2
The opening up of the Atlantic world to trade and settlement heralded a century of growth and increasing prosperity for France’s west coast ports, whose geographic position made them obvious points of departure for the New World. Like Lisbon and Cadiz to the south, or Bristol and Liverpool in England, they were eager to take advantage of the many opportunities that came from colonial trade, including physical expansion, rapid population growth, and exceptional levels of investment.1 Not all ports, of course, benefited to the same degree, and not all showed the same enthusiasm for the new colonial markets that were opening up. Fitting out ships for the long voyage to the Antilles took substantial amounts of capital incurred a high degree of risk, especially during the many wars that broke out between Europe’s colonial powers in the course of the century. Fortunes could be lost as well as won. In the smaller ports, there were often insufficient numbers of merchants to share the investment in Atlantic voyages and thus reduce the risk of loss and bankruptcy, as was the norm elsewhere. Or a port would find itself geographically disadvantaged, too far from the Atlantic or too close to the enemy’s navy in times of war. Dangers lurked. From Norman ports like Rouen and Honfleur a captain had to steer his vessel past the mud banks of the Seine estuary and through the hostile waters and prevailing westerlies of the English Channel before passing Cap Finisterre and moving out into the ocean. So from Marseille, ships had to escape the Mediterranean through the Straits of Gibraltar—a favoured lurking-place for Barbary pirates—before setting course for West Africa or the Caribbean. In wartime, of course, these problems became more marked as the sea routes were littered with English privateers eager to profit from every lapse in the vessels’ defences. The practice of using corsairs to attack commercial shipping was long-established in England, where it had been turned to both military and commercial advantage since the wars with Spain in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries.2
The slave trade formed an important part of Atlantic commerce, but its importance varied from city to city, while a port’s involvement in slaving could change rapidly across time. In the years between 1642 and 1807—from the time when northern Europe began to supplant Spain and Portugal in organizing slave voyages until the first major abolition, in Britain—France was a major player in the slave trade, transporting some 1,188,000 black Africans to the New World. But hers was never a dominant position. In these years, French ships carried only about a third of the number of slaves transported by Britain (3,247,000) and Portugal (3,061,000), and no French port ever came near to challenging Liverpool’s predominance in the trade. Nantes was the most successful across the whole of the century, carrying nearly half a million slaves from West Central Africa and the Bight of Benin, the vast majority to Saint-Domingue.3 Other ports flourished over shorter periods, or had more concentrated periods of activity. Le Havre, for instance, was the first port of any importance to turn to trading in African slaves, and it was one of the last to renounce slaving; but the voyages it fitted out were not spread equitably across the century and were heavily concentrated in the last years of the Ancien Régime.4 Bordeaux only figured among the leading slave ports after about 1750. And La Rochelle, which had been the second most successful slaving port in France, saw its share of the trade decline after 1788, during the very period when other ports were enjoying high returns.5 Each port city responded in its own way to the challenges of Atlantic commerce, and to the problems of finding credit and managing risk. Some gave it up altogether.
As time passed, it seemed that it was the smaller ports that lost out in the struggle for Atlantic dominance. Local circumstances differed from one town to another, though all the smaller towns complained of the fierce competition they faced from their larger neighbours, from ports able to offer more generous credit terms or better placed to take advantage of economies of scale. Lorient is a case in point. It had, as we have seen, become heavily dependent for its wealth on the monopoly of the East Indian trade enjoyed by the Compagnie des Indes after it moved its headquarters and the bulk of its activity there from Nantes in 1733. This did not exclude it from the slave trade, however, as the Company had incorporated the old Compagnie d’Afrique in 1719 and continued to fit out slave ships for Africa for a further fifty years. But the level of its slaving activity declined, especially after periods of maritime warfare. Between 1719 and 1769, it sent 151 slave ships out of Lorient; thereafter it largely left the trade to private shippers, who sent a further twenty-five vessels from Lorient between 1764 and 1790.6 In Saint-Malo, too, merchants’ interest in the slave trade tended to be spasmodic, reflecting the varying profitability of their other commercial ventures; and after 1769, left without the assurance provided by Company backing, few of Saint-Malo’s merchants were prepared to risk major investment in slaving. Trade with the Indian Ocean seemed to offer higher returns and less risk, and the ending of the Company’s monopoly provided the merchants with the freedom and commercial opportunity they desired. In the last twenty years before the Revolution, they placed more and more of their capital in the east, especially in trade with India and China.7
Marseille expanded its trade with the West Indian islands in the last decades before the Revolution, until by 1789 it had become the second port in France for exchanges with the Antilles. The years from 1790 to 1792, before war broke out again, saw more ships fitted out in the city for the colonial trade than at any other moment in the eighteenth century. But Marseille, a long-established Mediterranean port with commercial links in North Africa and the Levant, never became wholly dependent on the Atlantic, or over-exposed to the vagaries of the slave trade. While it was reinvigorated by the opening up of the Atlantic shipping lanes, its merchants continued to develop trade with the Levant; this diversity would prove to be a considerable source of strength when crisis struck in the Caribbean. As Charles Carrière has shown, in the last years of the Ancien Régime commerce with the Caribbean colonies accounted for 23 per cent of Marseille’s activity compared to 44 per cent for Bordeaux. Similarly, the re-export of colonial produce accounted for 11 per cent of total business in Marseille compared to 30 per cent in Bordeaux.8
Others faced more intractable problems. Bayonne’s potential for growth was restricted by the presence of a huge sandbank across the mouth of the Adour, which excluded larger ships and forced others to wait at anchor in the roads before entering the harbour, some for as many as sixty or eighty days. By the 1780s, Bayonne was also dependent on its newly won free port status if it was to have any success in luring trade from its rivals along the north coast of Spain, Bilbao, and San Sebastian. It was a forlorn cause: Bayonne would see its commerce drain away and its population fall steadily across the century, from 15,000 in 1715 to 11,000 in 1764 and fewer than 10,000 by the mid-1770s.9 Its participation in the Atlantic slave trade dwindled, too, with only eight merchants involved and nine voyages fitted out between 1741 and 1792. They were not helped by the tendency, common to all the Atlantic ports, to use larger vessels for slaving, which led to the disappearance of the smaller boats of between fifty and eighty tons in favour of large ocean-going ships of 250–300 tons.10 It was a trend that could not but benefit the major port cities such as Le Havre, Nantes, and Bordeaux, with their larger merchant houses and easier access to credit and investors.
