5

Populating the French Atlantic

The slave trade, in France as in all the slaving nations of the Atlantic, had grown out of a conviction that white men could not work in the intense heat of the Caribbean and that Europeans were uniquely exposed to the fevers that periodically decimated their numbers. It was a claim repeated almost mechanically in the pamphlets published by the pro-slavery lobby and by the chambers of commerce of the Atlantic ports. Africans, they had convinced themselves, enjoyed a stronger physical constitution and were better acclimatized to the ravages of tropical diseases: they could therefore endure hard physical labour under the boiling suns of the West Indies to a degree that Europeans could not hope to do. For some, this contrast was part of a wider problem: how to explain negritude, how to give meaning to skin colour. It was a question that fascinated theologians and philosophers alike, and the eighteenth century tended to look for an explanation in nature, to see the colour of a man’s skin as a direct reflection of his exposure to heat. This might not seem entirely satisfying as an explanation, as there were no black-skinned peoples native to the Americas, even in regions close to the Equator, but many authors persisted in voicing this view. The French naturalist and cosmologist Georges-Louis Leclerc, comte de Buffon, maintained in 1777 that winds and altitude were also relevant determinants. He argued that it was ‘the excessive heat that is encountered in some countries of the world’ that made for black skin colour, and that such heat is not to be found in mountainous countries like Peru or the interior of Africa. Hence ‘it is on the west coast of Africa, the countries from which slaves were exported to the New World, that are to be found men of the blackest complexion’.¹ From this it followed logically that Benin, Senegal, and the Bight of Guinea were among the best places in Africa to trade in slaves.

The forced migration of millions of Africans to the slave plantations of the American South, the Caribbean, and Central and South America was undoubtedly the most brutal part of the movement of peoples across the Atlantic world, but Frenchmen were affected, too, as imperial conquests brought new scope for trade and travel between continents and hemispheres. Like Britain, eighteenth-century France had a global presence, even if, as a result of a series of wars, her outreach was increasingly curtailed as the century progressed. Her empire offered economic, administrative, and military opportunities to people who would never previously have dreamt of crossing the ocean in search of wealth and security for their families. France’s eighteenth-century world stretched from the Americas to the Levant and from the Caribbean to the East Indies, and her merchants, seamen, planters, administrators, craftsmen, and soldiers criss-crossed that world to an unprecedented degree. Not all were rich. In the Caribbean islands, the less affluent could find a niche and prosper, and even former indentured servants went on to own land.² Back in Europe, the Atlantic achieved a new familiarity and immediacy in everyday life. In French ports local people mingled with ships’ captains and crews recently returned from exotic overseas parts; and, as consumers, they became accustomed to the delights of sugar, coffee, tobacco, and the produce of foreign climes. Elizabeth Marsh, the heroine of Linda Colley’s global narrative of the British Empire, may not have had a precise French equivalent: she did, after all, live an exceptional life even for Britain, passing seamlessly from Jamaica, where she was born, to London, then to Menorca and Marrakesh, then on to the Cape and Rio, before finally following her husband to India, where she died of cancer, in Calcutta, at the age of only forty-nine. But she illustrates perfectly the global character of the eighteenth century colonial world, and, more generally, of European empires. ‘Elizabeth Marsh’s existence coincided with a distinctive and markedly violent phase of world history, in which connections between continents and oceans broadened and altered in multiple ways. These changes in the global landscape repeatedly shaped and distorted Elizabeth Marsh’s personal progress.’ Hers is, Colley insists, ‘a global story’.³ It is one that would have found instant resonance across France’s overseas empire.

The Atlantic world was built around human mobility. The belief that tilling Caribbean soil was an activity that must be reserved for Africans had developed only gradually, with the consequence that it was only around the mid-eighteenth century that white Europeans were finally supplanted by African slaves as labourers on West Indian plantations. In the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, in contrast, it was largely Frenchmen who had laboured in the Caribbean heat, and during the first decades of France’s presence in the Antilles there had been repeated migrant voyages from France, and especially from the regions of the west and south-west that formed the hinterland of the great Atlantic ports. Those who left were drawn from a wide spectrum of trades and professions, some paying their own way, others sailing as engagés, their passage paid in return for a period of contracted labour once they had reached the islands. Some of the migrants were merchants set on enriching themselves and on exploiting the growing market for colonial produce. But most were men of modest means, who could not find the price of their ticket but who were imbued with ambition and a sense of adventure. They were recruited with government support, and in the first years of the scheme, from 1699, volunteers were not hard to find.⁴ They would sign a sworn contract before a notary, accepting to work for three years for colons who, in return, paid for their passage. Those who sponsored them did so out of the myriad motives that underpinned the imperial dream. Like their British counterparts, they hoped through migration to ensure imperial and domestic security and to strengthen the French economy; they held out the prospect of social betterment to the poor and vulnerable; but they were primarily concerned to ensure profits for themselves through higher productivity and cheap labour.⁵ They were not philanthropists.

The practice of engagement had begun at a time when the government was anxious to populate its Caribbean islands with Frenchmen, and voluntary engagements of this kind—of those who became known as les trente-six mois—continued until 1772, when the scheme was finally abandoned. By then the planters had no need for their services. They had turned to slave labour, which both made the scheme unnecessary and discouraged French workers from accepting any form of legal commitment that would equate their labour with that of slaves.⁶ For the French workers, their status as free men was a key part of their identity and self-esteem. But the planters and merchants also resisted the temptation to enslave white men for the plantations, despite the higher costs involved in seeking their labourers from Africa. And though they generally believed their own propaganda about the need for African labour to resist the Caribbean heat, climatic arguments were only part of their rationale for engaging in the slave trade with West Africa. They also shared in a more general European culture that found the idea of enslaving fellow-Europeans repugnant. There was a cultural element in this that was almost ideological, and from the time of the earliest colonization in the sixteenth century there had been no serious effort to enslave fellow Europeans, whether the poor from their own society or prisoners captured in war. ‘In a fundamental sense,’ concludes Seymour Drescher, ‘early modern Europeans were culturally inhibited from enslaving each other, while uninhibited from, and even encouraged to, enslave others.’⁷ Even the most impoverished of white men, once settled in the French Caribbean, enjoyed personal freedom and the status that went with it.

But the years of engagement left their mark on the Caribbean economy. Substantial numbers of poor whites had left France for the islands, with many electing to stay on after their legal commitment was over. Some became habitants in their turn, clearing ground for cotton or sugar cane, and, after several good harvests, employing their own slaves to spare themselves the hard manual labour of tilling the soil.⁸ Others stayed as seamen, artisans, or small shopkeepers. They had been chosen for the skills that they brought to a community that was sorely in need of them, and they played an important part in building a diversified French community in the Caribbean. They had just one thing in common. They enjoyed a privileged status that distinguished them from the slave majority, and they cherished it.

