3
Contemporaries did not hesitate to contrast the prosperity of the Ancien Régime with the decay of the revolutionary years. They painted a picture of the eighteenth century as an age of opportunity, when the Atlantic ports had become by-words for commercial success and the quaysides resonated to the cries of dock workers and stevedores filling the holds of ships setting out for the Indies. But all that, they insisted, was now lost. A golden age had been swept away, leaving merchants ruined, ships idle, and the domestic economy of thousands of families destroyed. In the nineteenth century, investment would be diverted elsewhere, to the booming textile towns of the north of France and the coal- and iron-rich provinces of the east. The people of the west and south-west felt neglected, and this led to an outpouring of nostalgia for the monarchy that goes far to explain Bordeaux’s enthusiastic embrace of the Bourbons after 1814 and the continued fascination of historians and collectors in the city for the Restoration period which followed.1 The monarchy was praised for its encouragement of enterprise, for the naval protection it had provided for the merchant community, and for a colonial policy that had opened up European markets for colonial products. All this, it seemed, had been lost in the chaos of the revolutionary decade.
Taken over the century, commercial growth in the port cities of France’s Atlantic coast certainly looks impressive, especially in the decades leading up to the French Revolution. Of course there were discrepancies among them. Not all grew at the same rate, or experienced the same boom years; not all attracted the same entrepreneurial spirit, or showed the same taste for risk. But the general picture is clear: the century saw an expansion in Atlantic commerce that was reflected in higher profits, greater port activity, higher tonnages and volumes of trade, and which—albeit briefly—saw the wealthiest of the port cities, Bordeaux and Nantes, grow at a faster rate than Paris itself. So in the West Indies, against a backcloth of general expansion, volumes of trade with France fluctuated. The century saw a relative decline in the importance of Martinique compared to its Caribbean neighbour, Guadeloupe, and, more importantly, a spectacular rise in the position of Saint-Domingue among France’s Caribbean sugar islands. Sugar was the most profitable of all colonial products, the one that revolutionized taste not only in France but throughout the European world.2 It lay at the heart of the plantation economy, but that does not mean that the colonies were primarily rural, or that the sugar plantation was the centre of Caribbean social life; for France’s West Indian colonies also produced a flourishing urban culture, especially during the key growth years of the second half of the eighteenth century.3 In particular, Saint-Domingue’s two main cities, the commercial city of Cap Français (more commonly known as Le Cap) and the administrative capital of Port-au-Prince, were urban centres of some size and importance. By 1789, Le Cap numbered around 15,000 people and provided the link to the outside world for some 170 sugar estates and 274 coffee plantations; Port-au-Prince was perhaps half that size. Both had the range of amenities, and much of the ambience, that one might find in a major provincial French town. As David Geggus explains, ‘with an uneasy mixture of military and civil government, large theatres, Masonic temples, billiard halls, bathhouses, a fine colonial highway, and growing though recent systems of fountains and aqueducts, the two towns were quite distinctively French.’4 They were also recognizably urban, places where a Frenchman from the metropole could expect to find the amenities he needed for a civilized lifestyle.
Both Le Cap and Port-au-Prince were cities in the throes of rapid growth during the last twenty years of the Ancien Régime, a growth that was reflected in the new quarters that were being opened up and the houses that were constructed in the city centres and in suburbs stretching back toward the mountains. These houses were often of a single storey, especially in Port-au-Prince where people had lurid memories of the destruction caused by earthquakes at regular intervals across the century (there had been five earthquakes in all, in 1701, 1713, 1734, 1770, and, most terribly, in 1751, when more than half the city had been razed to the ground). Many of the new buildings were built of wood and to a colonial design, with covered galleries leading to internal courtyards where people could meet to socialize, offering some protection from the hot tropical sun. The more luxurious of them would be equipped with wells from which dwellers could pump drinking water, another prerequisite of a comfortable lifestyle in the Caribbean.5 Such houses represented a rich investment and could command substantial rents; they were not built for the more modest inhabitants, who were increasingly forced to live farther out from the centre of the cities. A study of notarial records has allowed Paul Butel to identify the groups with money in Le Cap, the groups who were capable of paying high rents for their housing and who would benefited most from the boom years from 1740 to 1780. Among those renting prime properties or who owned the capital necessary for purchase were merchants (unsurprisingly), lawyers (for the legal process was particularly onerous in the Antilles), staff in the colonial administration, and plantation owners who chose to invest part of their profit in urban real estate. Free men of colour figured prominently among them, a sign of their increasing wealth and greater social aspiration. Also significant were the purchases of townhouses by absentee owners, often plantation owners who had left their plantation in the hands of an estate manager to return, or retire, to France.6
So in Guadeloupe, city life was sufficiently varied and sophisticated to appeal to men who had been raised in France, and they came in many different roles: as merchants, ships’ chandlers, shopkeepers, tradesmen, or colonial administrators. It had not always been so: Basse-Terre had been founded as a fortified trading post, which by the second half of the eighteenth century, thanks mainly to the expansion of trade within the Americas and the maintenance of strong cultural ties with France, had developed a discrete urban culture of its own. Its raison d’être remained, of course, that of every colonial port, as a service node for the Atlantic economy; but, as Anne Pérotin-Dumon shows, it was not purely through its trading function that it had grown and developed its particular urban contours. Basse-Terre was shaped by the waves of immigration it received, both white and black, from France and from Africa; by the needs of military defence and colonial administration; by the different requirements of colonial trade in war and peace; and by the range of crafts and trades to which it was home.7 By the end of the Ancien Régime, the city not only had schools and medical facilities to cater for the health and education of the inhabitants, but also boasted shops that sold fine clothes and jewellery, carpets and furnishings, paintings and decoration. It offered inns and meeting halls, theatres and masonic lodges, printing presses and bookshops. From 1775, the island had a regular newspaper in the form of the Gazette de la Guadeloupe and published various periodicals and almanacs. These were features of other Caribbean islands, too, in both the British and the Hispanic world, creating a creole culture that was shared by its different inhabitants and had at its root an Atlantic world that was united by colonial commerce and a taste for urban civilization.8
Back in France, trade with Saint-Domingue had become by the end of the Ancien Régime the single most important source of commercial wealth for the ports of the Atlantic coast.9 But it was not the only source, as Bordeaux’s success makes clear. Ships sailing from the Gironde estuary traded with cities in Germany and the Baltic, with Spain and Portugal, with Ireland, Scandinavia, and beyond. Bordeaux merchants had commercial contacts and agreements with shippers and agents in ports across Europe, while merchants from across the continent flocked to Bordeaux to establish a commercial presence in the city. Bordeaux had a rich hinterland, which provided the port with exports of grain, flour, and wine, as well as more particular regional specialities like prunes from the Agenais.10 Its merchants had long grown affluent on the profits of the wine trade, especially with markets in northern Europe that had been developed since the late Middle Ages and would continue to flourish across most of the century. But it was the opening up of the Atlantic world during the eighteenth century, and the expansion of commerce with France’s possessions in the Antilles in particular, that transformed Bordeaux from a regional port within Europe into a centre of world trade with lucrative investments on both sides of the Atlantic. By the second half of the eighteenth century, a major part of the port’s exports of wine and flour was being despatched to the Caribbean to serve the needs of a fast-growing colonial population, a market that Bordeaux was uniquely well-positioned to capture. The tonnage of the goods exported increased dramatically over the century: for wines, for instance, it increased from an average of 1,800 tons in 1713–14 to 27,700 tons in 1787–9. In terms of value, the figures are equally impressive. In 1788, Bordeaux exported to Saint-Domingue alone wines worth around 4.5 million livres and flour worth 4.8 million.11 These products filled the holds of ships on their long voyage westwards and helped ensure the profitability of the return trip. They go far to explain Bordeaux’s dominant position in direct trade with the islands and the seeming reluctance of many merchants to send their vessels to the African coast.
