what many merchants wanted more than anything else was a return to past trading conditions which they still looked back upon as a golden age. Having access to their colonies represented one element in resurrecting Atlantic commerce. More important for many of them, however, was the right to resume their old trading patterns, and especially the triangular trade with West Africa and the Caribbean. And here so much had changed since the Revolution, both in France itself and across the broader Atlantic world. France, as we have seen, had abolished both the slave trade and the institution if slavery in the 1790s, though their legality had been restored by Napoleon in 1802. Her richest colony, Saint-Domingue, was now an independent republic which had itself banned slavery and had cut most of its commercial links with France. And if Napoleon had previously raised hopes that he might champion a return to slaving when the war was over, those hopes were dashed during the Hundred Days when, in pursuit of liberal support, he committed himself and the Empire to abolition. Almost immediately on his return to Paris, indeed, on 29 March 1815, Napoleon issued a decree from the Tuileries abolishing the slave trade. From that date no expeditions would be authorized either from French ports or from those of France’s colonies. And though those slavers who had already left port were authorized to complete their voyages and sell their cargoes, they would be the last. In future no blacks could be taken legally into France’s colonies for sale, whether by French ships or by others.18
Just as significant was mounting international pressure in support of the abolitionist cause. For since the beginning of the Empire, the international climate on the subject had changed dramatically, with the calls for abolition becoming more strident. Britain, where the abolitionist voice had been strong in parliament for two decades, made the slave trade illegal in 1807, with the United States following a year later. And though neither abolished slavery as an institution—slaves still worked the plantations of Jamaica and Barbados until 1837, and it would take the Civil War to force the American South to abandon the slave economy—Britain’s parliament was not prepared to watch French merchants make profits where their own were forbidden to venture, while the cause of anti-slavery captured the popular imagination in large swathes of the country.19 Spain, Portugal and, to a much lesser extent, Holland and Denmark still outfitted vessels for slave voyages, and the trade was not totally stamped out in the Anglo-Saxon countries, either. But there had been a sea-change in the moral climate, especially in Protestant northern Europe, which ensured that slavery and abolition remained at the heart of Atlantic politics. Merchants in the French ports were not unaffected by the calls to abandon the slave trade, and a number of former négriers chose this moment to withdraw from slaving and concentrate on markets that they considered less reprehensible. Some were deterred by the increased risks they incurred, while others had been affected by the ideals of the French Revolution. The Nantes merchant Thomas Dobrée is a good example of a leading trader who abandoned the Antilles in these years. His family’s fortune in the second half of the eighteenth century had been built on sugar, coffee, and slaves, but he was attracted to revolutionary politics and served in the Nantes National Guard. By the later years of the Empire, he had abandoned the Caribbean to focus on other regions and other commodities, on whaling and the fur trade, and especially on the East Indies and China; in turn his son, fascinated by the world he had discovered through trade, would become a leading collector of Oriental art and notable benefactor of his native city.20
The defeat of Napoleon and the gathering of Allied leaders at the Congress of Vienna provided Britain with what many saw as a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to impose its abolitionist agenda on France. Since 1807, reformers had campaigned to end slaving not just in the British Empire, but in its entirety; for many, like Thomas Clarkson and William Wilberforce, theirs was the supreme moral cause of the age which it was Britain’s duty to press on other European leaders.21 Abolition was presented as a potent symbol of Britain’s protestant morality, and abolitionists clamoured for action, unwilling, as they said, to be ‘answerable for the guilt’ of doing nothing.22 At Vienna British ministers tried, without great success, to impose their moral view of the world on all the signatory nations, and especially on France, traditionally their most bitter rival in the North Atlantic. In Parliament, members were relentless in their pursuit of the cause. For Wilberforce, Clarkson, and other leading abolitionists the issue was the touchstone by which the Foreign Secretary, Lord Castlereagh, and the entire ministry would be judged. Would they impose Christian values on the French, or would they allow themselves to be outmanoeuvred by Louis XVIII and Talleyrand? For the British government, it was a public relations exercise at home as much as it was a diplomatic issue abroad, a crusade that was pursued in the London press as vigorously as it was by Quakers and by others in Parliament.23