To the north, the smaller ports of southern Brittany and the Loire estuary—Pornic, Paimboeuf, Le Pouliguen, or Bourgneuf—were increasingly drawn into the slipstream of their bigger neighbour, Nantes, serving as feeder ports to the Atlantic trade.11 Even larger ports up the Breton coast, like Vannes, which had fitted out their own transatlantic voyages and had invested in the slave trade, lost out in competition with their bigger neighbour. As the eighteenth century drew to a close, the merchants who traded successfully with the Caribbean and the Americas were increasingly concentrated in four cities: Le Havre to the north, and Nantes, Bordeaux, and La Rochelle on France’s west coast.
Each port exploited its strengths and its value to the expanding colonial population of the Americas, who remained highly reliant on food and other basic commodities imported from France. The Atlantic ports were not only key points of entry for colonial products into France; they were also, necessarily, the source of goods passing in the other direction, in particular the agricultural cereals and industrial staples which were in constant demand in the colonies. For this purpose, geography was everything, as the shippers were dependent on the cities’ hinterlands for the foodstuffs and raw materials their customers required. Some Atlantic ports were better sited than others from this perspective. Le Havre, for instance, benefited from its position at the mouth of the Seine, along which goods for export were channelled; its proximity to Paris meant that it could easily access goods manufactured in the capital; and it also had, in Lower Normandy, a flourishing agricultural hinterland on which to draw. The port’s status had grown rapidly since the early eighteenth century, when it was still principally a centre for deep-sea fishing: on a list of the leading merchants drawn up in the 1680s, all but five had concentrated their energies on catching cod in the Atlantic shoals and off the coast of Newfoundland, while overseas trade, credit, and insurance facilities had been more widely available upstream in Rouen.
Rouen enjoyed other advantages, too. It was the administrative centre for Normandy; it was home to a range of industries, not least in textiles; and it was an important banking centre.12 But by the mid-eighteenth century, Le Havre’s fortunes had changed dramatically. The relationship with Rouen was more one of competition, the two cities vying with each other for commercial privileges and markets, and Le Havre increasingly challenging Rouen’s established position among the merchant elite. In particular, merchants abandoned fishing to concentrate their investment in the colonial trade, and from the mid-1780s expanded their interest in the African slave trade.13 Other, smaller, ports close to the Seine estuary fared markedly less well. Honfleur, which some had earlier regarded as a serious rival to Le Havre at the mouth of the Seine, served rather as a feeder port, taking responsibility for much of the traffic upriver to Rouen and beyond, and taking over from Le Havre as the principal centre for cod-fishing in the Seine estuary. By the eve of the Revolution, the fishing families who had figured among the richest entrepreneurs in Le Havre a hundred years earlier had either given up fishing or had moved elsewhere. The merchant houses of Le Havre were more interested in the profits to be made from trade in colonial produce.14
This new interest in colonial commerce and eagerness to get involved in slaving did not pass unremarked. By the 1780s, the commercial newspapers of Nantes and Bordeaux began to see Le Havre as a serious rival to their domination of the Atlantic, leading them to fear for their own future prosperity. In their view, Le Havre had that precious advantage with which they could never compete: it was the gateway to Paris, which was the unchallenged centre of consumption for luxury goods, with more than a third of the purchasing-power of the entire country and a metropolitan lifestyle no other city could match.15 A study of Le Havre’s merchant elite suggests that they left little to chance, that over the course of the century they developed a coherent commercial strategy, maintaining partnerships with merchants in other ports, choosing an appropriate legal structure for their business, and establishing a high standard of bank credit to tide them over in difficult times. The liberalization of trade in 1784 provided them with an opportunity to expand their trading activities, but, significantly, the nature of their commerce did not change. The big merchant families were discerning, and they knew their business world. They made alliances with third parties to get round blockades; they maintained a prudent balance between the slave trade with West Africa and direct commerce between France and the Caribbean; and they re-exported the colonial goods they imported to their traditional destinations in Scandinavia and the Baltic.16 By the last years of the Ancien Régime, Le Havre was solidly established as the third slaving port in France, behind Bordeaux and Nantes. It was clearly a rival to be taken seriously.
Yet Le Havre remained a small town, provided with modern, elegant buildings that impressed the visitor, yet strangely cramped on a site dominated by its military defences, the ramparts and citadel built for Louis XIV by Vauban. This undoubtedly had the effect of limiting its potential for growth in the early part of the eighteenth century at a time when the bigger maritime cities of the Atlantic coast were expanding rapidly. Le Havre had been conceived as a military town, and in the eighteenth century it still maintained a strong military presence, even if it had never really developed into the major naval port and dockyard that Louis XIV had dreamt of founding. If it had a weakness as a port city, it was the constant threat of silt blocking access to the biggest ocean-going vessels, a threat that became more troubling as it launched itself into the colonial trade in the last years of the Ancien Régime. But that colonial trade implied change: expansion and population growth, much of it drawn from the surrounding countryside and from other coastal towns in Normandy, most notably Dieppe. Successive censuses in the eighteenth century show a town whose population was rising steadily, if not dramatically, from around 12,780 inhabitants in 1723 to 14,653 in 1763 and more than 18,000 in 1787, as opportunities opened up to those who made their living from ships and the sea. The ramparts were finally breached to build new suburbs on land beyond Vauban’s planned city—a move that, after decades of overcrowding on its fifteen-acre site, finally allowed Le Havre to satisfy more of its commercial and maritime potential.17 The years immediately before the outbreak of the Revolution represented something of a boom for the city, and for the triangular trade with West Africa and the Caribbean in particular.