The presence on the islands of Frenchmen of different classes and social outlooks is important in explaining the relative complexity of Creole society. The French who settled in Saint-Domingue—as in the Petites Antilles—were not simply a governing and plantation-owning elite. They came from all classes of society. In a study of the rôles d’armements of the port of Nantes, Corinne Janin has concluded that in the fifty years before engagements were abandoned, some 4,435 men embarked in Nantes to seek their fortunes in the New World.⁹ The majority of these were young: the law stipulated that they must be aged between eighteen and forty, but the overwhelming majority were under twenty-five, sometimes well under: the high number who declared their age as eighteen (556 in her sample) makes one suspect that younger men were falsely claiming to be eighteen so as to be admitted to the scheme. Many came from Nantes and its immediate hinterland, though among these were men who had journeyed to the city with the express purpose of signing their engagement. Beyond the city, two regions stand out as suppliers of colonial labour: Brittany, where most men came from the textile towns of the interior, and the Loire valley, most notably Anjou, where, by contrast, the majority came from farms and rural villages. The number of Breton sailors leaving through Nantes for the islands was consistently low, perhaps because they were drawn to other ports of departure, like Saint-Malo, or perhaps because there was enough work to be had at home. Along the Loire valley, Tours, Angers, Saumur, and Orleans were active centres of emigration, towns which were regular stopping points for river craft and where significant numbers were employed in the sugar refineries that treated the raw sugar imported from the islands through Nantes.¹⁰ Most had skills that would be of value in the New World: they had worked with wood and metal, in the building trades, or as textile or leather workers.

A similar pattern can be observed in all the west-coast ports which sent engaged men to the Antilles. Jean-Pierre Poussou, who has examined departures from Bordeaux between 1713 and 1787, concludes that two-thirds of those emigrating through the port came from the south-west, and that, more generally, around 40 per cent of all emigrants from France in these years came from the south-western quarter of the country. Bordeaux itself produced significant numbers of those who sought to make a new life in the islands, with the Charentes and the Pyrenees not far behind.¹¹ Again, not all were native to their port of departure. Many had travelled from the towns and villages of the interior to claim their passage from Bordeaux, from across a broadly defined region that included the Agenais, the Rouergue, the Albigeois, and the Toulousain.¹² Bordeaux served as a magnet for all those who, whether through poverty or ambition, set out to make their fortune in the New World.

By far the most popular destination for the engagés was Saint-Domingue. From Nantes, for example, 2,642 men embarked for Le Cap or Port-au-Prince over these years, compared to 1,265 for Martinique (the second most popular destination), and only 201 for Guadeloupe.¹³ Not all were employed on the plantations that spread over the plains and the lower slopes of the mountains; many joined the administrators and merchants who settled in the cities, flourishing urban centres that reminded them of the provincial France they had left behind. These towns had grown rapidly, often in spectacular style, during the second half of the eighteenth century. Each had its style of life and its distinctive elite. Thus, if the French administration, answerable to the Intendant and General, was concentrated in Port-au-Prince, Le Cap was home to a dynamic merchant community, as powerful a group here as they were in Nantes or Bordeaux. They needed space to talk and plot deals, and from 1761 the city was endowed with its own Chamber of commerce, just like any French port city of this period.¹⁴ Smaller towns had a more specialized role. Fort-Dauphin was a fortified town on the frontier with the Spanish part of the island, while Jacmel, Jérémie, and Saint-Marc were all important centres of maritime trade.¹⁵ But all were recognizably urban. For a young man plucked from one of the cities of western France, the urban texture of the Caribbean provided reassurance and familiarity, while the major cities offered many of the cultural facilities of metropolitan France: libraries, reading circles, masonic lodges, and—perhaps the most popular form of entertainment in the Caribbean—theatres with resident troupes of players. Moreau de Saint-Méry, who himself had headed one of the lodges in Le Cap, laid special emphasis on freemasonry as a source of sociability in the city. Of the Lodge ‘L’Amitié’, he wrote fondly that it was situated in the outskirts of the city, close to where it merged with the countryside. ‘Here we had the benefit of being able to hold lodge meetings with the doors wide open, without fearing being watched by non-believers, which is an inestimable advantage in a hot climate.’ He added that he had attended a large number of its meetings and had witnessed generous acts of charity ‘which provide a fitting response to those who argue that the lodge does nothing useful; it provides the opportunity for us to meet, an opportunity that is so rare in Saint-Domingue’.¹⁶

Some met to discuss politics and public affairs, taking advantage of the arrival of ships from France to keep abreast of events in Europe. To this end a learned society, the Cercle des Philadelphes, was established in Le Cap in December 1784, which would develop into one of the principal philosophical societies of the age. Its membership was divided into three distinct classes that took account of the floating nature of colonial society: there were resident associates, who lived in Le Cap and its immediate hinterland; colonial associates, who were based elsewhere in the islands; and national or foreign associates, drawn from the transient population of French and foreign merchants who came and went with the merchant marine. But their constitution stated firmly that only the resident members, whose number was limited to twenty at any time, could direct the work of the society or elect its office-holders.¹⁷ In its purpose and social composition, the Cercle closely resembled the academies and learned societies of its day. Its members were men of substance: besides a few merchants, they were drawn primarily from among the ‘grands blancs’ of colonial society, planters, government officials, magistrates, and members of the liberal professions. Many were also freemasons. They would seem to have been especially interested in botany and the challenges of agriculture in the tropics, a subject that made regular appearances on the agenda of its fortnightly meetings. Outside of its meetings, the Cercle had many of the trappings of a gentlemen’s club, providing its members with a library, a cabinet to study the physical sciences, and a botanical garden. It offered an entrée into polite society and held out the promise of intelligent and cultured conversation.¹⁸

But it was at the theatre that colonial society most often congregated to relax and be entertained. The theatre had social value too, as a brochure published in 1774 made clear: it provided distraction to merchants and tradesmen alike and encouraged a degree of social integration. ‘If theatre is useful in Europe where there are many other means of distraction and relaxation,’ it argued, ‘it is even more indispensable in the colonies where there is nothing but this single establishment.’ The author was not only thinking of entertaining the population; he was also concerned with public order in a town with a large population of artisans and single men. ‘Experience shows us that since the opening of the theatre in this city there have been many fewer quarrels and incidents because people of different social groups come together to watch plays.’¹⁹ It could not but meet with the approval of the town’s police and militia.

