PART ONE
1
The long eighteenth century marked the high point of France’s Atlantic empire. Before the reign of Louis XIV, indeed, France had been a relatively minor player, and the Atlantic had been largely the preserve of the Iberian powers, Spain and Portugal, and the territories they controlled in Central and South America. The main interest of European governments in the Americas had been to extract precious metals to enrich their rulers and stock their state coffers. But by the second half of the seventeenth century, the balance of power was shifting, as the Spanish and Portuguese found themselves increasingly challenged by other European states for the commerce of the New World. The traditional quest for bullion gave way to a plantation economy, producing goods like cotton, indigo, sugar, and coffee, which were highly prized in the urban centres of the European world. The Iberian monopoly was first broken by corsairs and interlopers from Britain, France, and Holland; then, little by little, the maritime powers of northern Europe gained access to Caribbean markets, and traders from Britain and France, as well as from mainland North America, challenged the Iberian monopoly.1 An Anglo-Spanish treaty recognized Britain’s occupation of Jamaica in 1670, before, by the Treaty of Ryswick, France was accorded the right to annex the western part of Santo Domingo, which as Saint-Domingue would become the richest European possession in the Atlantic world.2
In this way, the North Atlantic was opened up to European settlement, with the maritime powers of north-western Europe—Britain, Holland, and France—extending their influence in the Americas. The eighteenth century was a period of intense colonial rivalry and territorial acquisition, when colonies became one of the principal causes of war between European states, and most especially between France and Britain. Colonies were a major source of both profit and power, and the last decades before the French Revolution were years of intense rivalry over territory, trade, and—increasingly—slaves.3 In spite of the exhortations of free-market economists like Adam Smith in Britain and Gournay or d’Argenson in France, European governments found it hard to break from ideas of imperial preference and continued to seek competitive advantage from their overseas territories. French thinkers, it should be emphasized, had been prominent among the early exponents of laissez-faire economics, with Turgot arguing the need to shift French focus from conquest to commerce and noting that Britain was losing money through its ownership of colonies in North America.4 But these arguments had a limited impact on public policy. This was a period when the French Crown looked to the Atlantic to obtain the wealth that would secure its political and military power at home, while traders and adventurers from metropolitan France, most especially those from a wide tranche of the Atlantic littoral that stretched from Normandy and Brittany in the north to Gascony and the Bearn in the south, sought to make their fortunes across the ocean, whether from deep-sea fishing off Newfoundland, trapping wild animals for their pelts in Canada, or growing sugar and tobacco in the Caribbean.5 They did not, of course, get things all their own way, and between the Treaty of Utrecht at the beginning of the century and the end of the Napoleonic Wars, France would be embroiled in a succession of colonial wars, mainly (but not exclusively) with Britain.
The economic potential of the New World could appear limitless, and observers commented on the range of raw materials and of exotic goods that excited consumers across the continent and provided the French Atlantic ports not only with huge import opportunities but also with a lucrative entrepôt trade to the rest of Europe. This was a trade boom that was consumer-led and reflected something of a revolution in European taste. New markets opened up in response to the sudden availability of colonial produce, among them some that encouraged addiction, from coffee and chocolate to sugar and tobacco, the majority of them sourced from the Americas, while fashion and the clothing industry were revolutionized by the availability of cheap cotton.6 Overall, the commerce in slaves and in colonial goods imported from the Caribbean contributed more than 15 per cent to economic growth in France between 1716 and 1787, meeting a demand that extended across the country and was felt far beyond the Atlantic littoral. Wealthy consumers created a market for semi-luxury products, and the Atlantic merchants were among the first to profit, their business stimulated by the court and public officials in Paris and Versailles. In this respect, in the rather nicely chosen words of Allan Potofsky, Paris served as ‘an urban hinterland for the broader Atlantic’.7
Of all the foodstuffs produced in the colonies, sugar had the most profound effect on European taste: in France, Susan Pinkard notes ‘the array of wafers, biscuits, petits fours and other cakes and pastries that appeared for dessert along with custards, sweet soufflés, fruits and preserves’.8 At the same time, the eighteenth century saw a new fashion for coffee houses, especially in London, where they became centres of conviviality and meeting places for the men of letters and the political elite, and for bars and restaurants in Paris and some French provincial cities. In 1804, Louis Prudhomme would claim that eating out had become so normal for Parisians that their city was now home to as many as 2,000 restaurants.9 While this figure may have been exaggerated for effect, there is no doubt that restaurants, which had been virtually unknown in 1750, were to be found all over the French capital, and that good food and wine were now commonly enjoyed outside the home. There was a social aspect to this, too. Taste was something to be experienced in public, part of a polite sociability that spread across much of urban Europe—and the products of France’s colonies contributed mightily to that process.
The key years of French expansion in the Atlantic world were between 1670 and 1730, when France occupied, founded, and settled at least fourteen colonies in the Americas, stretching from Cayenne, next to Brazil on the north-east coast of South America, to Quebec and the valley of the St. Lawrence in modern-day Canada.10 On the North American mainland, France’s other major settlement was in Louisiana, on the Bay of Mexico, a vast and ill-defined territory that stretched back from New Orleans and up the valley of the Lower Mississippi, and would remain French until Napoleon sold it to the United States in 1803. But popular enthusiasm for colonial conquest should not be exaggerated. The country wanted trading posts rather than permanent settlements on the American mainland, and the numbers of emigrants from France to the New World remained disappointingly small, numbering fewer than 75,000 in 1730. But those who did settle in the Americas worked tirelessly to open up the country, as the example of French Canada demonstrates.