The heterogeneity of Bordeaux’s merchant community, and the prominent part played by foreign merchants in the business of the port, can be seen as a symptom of economic dynamism, of a community seizing the advantages offered by colonial trade. And over the century colonial traffic did increase dramatically, though Bordeaux appeared relatively slow in exploiting the opportunities offered by the Caribbean, and reluctant to move out of more traditional markets in pursuit of West Indian riches. The fact that it was new and often foreign-owned companies that first traded with Martinique, Guadeloupe, and Saint-Domingue betrays a certain prudence among established merchants in the port, who continued to rely on their profitable markets for wine in northern Europe. It was not until the second half of the century, and particularly after the Seven Years’ War, that Bordeaux became a major Atlantic port. Nantes was the port most prepared to embrace risk, staking all on the Americas, while Bordeaux’s merchant elite preferred to spread their activity across Europe and the world. The eighteenth century saw commercial vessels setting out from Bordeaux for many parts of the globe, among them India, the East Indies, and China. After 1783, there was a cautious enthusiasm for trade with the new United States, though the majority of the ships coming into Bordeaux from American ports were American, not French.12 By this time the Caribbean, and especially Saint-Domingue, was clearly seen as the most lucrative destination for Bordeaux’s high-seas fleet. Yet even in the last years before the Revolution, when Bordeaux’s stake in the Caribbean trade was at its peak, its share was little different from its share in French colonial trade as a whole: in 1789, the city fitted out some 40 per cent of French shipping leaving for Saint-Domingue, and around a third of those arriving back from the islands.13
If Bordeaux flourished in these years, it was because it succeeded in establishing itself as a centre for the lucrative entrepôt trade between France’s American colonies and the European continent. Colonial traffic almost tripled between 1749 and 1788, from some 36,000 tons to more than 87,000 tons when measured by weight. When expressed in the value of colonial goods imported, that growth was even more impressive, rising from a figure of 20 million livres before 1750 to 163 million twenty years later, with tobacco from the southern United States complementing the sugar, coffee, and indigo imported from Saint-Domingue. Bordeaux’s fortunes cannot, however, be measured by colonial imports alone. The city’s wealth stemmed also from the re-export of colonial produce to large parts of northern Europe, a trade which was largely undertaken by ships of other European countries: British, German, Danish, and Dutch. Much of this trade passed through Amsterdam, then later through Hamburg and the Hanseatic ports; and Bordeaux merchants had been pioneers in trade with Russia, conducted through St Petersburg and Archangel.14 By the later eighteenth century, indeed, Bordeaux had become home to a substantial colony of immigrants from Hamburg and other Baltic ports who were engaged in the re-export of colonial produce to their own countries. Among them were the commercial agents who represented Hanseatic merchant houses, some of whom, like J.-J. Bethmann, were to become successful merchants in their own right.15 These two forms of commerce—a colonial trade dominated by native Bordeaux merchants and a European trade that was largely devolved to foreign shippers—grew apace and were mutually supportive, together generating the commercial dynamism on which Bordeaux’s growth was largely dependent.16
That dynamism was reflected in the heterogeneity of Bordeaux’s merchant elite, composed as it was of Protestants, Catholics, Christians, and Jews. In religious terms, Bordeaux was a notably tolerant city, prepared to integrate outsiders and free from the heritage of religious acrimony that had been engendered by the Wars of Religion and which was so evident in La Rochelle. If some had been born in the city, others had migrated there from across the commercial world, from Germany, the Baltic, England, Ireland, Spain, and Portugal, as well as from towns and cities across France. Protestants, it is true, were not admitted to public office under the Crown and had become accustomed to conceal their religious feelings following the revocation of the Edict of Nantes. But after mid-century, when there was no prohibition on worship or expressions of Protestant identity, individual Protestants could choose how to react. If they were strongly committed to their families and to achieving commercial success, not all cared deeply about the religion of their forefathers. Some rallied to the Protestant faith and attended religious services; others showed a marked indifference, or participated with discretion.17 What united them far more was their focus on the commercial opportunities which their presence on the Bordeaux waterfront afforded and the need to defend these against outside competition. In 1789, for instance, when a meeting of the entire mercantile community was called by the city’s Chamber of commerce, more than 500 turned up, men of different religious groupings and national identities, all equally concerned about the implications for their fortunes of the revolution that was being prepared.18
The colonies of foreign merchants in Bordeaux were replicated by colonies of French merchants elsewhere in Europe who formed commercial networks of their own, often based on national and friendship groups. In London, for example, there was an important French presence among City traders, many of them Protestants and Jews who had links with the co-religionists in Bordeaux and who could provide them with valuable contacts in London’s commercial circles. Religious affinity certainly appears to have been a significant factor in forging these friendships. A good example is Theodore Thomas, a Protestant and the commercial agent through whom the leading Bordeaux merchant, Jean Pellet, worked to raise funds on the London market. When Pellet travelled to London, he would often stay with his commissioners: they became friends, much more than just business associates, and they provided an entrée into London’s commercial circles. By 1739, Thomas had risen to be the managing director of a London insurance company that did much of its business in Bordeaux. He was also related by marriage to wealthy figures in the English financial world, where banking and insurance companies could offer better terms than their counterparts in Paris. The links between merchant houses in Bordeaux and financiers in London were a major element in the financial structures the city relied upon at the end of the eighteenth century.19