In Le Cap, the first theatre was opened in 1740, and it soon proved too small for the needs of an expanding city. As a result, a second theatre was inaugurated in 1766: it was lavishly appointed, with fine plasterwork and tastefully decorated loges for the Intendant and other civic leaders, and it impressed Moreau de Saint-Méry. It could, he noted, hold 1,500 spectators, which was a telling indication of the city’s cultural ambition. Yet demand for seats far exceeded supply, with the consequence that in 1784 the building underwent further improvements, including the addition of a third row of loges. Unlike many provincial theatres in France, it could afford to maintain a resident troupe of around twenty actors, the majority of whom had come out from France to work in Le Cap. But Moreau admits to being impressed more by the building than by its levels of comfort. The sun’s heat only exaggerated by the stuffiness of the theatre, he observed, with the narrow corridors perennially short of fresh air because of the impact of surrounding buildings.²⁰ Across the island, other cities followed Le Cap’s example. In the new capital of Port-au-Prince, despite its exposure to the ravages of earthquakes and hurricanes, a hall for plays and spectacles was seen as a priority; the first theatre was opened in 1762, though it quickly had to be replaced as the entire city was razed to the ground in the terrible earthquake of 1770.²¹ The fact that the theatre was replaced within a few years illustrates the high priority it commanded in Creole society.

The Creoles had a reputation for enjoying dance and spectacle. The beau monde of Saint-Domingue gave lavish balls and attended performances of theatre and dancing wherever they were presented, and by the end of the 1780s theatres had been built throughout the island, even in the smaller urban centres like Saint-Marc, Léogâne, Jacmel, Les Cayes, and Jérémie, while travelling troupes of players went on tour, performing for a couple of nights in smaller towns where their arrival created ripples of excitement. In 1786, for instance, a troupe of Italian actors performed in Anse-de-Veau, and in 1790 a dance troupe in La Croix-des-Bouquets.²² Tastes were eclectic, ranging from vaudeville to opera and plays by Molière, Racine, Beaumarchais, or Marmontel. There were also performances of works by Voltaire and Rousseau.²³ For exiles from the metropole, it was all so reassuringly French, a reminder of the Francophone culture they had left behind. But Creole drama could be innovative, too, reflecting the interests and tensions of Saint-Domingue society. It is surely no accident that playwrights and theatre directors from the island would play a prominent role in promoting Francophone theatre in New Orleans during the first half of the nineteenth century.²⁴

Saint-Domingue’s reputation for gaiety and urban sophistication was not undeserved and it helped attract migrants to the island who had few links with trade or the plantation economy. The career of Albert Simon is instructive in this regard. Simon was a relatively junior official in France, who had held minor administrative posts in the customs houses of Metz and Bar-le-Duc, before moving to Marseille, where he seems to have developed a taste for life in the colonies. After the death of his wife he decided, at the age of thirty, to try his luck in Saint-Domingue, spurred on by the customary colonial dream of lands and riches. But when he got there, in December 1784, he found few openings in trade and turned instead to his other skill, as a musician, taking a post as second violin at the Comédie in Port-au-Prince. From there he maintained a regular correspondence with his brother-in-law, Mathurin Henry, in Lorraine, from which it becomes clear that the brash commercial ambitions he had once harboured were not to be realized. Simon would remain a member of the orchestra until his death, and he seems to have become satisfied with his role, admitting to Henry that he had no regrets about coming to America and that ‘I will be well satisfied if, after ten years here, I can retire to Lorraine with savings of 20 to 30,000 livres’. His wish was not to be granted, however, as he died a few years later, most probably a victim of the violence and murder that swept the island in 1791. His fellow musicians played in a concert in his memory, staging the first production of a Gluck opera in Saint-Domingue to raise money for his family.²⁵

Like Simon, most of those who left France for the islands were economic migrants, lured by dreams of wealth and prosperity. But relatively few—certainly of those who paid their own fares and arranged their own passage—did so as idle speculation. Merchants sent their agents, their traders and not infrequently their sons to represent their interests in the colonies, and they could spend years in the Caribbean, purchasing and deal-making to further their company interests. Others combined the roles of merchant and planter, or encouraged their younger brothers to work plantations, seeing the twin roles of armateur and habitant as complementary in the dynamic of capitalism. They were part of a family enterprise, united in a single belief that, for Frenchmen in the eighteenth century, colonial trade and slavery represented the key to wealth-creation and social ascension. Given the cost of fitting out a slave voyage, this was not an option available to all. It required savings and considerable outlay, through inherited wealth or the help of friends or the capacity to raise funds cheaply. And it was, as we have seen, imbued with risk. But so strong was the attraction of the Atlantic, and so exciting the dreams that it conjured up, that many were tempted to take that risk, and invest their fortunes, and those of their families, in the sugar islands. Some had come from relatively humble backgrounds, seeing the Caribbean as a means of establishing their fortunes; others were established merchants who looked to profit from sugar and tobacco; others again were sons of noble families, often of the poor nobility of regions like Brittany, who saw in the Antilles a means of restoring their fading family finances. But they all had one thing in common—a determination to share in what Olivier Pétré-Grenouilleau has aptly dubbed a ‘machine of dreams’.²⁶

Studies of emigration from Nantes to the Caribbean show that the majority of those who bought plantations regarded their holdings in Saint-Domingue or in the Lesser Antilles as extensions of their business interests and of the property they held in France. They were taking a commercial decision, often as part of a broader family strategy after previously investing in privateering and in colonial trade.²⁷ Not all succeeded; in the years before the Revolution, particularly, there were complaints about the prices they were being offered for colonial goods and the low returns on their investments. The hard work involved in maintaining a sugar plantation with its mill and sugar refinery could seem thankless. As one colon wrote back to his wife in Poitou in 1788, he had had to bring in new slaves, buy mules, build a new mill, and replace the boilers used to prepare the sugar, all in the course of a single winter, in order to pay off his debts back in France. In his words, ‘I thought this work far beyond my strength, but with patience I shall get there.’²⁸ Like so many pioneers, he was determined not to give up.

Such were the profits to be made from sugar that many remained undeterred by what they regarded as short-term problems. The example of those who had preceded them offered encouragement and inspiration, for during the previous century many merchants and ships’ captains had invested in refineries and bought plantations in the hope of making a quick fortune, and few had been disappointed. It seemed a logical form of investment which complemented their shipping interests, the plantation producing the sugar and indigo that would fill the holds of the merchants’ ships on their return journey to France. In 1775, for instance, the wealthy Le Havre merchant Stanislas Foäche built himself a sugar mill in Môle Saint-Nicholas on Saint-Domingue to exploit the sugar cane fields which he owned in the surrounding area. By the time of the Revolution, Foäche was employing some 550 slaves and had accumulated a considerable fortune, less because of the high quality of his sugar, Moreau suggests, than because his sucrerie was equipped with a water mill on a nearby river, while others in the area were still dependent on mills powered by oxen.²⁹ Continuous production was virtually guaranteed. For the armateur, the act of acquiring the sucrerie was primarily a means of spreading risk and protecting himself from the hazards of the Atlantic and the vicissitudes of war.