In Canada, New France, and the French Acadian territories along the Atlantic seaboard were lands to be exploited, to make men rich, whether as hunters and fur traders doing business with local Native American tribes or as loggers floating timber down the rivers for export back to Europe. French frontiersmen integrated and procreated with local people, much more than settlers from the Anglo-Saxon countries, until voyageurs of French extraction dominated the fur trade not just in Quebec but across the whole American West. By the first half of the nineteenth century the ratio of ‘Frenchmen’ to Americans in the fur trade of the United States was around four to one, the majority being drawn from among the French voyageurs of Western Canada. In 1832, George Catlin described the men working at the American Fur Company’s post on the Upper Missouri as being ‘nearly all French’, while Francis Parkman described the trappers on the North Platte as ‘half-savage men…all of Canadian extraction’.11 Most were half-castes, métis, belonging to ‘a mongrel race’ in which ‘the French blood seemed to predominate’. They inhabited a wild, frontier world of trading posts and lumber camps, the world so graphically described in the novels of Annie Proulx.12 Here traders and settlers made their own societies with little reference to Paris, and, in contrast to the merchants, ship-owners, sailors, and fishermen of the port cities, they looked to the interior rather than to the ocean, lured by the West in their quest for further lands to exploit and natural resources to pillage.
In administrative terms, France’s American colonies were widely scattered, and little contact was maintained between them. The islands of the Caribbean were a world apart from the settlements in French Canada, and Paris would seem to have had little notion of building a coherent empire across the Atlantic. At first glance, even France’s presence on the North American mainland might appear to lack any strategic purpose. In the years to 1730, for instance, seven separate colonies were established in New France—at Placentia in Newfoundland, Acadia in what is now Nova Scotia, Ile Royale, Louisiana, Illinois, the pays d’en haut or Upper Country, and Canada itself, stretching for some 250 miles along the central valley of the St Lawrence River.13 In wider geopolitical terms, however, this scattered empire made greater sense, stretching like a bow across the interior of the North American continent from Newfoundland to the Gulf of Mexico, an interior defined by the great rivers of the St Lawrence and the Mississippi and linked together by the huge basin of the Great Lakes. Those trekking westwards opened up uncharted territory and cleared forest land for farming. They also discovered the source of the great Mississippi River, from where they followed its course southwards. In 1682, indeed, it was a French expedition, under La Salle, that first canoed the length of the Mississippi down to the Gulf of Mexico.14 And while the British settled the lands of the thirteen colonies the length of the eastern seaboard, the French, despite their small numbers, threatened to take control of the rich, open lands to the north and west. What they often lacked was a permanent administration and the critical mass of people needed to settle and defend the land, which proved a major impediment to colonization. By the middle of the eighteenth century, settlers from the Anglo-Saxon world outnumbered the French in North America by around ten to one, an imbalance that would prove critical in determining the future of the continent. But the French did not give up without a struggle.
The roots of their empire can be traced to 1603 and the first voyage of exploration by Samuel de Champlain to what would be New France. Champlain was not just an explorer, though he is primarily remembered as such. He was also a prolific writer and a skilled cartographer, mapping the territories he discovered and assessing their future value to France.15 Importantly, he was not afraid to treat with the native peoples he encountered. At Tadoussac, around the confluence of the St Lawrence and the Saguenay River, which had been set up as a trading post three years earlier, Champlain signed a peace treaty with the Micmac and other indigenous peoples that would allow the French to establish a durable presence in the region and to dominate the trade in furs and timber. Both sides grasped the opportunity which Franco-Indian cooperation held out for future conquest and, uniquely in the history of Europeans’ dealings with the native peoples, both sides saw advantages in the arrangement. In the view of the Canadian historian David Hackett Fischer, the meeting held by Champlain with leaders of the local Native American tribes at Tadoussac in 1603, known in French as the Grande Tabagie (or ‘Great Feast’), marked the start of an alliance between the founders of New France and three Indian nations from the surrounding region that would establish one of the strongest bonds between Europeans and Native Americans. ‘Each entered willingly into the relationship and gained something of value in return. The Indians acquired a potential ally against their mortal enemies, the Iroquois. The French won support for settlement, exploration and trade.’16 Five years later Champlain founded Quebec, and the settlement of New France began in earnest.17
The conquest of the interior would prove long and debilitating, incurring a high cost in human lives. And riches were far from guaranteed. Much of the French presence on the North American mainland took the form of small settlements and isolated trading posts, many of a temporary character, rather than substantial towns and cities. Their first attempts to settle eastern Canada in the sixteenth century had not been filled with promise, with buildings hastily abandoned and would-be settlers forced to return to France. Just like those who came from Britain and other parts of continental Europe, a substantial number of these first settlers belonged to religious minorities, groups fleeing persecution or leaving their homeland in the hope of establishing Christian settlements in the Americas. In Britain, those refugees often belonged to Puritan cults faced with intolerance at home; and in France, too, it was among the Protestant community, those Huguenots threatened with persecution after the revocation of the Edict of Nantes in 1685, that we find those most attracted to seek out a new life across the Atlantic.18 Persecution served to reinforce their Protestant identity and their desire to settle on territory removed from the spiritual authority of the Catholic Church. Often they joined existing Protestant communities overseas, where they felt confident that they could integrate and pursue their livelihood, frequently as merchants and traders. Some fled to Protestant Europe—to north Germany, Switzerland, or England—to escape persecution. But others went to the Americas, whether to the British colonies in North America, to Quebec, or to Dutch and Danish colonies in the Caribbean. Others again chose to settle in South Africa. In all, they may have numbered as many as 70,000 of the 200,000 who left France during the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, often passing through London or Dublin on their way to the New World.19
How far these refugees were driven by religious conscience, is, of course, debatable: many went on to make highly lucrative commercial careers in the New World and took full advantage of the opportunities it offered. And not all left willingly. Some, even in the last decades of the Ancien Régime, used the threat of emigration to put pressure on ministers to grant them toleration, taking advantage of the periodic wars in the Atlantic to pressurize—some would say to blackmail—their own government.20 They were, they said, prepared to take their families, their wealth, and their labour from France and to settle in what was after 1763 British North America, rather than risk persecution in France, with many planning to set up exclusively Huguenot communities, such as New Bordeaux in the Carolinas, where their religion would be recognized and protected. It seemed a credible scheme, one of a number that were being proposed in these years by their fellow Huguenots. The problem, as so often with French colonial projects, was to find people who were willing to abandon France for a new life in an unknown continent. New Bordeaux was a case in point, its colonists drawn largely from the west and south-west of France. Even as the ship taking the emigrants prepared to leave for the New World, the numbers willing to make the voyage dwindled visibly. What many of them really wanted was not a new life in America, but the promise of religious tolerance at home in France. And if that opportunity presented itself, they were ready to return, or to abandon the project entirely.
