The Age of Revolutions was a period of profound crisis across the French Atlantic world. The prosperity that had been generated through colonization in the course of the eighteenth century came to an abrupt end, and it would be many decades before the richest of France’s Atlantic ports—Nantes, Le Havre, and Bordeaux—recovered even a fraction of their former dynamism. But it would be misleading to attribute all their ills to the Revolution and Empire. Some ports had suffered grievously in earlier eighteenth-century wars, only to recover and re-establish their primacy in Atlantic markets in the second half of the century; while in the case of others—ports like Bayonne and La Rochelle—their best days were behind them long before the outbreak of revolution in 1789. Revolution, war and blockade during the Napoleonic years, combined with the loss of their most lucrative colony in Saint-Domingue, may have marked a new low for the ports and their merchant elites, the nadir of their commercial fortunes. But they have to be seen in context; they do not explain everything.
That is not in any way to downplay the significance of these years. For the major Atlantic ports, the Age of Revolutions was a turning point from which recovery would prove long and slow. Bordeaux, it is true, would find opportunities to diversify in the course of the nineteenth century, developing trading links with the Far East, the Indian Ocean, and Senegal in West Africa and growing its trade with ports in Central and Latin America, most especially with Cuba. But success in these markets was hard to predict and the merchants found that what had seemed promising outlets were periodically blocked, whether by tariffs imposed by other European states, by English competition in the Americas, or by the French government’s own policies in its overseas colonies. Bordeaux would suffer further setbacks, leading to years of slump and to periodic falls in the volume of its wine exports. Prosperity was far from assured. The nineteenth-century port became more dependent on less lucrative internal and coastal traffic—cabotage—than it had been in the past. By the time of the Second Empire, Bordeaux seemed destined to make a steady, if unspectacular, recovery from mercantile decay, but that recovery was impeded by the conservatism of the merchant class and its refusal to indulge in risk or speculation. Both owners and workers, indeed, seemed singularly resistant to change, and Bordeaux’s commercial fortunes suffered as a consequence.1 Investors turned away from shipping and colonial commerce in favour of the more lucrative returns which nineteenth-century industry held out to them. In geographical terms, the Atlantic lands lost out to the heartlands of the French industrial revolution in the north and the east.
Of the other ports, Nantes also turned to its industry and the produce of its hinterland for much of its port activity as Atlantic trade declined. After 1830, even those most involved in the slave trade were forced to look elsewhere as their connections with the sugar islands fell away. Sugar continued to be imported and refined in Nantes, but increasingly it came from the Indian Ocean rather than the Caribbean. The transition came suddenly. Whereas in 1827 around 73 per cent of the sugar unloaded in Nantes came from the West Indies, within a decade, in 1836, 63 per cent originated in the Indian Ocean, and leading Nantes merchants had transferred their attention to Mauritius and especially to Réunion.2 Renewed prosperity did not come until the second half of the century, until the Second Empire and the Third Republic. By then Nantes had established itself as an industrial city in its own right, with part of the port given over to shipbuilding and the chantiers navals. Like Bordeaux, much of its trade was now conducted in Europe and between coastal ports. Just like Bordeaux, too, its population grew only slowly. The eighteenth-century Atlantic world could not be restored.
The Atlantic port which defied the seemingly ineluctable decline following the loss of Saint-Domingue and the damage wrought by the revolutionary years was Le Havre, where industry remained secondary and merchants sought ways to adapt to diminished prospects. At first, many of their initiatives were met with failure and bankruptcy, but by the Second Empire the economy of the port was once again booming. In part this was due to a rapid increase in coffee imports, in part to trade in cotton with the American South, in part, too, to an influx of Californian gold which helped to relaunch mercantile enterprise. Not everything was plain sailing. The American Civil War got in the way of growth in trade with the United States, the Franco-Prussian War, more briefly, with European commerce; and Le Havre suffered, with other ports, from economic recession in the 1880s. But the longer-term trend was one of growth and rapid expansion: if the ships using the port weighed in at 2 million tons in 1856, this doubled by 1878, and grew dramatically in the first years of the twentieth century, hitting 6 million tons in 1901, 9 million in 1907, and 11 million on the eve of the First World War, making Le Havre the second port in France after Marseille. But not all of this tonnage was accounted for by cargo vessels, or by colonial trade. Where Le Havre really prospered was in passenger traffic, as it established itself as the premier port in France for transatlantic liners, vying in sailings to New York with the English Channel port of Southampton. In the century since 1815, the city had reinvented itself.3
Contemporaries argued about which of these elements—revolution, war, or the loss of Saint-Domingue—contributed most to their decline. All posed threats, not least in terms of the huge risks involved in trading on the high seas. In the short term there is no doubt that naval warfare posed the most critical threat, causing severe disruption to the trading patterns which French merchants had established and to partnerships on which their profits depended. The extension of the war into a colonial war with Britain, and the long years of blockade caused by Napoleon’s Continental System and Britain’s Orders in Council, led to ships being laid up and long-established merchant houses being forced out of business. Markets which the French had nurtured and exploited were lost to foreign competitors. Over more than twenty years of war, the damage and disruption suffered were on a scale unparalleled during the wars of the eighteenth century. But wars end, and periods of peace follow when overseas commerce can again flourish. Revolution, allied to an anti-slavery campaign, would prove more damaging in the long term, inflicting lasting damage rather than temporary disruption, and making it impossible for the Atlantic ports to return to their established ways. The loss of Saint-Domingue, the richest of all European countries, was a blow from which they took decades to recover. Guadeloupe and Martinique, France’s remaining Caribbean colonies, could not compensate for the riches that had been lost, and the nineteenth century saw vessels from other countries—Spain, Portugal, Cuba, and Brazil—replacing the French on the trade routes to the Americas.