For the abolitionists there was no room for compromise, and after the Hundred Days, when Napoleon abdicated for the second time, they felt that their moment had come as Britain had played a primary role in his defeat. Their leaders in parliament were already planning for total abolition across Europe. In a private letter Wilberforce wrote that he was ‘extremely occupied, both mind and thoughts, with considering about, and taking measure for, effecting a convention among the great powers for the abolition of the slave trade’.24 Samuel Whitbread, speaking to the Commons on April 28, expressed the hope that ‘in the pending congress a decisive declaration would be made by all the allies against the continuance of this nefarious traffic; and that this declaration would be followed up by efficient acts on the part of each of those allies; at least, that the utmost influence of this country would be used to promote this desirable and desired end’.25 Wilberforce went further, arguing before the House on 2 May that ‘there never was a period when the general circumstances of all nations were more favourable to such a motion than the present’. It was surely, he continued, an unrivalled opportunity ‘when all the great powers of Europe were assembled in congress to consider and discuss the very elements, as it were, of their own political rights’. He then, not uncharacteristically, got carried away by the religious import of the moment, concluding that when he examined the ‘extraordinary succession of providential events which had placed the world in its present state of hope and security, he could not but contemplate in them the hand of the Almighty stretched out for the deliverance of mankind’.26 It was a rhetoric that found a ready echo among Dissenters, many of whom believed that anti-slavery was a specifically Christian cause, and slavery ‘a system full of wickedness, hateful to God, and a curse and disgrace to Britain’.27
The anti-slavery lobby at Westminster aimed to force through abolitionist measures in France and other slaving nations, whether or not their rulers acquiesced. They believed that the colonies which Britain had captured during the war, from France and Spain in particular, provided London with excellent bargaining counters in the negotiations to follow. Britain, it was implied, had won its war with France, on land in the Peninsula as well as at sea and in the colonies, and the peace should be Britain’s, too. They urged the government to press home its diplomatic advantage, first recruiting those countries which had no direct interest in the slave trade (Russia, Prussia, and Austria), then putting pressure on the Dutch to heed ‘the wishes of the British nation’, before trying to wrest concessions from Spain and France. Some wanted to link the return of captured colonies to commitments to abolish slaving. Others were intent on stopping France, Spain, and Portugal from trading in slaves with immediate effect. Clarkson, believing that Louis XVIII was broadly sympathetic to the cause, suggested that the cession of an additional West Indian island to France could be the price of immediate French abolition. Talleyrand, who resisted all demands for immediate legislation, remarked that for the English the slave question had become ‘a passion carried to fanaticism and one which the ministry is no longer at liberty to check’.28 This perception was widely shared, and it became a handicap for British diplomacy when it sought to press the abolitionist cause. Castlereagh remarked to Liverpool in October 1814 that the extent of domestic pressure that was being exerted on the anti-slavery issue restricted his freedom of diplomatic manoeuvre, and he complained of ‘the display of popular impatience which has been excited and is kept up in England upon this subject’.29
For the British—but not for the French—abolition was a populist issue that excited political passions and drew huge crowds to street rallies. The French position at Vienna was more cautious. Talleyrand was explicit in acknowledging Louis XVIII’s sympathy for the abolitionist cause, but he insisted that it was France’s sovereign right to legislate on the question, and, while he recognized the force of English public opinion on the slave trade, he also understood the strength of opposition to abolition in the French merchant community. He therefore felt obliged to negotiate cautiously, telling Castlereagh that it was the King’s firm intention to abolish the slave trade but adding a significant qualification: ‘as much as would be compatible with the needs of our colonies’. For, even as Talleyrand was appeasing the British delegation, he was made aware by his own minister for the navy that if he tried to impose too stringent limitations, the government would encounter fierce resistance. As the minister wrote on 30 September 1814, if France were to agree to end slaving within a fixed period, the French had to be allowed to take full advantage of that period of grace to build up their colonial economy, or risk disaster. ‘The needs of our colonies’, he said, ‘demand all the more imperiously the greatest possible extension of slaving and the highest level of commercial activity’ if the trade was to end after a few years.30 It would be impossible to cede to British pressure without leaving an indelible impression of weakness, of having sacrificed the interests of the Atlantic ports for diplomatic advantage.