Across the eighteenth century, religious persecution accounted for only a small proportion of France’s emigrants. The majority were attracted by profit and the promise of wealth, and many saw a greater promise of prosperity in islands off the American coast. To the north, off Canada, lay rich fisheries close to Newfoundland and Saint-Pierre and Miquelon, which were highly prized by men from La Rochelle, Saint-Malo, and the coastal ports of Brittany and north-west France, and especially, of course, by those who lived in the close-knit fishing communities of the Atlantic and Channel coasts. Like fishermen across Europe, theirs was a dangerous life at the mercy of rocks and currents, which fostered a deep sense of community and interdependence. They were often deeply religious, superstitious about the elements and the workings of fate, communities forged by the sea, their lives punctuated by recurrent tragedy. They had few links with the rural hinterland of their towns and villages, far more with the foreign fishermen whose paths they crossed and whose dangers they shared. For many, the various wars of the eighteenth century had brought new trauma and increased risk, as the men were often impressed into service in the French navy during the war years. The impact on the maritime population could be disastrous, as large numbers of those who were lost to fishing never returned.21 In Dieppe, it was reported in 1744 that the town had lost 3,000 sailors, many of whom had died on board naval vessels, or on privateers, or in prisons in England.22 The fishing boats they had sailed on were laid up, often for good, and in some cases ports gave up fishing altogether. For some who returned there were no jobs to go back to, and emigration to the New World must have seemed an attractive option.
It was further south, however, and especially in the Caribbean, that France’s eighteenth-century Atlantic empire was concentrated, for it was here that the greatest profits were to be made. By the middle of the eighteenth century, the French had colonized eight islands in the Lesser Antilles or Windward islands: Grenada, Martinique, Marie Galante, Guadeloupe, Saint-Christophe, Saint-Barthélemy, Saint-Martin, and Sainte-Croix.23 But their greatest prize was Saint-Domingue, which within a few decades had become the epicentre of France’s Atlantic economy and the wealthiest colony in the whole Atlantic world, easily outstripping Britain’s possessions in Jamaica and Barbados. Crucially, it was a place where Frenchmen were prepared to settle, whether in the open countryside on their sugar plantations or in their town houses amid the relative sophistication of cities like Pointe-à-Pitre and Le Cap, with their clubs and debating societies, their churches and Masonic lodges. Here they tried to replicate the urban culture they had known in Nantes or Bordeaux, and to live the life of provincial notables in a colonial setting. Not everything was ideal, of course. They had to adjust to the Caribbean climate, which could be deadly to Europeans, and many succumbed to the diseases carried by mosquitoes and other tropical insects. But, if these were avoided, the cities of the French Caribbean enjoyed a reputation for elegance and polite society, and life there compared favourably with that in most French provincial towns. Women played an important part in colonial society, and many saw this as a civilizing influence that contrasted with the masculine culture of the American frontier. Creole women were much praised for their elegance and dress sense, and the large number of free women of colour in the cities of Saint-Domingue played a central role in forging Caribbean society.24
Those who left France for the islands were seldom venturing into the unknown. They understood that breaking in the soil or setting up in business in the islands would be hard, unremitting work; and it is true that many died relatively young, often before they saw France again. But they went secure in the knowledge that they would find a French community to welcome them in the Caribbean, and that they would discover the benefits of urban civilization when they arrived. These merchants and colonial administrators seldom complained of boredom. They enjoyed levels of comfort and luxury that they could not have aspired to back in France, in a society where they were spared the pain and indignity of manual labour, where they had slaves to serve them in their homes and work for them in the fields. With the passage of time, and with the birth of the second and third generations of Creoles, men who had set out from France as adventurers and soldiers of fortune saw themselves as increasingly divorced from their home land, and as belonging in Saint-Domingue, their country of adoption. They even described themselves as ‘Americans’. They had been changed by their experience, and it showed: back home in France, people talked of them with growing reserve, even with a certain moral ambivalence. They had developed, it seemed, their own lifestyle, their own values, and a taste for luxury that marked them out from the people they had left behind in the Old World. In the eyes of many back in mainland France, their spendthrift ways implied frivolity and self-indulgence, and their taste for luxury led to accusations of idleness and decadence.25
Part of that moral ambivalence stemmed from the fact that Saint-Domingue, like much of colonial America, was a society built on slavery and on the shipment of black Africans across the Atlantic, through the horrors of the Middle Passage, to cut the sugar cane which, white Europeans had persuaded themselves, was work they were physically incapable of doing in a tropical climate. Originally, in the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, the French had attempted to populate their sugar islands through voluntary engagement, principally in the port of La Rochelle, but by 1717 it was becoming clear that it was well-nigh impossible to persuade young French workers to commit themselves to labour in the plantation economy; conditions were simply too hard, the heat and humidity enervating. And as merchants turned increasingly to African slave labour for the colonies, they lost all interest in other forms of engagement or indentured labour, until in 1774 a royal decree stipulated that it was no longer necessary to sign on French workers or to pay men to populate the Antilles. Abruptly, the system of engagement was abandoned.26 Like the planters on Saint-Domingue, the French Atlantic ports became more intensely dependent on the slave trade in order to profit from the fruits of empire.