Though the rate of population growth in Le Havre was by no means exceptional across the eighteenth century—it was dwarfed by figures in Bordeaux, Nantes, and Marseille—not all colonial ports benefited equally from the boom years. For La Rochelle, in particular, the eighteenth century was a period of relative decline after years of growth and prosperity. From the sixteenth century the port’s merchants and sea captains had thrown themselves into Atlantic trade, scouring the Americas from Newfoundland to Brazil, and establishing a capitalist network that encompassed Paris and the major French ports, as well as England, the United Provinces, and Spain.18 But this era of prosperity had come to an abrupt end with the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes in 1685, which ended a hundred years of toleration for Protestants in the city. The result had been an exodus of some of the city’s most dynamic Protestant merchants, and with their departure the Protestant dominance in the Chamber of commerce was ended. Wars also caused disruption from which La Rochelle never recovered, while other problems soon presented themselves. Although La Rochelle was a well-established port with longstanding connections across North America, its geographical location was less ideal than it seemed; the narrowness of the old port and its tendency to silt up meant that larger vessels could not access it at low tide. And, unlike the Bordelais with its rich vineyards, the Saintonge and Aunis were regions of relatively poor soil that did not produce the wheat or cereals needed to provision the islands; the wines they produced were of mediocre quality, and much of the coastal land was given over to salt marshes.19
Overseas trade declined over the century as the economy weakened, and if it was still a specialist colonial port on the eve of the Revolution, it operated on a much more modest scale, with only thirty-four ships registered at or departing from the port in 1787 compared to 116 in Nantes, 119 in Le Havre, 146 in Marseille, and 245 in Bordeaux. Even Lorient boasted more shipping movements than La Rochelle.20 Its modest commercial position was reflected in demographic weakness, too. Whereas the second half of the seventeenth century had seen a rapid growth of population, the new century brought decline, with more people leaving than arriving. From 25,000 inhabitants in 1700, La Rochelle’s population fell to 20,000 by 1728, and stood at only around 17,250 on the eve of the Revolution.21 This decline was both absolute and relative as other ports continued to grow and to attract migrant labour. Nantes was now two and a half times its size, Bordeaux five times. And if La Rochelle still had wealthy merchant families who built fine town houses in the old city, they were few in number, and they could not hide the fact that the port was no longer prosperous enough to provide a magnet to the dispossessed of the rural West. Even in the early part of the century, it was difficult to deny that the city’s prosperity was unhealthily dependent on the enterprise of a handful of individuals, or to ignore the fact that a golden age that had numbered it among the premier ports of France now lay well in the past.22
Down the coast, the naval port of Rochefort fitted out some twenty slaving expeditions to the West African coast, almost exclusively in the years after 1770. But it had no claim to being a major colonial port, and, significantly, very few local people were involved in these ventures. Rochefort, like the other naval dockyards of Toulon and Brest, had no tradition of commercial slaving, or, more generally, of fitting out vessels for the colonies. It was a naval arsenal, its activity dominated by the needs of the navy and financing from the state; and state officials played a disproportionate part in organizing and financing these expeditions. Indeed, although naval vessels were seldom permitted to be used for commercial voyages, it is clear that there were occasions when ships of La Royale were authorized to carry out slaving missions on behalf of merchant houses, most notably at those moments when French colonies had reported a dearth of labour and when the government was actively encouraging the slave trade. In 1768, for instance, a naval vessel, Le Salomon, stripped down to maximize its cargo space, was loaned by the Duc de Praslin on the King’s behalf to a merchant from La Rochelle to sail to Cayenne with a cargo of slaves. Similarly, in 1771 and 1786, two naval vessels stationed in Rochefort, L’Expérience and Le Pérou, were lent to merchants to pursue the royal aim of assisting colonization. Both were authorized to carry slaves to France’s Caribbean colonies; in exchange, part of the hold space was set aside for the king’s use. In the hold of L’Expérience, for instance, were goods loaded on the king’s account for use in Gorée.23 These voyages may not have made a major contribution to the pre-Revolutionary slave trade. They did, however, bestow a degree of respectability on a type of trade whose morality was coming to be questioned.
In contrast, eighteenth-century Bordeaux thrived on colonial traffic. The Atlantic trade brought to its merchants a period of unparalleled commercial success, reaching its zenith in the last years before the Revolution, leading to a new confidence and civic pride that was reflected in bold town planning and proud public buildings. But Bordeaux’s wealth and regional prominence did not depend on trade alone, nor was its urban elite restricted to the merchant classes. It was the capital of a province, seat of an archbishopric, and home to a royal intendant and to one of the country’s thirteen parlements. It was, in other words, an important centre of both administration and justice, a city to which people brought civil cases from all over the South-west and where a powerful legal fraternity was clustered. And unlike Le Havre or La Rochelle, Bordeaux was home to a substantial number of local nobles, many of whom would divide their time between the spacious town houses they had built in the city and their wine-growing estates in the Médoc or Entre-Deux-Mers. There was old money in Bordeaux as well as new; and these legal and professional elites, as much as the rich merchants, helped ensure that the city enjoyed a varied and sophisticated cultural life, whether through its learned societies, like the Académie and the Musée, or through the plays presented in its lavish new theatre, the Grand Théâtre, designed by the architect Victor Louis in 1779 and for many the very epitome of Bordeaux’s cultural pretensions. Money was lavished, too, on the construction of elegant squares and boulevards, and on the opening of a public park (the Jardin Public), investments in public space that showed the pride the new commercial elite took in their city and its amenities. But the benefit that accrued was not that of the wider community; every decision taken was carefully calculated to serve the mercantile interest of the elite. As the Intendant wrote in 1746 when announcing the investment in the new park, it had a commercial benefit, too, since its presence on the edge of the Chartrons would encourage lucrative deal-making. ‘In a commercial city,’ he noted, ‘we must see a garden like this as necessary, or at least very useful, to commerce, since merchants will often have occasion to meet and will broker a greater number of business transactions: in this way it will serve as a second stock exchange, one that will be used in the evenings.’24