In the event, British pressure for abolition achieved relatively modest results. The Treaty of Paris in May 1814 addressed only the future of the French slave trade, excluding mention of any of the other slaving nations. Under the terms of the Treaty, France was given back her Caribbean colonies but was not forced to agree to an immediate suspension of slaving. Instead, she was to be allowed a five-year period of grace during which to run down the slave trade and realign her commerce, five years in which slaves from West Africa could continue to repopulate the plantations in the West Indies and restore a flourishing slave economy to the islands.31 And though Castlereagh was careful to keep the issue on the Vienna agenda, others had more important diplomatic priorities, and the future of the slave trade remained somewhat peripheral in the negotiations. For Talleyrand was not alone in rejecting Britain’s demands. The other European slaving nations, which included Holland and Denmark as well as Spain and Portugal, were equally resistant, observing that Britain’s attempts to police her own slaving voyages had been less than wholehearted. For in the years following the Act of Abolition, British interest in the slave trade had not entirely ceased, even if the last legal British slaver, Kitty’s Amelia, sailed in July 1807 out of her home port of Liverpool with all her papers in order.32 Thereafter, though reputable merchants were largely deterred from further involvement in slaving, the less scrupulous seized the moment to turn a quick profit, the majority sailing under the flags of other nations. Initially British captains tended to choose American ships since this made simulation easier, but when the Navy began carrying out arrests in Caribbean waters, they increasingly turned to Spanish or Portuguese vessels. Nor was British involvement restricted to captains and crews. As Peter Grindal has noted, several prominent companies in Liverpool and London invested in, or in some cases owned, slave ships sailing under Spanish or Portuguese colours.33 British firms also continued to supply goods for trade in West Africa, and British bankers, insurers, and industrialists all connived in the trade to a greater or lesser degree.34 Britain’s record was not quite as morally pure as the triumphant abolitionists would like to have claimed and as the European slaving nations were well aware.
For Europeans were increasingly the victims of British anti-slavery politics and the target of the campaign launched by the Royal Navy to curb the slaving activities of others. In the years from 1807 the Navy, whose task had only recently been to escort British convoys of slavers and protect them from foreign attack, had been policing the waters off West Africa and claiming the right to board and arrest the vessels of other nations, including neutrals that might be of assistance to the enemy. These initiatives centred on the Court of Vice-Admiralty that was established in 1807 at Sierra Leone, whose Chief Judge, Robert Thorpe, a British barrister and a committed abolitionist, showed quite exceptional ardour in prosecuting ships’ captains caught with slaves on board their vessels, regardless of where the ships were intercepted and with little regard to their nationality. Spanish and Portuguese, Dutch and Danish vessels were intercepted and arrested, their captains were prosecuted, and the ships and their cargoes seized and sold, leading to a predictable outcry in the foreign ports concerned and to judicial appeals, some of which were upheld. For those countries that held territory in West Africa did have a legal right to trade; in Portugal’s case, and in some others, this had been confirmed in a bilateral treaty with Britain. Thorpe effectively took the law into his own hands, inventing norms based on a mixture of British law, treaty law and such rules as were laid down by humanity and natural justice. The result, hotly disputed in other countries, was to place British jurisdiction above the international law of the sea and to lay claim to a judicial oversight that was not theirs.35 In the eyes of the other nations involved, this was a further instance of British bullying. It is therefore unremarkable that discussion at Vienna quickly swung from the immorality of the Atlantic slave trade to the legal rights of shipping in neutral waters and on the high seas and the role played by the Royal Navy and its West Africa Station.36
Castlereagh and the British delegation did not leave Vienna empty-handed: it was just that most of what they achieved consisted of promises for the future, of statements of intent rather than clear political commitments. In a recent study of the Congress settlement, David King tries to portray this achievement in as positive a light as possible, given that the diplomats and political leaders present had more pressing matters to settle with regard to the balance of power on the Continent. ‘On February 8, 1815, just days before his expected departure’, he writes, ‘Castlereagh could finally point to some success’, when the Great Powers issued a joint declaration condemning the slave trade in seemingly unequivocal terms, describing it as ‘repugnant to the principles of humanity and universal morality’. They further agreed on the importance of ending a scourge which, they alleged, had for so long ‘desolated Africa, degraded Europe and