Though Nantes’ position as a major port was not in doubt in the eighteenth century, its fortunes were less assured than those of Bordeaux, in part because its reliance on the slave trade, and on the heavy, less manoeuvrable ships which slavers used, made it more exposed to attack by enemy warships in times of war. At the beginning of the century, Nantes’ status, even within Brittany, was unremarkable: it was the second port of Brittany for overseas trade, considerably behind Saint-Malo, which enjoyed an outstanding period of prosperity between around 1680 and the end of the War of Spanish Succession in 1715. But the opening up of the colonial market had brought dramatic expansion as Nantes benefited from the explosion of demand for sugar, tobacco, and other colonial products, and by 1730 it had become the most important commercial port in France. But this proved short-lived. By the eve of the Revolution, Nantes had regressed, and though it was still a major slaving port, the other forms of commerce that had sustained it had declined. By 1789, Bordeaux had established a clear lead, as the figures for the value of trade in each port make clear. Bordeaux enjoyed 41 per cent of French commerce by value, compared to 18 per cent for Nantes and 17 per cent each for Le Havre and Marseille.20
The statistics of commercial voyages from Nantes in the second half of the century have been closely analysed by Jean Meyer. He notes that during periods of warfare at sea the activity of the port would suddenly fall away, only to resume with increased vigour once peace was signed. Between the Treaty of Augsburg and the outbreak of the Seven Years’ War, for instance, levels of trade were maintained with around sixty or eighty voyages en droiture each year: the figures for 1752, 1753, and 1754 were seventy-eight, eighty-three, and seventy-nine respectively. The outbreak of war caused the number of departures to collapse, with only one voyage out of Nantes in 1761 and three the following year. Yet, almost as soon as peace was announced, trade picked up again. From only three voyages in 1762, activity rallied so that there were sixty-six in 1763 and 110 the following year. Though figures rose and fell from year to year, the general trend was maintained, of profitable trading conditions in the peacetime years of the early 1770s, followed by a slump in the American War (though never on the same scale as the virtual wipe-out of the early 1760s), then recovery, or at least a partial recovery, after 1783. By the end of the monarchy, however, Nantes’ relative position in Atlantic trade had weakened, and Meyer argues that the apparent ease with which the port recovered after each period of war was deceptive, as the losses suffered were such that merchants were forced to change their priorities and to abandon parts of their activity. Fishing was largely left to Saint-Malo after mid-century, while Nantes’ contribution to privateering expeditions during the second half of the century was of little importance. Scarcely a dozen ships were fitted out as corsairs during the whole of the Seven Years’ War, while in the War of American Independence the number was only three.21 If the American War did not decimate Nantes’ Atlantic trade to the same degree as the Seven Years’ War, the reprise afterwards was less imposing, too. Recovery was proving ever more difficult.
War and peace were the principal determinants of maritime activity in Atlantic waters during the eighteenth century, and with good reason. Almost as soon as war was declared, Britain profited from its naval strength to blockade the French coast and cut off the principal shipping channels, and the French ports began to suffer serious losses of ships, cargoes, and crews. Merchants, ships’ captains, and insurers alike took fright, and responded by cutting back on colonial voyages. In Bordeaux, for instance, where 154 vessels had sailed for the Americas in 1754 and another 147 in 1755, the statistics thereafter tell a story of fear, caution, and diminished activity: 103 departures in 1756, thirty-eight in 1757, then four and eight in 1758 and 1759. Ships stayed in port to avoid capture or sinking; so the reduced number of sailings could expect to be reflected in a smaller number of losses. The figures for Nantes in the Seven Years’ War bear this out. The largest number of vessels lost—twelve—was recorded early in the war, in 1757. Thereafter numbers dropped to single figures: nine Nantes ships were lost in 1758, two in 1759, five in 1760, and then only a solitary vessel in each of 1761 and 1762.22 With few vessels leaving port, there were scant pickings for the frigates of the Royal Navy or for the privateers of the English Channel coast.
For most of the eighteenth century, Nantes’ merchant community had shown an almost stubborn spirit of particularism and a distrust of central authority that was constant from the reign of Louis XIV to the Revolution. This spirit was especially evident over the question of collective representation and in their reluctance to create a chamber of commerce like those in other commercial cities. Chambers of commerce were established, and actively encouraged, by the King, whose decree of 1701 authorized their creation in all major port cities. The advantages were spelt out in the decree. The chambers, it was stated, could represent merchant interests through a single body; they would allow them to speak with a collective voice; and they provided the community with a simple structure and the funding they would require. Other commercial cities had responded favourably, Lyon setting up its chamber in 1702, Rouen and Toulouse in 1705, La Rochelle in 1710, Lille in 1714, and the monarchy had made it clear that any application from Nantes would be approved. But Nantes demurred, insisting that it be allowed to retain its old (and many would say archaic) system of juges-consultes, on the grounds that this was a guarantee of their autonomy from outside interference. As late as 1791, in an address to the city council, the merchants stood by their position. They had, they said, never been forced into any form of corporation, nor were they subject to any direct ministerial regulation, as other towns had been that had set up a chamber of commerce. In truth, they said, choosing their words carefully to assuage the revolutionary authorities, though they had been pressurized many times to fall into line by a succession of royal ministers, ‘the merchants of this city have always rejected the idea with that liberty and energy which they maintained under the former despotism, protected by those rights which at the time we were pleased to call provincial privileges’.23 Theirs was a spirit of defiance that betrayed a deep-seated distrust of authority and a fear of change. It was an attitude that also affected their approach to commerce and to the trading conditions brought on by war. The merchants felt that they had a lot to lose, and much to defend.