The move from engagement to slavery was not achieved without dissent, however, since by the end of the Ancien Régime slavery had become more morally questionable, as men educated in enlightened ideas increasingly challenged institutions, talked about liberty and equality, and argued over human rights. How far could the system of slavery, or the huge profits France made through the use of slave labour, continue to be morally justified, even in the eyes of its own people? For how long could the merchant houses and landed estates, the factories and charitable institutions which derived profit from slavery continue to escape scrutiny for their actions and their investments? If the slaves remained far away, concealed from French eyes by 2,000 miles of ocean, what of the slave trade itself, when the ships consigned to carry their human cargoes left from the Loire or the Garonne for the west coast of Africa, crewed by Bretons or Basques or Gascons who would dock in the port cities of the Atlantic coast before returning home to their villages with tales of their adventures in exotic parts? Did their lips remain sealed? Could Frenchmen deny all responsibility for human trafficking, or was the lure of profit sufficiently strong to blind them to the moral incongruity of the trade? In the course of the eighteenth century, French merchants sent out more than 3,000 ships to the African coast in search of slaves, and transported more than 1 million black Africans to the slave markets of the New World. The toll on human life was a deadly one. Between 100,000 and 200,000 of the captives died before they reached the Caribbean, in addition to more than 10,000 French sailors who lost their lives on slaving voyages.27 It was hard to remain blind to such horrific losses, or to provide a moral justification for human trafficking on this scale. Yet before the second half of the eighteenth century, these questions were seldom discussed. Abolitionism would emerge only later as a political issue, as part of the democratic impulse of the period we know as the Age of Revolutions.28
Saint-Domingue intrigued and fascinated the French. The eighteenth century was a golden age of travel literature, when writers and intellectuals were swept by a passion for the exotic and the Orient, and this curiosity drew them to France’s overseas colonies, too.29 Among eighteenth-century writers on Saint-Domingue, the best known was himself a Creole, Moreau de Saint-Méry, who at the age of nineteen had left his native Martinique to pursue legal studies in Paris before setting out in 1775 to make his fortune, like so many others, in Saint-Domingue. Here he proved himself to be a jurist of some distinction, a leading member of the masonic lodge and a self-proclaimed son of the Enlightenment; the planters were highly litigious, and the young lawyer became a wealthy man.30 In 1785, at the age of thirty-five, he was elected to the Council of Le Cap, in 1789 played a limited role in the first months of the Revolution, and throughout his life would retain a passion for the island and its people. But he remained a figure of deep contradictions. Though liberal on particular issues—on the status of free men of colour, for instance—he was also, in revolutionary terms, a deeply conservative, if not an openly reactionary figure who after a few months changed his allegiance and joined the Club Massiac, the organization most closely aligned to the interests of the rich planters in the Caribbean. In this, he illustrated better than most the fundamental dilemma of the colon and colonial administrator, forced to choose between accepting a new sort of society on the one hand and maintaining colonial authority on the other.31 The violence that followed drove him into emigration in the United States, and in 1797, from exile in Philadelphia, he published the first volume of his great work on Saint-Domingue—his Description topographique, physique, civile, politique et historique de la partie française de l’isle Saint-Domingue. This was the fruit, he said, of around fourteen years’ work, packed with administrative and religious detail and containing telling comment on the climate, culture, and character of the population. A second volume followed in the next year, and a classic of French literature was born, a book that set out to explain exactly what most clearly distinguished the French colonists of Saint-Domingue.32
In the Description topographique, French readers could find information on every aspect of colonial life. They read about the conditions of the soil in the different parts of the island, the extent of landholding, the level of church attendance, the population of every commune, and the numbers of slaves that each man held. But what the book sought to do above all else was to explain to the French something of the grandeur of Saint-Domingue, a colony which, until the unremitting violence unleashed by the French Revolution, had been, Moreau claimed, the envy of the European world. The riches of the island were described in alluring detail, but so were the frequent tensions that had developed with successive waves of immigration from Europe— [omit space] especially tensions between those who had been born in Saint-Domingue, the Creoles, and those who had come more recently from France, bringing different demands and expectations. Many of the new arrivals had served as soldiers in the wars and had gone on to own land and oversee plantations. But they found it hard to break into the society of Creoles, those who had been there for a generation or more and who suffered problems of a different sort. Moreau talks of the temptations of luxury and idleness, of the destructive pleasures of gambling, of oversexed appetites which drained away the robust physical health of youth, of the passivity and self-indulgence that came with being served by others at all times. These, he believed, could have a detrimental effect on their physical strength and expose them needlessly to sickness and disease. Moreau goes so far as to imply that their premature youth and the abuse of alcohol and sexual pleasure help explain the high death rates and the proneness to suicide among the Creole population.33 Reading the Description, it is hard to avoid the conclusion that Moreau commented on Creole society less from the standpoint of a fellow Creole than through the eyes of a French outsider who had become increasingly critical of the island’s society and seemed detached from the attitudes he observed.
The eighteenth-century French Empire was not, of course, confined to the Atlantic; the colonies there were part of a wider, global economy that stretched as far to the east as to the west. France had also established a presence in the Indian Ocean, and though she had entered the race for India rather later than either the British or the Dutch, by the mid-eighteenth century France had established outposts across the Indian Ocean. The first steps in opening up Asian trade to French commerce, taken by Colbert in the 1660s, had hardly been encouraging, as the original flotation of a French East India Company, the Compagnie des Indes Orientales, was seriously undersubscribed.34 But Colbert was eager to establish a government-protected company that would enjoy a monopoly of the Asian trade, to be run in accordance with his mercantilist principles, and the Company benefited from the many favours and privileges that the monarchy could bestow. In 1665, it was granted a fifty-year monopoly on French trade in the Indian and Pacific Oceans, a region stretching from the Cape of Good Hope to the Straits of Magellan. It was also granted a concession in perpetuity for the island of Madagascar, as well as for any other territories it might conquer in the Indian Ocean. It had some notable successes in its early years, setting up successful ports on the islands of Bourbon (today’s Réunion) and Île-de-France (Mauritius), and established a number of important trading ports on the Indian mainland, most notably at Pondichéry and Chandernagore on the east coast and Mahé on the west.35 The government involved itself in the struggle for trading posts, backing the aggressively expansionist policy of the Governor-General, Joseph-François Dupleix, in the 1740s, which inevitably brought the French into conflict with the British and the Dutch. This was not an issue that could be left to commerce. Colonial trade was a matter for the state, and for the military, too.