afflicted humanity’, though there was no clear commitment as to quite when that would happen. The slave trade should be abolished as soon as possible; but only the Dutch could be pressurized into immediate abolition. France promised to do so in five years; Spain and Portugal agreed on eight years. Yet it was a start, and Britain took some satisfaction from it. Louis XVIII’s words support for abolition seemed incontrovertible: ‘The King has promised to combine his efforts with those of England to work for universal abolition of the slave trade. This promise must be upheld.’37 Human rights, for the first time, had been made a subject of a peace conference, and it looked as if anti-slavery had become a moral force that was difficult to counter.38 Indeed, Wilberforce admitted privately, after meeting Castlereagh on his return from Vienna, that he was not unhappy with the outcome: ‘I believe all done that could be done.’39
But without the right to search suspect vessels, Britain’s powers were limited, and balancing the conflicting expectations of foreign states and British public opinion would never be easy. The United States, which had already abandoned the slave trade, was perhaps the exception. Here it proved relatively simple to find a compromise position: in 1817 Castlereagh offered the American ambassador to London, Richard Rush, ‘a reciprocal right of search for slaves, and a limited number of the armed vessels of each of the maritime states to be empowered to search’.40 France presented the British government with an altogether more difficult problem. Louis XVIII had domestic concerns to address, especially in the merchant ports of the Atlantic coast, and he could not be seen to be giving in to British pressure while an army of occupation remained on French territory. Castlereagh had to make do with statements of intent which he could present to the British Parliament as a more limited diplomatic triumph. A further conference called for 1816 in London also failed to produce binding agreements, though the assurances given by the French at least had the result of diverting the main thrust of abolitionist attack from France to Spain, which refused to take any action before 1823, and then only in the seas north of the Equator. A series of bilateral treaties with Holland, Spain, and Portugal placed limits on their liberty to trade (in the cases of Spain and Portugal, Britain paid out £700,000 each in compensation).41 But Britain’s right to stop ships that were suspected of slaving remained contested by other nations and had no basis in international law until 1831, when it was at last recognized in a bilateral agreement between Britain and Louis-Philippe’s France. However, in the meantime the French had themselves moved the debate forward by taking their own action against slave-traders off the Atlantic coast. Louis XVIII kept his promise to criminalize the slave trade, and by a royal ordinance of 8 January 1817 and the subsequent law of 15 April 1818 the trade was outlawed in France. This marked a considerable change of heart, and it meant that, when it was fully implemented, vessels caught slaving faced confiscation and their captains could be stripped of their command.42 But it would be the early 1820s before the French navy had the capacity to enforce that law, leaving merchants free to decide for themselves whether to cease their participation in the trade or take a calculated risk by continuing slaving.
It would be wrong to imply, however, that the French government stood idly by in 1815 while slave voyages were planned and ships sailed freely from the Loire estuary for West Africa. Louis XVIII’s public condemnation of the slave trade was not disingenuous, though he had to be careful not to allow it to sound like a concession born of weakness. For if the trade could be legally engaged in for a five-year period, the government did not have to give it its blessing or make life easy for those profiting from it. Legal entitlement was one thing; getting the necessary papers to engage in the trade quite another. And the minister whose responsibility it was to regulate French shipping, the navy minister Jaucourt, was no champion of slaving. On 23 August, he instructed French port authorities that no vessel that declared an intention to engage in the slave trade should be given permission to depart, in effect forcing the trade underground. His successor, Dubouchage, went one step further by telling governors in French colonies not to receive ships carrying slaves, thus making the slaver’s task doubly difficult. None of this was done very publicly: the royalist government was keen to imply that any blame for these measures attached squarely to the British with their single-minded obsession with ending the Atlantic slave trade.43 But it was a step in the direction of abolition. Of course these measures did not stop French slave voyages in their entirety, any more than Britain had managed to drive the last slave ships out of Liverpool or Glasgow. However, they did begin a process of prohibition which forced colonial merchants and ships’ captains to seek anonymity, to trade in secret, to hide their true purpose behind a range of subterfuges. It was a crucial step towards denying them legitimacy, and with it respectability. Naval patrols added to the risks which those who continued to engage in the slave trade had to accept.