There was nothing demeaning about owning a plantation, or owning slaves, for that matter, nothing that could threaten a family with disgrace or social degradation—even in the case of a noble family. Nobles had strict notions of what constituted correct behaviour and they knew what activities would incur rejection or disapproval in the society they frequented. And though buying and selling slaves might seem to the modern mind a less than honourable pursuit, noble families were among the largest slave-owners on Saint-Domingue, and they were untroubled by questions of honour and status. Natacha Bonnet discusses four planters from Anjou who crossed the Atlantic and who successfully combined the roles of seigneurs in western France and planters in the Caribbean. They had very different family histories, four distinct social profiles, in spite of their claims to nobility. The Pays de Lathan were a family that had risen from the bourgeoisie of the Sarthe and had been ennobled early in the century; the Galbaud du Fort were from Nantes, a family whose background lay in the noblesse de robe; the family of Le Chauff de Kerguenec belonged to the Breton rural nobility; whereas the Stapletons were of old Irish aristocratic stock. None of them felt any shame in owning a sugar plantation. Indeed, Bonnet finds that, between Anjou and Saint-Domingue, they evolved a family strategy as they looked to construct their family fortunes and—in some cases—to acquire anoblissement in the process. Certain of them had been office-holders in Anjou and had been in the service of the King. They were all well educated, with private libraries, and they made sure that their children were well educated, too. But, equally, she finds that they had no difficulty in transferring their lifestyle and their interests to their plantation and to make money from slavery.³⁰

Since 1669, French nobles had been permitted to engage in overseas commerce, and from 1681 to build and fit out ships for trade on the high seas. And by the mid-eighteenth century, those merchants who invested in the Caribbean were among those who bought titles of nobility. Some made their money from slaving and from trade with the Antilles; others bought land on Saint-Domingue where they owned slave plantations and sugar mills. Laffon de Ladebat, for instance, was a prominent Bordeaux slave-trader who from 1764 transported around 4,000 negroes from West Africa to the Caribbean; he also owned around 2,000 acres of land on Saint-Domingue and was unapologetic in his pursuit of slaving. He was rewarded in 1774 with letters of nobility and his passport to membership of the second estate.³¹ Laffon was only one of several Bordeaux merchants whose fortunes were based on the slave trade and whose position among the city’s elite was sealed by ennoblement. And the merchants were not alone. A considerable number of the magistrates who sat on the Bordeaux Parlement also invested in the plantation economy and became slave-owners. Among them, Pocquet de Lilette spent the major part of his life in Martinique; Lamolère and Prunes regularly travelled back and forward to their Caribbean plantations to manage their affairs; and the president of the Parlement, Dupaty, owned one of the richest habitations on Saint-Domingue, a property estimated to be worth almost 1.5 million francs by the eve of the Revolution.³² But it was not only his great wealth that Dupaty owed to Saint-Domingue; he owed much of his social standing, too, to his colonial connections. Whereas other presidential families had unimpeachable noble titles going back to the sixteenth century, he risked being seen as something of an arriviste. His third-degree nobility was relatively undistinguished; but he benefited from strong colonial connections, his father and his grandfather having been counsellors on the sovereign council of Cap Français.³³

Those who migrated to the Caribbean were willing to work, to invest, and to take risks to succeed; they also shared a common desire to establish their lineage, to set up the next generation. To that end, most maintained regular correspondence with family members back in France, and some criss-crossed the Atlantic many times during their careers. Pierre Letestu, from Honfleur, described himself as an ‘armateur, capitaine de navire and planteur’ whose career oscillated between the two shores of the Atlantic. But his loyalties did not weaken: he was a businessman first and foremost, and he died in the town where he was born, in Dieppe.³⁴ In this he was surely typical. Families were often split by the decision to leave for the colonies, and few planters wished to leave France forever or to abandon the wives and parents they had left behind. Among those sailing from Nantes who came from Poitou, for instance, Gabriel Debien distinguishes several discrete groups. The majority, of course, were first-time emigrants; they accounted for around four-fifths of those who sailed in the later eighteenth century. They sailed alongside colons who had returned to France for family reasons or on business, and who were now going back to their workplace. Others were officers in the King’s army, returning to the Caribbean to rejoin their garrison or to manage their plantation: a number of army officers, generally still young, had taken wives in the colonies and had bought property, sugar mills, or plantations, in Saint-Domingue or Guadeloupe. Some, following their army service, made a new career among the sugar cane groves of the Antilles and became colons in their turn. Others left—and it is a feature of emigrant communities across the world—for social and economic reasons, ranging from poverty and a lack of opportunity at home to disillusionment, family disputes, and boredom with village life.

Not all the passengers on ships bound for the Caribbean were men. The passenger lists also contain the names of women, mostly wives leaving France, alone or with their children, to join their partners in the Caribbean.³⁵ Some went with their husbands to take up posts in the islands, whether in the army, the French administration, or a trading house in Le Cap or Basse-Terre. For families accustomed to move from posting to posting this was a necessary stage in their lives, though the children would often be sent home to France for schooling. In merchant families, too, it was not uncommon to move with one’s family to the Caribbean, as the societies of the islands and of merchant houses in the cities of western France were tightly interconnected. The case of Jeanne-Eulalie Lebourg was in no way exceptional. Her husband was a colonial merchant in Nantes, Jacques Millet, who after his marriage in 1773 retired from a life at sea captaining one of his father’s merchantmen to manage the family plantation in Saint-Domingue. He and his young wife sailed from Nantes together with their baby of seven months. But she lasted only seven years in the Antilles before returning to France, leaving her husband behind. Creole society did not suit her, she explained to her sister some years later. There were aspects of colonial life, especially for wives, to which she had found it difficult to adjust, not least the islands’ well-founded reputation for libertinage. She noted that ‘the women here are almost all very gallant, but gallant in a scandalous way. They no doubt measure their qualities by the number of their lovers and the publicity they can command.’ And affairs could scarcely be kept secret in a society which loved to gossip, where houses had few alcoves and closets to which they could withdraw, and where they could always be spied on by their slaves.³⁶

Affairs and sexual conquests were an accepted part of life in the Antilles, and, however much planters insisted that their main interest was to further their family fortunes, this did not make them any more faithful to partners back in France. The baptismal records in Le Cap and Port-au-Prince make frequent reference to illegitimate births and to the liaisons that were established between French planters and African women. These were often slaves or former slaves who worked as housekeepers and domestic servants, roles in which they gained privileges denied to those working in the fields, and who had less restricted access to their colonial masters. Casual sex and rape were frequent on the plantations, where slaves had little recourse against their masters, and slave women were frequently thought of as easy game by Frenchmen removed from the civilizing constraints of family life. For slave women, moreover, living with their master was also a way of buying their freedom from slavery. The process of creolization involved a certain fluidity in relations between the races, resulting in the birth of mulatto children who, as free people of colour, would go on to play a vital part in the multi-tiered racial structure of the Antilles. Sometimes the colons would marry their black mistresses; on other occasions they would simply live together, and we find them listed as the beneficiaries of their wills, often many years later.