The eighteenth century had not only brought prosperity to the west-coast ports; it had also conferred unprecedented prestige on an elite of merchants, ship-owners, and insurers who had established themselves as a sort of commercial nobility, respected for their style and consumerism as much as for the profits they generated. Established merchant families were not only looking after their profits; they were also concerned to maintain their social pre-eminence and their place in urban society. Though they were careful to avoid flaunting their wealth, they lived in large houses, maintained country estates, were leading figures in the commercial and cultural life of their town, and they did not want to run the risk of imperilling their social position by courting dishonour or bankruptcy. They thought and acted as a social elite, as men who might aspire, in the most favourable conditions, to be granted titles of nobility by the king, to live nobly on their country estates in rural Brittany, along the Loire valley, or in the vineyards of the Médoc. For by the mid-eighteenth century there was nothing about commercial activity that would disqualify them from holding noble titles, and there were in all the great Atlantic ports a handful of merchants—a ‘noblesse commerçante’ or ‘noblesse d’affaires’ in the language of Guy Richard24—who could lay claim, at least in a personal capacity, to all the privileges of nobility. It was in Rouen that their number was highest, with fifty-five of the 165 merchants of the town claiming nobility in 1785; Bordeaux’s capitation rolls of 1777 listed thirty-one anoblis out of a merchant population of 455; in La Rochelle, Le Havre, and Marseille their numbers were much lower and the desire for social elevation and privilege less evident.25 They were in many ways an incoherent grouping, some emerging from the local bourgeoisie, others—most notably in Bordeaux—scions of an international merchant community. But the fact that some were to be found in all the principal Atlantic ports is evidence of the status that wealthy merchants now enjoyed and of the social heights which economic success could bring.
The bonds that tied the merchant elite to the local aristocracy were not all one-way, the result of purchase or ennoblement for service to the king by merchants whose coffers were bulging from the profits of trade. For if merchants might seek the respectability that came with a noble lifestyle, some at least among the nobility aspired to make their fortune from commerce. During the eighteenth century there had been a long and sometimes bitter debate between those who believed that the nobility’s function was to fight and serve the king, and whose who, like Voltaire, castigated the French aristocracy for showing an open contempt for trade and admired the way the younger sons of British peers openly embraced capitalism.26 The Enlightenment sided strongly with the modernizers, culminating in 1756 in the publication, in both Paris and London, of the abbé Coyer’s uncompromising tract on La noblesse commerçante, which castigated the aristocracy for their profligacy and demanded that they start to make a useful contribution to France’s economy.27 Coyer’s book could not have been more explicit in contrasting commercial enterprise and aristocratic torpor. Its frontispiece depicted an impoverished nobleman about to board the merchant ship that would take him to future riches, looking down on the coat of arms and titles of nobility that he would leave behind. What good, he asked, could be served by such baubles, by what he now saw as a heap of useless glory?28
His book pointed to a very different future. And as the century progressed, and more and more nobles turned their hand to commercial activities to boost their fortunes, so the longstanding prejudices against commerce began to fade as the threat of public humiliation through dérogeance was withdrawn. From 1669, indeed, commerce on the high seas had been specifically excluded by royal edict from the general prohibition on noble mercantile activity.29 For many, whether younger sons who were unlikely to inherit the family estates, impoverished hobereaux barely able to make ends meet, or young nobles driven by social ambition and economic aspiration, the lure of Atlantic commerce proved too strong to resist. Though the stigma of commerce dissolved only gradually and many nobles continued to profess their distaste for commerce, noble culture was changing. Others saw little reason to abandon the wealth of transatlantic commerce to commoners now that shipping and insurance had become respectable areas of activity. Only retail trade and inshore navigation were forbidden as a cultural change took place that allowed nobles to reinvent themselves as capitalists, merchants, and entrepreneurs.30
Across the region, some nobles responded by investing in trade and commerce. The gravitational pull towards the Atlantic port cities was strong throughout the West and was especially marked in Brittany, a region with large numbers of impoverished nobles and a high proportion of poor and unyielding agricultural land. Brittany was a land of sailors and ships’ captains where the sea played an important part in the lives of the community, where the small ports of the Breton coast had provided both the French navy and the merchant marine with their officers and crews for many generations. The sea and seamanship were in Breton blood, and for the merchants and ship-owners of eighteenth-century Nantes, the hinterland of Brittany was a valued source of seamanship on which they liberally drew as the prospect of Atlantic wealth opened invitingly before them. Nobles were not immune to the call of commerce—or, indeed, of empire, as some joined the mercantile community in sending their sons not just to Nantes, but on to the cities of the French Caribbean, to Pointe-à-Pitre, Basse-Terre, Port-au-Prince, Le Cap, or Les Cayes. For many of them poverty was the determinant factor, the destiny from which, despite their noble status, there was no escape at home in Brittany. They belonged to what Martha Keber describes as the ‘impoverished gentry’, whom respectability and social status impeded from gaining the levels of family income they required. Though social hierarchies were loosening, she argues, they had few choices. ‘Their station in life limited them to the professions of law, the military and the church, yet noble descent counted for little without the money and patronage to establish a young man in an acceptable profession. As a result,’ she concludes, ‘many well-born men languished on their estates, dependent on the productivity of their tenants, and fell year by year closer to penury.’31 A minority, doubtless chosen from among the more enterprising and impatient among them, headed for Nantes to answer the call of the sea.