As the Restoration years would demonstrate, not everyone was dissuaded by these measures or by fear of social ostracism. There were many in Bordeaux, La Rochelle, and especially Nantes who deemed the risks worth taking, and since it was the slave trade, and not the system of colonial slavery, that was under attack, there was still a rich market in the Americas for slave labour. Among the merchant houses which had engaged in the slave trade in the eighteenth century were a number whose overwhelming concern, with the return of peace, was to revive their fortunes by once again sending vessels to the coast of Africa to trade in slaves. These merchants had generally maintained their commercial contacts in the New World, and they saw no reason to sacrifice them; their mentality was still very much that of the late eighteenth century, leaving them completely unmoved by the abolitionist cause.44 If there was still profit to be made from slaving, they had few qualms about despatching a new generation of vessels to West Africa and the Caribbean.
More dissuasive than the call of conscience were the messages they received from the West Indies, from agents and commercial partners left increasingly anxious by the news that reached them from France. The correspondence between two merchants, Lesage in Cayenne and Meyer in La Rochelle, in 1815 shows the extent of their despondency. Lesage points out that their warehouse in Cayenne is already working at a fraction of capacity and that the tariffs on trade with Guadeloupe and Martinique promise to be prohibitive. But it is the news that the slave trade will be abolished in five years that he finds most alarming. For, he asks, what is the use of five years to the local economy? ‘If slaving is abolished in five years, we will have to give up all commercial activity; eighteen months will already have passed before the first slave ships arrive, and we’ll have to stop trading nine months before the period of grace expires. More than two years will have slipped past without being able to do anything.’ And in the remaining period there are severe limits to what the economy of Cayenne can ingest. ‘In the position in which we are going to find ourselves,’ he concludes, ‘if French ships do appear, Cayenne cannot purchase and feed more than 1000 or 1500 slaves each year.’45 Neither Cayenne nor the islands of the Petites Antilles had the capacity to replace the huge colonial market that had been lost in Saint-Domingue, and that did affect the viability of the French slave trade. In the years after 1815 it would be the lack of commercial opportunity as much as the pressure of legislation that caused the slaving activity of the west-coast ports to fall into a terminal decline.46
It remained an open question under the Restoration whether the monarchy had the political will to end slavery in its colonial possessions or to suppress what remained of the slave trade. For we must recognize that, though it had been the first country in Europe to abolish slavery in February 1794, and though the principle of abolition was confirmed by the Convention in 1795, France’s relationship with slavery over the previous twenty-five years had been anything but consistent. In May 1802, Napoleon had re-established the slave trade in France and had restored slavery in those colonies returned by Britain under the terms of the Treaty of Amiens. During 1802 and 1803, he in turn reintroduced slavery in Réunion and Mauritius, Guyana and Guadeloupe. For Napoleon at this time, slavery was clearly not an issue of conscience, certainly not when it stood in the way of French economic interest, and if he went on to proclaim an end to slavery during the Hundred Days, this was little more than a political ploy to win liberals to his side. Reform after 1815 was similarly ambivalent. While Louis XVIII confirmed the illegality of the slave trade in 1817, France, like the other slaving nations, did nothing to abolish the institution of slavery itself, which would remain in force in all of France’s colonies until the mid-nineteenth century. Progress towards reform was slow and intermittent, with equality in law between whites and free men of colour—a right first gained back in 1791—offered in 1833 and the conditions of servitude re-examined and liberalized in 1845. But it was not until March 1848, and the arrival of the Second Republic, that France again proclaimed the total abolition of slavery and finally confirmed one of the great liberal reforms of the First Republic. This was no coincidence, for abolition had been turned into a specifically republican cause, one closely identified with the rights of man. Slavery was seen as an outrage to the ideals of republicanism, what Victor Schœlcher denounced as ‘a crime of lèse-humanité’.47 Before the advent of the republic, France’s approach to abolition was more a matter of international bargaining than of ideological commitment. It is scarcely to be wondered at that men who had made their fortune from the slave trade were able to convince themselves that in sending vessels out to Africa they were doing nothing that was morally wrong.
For, whatever Clarkson, Wilberforce, and their fellow abolitionists had started, they certainly did not achieve their goal of abolishing slaving in the immediate post-war world. Nowhere was abolition total. Britain and the United States might have legislated against the Atlantic slave trade during the Napoleonic Wars, but they did nothing to outlaw slavery on their plantations, nor did they resolve the more fundamental problem that sugar, coffee, and cotton production was deemed by most contemporaries to be uneconomic without slavery. Where the slave trade was criminalized, moreover, governments, even British governments, were not especially rigorous in ensuring that the law was respected, and ships continued to be fitted out for the slave trade after the war was over, albeit on a smaller scale and often, though not always, under the cover of a foreign flag.48 The abolitionists’ work remained far from complete. Even in Britain’s Caribbean islands, slavery remained legal until the passing of the Slavery Abolition Act of 1833, and even then colonies like Jamaica and Trinidad turned to an apprenticeship system which kept former slaves on the land, in the process retaining many aspects of the unequal relationship with their masters.