A good example of this pattern of behaviour is Aimé-Benjamin Fleuriau, one of the most successful of La Rochelle’s colonial merchants in the eighteenth century.³⁷ He left for Saint-Domingue in 1730 at the age of twenty-one to join his uncle’s trading house, and would spend a quarter of a century on the island before returning to La Rochelle a very wealthy man. For much of this period he lived at La Croix-des-Bouquets with a woman variously described in official papers as either a ‘ménagère’ or ‘négresse libre’, and almost certainly one of his former slaves. Between 1740 and 1748 she bore him at least eight children, who were all duly baptized in the local church at Cul-de-sac. But he was not finished with procreation. On his return to France in 1755, and thinking of the future of his business, he took up with another woman, Marie-Anne-Suzanne Liège, twenty-three years his junior, whom he married in the following year and with whom he had six children, all born between 1758 and 1766. On his death it was she took control of his business on Saint-Domingue, though she ran it entirely from France, never bothering to set foot on the island.³⁸ His mulatto children were not forgotten, however. They were remembered in his will, and the two eldest, both girls, accompanied their father when he returned to France and spent the rest of their lives in La Rochelle, close to the family home. They saw their father marry, watched on as their six half-brothers and sisters were born, and remained on amicable terms with their new family. Fleuriau kept in touch with his children on Saint-Domingue, too, or with the two sons who survived. In 1777, he made a gift of four slaves to his elder son, Jean-Baptiste, who was described in the legal papers as a ‘mulâtre libre, living in Port-au-Prince’. By the time of Fleuriau’s death in 1785, Jean-Baptiste had predeceased him, but Paul, his younger son, was left 26,000 livres in his will, and a similar sum was left to the next generation, to the sons and daughters of Jean-Baptiste.³⁹ Fleuriau, like so many others, had become a Creole: to his mind race did not define relationships in the way it still did to many in metropolitan France.

Life in the Caribbean was often hard and dangerous for one’s health: men might grow old before their time and succumb to tropical diseases, and as they grew older, many lived in fear of an uncertain future, apprehensive lest they face a slave rebellion or die in an epidemic of yellow fever. Their correspondence was filled with their fears and anxieties, which they relayed to their families back in France. Unsurprisingly, health was a major topic of conversation. Their letters often told of sickness and disease, offered reassurances about the health of sons and daughters, and inquired desperately after the health of parents in France. The letters of Pierre-Jean Van Hoogwerff are typical in this regard. Every letter returned to issues of health, most especially that of his beloved daughter Betsy, for whose welfare, as we noted in an earlier chapter, he cared deeply.⁴⁰ Betsy appears to have been in a state of chronic ill-health, not helped, one must assume, by the ravages of the Caribbean heat. Although she was a young adult by the time his correspondence begins—in 1784 she would have been twenty years old—he writes of her as he would of a young child, a girl with the mental age of an infant who required of him a constant care and attention he was ill-equipped to provide. Van Hoogwerff, a slave-trader from La Rochelle who still saw himself as part of a Dutch extended family, wrote regularly about Betsy’s condition to his brothers in the Hague and St Petersburg and to his sister, married to another merchant, William Stuart, in Edinburgh. These letters are infused with a genuine humanity, a Protestant conscience, and a concern for family matters. Yet in commercial matters he could appear hard and uncaring, not least about the welfare of the Africans in his employ. Writing in 1789, he notes that, of his two slave ships, one had earned nothing from its latest voyage, while the other, L’Aimable Suzanne, had performed much better, ‘trading at a profit far beyond our hopes’; the voyage can be regarded as a good one, he adds rather casually, ‘despite the fact that a hundred negroes died of smallpox during the crossing’.⁴¹ For the caring Christian that he was, their deaths were a matter of little import.

Where plantations were owned by men from the west and south-west of France, their owners tended very frequently to look to their home regions for agents, factors, and others whom they had to trust with large sums of money and heavy responsibilities, often when they themselves were thousands of miles away. Distance posed a threat to their fortunes, as did political turmoil and the uncertainties of war and peace. In a letter of 25 June 1768, Dominique Clérisse notes that he has been unable to access the funds he required for his marriage because ‘his fortune was too far distant, and in a country that is subject to too many great revolutions in wartime’.⁴² It was comforting to do business with people close at hand, fathers and sons, agents and ship-owners back in France, preferably in the familiar settings of Bordeaux, Nantes, or Le Havre. Like soldiers and sailors on campaign, the owners of habitations in the Caribbean would reflect on the world they had left behind and their loved ones back home. Colonial life, too, could evoke a sense of loss, a spirit of nostalgia, and for many it was a matter of importance to keep these links alive. When they wanted to enquire after the health of their families, to consult with insurers or business partners, or to hire a crew for their next voyage, it was often to their home port that they wrote or to a ship heading home that they entrusted their mail. Home was, for many, still back in France, in those west-coast towns and cities where they had lived their adolescent years, where they still had close ties of family or friendship and to which many dreamt of returning when their working lives were over. This emotional pull is not peculiar to those from the west coast of France, of course; it is an almost universal characteristic of colonial societies, one that was to be found in every corner of the British Empire.⁴³ Transatlantic communication was always a two-way process, with messages about commerce, family illness, and life and death crossing the ocean in both directions.

Some plantation owners chose to return to France before old age set in, and to run their estates from afar, entrusting the day-to-day transactions to a factor or estate manager back in the Caribbean. They might do so for health reasons, or to invest their profits in property, or to send their children to French schools. But it was not easy to maintain control from a distance of several thousand miles, and those who returned often complained of lax management, sliding profits and poor productivity from the slaves. To manage effectively called for regular exchanges of papers and detailed accountancy if the owner was to remain in charge: he needed full lists of the slaves he owned, their ages, their functions, and their state of health; in addition, just as important for the owner of an habitation, he must keep abreast of fluctuations in sugar and indigo prices, and details of market trends, slave prices, and animal and crop disease. Absenteeism only worked if the owner was prepared to put in long hours and commit himself to hard work, and if he was lucky in his choice of agent and in the passivity of his slaves. Louis Drouin, for instance, having already established his position as one of the most prudent négociants trading with Saint-Domingue, bought two plantations near Saint-Marc, a town which he already knew well. This knowledge engendered trust and enabled him to leave the day-to-day running of the estate to others while he returned to Nantes. But he was careful not to lose control of his assets, appointing several people to represent his interests at all times and establishing a clear chain of command and responsibility. He might not be there in person, but his agents knew that they had to report to someone else, and no one was allowed too great autonomy of action.⁴⁴