If merchants invested in public spaces, they also built opulent new houses in suburbs like the Faubourg du Nord and the Chartrons, hôtels distinguished by their classically formal design, their construction in stone, and the fastidious concern for detail that was shown in the use for decoration of wrought iron railings and sculpted masks (or mascarons). That concern for detail was visible on the inside of many of these homes, too, which are characterized by their sweeping staircases and sumptuous interior design.25 What is striking is the concern of so many merchants to build their monument in stone, to invest the profits of trade in real estate and the security it offered. The Bordeaux merchant François Bonnaffé bought some twenty houses in the city over his career, in addition to four properties in the wine-growing lands of the Ambès peninsula. In the course of making these acquisitions, Bonnaffé spent more than 1 million livres.26 In Nantes, too, merchants indulged in speculative building, with some developments, like those in the Île Feydeau or the Quartier Graslin, requiring a capital investment of more than 1 million livres.27 In both cities, speculation flourished, often encouraged by governors and intendants eager to capitalize on their new-found wealth. But Bordeaux was the principal beneficiary, as Nantes was handicapped by its lack of administrative and judicial institutions and by the continued resistance and prejudice with which its plans were met by the provincial estates. As a consequence, Bordeaux’s speculative frenzy lasted forty-six years, compared to twenty-eight in Nantes.28
Bordeaux’s strength lay in the diversity of its trade and especially in the wealth of its winegrowing hinterland. Its merchants sold the wines of the South-west across the world, sending them to the Americas in substantial quantities as well as to its traditional European markets in Britain, Ireland, Holland, and, increasingly, Scandinavia and the Hanseatic ports. There were also more local markets, many of served by smaller barques and flat-bottomed boats that distributed Bordeaux wines within France, along river networks to the interior and to Brittany and the West. In this way, Bordeaux’s merchants maintained links with local distributors and created solid circuits between Bordeaux and Brittany, often setting out from the smaller ports of the Gironde estuary, like Blaye and Bourg, which were positioned closer to the vineyards.29 This diversity was what most clearly distinguished Bordeaux’s position within the Atlantic economy, and it would prove a source of stability in a region continually buffeted by the ravages of war. Unlike Nantes, the merchants never became over-tied to a single trade, or a single destination. Bordeaux boasted the largest port facilities in Europe on the eve of the Revolution, with more than two-thirds of the ships leaving for foreign destinations—3,009 out of 4,215 between 1785 and 1789—sailing to ports in northern Europe.30 This diversity proved crucial in explaining the city’s commercial dynamism. ‘The greatest originality of Bordeaux,’ insists Paul Butel, ‘was to be…the principal marketplace for trade with the Baltic.’31
The eighteenth century proved to be a period of unprecedented growth, when the prosperity of Bordeaux attracted migrant labour from all over the South-west, as well as merchants, ships’ agents, insurers, and importers from across northern Europe and a large number of artists, architects, and town planners from Paris. From a population of around 45,000 in 1700 the city grew exponentially—to 60,000 in 1747 and more than 110,000 according to the census of 1790, a figure that made it the third city of France behind Paris and Lyon. In the process, Bordeaux had developed from being a regional capital, attracting workers from its immediate hinterland, to being a pole of attraction for migrants from across a much wider area, including men and women from towns and villages in the catchment areas of other cities, like Toulouse, Poitiers, or Limoges. Immigrants were attracted by the possibility of employment, in the docks and on ships, of course, but also in ancillary trades like sail-making and bottle-manufacture, in the building trade, in transport, shops, and warehouses. Bordeaux by the second half of the eighteenth century was much more than a commercial port; it was a regional centre of note, a magnet for lawyers and professional men as well as artisans and workers. Some came, of course, as migrants always have, as a result of harvest failures of joblessness at home. But increasingly they came because Bordeaux attracted them, a city that had grown into ‘a remarkable and complex tissue of activities, populations and quarters’, a diversity born of confidence and commercial success.32
Nantes enjoyed less diversity, its economy being more tightly tied to Atlantic trade and especially to the colonies in the Caribbean. Its freedom of choice was limited. It did not have the same options as Bordeaux. It lacked the rich vinicultural hinterland, for Loire wines were less prized than clarets in the markets of England and northern Europe. It could not aspire, as Bordeaux could, to provide the colonies with the grain and flour for their daily needs; on the Loire there was no equivalent of the great flour mills at Tonneins and Marmande. As a result there were limited possibilities for Nantes to engage in direct trade with the colonies, the commerce en droiture that saw Bordeaux ships taking agricultural and industrial goods from France to supply the colonists in return for cotton, tobacco, indigo, and the other products of the plantations. Thus, very early in the century, the city’s merchants made what they saw as an obvious choice: to invest in slaving and the triangular trade with West Africa and the Caribbean. Nantes was a pioneer here, building between 1707 and 1721 a clear dominance over other Breton slaving ports like St Malo and Lorient, and establishing important connections with both the planters in the Antilles and traders in West Africa. If the following decades marked a period of consolidation when they faced stiff competition from other French ports, by mid-century, Nantes merchants established their predominance in the slave trade, a position they largely maintained until the Revolution. But it was not easy: these were years blighted by war, first the War of the Austrian Succession, then the Seven Years’ War, years when few others were prepared to risk so much and when the Bordelais, in particular, sought succour in more traditional European markets. Only in the final years of the Ancien Regime, when Le Havre and Bordeaux flexed their commercial muscles and expanded their Atlantic operations, did Nantes merchants finally see their dominant position in the slave trade threatened by the competition of other slaving cities. Over the eighteenth century, they had bought nearly 450,000 slaves on the west coast of Africa, and with more than 1,400 slave voyages were responsible for 42 per cent of the French slave trade.33 The fruits of their industry were to be seen in the streets around them.
Nantes enjoyed very impressive growth over these years, doubling in population between the end of the seventeenth century and the Revolution from around 40,000 to 80,000, and acting as a magnet for migrants from across the west of France.34 If the port was heavily dependent on the West Indian trade, so, too, was Nantes’ industrial base. In the shipyards along the Loire, workers built the large, heavy commercial ships needed for the Atlantic crossing and the slave trade. And the city’s textile industry, which employed thousands in spinning and weaving cotton, found a lucrative market in the West Indian islands where they sold the brightly coloured indiennages that were so highly prized in planter society (though we should not forget that they were also sold to rich French families for their town houses and rural châteaux). The production of these fabrics, with their bold designs and highly coloured patterns, was a specialism of the city, which had nine factories devoted to their production and which at their peak provided employment for more than 2,000 workers; in 1785, the inspector Watier de Nantes estimated that they turned out around 70,000 pieces each year.35 On the other hand, there is little to suggest that Nantes benefited directly from the importation of cane sugar and other colonial products, at least in the industrial sphere. The sugar that was landed at the port was transported to Orleans and other towns in the interior for processing; it was not processed in Nantes itself.
