PART TWO
6
Those who sent ships to Guinea and the Bight of Biafra felt under increasing attack from another quarter in the eighteenth century, from abolitionist writers and pamphleteers who professed themselves outraged by the immorality of the slave trade and denounced slaving as a crime perpetrated against fellow human beings. Slaving had not been an issue of much moral debate in earlier centuries, but the huge growth in the scale of the trade, combined with a heightened moral conscience in the wake of the Enlightenment, resulted in a growing unease in some quarters about the morality of making huge profits through buying human beings and selling them into slavery. Those who shared these moral qualms found inspiration in the new-found humanism of the eighteenth century and in the writings of some Enlightened authors, most especially Raynal, Voltaire, and Montesquieu. But we should be clear: there was no agreement among contemporaries about the rights and wrongs of the slave trade. What we are witnessing is growing concern over the issue, and public discussion of whether those condemned to slavery should enjoy the same rights as others. Was humanism to be reserved for Europeans alone, a prerogative of white races? Or was liberty a fundamental right of all human beings, a right that was denied when Africans were bought and sold and treated as chattels? Could slavery be made compatible with the dictates of reason? By the end of Louis XV’s reign, these questions were being asked not only by French philosophes but by intendants, colonial governors, and government officials.1 They were aware of the evils of the slave trade and sought ways to ameliorate the conditions of its victims, asking repeatedly the same question: was the system capable of reform?
Philosophical debate on slavery in the eighteenth century ranged over a wide range of topics: the equality of human beings in the eyes of God, the meaning and significance of negritude, the supposed qualities of different races, and what was coming to be seen as the civilizing mission of white Europeans across the globe were all proposed and debated. Not all were opposed to slavery. Some, indeed, were quite vehement in its defence, arguing from ideas of racial difference and questioning the universality of the rights of man. The reluctance to endorse abolition is not difficult to comprehend, since the system which was under attack as being contrary to the dictates of Reason and Justice was also the source of the material prosperity on which they all depended for their well-being.2 Even philosophers could not afford to be entirely unworldly. Behind many of the arguments posited in defence of slavery, Montesquieu detected traces of European self-interest and self-aggrandizement which he pilloried in the most sardonic tones. ‘The peoples of Europe,’ he wrote in L’Esprit des Lois, ‘once they had exterminated those of America, had to enslave those of Africa so that they could use them to clear such a great expanse of territory.’3 For him it was a moral issue, a simple question of right and wrong. Elsewhere he wrote that he was not surprised that Negroes ‘painted the devil in a dazzling white and their gods black like coal’.4 It was, he felt, a just representation, one that condemned the crimes of the colonists and reflected their everyday experience of white rule. Abolitionists would continue to quote him and to look to him for inspiration and moral guidance.
But Montesquieu’s concern with the slave trade, his belief that it was one of the major moral issues of the eighteenth century, was not typical of the French Enlightenment. The expression of indignation about the ill-treatment of African slaves remained rare in the writings of enlightened authors, whose concerns were generally with problems closer to home or with more abstract approaches to the question of liberty. For many philosophes, as for their followers, mankind was everywhere in chains, and there was nothing qualitatively different about African slavery that merited their interest.5 Nor was there much economic criticism of slavery. The Physiocrats, though opponents of imperial preference and vigorous exponents of free trade, did little to question the economic basis of slavery, which seemed to them to be, in Philippe Steiner’s words, ‘everyday common sense’ and a guaranteed source of cheap labour for the plantations. If there was a debate, it was about the relative economic benefits of slave and free labour. But, again, the argument had little to do with Africans’ rights. It focused on how best colonial trade might be organized to accelerate the development of the French economy and how it might help to resolve the increasing disparity between France and Britain.6
Some did, however, join Montesquieu in openly challenging men’s right to own or to trade in others. Rousseau, for instance, observed approvingly that in the state of nature slavery did not exist, since everyone was his own master and was not beholden to others.7 He argued in general terms, without any particular reference to Africa or the Caribbean, concluding that slavery was an abrogation of rights, so that ‘the words “slavery” and “right” are contradictory, they cancel each other out’.8 He, too, believed—as did Diderot—that no man can rightly be considered to be born into slavery, just as no parent has the right to sell his children. Such ideas would be, they argued, against the laws of nature. Condorcet was equally forthright in his condemnation of the institution of slavery, arguing in 1781, in his Réflexions sur l’esclavage des Nègres, that the time had come for France to move towards the