In India, as in other colonial spheres, France suffered severe losses during the Seven Years’ War which provided encouragement to those reformers, like André Morellet, who advocated free trade and opposed company monopolies. They bore some responsibility, indeed, for forcing the French East India Company into liquidation in 1769.36 Its buildings and property were seized by the state in return for paying off the Company’s debt, and its monopoly privileges were abolished. For a brief period, French India was opened up to commercial competition, but investment declined along with the number of voyages to the East Indies from French ports. Morellet’s victory proved short-lived.37 In 1785, four years before the outbreak of the French Revolution, the monarchy reconstituted the Company with a share capital of 40 million livres, and restored its monopoly, if only for a fixed term of fifteen years. Though this allowed for the injection of large sums of money into French trading operations in India, it proved of short duration and did little to appease the fears of the French community in the sub-continent. They were alarmed by other developments in colonial administration which suggested that the French government was losing interest in the colony. The shift of the capital to Port-Louis on Mauritius, the withdrawal of the last European troops from French India, and the decision in 1787 not to rebuild the damaged fortifications of Pondichéry all suggested a reduction in government support and weakened the colony’s defensive capacities in the face of Indian or British aggression.38 When, in 1790, the revolutionaries abolished all commercial monopolies and opened up East Indian trade to independent merchants, the Company could not cope with the effects of competition. It collapsed ignominiously four years later, its reputation tarnished by corruption, bringing the Jacobin leader Georges Danton down with it in what was probably the biggest corruption scandal of the Revolutionary years.39
In contrast, the Atlantic economy emerged from the pre-Revolutionary years on a buoyant note. Between 1716–20 and 1784–88, the quantity of goods shipped in and out of France’s Atlantic ports trebled; their value—without taking account of inflation—increased five times, a figure that far outstripped the growth figures of British ports across these years.40 An increasing proportion of that trade was with France’s overseas colonies, especially with her transatlantic possessions; indeed, France’s North American and Caribbean trade across these years rose by a factor of ten. Commercial optimism grew apace, especially during the last years of the Ancien Régime, when, with peace signed in 1783 to end the War of American Independence, commercial shipping again enjoyed freedom of the seas. By the outbreak of the Revolution in 1789, French commerce had reached record levels, with the consequence that many merchants had redirected their shipping operations to the Antilles and began to dream of a future of limitless growth, with their port cities booming and employing ever more workers as crewmen and stevedores. Sugar, indigo, rum, molasses, and the myriad products of France’s overseas colonies held out the promise of ever-growing wealth and prosperity, and of the social esteem which such wealth brought to successful merchant houses. Increasing numbers of merchants, lured by the promise of quick returns on their investments, fitted out ships for the Atlantic crossing, and especially for the Caribbean. There was a buzz about the quaysides of Bordeaux, Nantes, and Le Havre that exuded confidence and prosperity.
But rapid colonization brought risks, too. For the individual merchant the profits of a trading season could be jeopardized by misfortune, by a shipwreck, or the loss of a crew, or the seizure of a ship by pirates and corsairs. It was a period of flux, when ambitious young merchants could hope to find a place among the elite, but when a number of established merchant companies were ruined or faced bankruptcy. There were other threats, too. The cost of colonial expansion, to both the government and the tax-payer, had been immense, drawing France into a succession of costly wars that had drained the country’s reserves and contributed to the fiscal crisis in 1787 and 1788, which made political reforms unavoidable and nudged the country towards revolution. In part, of course, this can be explained by the refusal of the privileged orders to accept that they should be taxed. However, it was France’s involvement in war, not least her ill-advised entry into the War of American Independence in 1778 to pursue her colonial rivalry with Britain, that finally threatened the monarchy with bankruptcy. The finances of the state were always precarious, though in normal circumstances they could be managed and massaged through resort to a variety of credit mechanisms. But a succession of wars had put this balance in jeopardy, and the cost of credit rose steeply. The five years of war between 1778 and 1783 cost the French exchequer more than 1 billion livres—more than twice the annual revenue of the state41—and left the Controller-General with a budget where more than half the revenue generated was spent on servicing the national debt. Since this required unpalatable political reforms, reforms which Necker’s false optimism in his budget statement of 1781 had appeared to render unnecessary, the administration was faced with a political stalemate at a time when the demands on the exchequer continued to rise. For the fiscal crisis could not be divorced from political crisis. In John Shovlin’s words, the political economy of France cannot be explained—and could not be solved—by fiscal measures alone. It was necessarily ‘at the confluence of old regime political culture and the institutional structures of the fiscal-military state’.42
In the peacetime years after 1783, France still needed to maintain a standing army to defend her position in Europe; to renew her fleet if she was to remain competitive with the Royal Navy; and to pay the costs of protecting French global commerce. France tried to do all these things, seeming oblivious to the consequences. Like Britain and Spain, she engaged in an ambitious shipbuilding programme to try to make good the losses in war, but this was an arms race she could ill afford. The French were not deterred, however, launching thirty-eight new ships of the line in the ten years after 1783, to Britain’s forty-four and Spain’s twenty-three.43 Given France’s position in the world, this construction programme cannot be seen as excessive,44 but it was economic folly. The interest rates offered by international creditors were unsparing, putting the French government at a cumulative disadvantage when compared to her competitors. While the Dutch government could access credit at an interest rate of 2.5–3 per cent, and Britain at 3–3.5 per cent, investors were charging France a much higher rate (between 4.8 and 6.5 per cent). These higher interest rates made investment in French debt attractive to foreign investors who could not get a similar return in their domestic markets. But for the French there was a cost. ‘The convergence of growing wealth, growing needs and growing supplies of international capital,’ concludes Lynn Hunt, ‘made it possible for the French to borrow themselves into bankruptcy.’45
The years of optimism could not last. By the early 1790s, France’s merchant community would be embroiled in political disputes about privilege and monopoly which risked pitting them against the Revolution in Paris, even as the stability and profitability of transatlantic trade were once again undermined by foreign war. In retrospect, the years between the end of the War of American Independence in 1783 and the declaration of war on France’s principal colonial rival, Britain, ten years later proved something of a false dawn, bearing a promise of colonial prosperity that would never be fulfilled and tempting many merchants into overinvestment and bankruptcy. For the same decade that marked the high point of France’s colonial trade was to herald the near-collapse of the country’s Atlantic empire. The speed of the decline in commercial activity was quite startling, replacing the mood of optimism in the merchant community with a deep-seated sense of insecurity. Between 1789 and 1792, for example, there were 152 slave voyages out of Nantes; but the number of ships involved in the trade each year fell steadily, from forty-six at the beginning of the Revolution to only six four years later.46 Waterfronts that had only recently resounded to the bustle of docks and shipyards and the clamour of crews leaving for the Caribbean had fallen ominously silent. The Atlantic ports that had, a few years before, pointed France towards a glorious commercial future based on transatlantic exchange had now, it seemed, been unstuck by internal turmoil and foreign war. What, many asked, had gone wrong? And was the Revolution to blame?