As in Bordeaux and other port cities, part of the wealth that was created by trade was invested in real estate and reflected in the fabric of the city: the Bourse and the new theatre that was opened at the very end of the Ancien Régime—the Théâtre Graslin—are suggestive of a highly developed civic pride and concern for urban planning. In particular, a new merchant quarter grew up in what had been the outskirts of a city still clustered around the cathedral and its medieval heart: the Quai de la Fosse and the Île Feydeau. And though at the beginning of the century, Nantes merchants were unable to compete with their Bordelais counterparts in matters of wealth and elegance, by 1742 the city authorities were engaged, encouraging merchants to demolish houses along the Quai, contributing half the cost of construction, and insisting that the houses be rebuilt to a clear architectural design and be aligned to the river. On the Île Feydeau, too, though merchants proved hostile to any idea of homogenization and sought to reflect their status and personality in the facades of their new homes, development provided the city with a new and elegant quartier that was a reflection of the taste and values of the merchant community. It helped to attract younger merchants and ship-owners new to the city and to integrate them into the commercial fabric of the city. Of those who built new houses along the Quai de la Fosse between 1718 and 1780, it has been shown that twenty-three were merchants, the architecture of their homes a reflection of their social aspirations. But few of them—no more than 8–9 per cent—came from established Nantes families or could claim to represent old money. These merchants were, in the great majority, a migrant population, men attracted to Nantes by the opportunities it offered for commerce and profit. Around 44 per cent of them came from the surrounding regions, Brittany, the Loire valley, and the West of France; the remainder came from other parts of France or from elsewhere in Europe, or else they were returning to France from the islands.36 Nantes was not only a major port of departure for the Caribbean; it also welcomed back many of those returning to France from the New World, among them hundreds of Acadians from Quebec after the Peace of Paris in 1763.37
If the eighteenth century was a golden age for Atlantic commerce, it was also an age of tourism and travel, when the rich and curious began to visit new places, taste exotic foods, explore historical ruins, and fantasize about the past. For many members of the English nobility and gentry, it marked the high point of a Grand Tour that offered the opportunity to travel and experience other cultures, a Tour that might take in many different regions and cities, but which had its heartlands in Italy and France. Within France, attention was, of course, most concentrated on Paris and the monuments surrounding it, notably the royal palace at Versailles and the great houses of the Île-de-France. But as the century advanced, so people’s curiosity widened to encompass visits to provincial cities and the coastal spa towns of the Mediterranean.38 Travel guides were published which further stirred the curiosity of the traveller and gave shape to his journey, and, among France’s myriad places of possible interest, the port cities of the Atlantic coast could not fail to attract the interest of greater numbers of visitors.39 They came to see places they had heard of or read about; many were prepared to be impressed and to admire. Travel opened their minds and was reflected in a vogue for travel literature, mainly in the form of personal narratives, giving accounts of places visited and wonders observed.40
By the second half of the eighteenth century, the most notable feature of these accounts is the emphasis they placed on the cities’ physical appearance and the quality of their fabric. They admired the public buildings and monuments, noting the clearance of congested slums to make way for open spaces and elegant townhouses. In Nantes and Bordeaux, what most impressed visitors was the speed of their expansion and renewal.41 Some could not hide their astonishment, especially after long wars which, they imagined, would have crippled France’s economy and disrupted its merchant shipping. Richard Hopkins, visiting in Brittany in 1749, had not expected to be confronted with all the symptoms of commercial prosperity that he saw in Nantes, and, as a patriotic Englishman, he could barely hide his dismay. He was, he said, ‘much surprised and indeed sorry to see so much appearance of wealth and commerce, the more so when from many hands I was assured that there was not a merchant in the town who had not lost almost all their vessels in the war’. But if they had, they had not lost their fortunes, as the ships were all insured in London, so that it was the London market that had taken the hit. Instead, ‘in every river, in every seaport town, nay in every ditch, they are building to restore, rather than increase their commerce above what it was at the beginning of the last war’.42 With the return of peace, Nantes would again be ready to compete at sea with Bristol and Liverpool.
The surprise was all the greater for those travellers who had had to labour through mud and ill-made roads in the surrounding countryside to reach their destination. The huge contrast between the wealth of the city and the squalor of the villages and hamlets through which they had passed could not but impress them. In France, as throughout much of Europe, it was a contrast that was often expressed by references to what contemporaries saw as the symbols of civilization, a contrast which they described in terms of wealth and poverty, cleanliness and dirt. There was so little that appealed to the traveller in rural areas, where he was met with a succession of rutted roads, inadequate communications, poor harvests, and miserable inns in the villages through which he passed. In this, the reflections of foreign travellers in France differed little from those of Frenchmen when they travelled abroad. The countryside always seemed dark and impoverished, its inhabitants rude and vaguely threatening. So it would be for the French soldiers who travelled to Spain during the Peninsular War, or for Germans when first they laid eyes on rural Poland. The territory they passed through seemed backward and impoverished, a world away from Paris or Berlin.43 Like all Europeans, they passed judgement on the lands they travelled through and compared them with what they had left at home. For those who came from cities, that comparison could often be unflattering, and the sight of poor rural farmsteads and failed crops only convinced them that they were in a world of mud and filth, misery and underdevelopment. Few found much in the countryside that was worthy of their attention or consideration.
For many travellers to France, Paris was, of course, the yardstick by which other towns were judged, and mostly they were doomed to disappoint. Market towns often seemed to share the misery of their rural hinterlands, and were dismissed as provincial backwaters, far removed from enlightenment and civilization. Even provincial capitals, despite the roles they played in administration and the law, attracted little praise. The English agronomist Arthur Young, on his travels through France in 1787, 1788, and 1789, did not restrict his comments to agriculture and animal husbandry, the subjects on which he could exercise real expertise. He deplored the misery he found in provincial cities, too: of Limoges, he commented, no doubt with some justification, that ‘it is ill-built, with narrow and crooked streets, the houses high and disagreeable’,44 while Rouen was ‘ugly, stinking, close and ill-built’, and ‘full of nothing but dirt and industry’.45 Whatever local prominence these cities might enjoy in Normandy or the Limousin was an irrelevance; to Young they symbolized that misery and lack of technological awareness which were to be equated with backwardness, a lack of enlightenment and civility, and an absence of civilized values. He was an unapologetic advocate of modernization, critical of the values of the local elites and of their stubborn refusal to break with the past.