But it is perhaps too tempting to equate prosperity with the Ancien Régime as a system of government or with the eighteenth century as years of unbroken harmony. For if across the century there were periods of dazzling commercial success, there were also deep troughs that saw profits slump and rows of merchant ships lie idle. By the mid-century, it is true, France’s Atlantic outreach seemed unchallengeable. In the early 1750s, the Breton and Norman ports still controlled the Newfoundland fisheries and the Canada trade, while the market in colonial produce with the West and East Indies was booming. It was easy to be optimistic about the future. But the French faced serious competition in these markets, and not only from Britain. Holland had acquired colonies in the Petites Antilles, while Denmark’s Guinea Company had also established a foothold in the Caribbean in the islands of Saint-Jean and Sainte-Croix and had built sugar refineries in Copenhagen from which to supply much of the Baltic.32 As for Britain, which was less concerned with European dynastic issues than France and arguably more commercial in its approach to foreign policy, it fought a succession of wars as much for trade and colonial expansion as for political advantage within Europe. In what became a keenly fought contest for imperial dominance, France’s colonial possessions were prizes to be seized and haggled over as a precondition for peace. During the frequent periods of conflict, colonies were no longer seen as a peripheral issue; they had become a casus belli in their own right. In wartime many commercial houses stopped sending cargoes across the Atlantic, and trading conditions deteriorated to the point where one historian can suggest that all transatlantic commerce, and the slave trade in particular, had become ‘incompatible with the state of maritime war’.33
Commercial growth was not steady and measured, but spasmodic, determined by external circumstance and by France’s capacity to keep her sea lanes open in the face of repeated blockades and raids on commercial shipping. Given Britain’s naval supremacy, there were limits to what the French navy could do to defend its interests, and during long periods the government found itself unable to respond in any meaningful way to British acts of aggression. During the war of the Austrian Succession, for instance, the French naval minister, Maurepas, lacked the resources to offer meaningful resistance and was able only to send out small squadrons of patrol vessels and the occasional frigate to patrol the French coast. If Britain determined to attack France’s colonial possessions, there was little the French navy could do to deter her. Indeed, such was Britain’s naval superiority that any French response could be little more than symbolic.34
Over the century, wars with Britain were increasingly focused on the colonies, as the British targeted France’s overseas possessions and sought to weaken her grip on empire. In India, in the Caribbean, and off the African coast, British ships sought to intercept French merchant shipping and to seize or destroy French settlements and trading posts. During the Seven Years’ War, for instance, the British navy effectively established British dominance of the Atlantic. In 1759, Britain seized Guadeloupe and held it for four years. In 1762, France’s other island in the Lesser Antilles, Martinique, fell. And though these islands were returned to France under the terms of the Treaty of Paris in the following year, this concession came at a price. In order to retain her colonies in the Caribbean and her share of the lucrative sugar trade, France had to renounce control of most of her possessions in North America and lost territories in India and the Indian Ocean. France, in other words, emerged from the War with her colonial strength undermined and her reputation in the Atlantic world greatly diminished. It took a costly intervention on the side of the Americans in the War of American Independence to regain her Caribbean colonies and to restore her credibility as a major player in the West Indian trade.35
Commercial prosperity was a by-product of peace. The evidence here speaks for itself. In periods of peace French shipping prospered, with increasing numbers of vessels and a vastly larger tonnage involved in Atlantic commerce. When, on the other hand, France was at war—and most especially when she was engaged in a naval war with Britain—that growth slowed or was dramatically reversed. In each of the three major maritime wars with Britain—the War of the Austrian Succession, the Seven Years’ War, and the War of American Independence—levels of colonial commerce slumped as merchant ships became legitimate targets for enemy corsairs and privateers, licensed by their governments to carry arms and seize commercial prizes. Corsairs were not free to do as they pleased: they were authorized—and to a degree regulated—by governments to act in their national interest. In the case of France, they were subjected to a series of rulings that were laid down in a royal ordinance on the navy dating back to 1681, and which would result in the issue of a lettre de marque, needed if their activity were to be legalized. The corsair had to obtain royal authorization for each individual voyage, to be confirmed in writing by the local admiralty, and to leave a caution of 15,000 livres tournois, to be guaranteed by a merchant of solid reputation. In return they were given royal permission to fire on and capture other vessels, but they could not attack indiscriminately. They were limited to taking the ships of enemy states, and the authorization lasted only for the duration of the war. Moreover, their activities and their manning levels were monitored by the authorities. Where a ship’s captain was armed with a commission en guerre, he had to take on at least double his normal crew so as to be able to man the ship’s guns, to board enemy vessels, and to steer any captures back to port. There the prize had to be declared to the port authorities, and it would be thoroughly searched to ensure that the ship really did belong to an enemy power. Only then could it be sold, along with its cargo, and only then was the owner of the privateer, along with his captain and crew, able to share the profits of the voyage.36 It was a perilous enterprise that incurred high risks and loss of life. These profits were far from guaranteed.
Privateering was a long-established weapon of European warfare, and its legitimacy was recognized by all seafaring nations. In peacetime, of course, it was outlawed, and was seen as indistinguishable from piracy; but in wartime even the most respectable merchants might sign up for privateering voyages, looking to the capture of an enemy cargo on the high seas as a profitable alternative to a long voyage to the Americas or the west coast of Africa. It could also be portrayed as a patriotic gesture, depriving the enemy of vital supplies and cutting off the sea routes to their colonies. In the grande guerre de course of the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries—and most notably during the Nine Years’ War of 1688–97 and the War of the Spanish Succession—the most famous French corsairs, men like Jean Bart and Duguay-Trouin, became national heroes, and their expeditions into the Western Approaches out of Dieppe, Dunkerque, and Saint-Malo posed a constant threat to British shipping.37 Saint-Malo, in particular, with a population of 20,000, was a classic cité corsaire, from where privateers roamed the oceans, from Guinea and the Caribbean to Chile and Peru and the fisheries of Newfoundland. In coastal communities, they were far from being peripheral figures drawn from a criminal underclass. Rather, they were civic leaders, men of wealth who commanded high social status and who often moved from winning notoriety as corsairs to serving as officers of the King’s navy. Besides, their activities were much prized since they brought prosperity to their entire community.38
The exploits of French corsairs were widely admired and celebrated in literature and in occasional memoirs. The most famous text of the period, by the seventeenth-century corsair Alexandre-Olivier Oexmelin, was first published in Amsterdam in 1678 before being translated into German, Spanish, English, and French over the following decade.39 Oexmelin, who had been born in Honfleur and who enjoyed a colourful career as a privateer on the Île de la Tortue, captured the imagination of his readers with tales of bravery, temerity, and defiance of the authorities that were, he implied, a part of everyday life in the seas of the French Caribbean. As he described them, his characters were brazen and fearless, carefree buccaneers who lived and died with their sword in their hand. They inspired admiration, not fear, and became natural heroes for succeeding generations of young men with a taste for adventure, appealing to the wild and untamed instincts of the young, to an exotic world of danger, empire, and the sea.