In fact, appearances in the last years of the Ancien Régime were deceptive. If the French emerged from this period on an unprecedented high, the eighteenth century as a whole had not spelt unbroken prosperity or colonial success. If it was to be successful, trade required a sustained period of peace and international stability to allow ships to be fitted and crewed, voyages to be planned, and transatlantic crossings to be made in relative security. Wars imperilled all these things, and the eighteenth century had been a century of war, war that had too often been waged over colonies and the Atlantic trade routes.47 The War of the Spanish Succession, at the beginning of the century, had been a conflict over access to the commercial wealth of the Spanish empire in the Americas, and Britain had emerged from it with important concessions. The next colonial war—in 1739—was a consequence of Britain’s determination to hold on to these privileges, and, rather ominously, it started in the Americas. In the same way, the Seven Years’ War was, outside of continental Europe, a global war between Britain and France over colonial possessions, one which Britain, with its parliamentary institutions and tax structures, was better equipped to wage. The City of London was already proving its worth as a source of cheap and reliable borrowing for governments facing the extreme, exceptional costs that waging war entailed, whereas the French had no such resource, and were thrown back on the markets of Amsterdam and Antwerp, as well as London itself, to raise the sums that their war effort required. The Bourbons also lacked the tax base of the British Crown, the foundation on which the fiscal-military state was built.48 By the end of the eighteenth century, a strong fiscal base, combined with established networks of private contractors, was seen as increasingly necessary for any ruler bent on pursuing a successful campaign of colonial warfare. The lack of such a base placed France at a permanent disadvantage every time a naval or colonial war threatened.
For geopolitical reasons, France had no choice but to fight on both land and water, to raise large continental armies to combat attacks from Austria or Prussia at the same time as constructing a navy that could match Britain at sea. This proved a costly imposition, and one which almost certainly doomed France’s military ambitions from the start. It is a supposition that France’s later involvement in colonial conflicts—whether with Britain in the War of American Independence after 1778 or with the United States in the so-called ‘Quasi War’ of 1800—did nothing to dispel. Yet France, it might seem, had little choice, as she needed to be able to defend her colonies and her place in international trade. And that was not easy, as commercial rivalries extended across the globe. According to the French government’s own secret estimates, in 1788 France dominated trade in the Caribbean, Spain enjoyed the lion’s share with South America, Britain had a slight edge in trade with the newly independent United States, and the British and Dutch far outstripped the French in trade with China and India.49 If world trade was developing rapidly, the European trading nations were developing strengths and weaknesses, and these would increasingly inform their commercial strategies. For France, the waters of the North Atlantic seemed the most remunerative and among the most propitious. It was there to be conquered.
The relatively short period of colonial prosperity that France experienced after 1783 was exceptional even within the prism of the eighteenth century. It was the fruit of a rare victory over Britain at sea, the consequence of France’s cripplingly expensive and ultimately misguided decision to take part in the War of American Independence. On the colonial front, the American War was simply the latest of a long series of conflicts, and one of the few where the French had emerged with tangible gains. It was undertaken, indeed, largely to gain back a little of the prestige lost in 1763. By the terms of the Peace of Paris, the French had had to cede their major possessions in mainland North America, India, and Senegal in West Africa. Quebec and her other Canadian possessions were handed over to Britain and Louisiana to Spain. Senegal had to be sacrificed, which had been a major source of West African slaves for the sugar plantations for the Caribbean, many shipped through the island of Gorée which the British had seized in 1758.50 France’s only consolation—and it was a significant one—was that she had been allowed to retain her sugar islands in Guadeloupe, Martinique, and especially Saint-Domingue, which had proved by far the most profitable of her colonies. To preserve Saint-Domingue, France’s leaders were fully prepared to cede Canada to Britain: at the time, it seemed a price worth paying in order to secure the ‘pearl of the Antilles’ and to maintain France’s presence in the Caribbean.
Why was Saint-Domingue deemed so valuable as to justify the cession of sucha huge and potentially wealthy land-mass as Canada? In part it is because eighteenth-century Frenchmen had little reason to appreciate Canada’s future potential. The country remained seriously under-populated by Europeans, and appeared little more than a series of settlements along the St Lawrence River with trading posts for trappers in the hinterland beyond. The geopolitical possibilities of a territory that could link east to west and follow the Mississippi down to its mouth in Louisiana were only poorly understood. Besides, in commercial terms Canada seemed of little value compared to the eye-watering riches of the Antilles. In 1789, Saint-Domingue produced half the world’s exports of coffee and sugar; it accounted for two-thirds of the goods imported to Europe from all France’s colonies, and produced twice as much income for France’s royal coffers as Spain’s richest colony, Mexico. It was also the most heavily populated of the Caribbean sugar islands: Britain’s most developed colony in the West Indies, Jamaica, produced only about a third of the sugar grown in Saint-Domingue and had only about half the population. Seen from this perspective, it is easy to understand why Paris was so reluctant to lose Saint-Domingue, or why many in Paris were prepared to accept the loss of Canada without demur.