The inequalities that he witnessed in France seemed especially shocking. Young held forth at length on the baleful effects of noble and ecclesiastical privilege on the prosperity of the nation, and repeatedly condemned the depths of poverty in which the majority of the inhabitants lived. To one of his hosts he commented, rather accusingly, that ‘his province of Brittany seemed to me to have nothing in it but privileges and poverty’.46 For an English agronomist accustomed to see drainage schemes, enclosures, and crop rotations as the requisites of modern agriculture, much of what greeted him in France seemed wasteful and undercapitalized, ensuring that the land would not produce the quantities of grain needed to feed the population and virtually guaranteeing the annual round of undernourishment and seasonal migration which so characterized many regions of the country. Of course, Young was not a neutral observer of French farming methods; indeed, it is often difficult to avoid the impression that he wrote with an assumption of superiority that came naturally to a prosperous gentleman farmer from the Home Counties immersed in the philosophy of his age. Everything he saw tended to be compared—and generally compared unfavourably—to the comfortable life he had left back home in Bradfield.
And yet the port cities of the Atlantic coast proved a startling exception to this perception of a France that was perpetually backward and impoverished. The architecture was often formal, the buildings of stone; they were new, capturing current classical fashion in architectural design. Young’s first impression of Nantes, for instance, was one of surprise and satisfaction. Barely had he pulled out of the marshy landes of the Loire estuary than he was in the city, and the contrast astounded him. In the rural hinterland, he had found little sign of agricultural improvement, little evidence that farmers had learned anything from the experience of the past century. Even the most basic rules of crop rotation seemed foreign to them. ‘Pare and burn,’ he scoffed, ‘and sow wheat, then rye and then oats. Thus it is forever and ever! The same follies, the same blundering, the same ignorance; and then all the fools in the country said, as they do now, that these wastes are good for nothing!’47 But what really shocked him was not the backwardness of Breton agricultural methods, for which he had little respect, but the fact that these antiquated practices were still to be found less than three miles from the commercial metropolis that was Nantes, where life was cultured and sophisticated. Young went to the new, lavishly appointed theatre: it was, he proclaimed, ‘twice as large as Drury Lane and five times as magnificent’, adding that ‘within all is gold and painting’. He also took time to admire some of the city’s other public buildings. ‘The town has that sign of prosperity,’ he remarked, ‘of new buildings, which never deceives. The quarter of the Comédie is magnificent, all the streets at right angles and of white stone. I am in doubt whether the Hôtel de Henri IV is not the finest inn in Europe.’48 His enthusiasm contrasts sharply with the contempt he showed for the miserable provision that he found for travellers in many other French provincial cities. But almost everything he was shown in Nantes seemed to command his interest. He was particularly impressed by the city’s library, or chambre de lecture, an institution which, he discovered, was frequently to be found in France’s trading ports. It was ‘what we should call a book-club that does not divide its books, but forms a library’. He went on to describe the comfort that awaited its subscribers: ‘There are three rooms, one for reading, another for conversation, and the third is the library; good fires in winter are provided, and wax candles.’49 All this Young found to his taste, though he cannot forbear from adding one crucial reservation. ‘What a miracle,’ he sighs, ‘that all this splendour and wealth of the cities of France should be so unconnected with the country!’50 It was an unease that many Frenchmen shared.
In Bordeaux, Young also found a city that oozed prosperity and lavish consumption, and where planners and speculators were executing the most remarkable works of urban renewal, laying out new squares and central quarters that would transform the appearance of the city. He does not stint in his praise. ‘The quarter of the Chapeau Rouge,’ he notes, ‘is truly magnificent, consisting of noble houses, built, like the rest of the city, of white hewn stone.’ He admired the Place Royale, with an equestrian statue of the King at its heart; and he praised the plans that had been prepared for a whole new quarter, with some 1,800 houses, that was to be built along half a mile of the river bank where the old Château-Trompette still stood. As for the city’s theatre, Young shared the view of Bordeaux’s inhabitants that it was ‘by far the most magnificent in France’. The superlatives do not stop there: he heaps praise on building after building, only expressing some reservations about the appearance of the Quay along the Garonne, ‘which is respectable only for length and its quantity of business, neither of which, to the eye of a stranger, is of much consequence, if devoid of beauty’. Overall, however, he makes no secret of the positive impression which the city has made on him. ‘Much as I had read and heard of the commerce, wealth and magnificence of this city,’ he opines, ‘they greatly surpassed my expectations. Paris did not answer at all, for it is not to be compared to London; but we must not name Liverpool in competition with Bordeaux.’51 It was a sentiment with which, he could be sure, the city fathers of Bordeaux—proudly aware of the cultural potential and commercial dynamism of their city—would not hesitate to concur.
Young’s opinion of Bordeaux was widely shared by his contemporaries. Outsiders declared themselves to be impressed by both the levels of investment and the good taste of Bordeaux’s merchant community. In 1783, the young François de la Rochefoucauld, son of the philanthropist Duke of La Rochefoucauld-Liancourt, took time off from his studies to undertake his own Grand Tour of the Midi. In Bordeaux, he admitted to being dazzled by the style and elegance of the architecture and by the activity of the port. ‘The Chartrons’, he wrote, ‘is one of the most beautiful suburbs in all of Europe’, stretching for several miles along the Garonne ‘until you get tired passing between fine houses and a forest of masts, for there are places where you cannot see the river’. To his eyes the houses that lined the quays were ‘almost all fine’, built of dressed stone and to a standard height. He had, he confessed, seen nothing so beautiful in either Lyon or Marseille, while, when talking of Bordeaux’s public buildings, he added that ‘overall, the luxury of the buildings in Bordeaux was as impressive as anything he had seen in Paris’.52 From a Parisian there could surely be no higher praise.