France was not, of course, alone in turning to privateering: it was the resort of every maritime nation, a hallmark of every colonial war. Like piracy, privateering was endemic in the colonial world of the Caribbean and the Americas: indeed, it was an essential part of the economy of port cities like Basse-Terre in Guadeloupe, where coastal trade, contraband, and privateering were interrelated activities, each with an essential place in the economy of the port.40 Indeed, when the British captured Basse-Terre during the Seven Years’ War, one of the main benefits that accrued from the capture was the destruction of a greatly feared nest of corsairs.41 In wartime merchant ships were routinely fitted out for privateering and used indiscriminately by the British, French and Spanish authorities as well as by the United States in the War of 1812. In Martinique and Guadeloupe, however, European governments could exercise little direct control, and privateering, like smuggling, was largely the resort of local people. Privateering had a long pedigree in the region: the islands of the Lesser Antilles were especially feared by commercial vessels from Europe, for whose arrival corsairs would customarily lurk in wait. French merchants viewed the activities of corsairs with a degree of ambivalence. For some merchants privateering was a means of survival during the war years; but for others it was the cause of crippling financial losses. Those who continued to send their ships to the Americas ran huge risks, as commerce had become something of a gamble. For those merchant ships that did get through and escape the attentions of British privateers, the rewards were, of course, considerable. But not all got through, and ships’ captains and merchants risked losing everything in pursuit of these gains. Convoys to and from the Caribbean were routinely attacked at sea. Ships were boarded, commandeered, burned or sunk. Return cargoes from the Antilles were seized and sold by their captors. Crews risked being seized, tried and imprisoned in England. In 1778, the first year in which France was involved in the American War, 110 ships of her merchant marine were seized or sunk by enemy privateers while on the high seas.
The results were easy to foresee. A number of established firms faced ruin as a consequence of corsair attacks, while others were tempted to abandon their commercial activities entirely until peace was restored in 1783. For some merchant houses, indeed, these years only confirmed their worst fears about the shipping lanes of the Atlantic, which they saw as a source of danger more than of opportunity. The larger Bordeaux houses had initially been slow to send vessels to the islands, wary of a form of commerce that tied down large sums of capital and which in wartime incurred high levels of uncertainty. Their natural aversion to risk often returned. Earlier in the century, indeed, it had taken a sea-change in their approach to risk before some of the principal names in the port were persuaded to invest in voyages to the Caribbean or to get involved in the slave trade. Many did so prudently, buying shares in voyages rather than fund entire cargoes, or spreading their exposure to risk by investing in a number of voyages in the same season. In wartime, when losses were being posted daily at the Bourse, they were often among the first to pull back.42
Others chose to gamble, to turn themselves to the uncertain profits of privateering, seeking commissions from the French government and investing in new ships better fitted to this form of trade. Sending merchant ships unescorted to the islands had become too risky, and they felt they had little choice. Insurance rates soared and with them the capital costs of commercial voyages to the Americas, and their crews found themselves forced to take up arms if they were to avoid what they saw as the inevitability of capture and loss. In every war from the Nine Years’ War in the late seventeenth century to the War of American Independence a hundred years later, levels of commercial activity fell away as French vessels were taken as prizes by British warships, with their crews either killed or taken as prisoners to England. In the Seven Years’ War alone, Nantes lost around 115 ships to British privateers, with some of the larger merchants losing as many as five of their vessels. Three merchant houses claimed to have suffered to the tune of more than a million livres. This partly reflected a concerted British campaign against French merchant shipping, and partly the refusal of the French government to provide naval protection for the sea lanes. The result was a disaster for the port. In the three years from 1756 to 1758, thirty-seven of the 104 ships that left Nantes for the Caribbean were captured, while those plying the triangular trade between Nantes, West Africa, and the Americas suffered even more grievously. Of a total of twenty-eight departures, no fewer than fifteen, more than half the total, were lost. When Nantes began to recover, it was through the increased use of neutral shipping and a change of government policy on convoys.43
In each of these wars, the French Atlantic ports lost large tonnages of shipping and recorded dramatic reductions in their commercial activity. Privateering was seen as a form of warfare as much as a mechanism for trading in commercially perilous circumstances, and in each war merchant houses took individual decisions as they made their own calculations about what would be a tolerable level of exposure to loss. Merchants clubbed together to spread risk at times when there were no realistic or affordable rates of insurance on offer. And many did refit ships more customarily used for commercial voyages with the cannon required if they were to succeed as privateers. The numbers varied from war to war, but in each of the wars of the eighteenth century their number ran into hundreds. The figures for Bordeaux alone make salutary reading: here 221 lettres de marque were issued in the course of the War of the Spanish Succession, 150 in the War of the Austrian Succession, 169 during the Seven Years’ War, reaching an unprecedented 412 in the War of American Independence.44 The names of the ships, their owners, and their captains were all recorded in the admiralty’s ledgers.45 If Bordeaux merchants suffered losses to British privateers, they responded in kind, despite the costs that were involved. Captains invested their own money in the hope of sharing in the large profits which a successful privateering voyage always promised, but also because their normal commercial activities had become too risky.