Yet with the benefit of hindsight, even that calculation proved problematic. The French Atlantic world was more mutually dependent, and more inextricably entangled, than many contemporaries realized, as the loss of Canada and subsequently of Louisiana would undermine France’s ability to supply and provision her possessions in the Caribbean. The principles governing France’s relations with her colonies were long-established and were supposedly to the advantage of both the colonies and the mother country. Mercantilist policies made the colonies entirely dependent on France and French produce; and the primary purpose of islands like Saint-Domingue was, as Manuel Covo has insisted, to engage in capitalist agriculture and farm lucrative crops like sugar and coffee that could not be produced in Europe; this was the very basis of the rationale for slavery. Under the terms of the Exclusif—the regulations that governed trading relations between France and her overseas colonies during the Ancien Régime—France had enjoyed a monopoly over the colonial produce of its possessions overseas, leading in principle to a situation where France would import the entire crops of sugar, rice, or indigo and either use them for her own consumption or take advantage of free ports on the French mainland to re-export them, free of import duty, to customers across Europe. In return, France would supply the colonies with the basic commodities they needed and which they could not grow on their own soil—everything from corn and wine to timber and fish, much of it carried in French ships on their return voyages from ports like Bordeaux and Le Havre to the Caribbean.
Much, but not all: traditionally the French had brought some of this produce, and heavier goods like timber, from French North America. The Peace of Paris took away this option, and it proved a real challenge to provision the colonies, especially in years of war when the shipping lanes to and from the Antilles risked being cut. At such times it was customary to allow neutral vessels to break the national monopoly and import goods to the colonists, while smugglers, ever-present in the waters off the Americas, could be assured of good business.51 After 1763, indeed, those defending France’s mercantilist laws came under increasing pressure from reformers and those advocating a free market in colonial goods, and saw this as a possible way to combat British ambitions in the Americas. French trade could be strengthened, they argued, through such collaborations, without incurring the costs of establishing a formal empire. France could also aspire to a share in the lucrative American trade that had been thrown open through Britain’s loss of her thirteen colonies.52 Thus we find that by the end of the Ancien Régime, the Exclusif was rarely enforced to the letter as neutral ships increasingly became involved in colonial commerce, with the new United States the principal beneficiary. In 1785, for instance, American ships were allowed to trade directly with the entrepôt ports of Pointe-à-Pitre and Basse-Terre in Guadeloupe, and foreign merchants were authorized to import some foodstuffs, primary materials, and animals into the colony on the same terms as French traders. By 1788, a new pattern of trade had emerged, with the port of Basse-Terre alone seeing 304 ships take on cargoes. Of these, only forty-two were French; one was Danish, four Dutch, and forty-eight British—with the others, 209 in all, being registered in the United States.53 Even without the Revolution, France’s traditional position in the Caribbean—as, indeed, in the Indian Ocean—was coming under pressure, and many were persuaded that as the century drew to a close, it was Britain, and not France, that looked best placed to assume the role of a truly global power.
1 David Eltis and David Richardson, Atlas of the Transatlantic Slave Trade (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2010), 21.
2 Paul Butel, Histoire de l’Atlantique, de l’Antiquité à nos jours (Paris: Perrin, 1997), 143.
3 Richard Bessel, Nicholas Guyatt, and Jane Rendall (eds), War, Empire and Slavery, 1770–1830 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), 1–18.
4 Anthony Pagden, Lords of All the World (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995), 192; Andrew Hamilton, Trade and Empire in the Eighteenth Century Atlantic World (Newcastle-upon-Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2008), xxiii.
5 Butel, Histoire de l’Atlantique, 143–4.
6 For the impact of colonial goods on public taste in Britain, see James Walvin, Fruits of Empire: Exotic Produce and British Taste, 1660–1800 (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1997), passim.
7 Allan Potofsky, ‘Paris-on-the-Atlantic from the Old Regime to the Revolution’, French History, 25 (2011), 91.
8 Susan Pinkard, A Revolution in Taste: the Rise of French Cuisine (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 235.
9 Rebecca L. Spang, The Invention of the Restaurant: Paris and Modern Gastronomic Culture (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000), 173.
10 James Pritchard, In Search of Empire: The French in the Americas, 1670–1730 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), passim.
11 Leroy R. Hafen (ed.), French Fur Traders and Voyageurs in the American West (Lincoln: Nebraska University Press, 1997), 11.
12 See, for example, Annie Proulx, Barkskins (New York: Fourth Estate, 2016).
13 Pritchard, In Search of Empire, 31.
14 Catherine Armstrong and Laura M. Chmielewski, The Atlantic Experience: Peoples, Places, Ideas (Basingstoke: Palgrave-Macmillan, 2013), 9.
15 David Hackett Fischer, Champlain’s Dream: The Visionary Adventurer who made a New World in Canada (Toronto: A. A. Knopf, 2008), 5–6.
16 Ibid., 134.
17 Gilles Havard et Cécile Vidal, Histoire de l’Amérique française (Paris: Flammarion, 2003), 13.
18 Jon Butler, The Huguenots in America: A Refugee People in New World Society (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1983).
19 Mickaël Augeron, ‘Les Huguenots et l’espace atlantique: aux sources d’un riche patrimoine historique et mémoriel’, in Mickaël Augeron, Didier Poton, and Bertrand Van Ruymbeke (eds), Les Huguenots et l’Atlantique, vol 1: Pour Dieu, la Cause ou les Affaires (Paris: Les Indes savantes, 2009), 27.