Another example of estate management at distance is the sugar plantation on Guadeloupe owned jointly by Jacques Reiset, who held the post of receveur-général des finances back in Rouen, and his cousin Xavier, who lived in Guadeloupe and maintained a frequent correspondence on the business affairs of the sucrerie in the decades after 1822.⁴⁵ As a result, the older man, in France, was able to study the regular lists he received of the slaves on their plantation, the majority cultivateurs, but including some who were employed as sugar-refiners, with their ages and state of health, the number of children among them, the number aged sixty and over, those who were in poor health.⁴⁶ He also received regular notes from his agent on the plantation, Giraud, with information about the prospects for the year: such matters as the state of the harvest, the price that could be obtained for sugar in Le Cap, any legal problems that had to be settled in court, and details of the purchase and sale of slaves. Giraud was keen to reassure him, and Jacques Reiset’s replies suggest how much he relied on his agent’s financial prudence. Occasionally, though, the news conveyed was more alarming and jolted the older man’s confidence. In 1822, Giraud informed him of the ‘catastrophe’, as he calls it, which had befallen the neighbouring island of Martinique, where a hundred escaped slaves, living in the mountains, had joined up with criminal elements to attack the plantations on the plain below, leaving around ten people injured and three dead. Giraud commented ominously that this sort of violence ‘necessarily threatens the existence of all whites living in the Antilles’.⁴⁷ His fears were widely shared by colons across the French Caribbean, with many recognizing that theirs was a society living on borrowed time and that the revolutionary insurrection that had swept Saint-Domingue in the 1790s could at any moment undermine their well-being, too.

As the decades passed, the trading routes between France and the Caribbean saw more and more Frenchmen abandon their Creole lifestyle and return to France, usually by way of the same Atlantic ports through which they had travelled west in their youth. The more successful among them returned as wealthy men, their fortunes made, and with money to hand that they could invest back in France. Like the merchants on the Île Feydeau or along the quays of the Chartrons, many of the rich colons sought to buy handsome town houses or domains in the region of their birth, often decorating them with textiles, paintings, mahogany furnishings, and carved clocks to remind them of the luxury they had once enjoyed. During their exile in the Antilles, many had shown signs of a nostalgia for the France they had left behind; now, in their surroundings and in their choice of interior décor, they harked back to another world, to the rich colours and the exotic landscapes of the Caribbean.⁴⁸ Maps of the islands and prints of sugar plantations, watercolours of Caribbean landscapes, images of slaves at work in the fields or of slave girls in domestic service, scenes depicting African music-making and dance, and brightly coloured indiennes with traditional floral motifs were the very stuff of colonial taste.⁴⁹ The returned colons, like the colonial merchants and ship-owners who had been their partners in Atlantic commerce, did little to hide their wealth or disguise their taste for luxury. As in imperial Britain, the ripple effects of their wealth were felt in towns and villages across the west of France, places far beyond the merchant quarters of Nantes or Bordeaux. They returned as notables, men with money to spend who were prepared to enjoy the status and lifestyle that their wealth permitted. But if they brought prosperity to their wider communities through their lavish consumption, their wealth might also have aroused jealousy and some resentment.

But as the journal of one colon who had returned from Martinique would make clear, the France they returned to sometimes caused them bitter disappointment, and left some dreaming lovingly of the colours of the Caribbean countryside and the plantation life they had left behind. Pierre Dessalles, it is true, belonged to a slightly later generation: he was a planter in Martinique from 1806 until the middle of the nineteenth century, troubled years when the opportunities available to white settlers were changing. But he was unashamedly nostalgic for his Caribbean island and the Creole lifestyle it had allowed him. Like many colons, he was a political conservative and a practising Catholic, and in his journal he reveals his goals, his family ambitions, and the practical and moral standards to which he feels a planter should adhere. With time he had become more Creole than French in his attitudes and prejudices, and, once back in France, he did not hide his admiration for the relaxed and informal manners of the Antilles. He regarded his investments in Martinique as more vital to his family interests than his properties in France; above all, he resented the fact that his children no longer treated him with respect. Indeed, there is much to suggest that he felt repelled by what he saw as the affectation of Paris. He felt oppressed by its materialism, its competitive consumer culture. ‘How I miss my plantation in Martinique,’ he would sigh, before calling it by name: ‘Where is La Nouvelle Cité? How I would love to be there!’⁵⁰

Those crossing the Atlantic to Europe were not all Frenchmen making their way back home; nor were they all Europeans, as the declarations of ships’ captains to the admiralty in the principal slaving ports of the Atlantic coast reveal. From the late seventeenth century, indeed, it had been quite common for ships’ captains to return to France with black slaves whom they employed as cooks, valets, and domestic servants. The Code noir only applied in the colonies, and once on French soil slaves could and did claim their freedom from any form of servitude. But the government was not consistent in its application of the freedom principle: in some cases manumission was made conditional on payment, while in others slaves were arbitrarily returned to their masters in the colonies. Some further codification was clearly required, and an edict of 1716 tried to establish the conditions on which slave-owners could bring their slaves to France without fear of losing them. But confusion ensued. The edict was not registered in the Parlement of Paris, and as a consequence slaves coming to France found themselves condemned to a ‘legal limbo’ that could only be settled in the courts.⁵¹ As the number of court cases mounted, moreover, and slaves continued to claim their freedom in French law, the attitude of the executive hardened and the stipulations imposed became more and more restrictive. In 1777, the entry of black people into France was forbidden altogether, with anyone who allowed them to land at a French port liable to a fine of 3,000 livres, and the slave sentenced to deportation on the first available ship.⁵² But soon it became clear that the new law—which drew little distinction between freedmen and slaves—was easy to evade. Slaves were often allowed to land in France without submitting to the registration process, just as the Church reported a large increase in the number of interracial marriages. There is no doubt that the number of black men and women landing on French soil continued to rise.⁵³

According to official figures, there were seven French cities which in 1777 housed more than fifty people of other races (though it must be acknowledged that some of these may have been short-term residents, those newly landed from colonial ships but bound for other parts of the kingdom). Besides Paris, to which many domestic servants were taken, the major Atlantic port cities unsurprisingly headed the list: Nantes with 338 residents and Bordeaux with 310, principally from the Caribbean, and Lorient with 132, largely from India and the East Indies. Following behind were the other Atlantic slaving ports: Le Havre (ninety-eight), La Rochelle (seventy-four), and Marseille (fifty-three). While most of their arrivals came on commercial ships, naval vessels also brought in black immigrants and refugees from slavery: Brest was home to around thirty-five and Rochefort to a further thirty.⁵⁴ Not all people of colour were slaves: among those settling in France were black soldiers who had served in the colonial regiments and former slaves who had been freed by their masters, either as a reward for their services or in their wills. In the Généralité of Bordeaux, for instance, the admiralty records show that ninety-four free blacks were living in the area, almost equally divided between men and women.⁵⁵ But these are official figures which generally underestimate the number of immigrants. Over the century, Alain Croix suggests that the total number of people of colour who landed and settled in Nantes may have reached around 1,500.⁵⁶ Others were born in France, the sons and daughters of former slaves who had returned with their masters to France. In the parish of Saint-Nicolas in Nantes—the parish that included the merchant quarter of the Quai de la Fosse—the birth rate in the black community far exceeded the death rate. Between 1680 and 1792, parish records reveal that there were 266 baptisms compared to ninety-eight burials, a proportion far in excess of two to one.⁵⁷