But the saddest victim of the Age of Revolutions in France’s Atlantic world was the country that had been inspired by revolutionary ideas to win its independence: Haiti itself. In the decades that followed the Haitian Revolution, the island would provide political inspiration to anti-colonial campaigners and revolutionaries across the Americas, where it would be held up as an example to other enslaved societies. Slaves could free themselves, the message ran. Black Africans could rise against European masters and win their freedom: the cry was powerful and exhilarating, a battle-cry for the enslaved and oppressed, and it swiftly resonated across Latin America. In the eighteenth-century world’s most prosperous colony, ‘a world built upon slavery, colonialism and racial hierarchy had been turned upside down’.4 Saint-Domingue had lit a beacon to the colonized world, and Toussaint’s revolution was greeted as a turning-point in race relations between Europeans and Africans in the New World.
But initial enthusiasm quickly turned sour. The gratuitous violence of the uprising spread fear among Haiti’s Caribbean neighbours, while back in France the main focus of opinion was on the inhuman cruelty of the insurgents and the obscene tortures which they had inflicted on the white population. Quickly, too, attention turned to economic questions, as Haiti sank into new depths of poverty in the decades that followed independence. While it is true that France must accept its share of responsibility for the economic failures that followed, crippling the Haitian economy by demanding reparations which it could not possibly afford as the price of diplomatic recognition in the 1820s, this does not wholly explain the transformation of a resource-rich island into the impoverished backwater it became. The sugar plantations that had been at the heart of its prosperity were left untilled as Haitians sought an escape from plantation labour, seeing it as degrading and equating it in their minds with slavery and exploitation. They aspired to economic as well as personal independence as part of a free peasantry.5 The result, however, was economic devastation. The larger estates were broken up, and Haiti was soon transformed into a land of peasant smallholdings and subsistence agriculture. In political terms, it might claim to have become a liberated society, among the most equal in the Western world, a society inspired by the memory of Toussaint Louverture. But these gains came at a terrible economic cost. An island which in 1790 had been classed among the most prosperous in the world, producing half the world’s sugar and more coffee that any other place on earth, sank into poverty and deprivation on an unimagined scale.6 The hope and optimism that had greeted Haiti’s birth in 1804 had been quickly snuffed out, to be replaced by a sense of profound abandonment.
By the end of the nineteenth century, living conditions on the island had deteriorated to such a degree that the mass of the population faced levels of penury and malnutrition that were without equal in other parts of the Caribbean. One nineteenth-century historian, writing in Nantes in the 1880s with all the benefit of hindsight and a knowledge of Haiti’s subsequent history, expressed sadness that ‘the former colony of Saint-Domingue which could be one of the richest and most prosperous countries on earth has become one of the most miserable’.7 And that was before the developments of the twentieth century which further ravaged Haiti, and what Jean Casimir refers to as the ‘uninvited intervention’ of the United States in 1915, bringing other problems in its wake.8 Haiti’s development was no longer one that other nations wished to emulate. And a state whose independent history had started with such promise had come to be seen by many as an economic backwater, still prone to the violence and volatility that had characterized it in the eighteenth century, a nation that seemed to pose a dire warning to the rest of the Atlantic world.
1 Pierre Guillaume, ‘L’economie sous le Second Empire’, in Desgraves and Dupeux, Bordeaux au 19e siècle, 192–201.
2 Pétré-Grenouilleau, Nantes, histoire et géographie contemporaine, 145–6.
3 Jean-Pierre Chaline, ‘L’explosion havraise’, in Corvisier (ed.), Histoire du Havre, 188–92.
4 Ada Ferrer, ‘Speaking of Haiti: Slavery, Revolution and Freedom in Cuban Slave Testimony’, in David Geggus and Norman Fiering (eds), The World of the Haitian Revolution, 223.
5 Paul Cheney, Cul de Sac: Patrimony, Capitalism and Slavery in French Saint-Domingue (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2017), 222.
6 François Blancpin, La colonie française de Saint-Domingue: de l’esclavage à l’indépendance (Paris: Karthala, 2004), 7.
7 Castonnet des Fosses, L’ile de Saint-Domingue au 18e siècle (Nantes, 1884), quoted in Blancpin, La colonie française de Saint-Domingue, 222.
8 Jean Casimir, ‘From Saint-Domingue to Haiti: To Live Again or to Live at Last!’, in Geggus and Fiering, The World of the Haitian Revolution, xviii.