Successful corsairs could easily become local, even national, heroes. In some French ports, and most notably in Saint-Malo, there were long-established traditions of privateering which were seen as both legitimate and honourable, traditions to which the government could turn in moments of national emergency.46 Here corsairs were honoured as patriotic figures who had stood up to the enemy and protected the honour and reputation of their communities. Notable among them in the early years of the century was Robert Surcouf de Maisonneuve, who had captained the corsair L’Aimable during the wars of Louis XIV. His great-grandson, also called Robert, was born in 1773 and grew up in the family tradition; he, too, would serve as a corsair and would go on to satisfy his love of adventure and his hatred of the English in a series of daring attacks on British shipping during the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars. Surcouf captained corsairs around the Channel coast and in European waters, but also, more successfully, in the Indian Ocean, where he harassed and captured East Indiamen on their return from the East laden with treasure. Before he died in 1827 he captured more than forty prizes, built a huge personal fortune from trade, and was rewarded by his government with the Legion of Honour. Like Jean Bart, Surcouf was widely admired, the adventurous hero of popular imagery during the nineteenth century and even the subject of a comic opera (Surcouf) by Robert Planquette in 1887.47 Today there is a street named after him in Saint-Malo, where his statue was funded by public subscription and inaugurated on the Quai de Dinan in 1903. The capital also boasts a street named in his honour. Yet not everything he did was honourable. Like many corsairs, he was a man of the sea prepared to make his fortune by any means available, and after the Napoleonic Wars in 1815 he would be one of the most prominent figures to invest in the illegal slave trade with Africa and the Caribbean, a fact that is largely erased from public memory today.48
Surcouf was not alone in acquiring riches through privateering: others, like Léonor Couraye of Granville, became local notables through la course, acquiring a manor house in the hinterland of the town and living in the style which his wealth permitted. Privateering did not, however, present any guarantee of profit or glory, and many eschewed it. Down France’s Atlantic coast, indeed, only Bayonne stood out as a centre of privateering, its seamen preying on English ships as they slipped in and out of Spanish and Portuguese ports. Over the century, it would be the smaller vessels fitted out along the English Channel, taking advantage of their manoeuvrability and their captains’ knowledge of the tides, that would inflict the greatest damage on the enemy and bring home the richest prizes. But generally, the effectiveness of privateering as a weapon of war declined in the second half of the century. Saint-Malo offers a perfect example, with its privateering voyages during the American War reduced by half since the Seven Years’ War. This may seem curious, in that privateers were also operating in the Caribbean, where the French found powerful allies in American corsairs like the legendary John Paul Jones. But for many the risks simply seemed too great, and they preferred to stand back and wait for peace to be restored.49
The lesson of the eighteenth century seems clear: that if French merchants could contemplate the future with a degree of optimism and equanimity, and in many cases amass huge fortunes from their commercial activities, their prosperity was not assured and was always threatened by the onset of war. Atlantic trade demanded open seaways and the defence of France’s colonies from attack and capture, assurances that could not be given once war had been declared and when all the European states along the Atlantic seaboard were pursuing their ambitions for conquest in the colonial sphere. Britain was the main threat, but not the only one, as Holland, Denmark, and Spain continued their quest for wealth in the Americas, and the peace on which commerce relied was regularly disrupted across the century. In 1789, the outbreak of revolution in France undoubtedly added a new element of disruption which few merchants welcomed. But, whatever these merchants may have said during the following decade, initially at least the Revolution had little effect on business confidence. There was no sudden recession in 1789, or in 1790 or 1791, the years of constitutional monarchy and of the early revolutionary reforms. It was in 1792 that the merchant community really began to suffer, following two developments that were far more ominous for commerce: the first signs of revolutionary insurrection in Saint-Domingue as civil rights were extended to free men of colour, and the declaration of war, first on Prussia and Austria in 1792, then on Britain in the spring of 1793. The wars that followed would disrupt commerce for nearly a quarter of a century and would upset the established order not just in Europe but across the globe: in Egypt and elsewhere in North Africa, in India, and ultimately in places as far distant as Java.50 For the Atlantic ports the twin forces of war and anti-slavery had been unleashed, forces that would go far to destroy the Atlantic economy on which they relied.
1 Jacqueline Du Pasquier, Raymond Jeanvrot, une passion royaliste: naissance d’une collection bordelaise (Bordeaux: Musée des arts décoratifs, 2007).
2 Jean Meyer, Histoire du sucre (Paris: Desjonquères, 1989), passim.
3 Anne Pérotin-Dumon, La ville aux îles, la ville dans l’île: Basse-Terre et Pointe-à-Pitre, Guadeloupe, 1650–1820 (Paris: Karthala, 2000), 13–16.
4 David Geggus, ‘The Major Port Towns of Saint-Domingue in the Later Eighteenth Century’, in Franklin W. Knight and Peggy K. Liss (eds), Atlantic Port Cities: Economy, Culture and Society in the Atlantic World, 1650–1800 (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1991), 87–92.
5 Philippe Loupès, ‘Le modèle urbain à Saint-Domingue au 18e siècle: la maison et l’habitat au Cap-Français et à Port-au-Prince’, in Paul Butel and L. M. Cullen (eds), Cities and Merchants: French and Irish Perspectives on Urban Development, 1500–1900 (Dublin: Trinity College, 1986), 165–79.
6 Paul Butel, ‘Le modèle urbain à Saint-Domingue au 18e siècle: l’investissement immobilier dans les villes de Saint-Domingue’, in Butel and Cullen (eds), Cities and Merchants, 149–51.
7 Anne Pérotin-Dumon, ‘Cabotage, Contraband and Corsairs: The Port Cities of Guadeloupe and their Inhabitants, 1650–1800’, in Franklin W. Knight and Peggy K. Liss (eds), Atlantic Port Cities: Economy, Culture and Society in the Atlantic World, 1650–1800, 58.
8 Pérotin-Dumon, La ville aux îles, la ville dans l’île, 640.
9 Paul Butel, Les négociants bordelais, l’Europe et les Îles au dix-huitième siècle (Paris: Aubier, 1974), 31–5.
10 Christian Bouyer, Au temps des Isles: les Antilles françaises de Louis XIII à Napoléon III (Paris: le Grand Livre du mois, 2005), 177.