Foreign visitors came from across Europe, attracted, no doubt, by the commercial opportunities which the city offered, and most were unstinting in their praise. Whether it was the Swedish merchant, Hallman, the English Mrs Craddock, or the German Madame de la Roche, the impressions they recorded of the city were universally favourable, seeing in Bordeaux an outpost of urban civilization that reassured and surprised them, offering them both material comfort and—at least for some—levels of intellectual stimulation which they had not expected.53 Hallman, in a letter to the Swedish botanist Carl Linnaeus, emphasized the dazzling opulence of the city and the huge sums spent on meals and balls by Bordeaux’s merchant elite. Expense, he marvelled, was never spared, adding—perhaps with a touch of exaggeration—that for the average négociant it was nothing to serve a dinner with seventy or eighty dishes on the table.54 Mrs Craddock, for her part, remained largely unaffected by intellectual matters; she enjoyed concerts and the theatre, appreciated luxury, and limited her comments to questions of urban elegance, or the wealth and conspicuous consumption of leading merchants and their families.55 Madame de la Roche was the most observant of the three. She was a woman of some education who had read the works of the philosophes and liked to see Bordeaux as the city of Montaigne and Montesquieu. Though she was German, from near Mannheim, she knew Bordeaux well as a friend of the Bethmann family, Frankfurt merchants who had established themselves in Bordeaux and to whom she made regular visits. Bordeaux did not disappoint here. She spent several years in the city, tightly integrated into the merchant aristocracy, and got to know Montesquieu’s château at Labrède and the Montesquieu family. Hers were more than the casual scribblings of a passing tourist; she viewed the city through the eyes of its merchant elite.56
What impressed these visitors was less the city’s historical monuments than the Bordeaux of the eighteenth century, the streets and squares that had been built during the previous decades to accommodate the merchant community, and which seemed to express the city’s commercial dynamism and to epitomize a civic pride which only prosperity could bestow. This pride was not confined to the commercial elite. It extended to high society, to ballrooms and concert halls, art and theatre. Bordeaux was a cosmopolitan city, with, in particular, a well-established German merchant community; it was curious, noted the young Arthur Schopenhauer when he visited the city in 1804, to hear so much German spoken. For him it was a symptom of a more general cultural sophistication and love of the arts. The Grand Théâtre, he thought, was a ‘sumptuous’ building, ‘massive, superb’, the roof ‘supported by magnificent columns surrounded by arcades and decorated with twelve statues’. But his enthusiasm was somewhat dimmed when he had seen the play. ‘It is astonishing,’ he confided, ‘that a town like Bordeaux does not have better actors.’57
Other west-coast ports made a less favourable impression on the visitor, one that was often vitiated by a sense of economic stagnation. At Lorient Arthur Young was more concerned with the inadequacy of the hostelry where he had to stay and the poor stabling provided for his mare. The town’s commerce was in decline following the loss of the East India Company monopoly under Louis XVI. Yet he still has words of praise for the port, and willingly concedes that ‘the town is modern, and regularly built, the streets diverge in rays from the gate, and are crossed by others at right angles, broad, handsomely built, and well paved’. It was a Company town, which meant that it had been logically planned, while the large warehouses built by the Company to store the produce of the Indies gave the port true distinction: ‘they are’, Young notes, ‘of several storeys, and all vaulted in stone, and of vast extent’; they ‘speak’, he adds, of ‘the royal munificence from which they arose’.58 And in Bayonne, though he is aware that silting has caused problems at the mouth of the harbour and that trade is not booming as it had earlier in the century, it is again the fabric of the city rather than the sluggishness of its commerce that holds his attention. ‘Bayonne,’ he says, ‘is by far the prettiest town I have seen in France; the houses are not only well built of stone, but the streets are wide, and there are many openings which, though not regular squares, have a good effect.’ He is particularly impressed by the view from the bridge and the appearance of the houses that fronted the river. The promenade, shaded by trees against the hot summer sun, elicits his particular praise, and Bayonne’s women are ‘the handsomest I have seen in France’. Unlike in the towns of the interior, where ‘hard labour destroys both person and complexion’, they were ‘clean and pretty’, with ‘the bloom of health’ on their cheeks.59 The ports along the Atlantic coast were privileged indeed, their inhabitants enjoying levels of education and culture denied to those whose lives were spent in the small administrative and clerical centres that characterized so much of provincial France.
Young was undoubtedly the most analytical of the many visitors to the west coast ports, and the writer who left the fullest account of his impressions. However, he was not alone in admiring the architecture of these commercial cities, or of expressing some astonishment at the levels of prosperity he observed. But could that prosperity last? In particular, could it survive ten years of revolution and maritime war, when trade was increasingly disrupted and merchant ships were left at the mercy of English privateers prowling the Atlantic sea lanes? Nothing was less certain. Under the Revolution, the inflow of visitors dried up as repression increased and tourists stayed away. But at the beginning of the nineteenth century, encouraged by the truce in the war that was heralded by the Peace of Amiens, visitors began to return. Within a year, nearly 20,000 British travellers came to France, resuming the tradition of the Grand Tour that had been brutally interrupted by the revolution. Some came to the commercial cities of the West, though few left diaries or memoirs to reflect their feelings or leave behind their impressions. Those who did tended to talk of the Revolution as a tragedy, its consequence the decline and ruin of commercial trade and the cities that depended on it. They noted the appearance of neglect and desolation around the docks and talked of the damage done to local industry. Port cities that had prospered on the back of Atlantic commerce now seemed to face only decay, with their docks idle, their industry in decline, and their population shrinking. Foreign merchants who passed through registered their shock that so much prosperity and culture should have been lost in such a short period of time. By 1800, they were already looking back nostalgically on a world they had lost.
1 For an analysis of the ‘golden age’ of slaving in Britain, see Kenneth Morgan, Bristol and the Atlantic Trade in the Eighteenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 128–51; also, by the same author, ‘Liverpool’s Dominance in the British Slave Trade, 1740–1807’, in David Richardson, Suzanne Schwarz, and Anthony Tibbles (eds), Liverpool and Transatlantic Slavery (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2007), 14–42.
2 Nicholas Kyriazis, Theodore Metaxas, and Emmanouil Economou, ‘War for profit: English corsairs, institutions and decentralised strategy’, Defence and Peace Economics, 29 (2018), 335–51.
3 Eltis and Richardson, Atlas of the Transatlantic Slave Trade, 59.
4 Ibid., 56.
5 Ibid., 56.
6 Nolwenn Picote, ‘Lorient, la Compagnie des Indes et la traite’, in Lorient, la Bretagne et la traite (17e–19e siècles), 33.
7 Alain Roman, ‘Les représentations de la traite à Saint-Malo (18e–20e siècles)’, in Lorient, la Bretagne et la traite (17e–19e siècles), 163.
8 Charles Carrière, Négociants marseillais au 18e siècle (2 vols, Marseille, 1973), vol. 1, 65–7.
9 Pierre Hourmat, Histoire de Bayonne, vol.1 Des origines à la Révolution Française (Bayonne: Société des sciences, lettres et arts, 1986), 491–2.
10 Jacques de Cauna and Marion Graff, La traite bayonnaise au 18e siècle: Instructions, journal de bord, projets d’armement (Pau: Éditions Cairn, 2009), 17.