Indeed, for those walking along the docks in Nantes, Bordeaux and a handful of other coastal ports, the sight of Africans—generally young, male, and well-attired, and often in the company of their masters—had become commonplace, with the consequence that their presence on French soil would have caused little surprise. They were no longer slaves, but artisans and domestic servants, highly valued by their masters and clients, often seen as providing docile and cheap labour. Many had trades: statistics from the admiralty of Nantes show that among men the highest numbers were of cooks, wigmakers, and barrel-makers; among women, dressmakers, washerwomen, and nurses to small children.⁵⁸ Some married, in exceptional cases to white women, before settling in either their port of entry or, quite frequently, in Paris. As domestic servants, they impressed by their appearance and by a suggestion of exoticism, and—like Amerindians and the servants brought to France from the East Indies—they were a source of prestige and pride to those who employed them.⁵⁹ Some entered France on repeated occasions, passing freely back and forth across the Atlantic as crewmen on ships sailing either directly to the Caribbean or on triangular slaving voyages by way of Africa. In the nineteen years between 1770 and 1788, for instance, we know of twenty-four ‘persons of colour’, one of them a woman, who embarked on ships at La Rochelle as crew members. Thirty of the ships leaving La Rochelle in these years had one or more black crewmen, some still enslaved, but the majority free and paid wages for their labour. Ships’ captains had few qualms about employing black cooks and seamen on slaving voyages, and their presence on board was deemed to be quite natural. Some, used as interpreters, had language skills that were uniquely valuable on triangular voyages to the west coast of Africa.⁶⁰ All were, first and foremost, experienced sailors.

Watching smartly dressed Africans going about their daily work, the citizens of the west-coast ports would have had little cause to associate them with the slaves who had endured the miseries of the Middle Passage or the cruel indignities of the plantations. The slave ships that took on their cargo at Bordeaux or Paimboeuf—the Loire at Nantes was too shallow to allow them to dock in the city—gave no hint of their future use: no slaves were ever brought to France, and the ships themselves were cargo vessels like any other, taking on a mixed cargo for their Atlantic voyage. Those in the know might recognize the bright textiles being hoisted aboard or note the presence in the cargo of firearms and gunpowder. But it was only once the ship was at sea, and safely distant from the French coast, that the tell-tale signs would appear. Carpenters would insert another deck, an entrepont between the actual deck and the bottom of the hold, that doubled the ship’s capacity and allowed slaves to be chained on two separate levels during the crossing. Only then was the vessel transformed from the innocent cargo vessel it had appeared to be into a négrier, a ship specially designed to transport its human cargo. Once the slaves were sold, often on board in the harbour at Port-au-Prince or Le Cap, it was quickly transformed again for the return voyage, its new cargo the sugar, rum, and colonial produce that were so greatly prized in Europe. When the last slave had been auctioned, the ship once again became an innocent trader. The scaffolding holding the extra deck was dismantled along with the barrier that had been inserted to prevent the slaves from rioting. The wood that had been used to build them was sold, the bars and chains were removed, and all trace of its use as a slave ship was destroyed.⁶¹ As a result, when the ship finally sailed back up the Loire or the Garonne, its mission accomplished, the people of France’s port cities had no reason to feel queasy about the nature of its commerce or to question the source of their city’s prosperity. There was nothing on deck or in the hold of the vessel that to suggest the human suffering it had witnessed. It was a simply another merchant ship returning from a profitable voyage to France’s colonies.

¹ Jean Ehrard, Lumières et esclavage: l’esclavage colonial et l’opinion publique en France au 18e siècle (Paris: Sofédis, 2008), 107.

² Philip Boucher, ‘The French and Dutch Caribbean, 1600–1800’, in Stephan Palmié and Francisco A. Scarano (eds), The Caribbean: A History of the Region and its Peoples (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011), 225.

³ Linda Colley, The Ordeal of Elizabeth Marsh: How a Remarkable Woman Crossed Seas and Empires to become Part of World History (London: Penguin, 2007), xix.

⁴ Christian Huetz de Lemps, ‘Engagement et engagés au 18e siècle’, in Paul Butel (ed.), Commerce et plantation dans la Caraïbe, 18^e–19^e siècles (Bordeaux: Presses Universitaires de Bordeaux, 1992), 66.

⁵ Marjory Harper and Stephen Constantine (eds), Migration and Empire (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), 21.

⁶ Jacques de Cauna, L’Eldorado des Aquitains: Gascons, Basques et Béarnais aux Îles d’Amérique, 17^e–18^e siècles (Biarritz: Atlantica, 1998), 123–5.

⁷ Seymour Drescher, ‘White Atlantic? The Choice for African Slave Labour in the Plantation Americas’, in David Eltis, Frank D. Lewis, and Kenneth L. Sokoloff (eds), Slavery in the Development of the Americas (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 36.

⁸ De Cauna, L’Eldorado des Aquitains, 98.

⁹ Corinne Janin, ‘Les engagés pour les Antilles à partir des rôles d’armement nantais, 1722–1772’ (mémoire de maîtrise, Université de Nantes, 1971), 3.

¹⁰ Ibid., 21–5.

¹¹ Jean-Pierre Poussou, ‘L’immigration européenne dans les îles d’Amérique’, Voyage aux Îles d’Amérique (Paris: Archives Nationales, 1992), 45–53; De Cauna, L’Eldorado des Aquitains, 106.

¹² Christian Huetz de Lemps, ‘Engagements et engagés au 18^e siècle’, Commerce et plantation dans la Caraïbe (Bordeaux: Presses Universitaires de Bordeaux, 1992), 65–70; De Cauna, L’Eldorado des Aquitains, 106.

¹³ Janin, ‘Les engagés pour les Antilles à partir des rôles d’armement nantais, 1722–1772’, 60.

¹⁴ Moreau de Saint-Méry, Description de la partie française de l’Isle Saint-Domingue, vol. 1, 318.

¹⁵ Jacques de Cauna, ‘Architecture coloniale: Haïti, des richesses à découvrir’, Art et Fact: Revue des historiens de l’art, des archéologues, des musicologues et des orientalistes de l’Université d’État à Liège, 7 (1988), 59.

¹⁶ Moreau de Saint-Méry, Description de la partie française de l’Isle Saint-Domingue, vol. 1, 434.

¹⁷ American Philosophical Society, Pam. V. 1101–14, Statuts du Cercle des Philadelphes (Le Cap, 1785).

¹⁸ Blanche Maurel, ‘Une société de pensée à Saint-Domingue, le «Cercle des Philadelphes» au Cap Français’, Revue Française d’Histoire d’Outre-mer, 48 (1961), 234–66.

¹⁹ ‘Mémoire concernant le spectacle de la Ville du Cap’, in Jean Fouchard, Le théâtre à Saint-Domingue (Port-au-Prince: Imprimerie de l’État, 1955), 15–18.