20 Owen Stanwood, ‘From the desert to the refuge: the sage of New Bordeaux’, French Historical Studies, 40 (2017), 11.
21 Alain Cabantous, Dix mille marins face à l’Océan (Paris: Publisud, 1991), 161–206; for a more general discussion of the identity of fishing communities, see Alain Cabantous, Les citoyens du large: les identités maritimes en France (17e–19e siècle) (Paris: Aubier, 1995), passim.
22 Renaud Morieux, The Channel: England, France and the Construction of a Maritime Border in the Eighteenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016), 211n2.
23 Pritchard, In Search of Empire, xvii.
24 Dominique Rogers and Stewart King, ‘Housekeepers, merchants, rentières: free women of colour in the port cities of colonial Saint-Domingue, 1750–1790’, in Douglas Catterall and Jodi Campbell (eds), Women in Port: Gendering Communities, Economies, and Social Networks in Atlantic Port Cities, 1500–1800 (Leiden: Brill, 2012).
25 John Shovlin, The Political Economy of Virtue: Luxury, Patriotism and the Origins of the French Revolution (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2006), 42–3.
26 Christian Huetz de Lemps, ‘Engagement et engagés au dix-huitième siècle’, in Paul Butel (ed.), Commerce et plantation dans la Caraïbe, 18e–19e siècles (Bordeaux: Presses Universitaires de Bordeaux, 1992), 66–9.
27 Robert Louis Stein, The French Slave Trade in the Eighteenth Century: An Old Regime Business (Madison: Wisconsin University Press, 1979), xiii.
28 See, for instance, Joanna Innes and Mark Philp (eds), Re-imagining Democracy in the Age of Revolutions: America, France, Britain, Ireland, 1750–1850 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013).
29 There is a burgeoning literature on Orientalism, both in France and the English-speaking world. Most influential is Edward Said, Orientalism (London: Routledge, 1979).
30 David Geggus, ‘Moreau de Saint-Méry et la Révolution de Saint-Domingue’, in Dominique Taffin (ed.), Moreau de Saint-Méry ou les ambiguïtés d’un créole des Lumières (Fort de France: Société des amis des archives et de la recherche sur le patrimoine culturel des Antilles, 2006), 129.
31 Dominique Taffin, ‘Introduction’, in Dominique Taffin (ed.), Moreau de Saint-Méry ou les ambiguἳtés d’un créole des Lumières, 7.
32 Moreau de Saint-Méry, Description topographique, physique, civile, politique et historique de la partie française de l’isle Saint-Domingue, Paris, 1796–7, reprinted in 3 volumes, eds. Blanche Maurel and Etienne Taillemite (Paris: Société de l’Histoire des Colonies Françaises, 1958).
33 Ibid., 39.
34 Glenn J. Ames, Colbert, Mercantilism and the French Quest for Asian Trade (DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 1996), 22–6.
35 The most authoritative recent history of the Compagnie des Indes is Philippe Haudrère, La Compagnie française des Indes au 18e siècle, 1719–1795 (2 vols) (Paris: Les Indes savantes, 2005).
36 André Morellet, Mémoire sur la situation actuelle de la Compagnie des Indes (Paris, 1769).
37 Anoush Fraser Terjanian, Commerce and its Discontents in Eighteenth-century French Political Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 147–50.
38 Mike Rapport, ‘“Complaints lost in the wind”—French India and the crisis of the absolute monarchy: a global dimension?’, in Julian Swann and Joël Félix (eds), The Crisis of Absolute Monarchy: France from Old Regime to Revolution (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 223–4.
39 Albert Mathiez, ‘Un procès de corruption sous la Terreur, l’affaire de la Compagnie des Indes’, Annales Révolutionnaires, 13 (1921), 516.
40 François Crouzet, ‘Angleterre et France au 18e siècle: essai d’analyse comparée de deux croissances économiques’, Annales: Economies, Sociétés, Civilisations, 1966, 261.
41 Peter McPhee, Liberty or Death: The French Revolution (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2016), 38.
42 Shovlin, The Political Economy of Virtue, 152.
43 Jonathan R. Dull, The Age of the Ship of the Line: The British and French Navies, 1650–1815 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2009), 119.
44 Jonathan R. Dull, The French Navy and American Independence: A Study of Arms and Diplomacy, 1774–1787 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1975), 336.
45 Lynn Hunt, ‘The Global Financial Origins of 1789’, in Suzanne Desan, Lynn Hunt, and William Max Nelson (eds), The French Revolution in Global Perspective (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2013), 33.
46 Nathalie Touzeau, ‘Etude des expéditions négrières nantaises sous la Révolution Française (1789–93) au temps des droits de l’Homme’ (2 vols, mémoire de maîtrise, Université de Nantes, 1993), 2, 4–6.
47 Geoffrey Plank, ‘War and Warfare in the Atlantic World’, in D’Maris Coffman, Adrian Leonard, and William O’Reilly (eds), The Atlantic World (London: Routledge, 2015), 275.
48 John Brewer, The Sinews of Power: War, Money and the English State, 1688–1783 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990).
49 See Desan et al., The French Revolution in Global Perspective.
50 Cyr Descamps, ‘Gorée au temps de la Compagnie des Indes, 1718–1758’, in Lorient, la Bretagne et la traite, 17e–19e siècles: Cahier de la Compagnie des Indes, 9/10 (2006), 202–3.
51 Manuel Covo, ‘Baltimore and the French Atlantic: Empires, Commerce and Identity in a Revolutionary Age, 1783–1788’, in Adrian Leonard and David Pretel (eds), The Caribbean and the Atlantic World Economy: Circuits of Trade, Money and Knowledge, 1650–1914 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015), 89.
52 Ibid., 90.
53 ‘Arrêts et ordonnances portant sur le commerce entre la Guadeloupe et la métropole’, in Françoise Koest, La Révolution à la Guadeloupe, 1789–1796 (Basse-Terre: Archives Départementales, 1982), ‘La Guadeloupe en 1789’.