11 Olivier Pétré-Grenouilleau, Nantes: histoire et géographie contemporaine (Plomelin: Palantines, 2003), 96.
12 Pierre Dardel, Commerce, industrie et navigation à Rouen et au Havre au 18e siècle (Rouen: Société libre d’émulation de la Seine-Maritime, 1966), 107–39, 147.
13 Ibid., 61.
14 Jean Meyer, ‘Les paradoxes du succès havrais’, in André Corvisier (ed.), Histoire du Havre et de l’estuaire de la Seine (Toulouse: Privat, 1983), 78–81.
15 Ibid., 75–8.
16 Edouard Delobette, ‘Ces « Messieurs du Havre » : Négociants, commissaires et armateurs de 1680 à 1830’ (thèse de doctorat, Université de Caen, 2005), 513–14, 710.
17 André Corvisier, ‘La part des réalités quotidiennes’, in Corvisier (ed.), Histoire du Havre et de l’estuaire de la Seine, 107–14.
18 Jean-Michel Deveau, La traite rochelaise (Paris: Karthala, 1990), 17.
19 Marcel Delafosse, ‘Le solide 17e et le brillant 18e siècle’, in Marcel Delafosse (ed.), Histoire de La Rochelle (Toulouse: Privat 1985), 196.
20 John G. Clark, La Rochelle and the Atlantic Economy during the Eighteenth Century (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1981), 27.
21 Ibid., 4.
22 Brice Martinetti, Les négociants de La Rochelle au 18e siècle, 27.
23 Christophe Cadiou-Quella and Céline Mélisson, ‘Enseigner l’histoire de l’esclavage à partir des ressources locales: les expéditions négrières de Rochefort’, in Mickaël Augeron and Olivier Caudron (eds), La Rochelle, l’Aunis et la Saintonge face à l’esclavage (Paris: Les Indes savantes, 2012), 311–14.
24 Jean-Claude Perrot, ‘Urbanisme et commerce au 18e siècle dans les ports de Nantes et Bordeaux’, in Centre d’histoire économique et sociale de la Région Lyonnaise, Villes et campagnes, 15e–20e siècles (Lyon: Presses Universitaires de Lyon, 1977), 208.
25 François-Georges Pariset, ‘Le Bordeaux de Boucher et de Tourny’, in Pariset (ed.), Bordeaux au dix-huitième siècle, 581–6.
26 Bertrand Guillot de Suduirant, Une fortune de haute mer: François Bonnaffé, un armateur bordelais au 18e siècle (Bordeaux: Confluences, 1999), 166.
27 Perrot, ‘Urbanisme et commerce au 18e siècle dans les ports de Nantes et Bordeaux’, 208.
28 Ibid., 194.
29 Hiroyasu Kimizuka, Bordeaux et la Bretagne au 18e siècle. Les routes du vin (Rennes: Presses Universitaires de Rennes, 2015), 134–8.
30 Paul Butel, Les dynasties bordelaises de Colbert à Chaban (Paris: Perrin, 1991), 66–7.
31 Paul Butel, Les négociants bordelais, l’Europe et les Îles au dix-huitième siècle (Paris: Aubier, 1974), 23.
32 Jean-Pierre Poussou, Bordeaux et le Sud-ouest au 18e siècle: croissance économique et attraction urbaine (Paris: Éditions de l’EHESS, 1983), 34.
33 Pétré-Grenouilleau, Nantes: histoire et géographie contemporaine, 82–92.
34 Ibid., 101.
35 Samuel Guicheteau, La Révolution des ouvriers nantais. Mutation économique, identité sociale et dynamique révolutionnaire, 1740–1815 (Rennes: Presses Universitaires de Nantes, 2008), 34–5.
36 Yannick Soufflet, ‘Les négociants nantais et l’architecture: le Quai de la Fosse, 1735–55’ (mémoire de maîtrise, Université de Nantes, 2003), 40.
37 Gabriel Debien, ‘Les exilés acadiens après leur départ du Poitou’, La Revue du Bas-Poitou et des provinces de l’Ouest, 2 (1972), 150–1.
38 See, for instance, Aimé Dupuy, Voyageurs étrangers à la découverte de l’ancienne France, 1500–1850 (Paris: Club du Livre d’histoire, 1957).
39 Louis Desgraves, Voyageurs à Bordeaux du dix-septième siècle à 1914 (Bordeaux: Mollat, 1991), 11.
40 Matthew Binney, The Cosmopolitan Evolution: Travel, Travel Narratives and the Revolution of the Eighteenth-century European Consciousness (Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 2006), 141. The same theme is developed in Anthony Pagden, European Encounters with the New World (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1993).
41 Desgraves, Voyageurs à Bordeaux, 135.
42 Jeremy Black, France and the Grand Tour (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003), 141.
43 Nicolas Bourguinat and Sylvain Venayre (eds), Voyager en Europe de Humboldt à Stendhal: Contraintes nationales et tentations cosmopolites, 1790–1840 (Paris: Nouveau Monde Éditions, 2007).
44 Paul Gerbod, Voyages au pays des mangeurs de grenouilles: La France vue par les Britanniques du 18e siècle à nos jours (Paris: Albin Michel, 1991), 28.
45 Arthur Young, Travels in France during the Years 1787, 1788 and 1789 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1929), 113.
46 Ibid., 131.
47 Ibid., 132.
48 Ibid., 133.
49 Ibid., 134.
50 Ibid., 132.
51 Ibid., 67.
52 Jean Marchand (ed.), Voyages en France de François de la Rochefoucauld, 1781–83 (Paris: Honoré Champion, 1938), 111–12; Paul Butel and Jean-Pierre Poussou (eds), La vie quotidienne à Bordeaux au 18e siècle (Paris: Hachette, 1980), 30–1.
53 Maurice Meaudre de Lapouyade, ‘Impressions d’une Allemande à Bordeaux en 1785’, Revue historique de Bordeaux, 4 (1911), 168; Paul Courteault, ‘Bordeaux au temps de Tourny d’après un correspondant de Linné’, Revue historique de Bordeaux, 10 (1917), 134.
54 Butel and Poussou, La vie quotidienne à Bordeaux au 18e siècle, 263.
55 Paul Courteault, ‘Les impressions d’une Anglaise à Bordeaux’, Revue historique de Bordeaux, 4 (1911), 9–23.
56 Desgraves, Voyageurs à Bordeaux, 53–4.
57 Desgraves, Voyageurs à Bordeaux, 110–14.
58 Young, Travels in France, 129.
59 Ibid., 62.