²⁰ Moreau de Saint-Méry, Description de la partie française de l’Isle Saint-Domingue, vol. 1, 360.

²¹ Fouchard, Le théâtre à Saint-Domingue, 45–6.

²² Ibid., 117–19.

²³ Ibid., 220.

²⁴ Juliane Braun, Creole Drama: Theatre and Society in Antebellum New Orleans (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2019), 11–41.

²⁵ Jacques Cauna and Richard Beckerich, ‘La Révolution de Saint-Domingue vue par un Patriote’, Revue de la Société haïtienne d’histoire et de géographie, 46/161 (1989), 2–4.

²⁶ Olivier Pétré-Grenouilleau, L’argent de la traite: milieu négrier, capitalisme et développement, un modèle (Paris: Aubier, 1996), 32–41.

²⁷ Natacha Bonnet, ‘L’investissement colonial au 18e siècle: l’exemple de quatre plantations sucrières à Saint-Domingue’, Entreprises et Histoire, 52 (2008/3), 46–55.

²⁸ Chevalier de la Barre to Madame de la Barre, 31 August 1789, in Gabriel Debien, Un colon sur sa plantation (Dakar: Université de Dakar, 1959), 111.

²⁹ Moreau de Saint-Méry, Description de la partie française de l’Isle Saint-Domingue, vol. 2, 14

³⁰ Natacha Bonnet, ‘Seigneurs et planteurs, entre Ouest Atlantique et Antilles: quatre familles du 18e siècle’ (thèse de doctorat, Université de Nantes, 2006); Bonnet, ‘L’investissement colonial au 18e siècle’, 46–55.

³¹ Michel Figeac, ‘La noblesse aux Antilles: l’exemple bordelais’, Bulletin du Centre d’histoire des Espaces Atlantiques, 8 (1998), 90–1.

³² Ibid., 94–6.

³³ William Doyle, The Parlement of Bordeaux and the End of the Old Regime, 1771–1790 (London: Edward Arnold, 1974), 19.

³⁴ AD Calvados, F 5545, Fonds Letestu, correspondence between Pierre Letestu and his son-in-law, starting in 1767.

³⁵ Gabriel Debien, ‘Poitevins partis par Nantes pour les Antilles, 1772–1791’, 94^e Congrès national des sociétés savantes (Pau, 1969), histoire moderne, t. 2, 463–70.

³⁶ Gabriel Debien, ‘Une Nantaise à Saint-Domingue’, Revue du Bas-Poitou et des Provinces de l’Ouest, 6 (1972), 413–14, 435.

³⁷ Jacques de Cauna, Au temps des Isles à sucre: Histoire d’une plantation de Saint-Domingue au 18^e siècle (Paris, 1987).

³⁸ Jacques de Cauna, Fleuriau, La Rochelle et l’esclavage: trente-cinq ans de mémoire et d’histoire (Paris: Les Indes savantes, 2017), 80–6.

³⁹ Ibid., 93.

⁴⁰ See Chapter 4, page 63.

⁴¹ AD Charente-Maritime, 4J 2848, letter-book of Pierre-Jean Van Hoogwerff, letter to his sister, 22 April 1789.

⁴² CAOM, 95 APOM/2, Letter-book of Gilles Clérisse, letter to Dominique Clérisse in Bayonne, Paris, 25 June 1768.

⁴³ Alexia Grosjean, ‘Returning to Belhelvie, 1593–1875: the impact of return migration on an Aberdeenshire parish’, in Marjory Harper (ed.), Emigrant Homecomings: The Return Movement of Emigrants, 1600–2000 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2005), 229.

⁴⁴ Laure Pineau-Defois, ‘Un modèle d’expansion économique à Nantes de 1763 à 1792: Louis Drouin, négociant et armateur’, Histoire, économie et société, 23 (2004), 387–8.

⁴⁵ For these papers, and especially the regular communication with his agent see CAOM, Fonds Privés (FP), 170 APOM.

⁴⁶ CAOM, FP. 170 APOM 4, feuilles de recensement for slaves on the Habitation Reiset, forms submitted annually from 1822.

⁴⁷ CAOM, FP, 170 APOM 5, letter from Giraud in Guadeloupe to Jacques Reiset in Rouen, enclosing a letter written about the troubles in Martinique, 22 November 1822.

⁴⁸ See the catalogue of the exhibition ‘Regards sur les Antilles: Collection Marcel Chatillon’ (Bordeaux: Musée d’Aquitaine, 1999).

⁴⁹ Délie Muller, ‘La constitution d’une collection et son inventeur averti, Marcel Chatillon’, ibid., 16–17.

⁵⁰ Elborg Forster and Robert Forster (eds), Sugar and Slavery, Family and Race: The Letters and Diary of Pierre Dessalles, Planter in Martinique, 1808–1856 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996), 10–11.

⁵¹ Sue Peabody, ‘There are no Slaves in France’: The Political Culture of Race and Slavery in the Ancien Régime (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), 22.

⁵² Alain Croix (ed.), Nantais venus d’ailleurs: Histoire des étrangers à Nantes des origines à nos jours (Rennes: Presses Universitaires de Rennes, 2007), 108.

⁵³ Peabody, ‘There are no Slaves in France’, 121–36.

⁵⁴ Pierre H. Boulle, Race et esclavage dans la France de l’Ancien Régime (Paris: Perrin, 2007), 179.

⁵⁵ Marcel Koufinkana, Les esclaves noirs en France sous l’Ancien Régime, 16^e–18^e siècles (Paris: L’Harmattan, 2008), 110.

⁵⁶ Croix (ed.), Nantais venus d’ailleurs, 108–9.

⁵⁷ Erick Noël, ‘Gens de couleur à Nantes et à Bordeaux au 18e siècle: mise au point, bilan et perspectives’, in Éric Dubesset and Jacques de Cauna (eds), Dynamiques caribéennes: Pour une histoire des circulations dans l’espace atlantique, 18^e–19^e siècles (Bordeaux: Presses Universitaires de Bordeaux, 2014), 81.

⁵⁸ Koufinkana, Les esclaves noirs en France, 63–4.

⁵⁹ Mickaël Augeron, ‘Des esclaves et des domestiques amérindiens à La Rochelle au 18e siècle’, in Mickaël Augeron and Olivier Caudron (eds), La Rochelle, l’Aunis et la Saintonge face à l’esclavage (Paris, 2012), 182.

⁶⁰ Olivier Caudron, ‘S’insérer dans une société de Blancs: destins de «gens de couleur» à la Rochelle et dans sa région, 18^e – début 19^e siècle’, in Dubesset and de Cauna (eds), Dynamiques caribéennes, 90–2.

⁶¹ Bertrand Guillet, La Marie-Séraphique, navire négrier (Nantes: Musée d’histoire de Nantes, 2009), 117.