In the United States, too, reformers could claim only a partial success. In the cotton-fields of the South, nothing changed; while even in the northern states slavery lingered well into the nineteenth century before abolition was proclaimed in Rhode island in 1842, in Pennsylvania in 1847, or in Connecticut in 1848.49 And of course slavery was at the heart of the dispute that rent the United States apart and plunged the country into the Civil War. Elsewhere the picture is very mixed. In Central and South America, slavery and the slave trade were sometimes ended during the struggle for independence from European empires; in particular, the slave trade between Spain and her former colonies was abolished by 1842. But elsewhere a slave economy was maintained, and often it was only the destinations of the slave ships that changed as old markets were shut off and new ones opened up. Slaving vessels continued plying between the African coast and the Americas well into the 1870s and 1880s, increasingly serving the major slave markets of Puerto Rico, Cuba, and Brazil. For those with slaves to sell, there were still eager purchasers, and profits to be made. But it was no longer a triangular trade between Europe, Africa and the Americas: nineteenth-century slave ships mostly passed directly between West Africa and Cuba or Latin America. And though the French continued to be implicated in slaving in the years up to 1830, and in slave-owning on the plantations of Martinique and Guadeloupe until mid-century, theirs was a declining role in a trade that was increasingly dominated by Catholic Southern Europe and by slavers based in Central America and Brazil.50
1 Dominique de Villepin, Les Cent Jours ou l’esprit de sacrifice (Paris: Perrin, 2001), 10.
2 Laurent Coste, ‘Bordeaux et la restauration des Bourbons’, 27–9.
3 J. Rambaud, ‘L’esprit public dans le Sud-ouest et l’entrée des Anglais à Bordeaux, 1814’, Annales historiques de Bordeaux et du département de la Gironde, 7 (1914).
4 Pierre Bécamps, ‘Despotisme et contre-révolution’, in Pariset, Bordeaux au 18e siècle, 474.
5 Anon, De l’administration financière des communes de France, avec quelques applications à la ville de Bordeaux (Bordeaux, 1816), 42.
6 Georges Caudrillier, L’Association royaliste de l’Institut philanthropique à Bordeaux et la conspiration anglaise en France pendant la Deuxième Coalition (Paris: Société française d’imprimerie et de librairie, 1908).
7 Albert Mengeot, Le Brassard de Bordeaux: 12 mars 1814 (Bordeaux: Bière, 1912), 10.
8 J.-S. Rollac, Exposé fidèle des faits authentiquement prouvés qui ont précédé et amené la journée de Bordeaux, au 12 mars 1814 (Paris, 1816).
9 Ibid., 16–18.
10 Coste, ‘Bordeaux et la Restauration des Bourbons’, 41.
11 Pétré-Grenouilleau, Nantes, histoire et géographie contemporaine, 131.
12 Robert Dupuch, ‘Le parti libéral à Bordeaux et dans la Gironde sous la deuxième Restauration’, Revue Philomatique de Bordeaux, 1902, 21.
13 Jean Cavignac, ‘Les Cent Jours à Bordeaux à travers la correspondance de Clausel’, Revue historique de Bordeaux et du Département de la Gironde, NS 14 (1965), 69–70.
14 André Tudesq, ‘La Restauration, renaissance et déceptions’, in Desgraves and Dupeux, Bordeaux au 19e siècle, 35–6.
15 AD Loire-Atlantique, 1 ET C5*, Chambre de Commerce de Nantes, minute of 1 December 1815.
16 AD Loire-Atlantique, 1 ET C5*, Chambre de Commerce de Nantes, minute of 5 December 1815.
17 Timothy Wilson-Smith, Napoleon, Man of War, Man of Peace (London: Constable, 2002), 98–9.
18 Imperial decree abolishing the slave trade, 29 March 1815, in Branda and Lentz, Napoléon, l’esclavage et les colonies, 345.