11 Jean-Pierre Poussou, ‘Le dynamisme de l’économie française sous Louis XVI’, Revue économique, 40 (1989), 970; Paul Butel, ‘La croissance commerciale bordelaise dans la seconde moitié du 18e siècle’ (Lille: Service de reproduction des thèses de l’université, 1973), 210.
12 Silvia Marzagalli, Bordeaux et les Etats-Unis, 1776–1815. Politique et stratégies négociantes dans la genèse d’un réseau commercial (Geneva: Droz, 2015), 62.
13 François Crouzet, ‘Le commerce de Bordeaux’, in Pariset (ed), Bordeaux au dix-huitième siècle, 223.
14 Peter Voss, ‘Le commerce bordelais et la route d’Arkhangelsk à la fin du dix-septième siècle’, in Silvia Marzagalli and Hubert Bonin (eds), Négoce, ports et océans, 16e–20e siècles (Bordeaux: Presses Universitaires de Bordeaux, 2000), 135–47.
15 François Crouzet, ‘La croissance économique’, in François-Georges Pariset (ed), Bordeaux au 18e siècle, 215.
16 Paul Butel, ‘Le trafic européen de Bordeaux, de la Guerre d’Amérique à la Révolution’, Annales du Midi, 78 (1966), 41.
17 Séverine Pacteau de Luze, Les protestants de Bordeaux (Bordeaux: Mollat, 1999), 111.
18 AD Gironde, C4438, 2 March 1789; Alan Forrest, The Revolution in Provincial France. Aquitaine, 1789–1799 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), 21.
19 Paul Butel, ‘Armateurs bordelais et commissionnaires londoniens au 18e siècle’, Revue historique de Bordeaux et de la Gironde (1974), 152, 161.
20 Crouzet, ‘Le commerce de Bordeaux’, 204.
21 Jean Meyer, L’armement nantais dans la deuxième moitié du 18e siècle (Paris: SEVPEN, 1969), 82–9.
22 Patrick Villiers, ‘Le commerce colonial pendant la Guerre de Sept Ans’, Enquêtes et documents, 17 (1990), 32.
23 AD Loire-Atlantique, L-A 6JJ 36, minutes of the Société d’Agriculture et de Commerce, 21 December 1791; Maurice Quénet, ‘Le Général du commerce de Nantes: Essai sur les institutions corporatives coutumières des négociants au 18e siècle (thèse de doctorat, Université de Nantes, 1973), 22–5.
24 Guy Richard, Noblesse d’affaires au 18e siècle (Paris: Armand Colin, 1974), passim.
25 Ibid., 93–5.
26 William Doyle, Aristocracy and its Enemies in the Age of Revolution (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 50.
27 Gabriel François Coyer, La noblesse commerçante (London and Paris, 1756).
28 Martha L. Keber, Seas of Gold, Seas of Cotton: Christophe Poulain DuBignon of Jeckyll Island (Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 2002), 1–2.
29 Édit portant que les nobles pourront faire le commerce de mer sans déroger à la noblesse. Vérifié en Parlement le 13 août 1669 (Paris, 1669).
30 Guy Chaussinand-Nogaret, The French Nobility in the Eighteenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), 84–116.
31 Keber, Seas of Gold, Seas of Cotton, 12.
32 Bouyer, Au temps des Isles, 60.
33 Karine Perraud, ‘L’armement maritime nantais en période de guerre: étude de la traite et de la course’ (mémoire de maîtrise, Université de Nantes, 1999), 225.
34 Ibid., 9–10.
35 Bouyer, Au temps des Isles, 61.
36 Daniel Binaud, ‘Note sur les corsaires de Bordeaux de la fin du 17e siècle à 1815’, in Silvia Marzagalli (ed), Bordeaux et la marine de guerre, 17e–20e siècle (Bordeaux: Presses Universitaires de Bordeaux, 2002), 121.
37 Michel Vergé-Franceschi, ‘Les Bart: une dynastie d’officiers-généraux de la Marine Royale’, in Silvia Marzagalli and Hubert Bonin (eds), Négoce, Ports et Océans, 371–87.
38 J.S. Bromley, Corsairs and Navies, 1660–1760 (London: Hambledon, 1987), 279–80.
39 The most recent edition of this work is Alexandre-Olivier Oexmelin, Les flibustiers du Nouveau monde: histoire des flibustiers et boucaniers qui se sont illustrés dans les Indes, introduction by Michel Le Bris (Paris: Phébus, 1996). For a brief history of the book in its various editions, see Bouyer, Au temps des isles, 274–7.
40 Anne Pérotin-Dumon, ‘Cabotage, Contraband and Corsairs: the Port Cities of Guadeloupe and their Inhabitants, 1650–1800’, in Knight and Liss (eds), Atlantic Port Cities, 58.
41 Ibid., 66.
42 Butel, Les négociants bordelais, l’Europe et les îles au 18e siècle, passim.
43 Perraud, ‘L’armement maritime nantais en période de guerre’, 17–22.
44 Binaud, ‘Note sur les corsaires de Bordeaux de la fin du 17e siècle à 1815’, 123.
45 Daniel Binaud, Les corsaires de Bordeaux et de l’Estuaire: 120 ans de guerres sur mer (Biarritz: Atlantic, 1999), 279–91.
46 Alain Roman, La saga des Surcouf: mythes et réalités: une famille de marins, de corsaires et de négociants à travers deux siècles de l’histoire d’un port (Saint-Malo: Cristel, 2006).
47 Robert Planquette, Surcouf: Opéra-Comique en 3 Actes et un Prologue (Paris, 1887).
48 Elodie Le Garrec, ‘La place de la Bretagne et des Bretons dans la traite illégale française, 1814–1831’, in Lorient, la Bretagne et la traite: Cahier de la Compagnie des Indes, 9/10 (2006), 121.
49 Michel Aumont, ‘La guerre de course française et atlantique sous Louis XV et Louis XVI, 1744–1783’, in Gilbert Buti and Philippe Hroděl (eds), Histoire des pirates et des corsaires, de l’Antiquité à nos jours (Paris: CNRS Éditions, 2016, 294–8.
50 Desan et al., The French Revolution in Global Perspective, 1.