19 Kielstra, The Politics of Slave Trade Suppression in Britain and France, 46.
20 AM Nantes, 8Z, Fonds Privés, Papiers Thomas Dobrée; Léon Rouzeau, Inventaire des papiers Dobrée, 1771–1896 (Nantes: Bibliothèque Municipale, 1968).
21 See Christopher Leslie Brown, Moral Capital: Foundations of British Abolitionism (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2006).
22 Wilson, Thomas Clarkson: A Biography, 125.
23 For a fuller discussion of Britain’s espousal of abolitionism in 1814–15, see Alan Forrest, ‘The Hundred Days, the Congress of Vienna and the Atlantic Slave Trade’, in Katherine Astbury and Mark Philp (eds), Napoleon’s Hundred Days and the Politics of Legitimacy (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018), 163–81.
24 Betty Fladeland, ‘Abolitionist pressures on the Concert of Europe, 1814–1822’, Journal of Modern History, 38 (1966), 356.
25 T.C. Hansard, The Parliamentary Debates from the Year 1803 to the Present Time, vol. 27, 576, House of Commons, 28 April 1814.
26 Hansard, Parliamentary Debates, vol. 27, 637, 2 May 1814.
27 Journal of the House of Lords, vol. 63, 31; James Walvin, ‘British Popular Sentiment for Abolition’, in Christine Bolt and Seymour Drescher (eds), Anti-slavery, Religion and Reform: Essays in Memory of Roger Anstey (Folkestone: Dawson, 1980), 155–6.
28 Jerome Reich, ‘The slave trade at the Congress of Vienna’, Journal of Negro History, 53 (1968), 132–5.
29 John Bew, Castlereagh: A Life (London: Quercus, 2012), 388.
30 Pascal Even, ‘Le Congrès et l’abolition de la traite des Noirs’, in Le Congrès de Vienne ou L’invention d’une nouvelle Europe: catalogue d’exposition (Paris: Musée Carnavalet, 2015), 151.
31 Brian E. Vick, The Congress of Vienna: Power and Politics after Napoleon (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2014), 195.
32 Peter Grindal, Opposing the Slavers: The Royal Navy’s Campaign against the Atlantic Slave Trade (London: I.B. Tauris, 2016), 101–2.
33 Ibid., 107.
34 Marika Sherwood, ‘The British illegal slave trade, 1808–1830’, Journal for Eighteenth-Century Studies, 31 (2008), 293–5.
35 Tara Helfman, ‘The Court of Vice Admiralty at Sierra Leone and the abolition of the West African slave trade’, The Yale Law Journal, 115 (2006), p. 1138.
36 For an overview of the Navy’s role, see W. E. F. Ward, The Royal Navy and the Slavers: The Suppression of the Atlantic Slave Trade (London: Allen and Unwin, 1969).
37 Even, ‘Le Congrès et l’abolition de la traite des Noirs’, 153.
38 David King, Vienna, 1814: How the Conquerors of Napoleon made Love, War and Peace at the Congress of Vienna (New York: Harmony Books, 2008), 217.
39 Kielstra, Politics of Slave Trade Suppression, 54.
40 Bew, Castlereagh, 446.
41 Ibid., 447.
42 Even, ‘Le Congrès et l’abolition de la traite des Noirs’, 153.
43 Kielstra, Politics of Slave Trade Suppression, 58–9.
44 Pétré-Grenouilleau, Nantes, histoire et géographie contemporaine, 132.
45 BM La Rochelle, Fonds Meschinet de Richemond MS 2272, letter from Lesage in Cayenne to Meyer in La Rochelle, 18 April 1815.
46 Frédéric Régent, La France et ses esclaves, de la colonisation aux abolitions, 1620–1848 (Paris: Grasset, 2007), 289.
47 Victor Schœlcher, Rapport au ministre de la Marine et des colonies, in Le Moniteur, 3 May 1848.
48 Marika Sherwood, ‘The British illegal slave trade, 1808–1830’, 293.
49 Ana Lucia Araujo, Reparations for Slavery and the Slave Trade: a Transnational and Comparative History (London: Bloomsbury, 2017), 60–1.
50 For statistics, see the Transatlantic Slave Trade Database; David Eltis and David Richardson (eds), Extending the Frontiers: Essays on the New Transatlantic Slave Trade Database (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008), 40–1.