progressive elimination of slavery from her colonies.9 In the same vein, the abbé Raynal, in his Histoire des Deux Indes, maintained that no man has the right to sell himself into slavery in what was necessarily an inequitable deal in which he receives nothing and sacrifices everything. Raynal, as a priest, turned to theology to support his case, arguing that any man ‘belongs to his first master, God, from whom he can never be freed’.10 Raynal’s work was not only a cry of protest against slavery; it was also a study of networks and communications between Europe and the Indies, east and west. Its importance lies in the influence it was able to exercise. Though the work was forgotten and disavowed in the nineteenth century, it was widely read in its own time, and among its readers were philosophers, statesmen, and creative writers from across Europe and the Americas.11 A once largely forgotten writer, he is now once again studied and analysed, this time from the viewpoint of the history of global exchange.12
For most Frenchmen, however, Atlantic slavery seemed a marginal issue, not an everyday concern, and this is reflected in the philosophers of the day, who devoted far more space in their writings to French institutions, justice and administration, than they did to slavery. And when they did talk about slavery, they often did so in a dry analytical way that did little to appeal to popular emotions and seemed divorced from contemporary problems. The plantations of the Americas or the horrors of the Middle Passage could seem very distant to a debate conducted around Montesquieu’s critique of slavery in Ancient Rome, and French intellectuals seldom discussed it in immediate or human terms.13 For many in France, as for Americans like Thomas Jefferson or George Washington on the other side of the Atlantic, there was no contradiction between slave-ownership and revolutionary or humanitarian views of society at large.
Even in the pages of the Encyclopédie the issue of slavery is discussed principally in abstract terms, with the emphasis placed on past civilizations, with Egypt and Rome given greater prominence than present-day colonial society. Moreover, what is said about the slave trade is curiously neutral in tone. The entry on ‘Negroes’ acknowledges that there is a substantial commerce in Africans, and that negroes form ‘the principal source of wealth of the inhabitants of the islands’, but it is reluctant to condemn it. There is some discussion of their strengths and weaknesses as field workers, of where ‘the best negroes’ were to be found—Cape Verde, Angola, Senegal—and of the different routes by which they come to be enslaved. Here the article placed much of the responsibility on the Africans themselves. Some, it was suggested, sold themselves of their own free will to local kings and princes in order to escape famine and misery in Africa; others had been taken prisoner in wars between local kings and tribes. And, once in the Caribbean, where they would become the responsibility of their new masters, the picture that is painted is one of almost unbelievable paternalism. Humanitarianism combined with self-interest to ensure that they were well treated: for the first ten days in the colonies, we are assured, they are well fed, rested, and given sea baths to prepare them for work, while the masters who bought new slaves were obliged to instruct them in Christianity. At the same time, those slaves who had already settled on the plantations would reassure them, tell them what was expected of them, and ‘explain to them that they had been bought to work, and not to be eaten, as some of them imagined when they saw that they were being well fed’.14
Discussion of the trade in eighteenth-century France was usually couched in deeply utilitarian terms: whether the slaves were well looked after, whether their rights were being breached, or whether it would be possible to manage the sugar plantations without some form of forced servitude. The abolitionists had no economic arguments to offer, and, since there were few philosophical principles at stake, even committed humanists seem to have viewed the question with a culpable indifference. If there was a new scientific interest in issues of race, it was directed at other questions: explaining why men were born with skins of different colours, understanding the nature of negritude in an age which believed it had refuted earlier theological explanations and could find answers in science.15 Biologists and naturalists turned to these questions, too, often concluding, like Buffon, that if all human beings had a similar constitution, if they shared the same interests and the same sources of pleasure, then the differences between the ‘varieties of the species’, differences in stature, physiognomy, skin colour and customs, must be explained by accidental, external factors such as heat and climatic conditions. As a naturalist, he believed that human beings could and should be studied like any other living creatures, and concluded that ‘the human race is not composed of radically different species’, but of men of common origins who had been marked by differences in climate, diet, disease, and lifestyle.16 Buffon and Voltaire agreed on this point; they also appeared to agree on the intrinsic cultural supremacy of the white race, a common supposition in what was a very Eurocentric literature.17 In the same vein, travellers set out on scientific voyages to visit foreign lands and exotic cultures, writing up accounts of their travels and of the peoples they encountered. For Volney, for instance, an inveterate traveller and orientalist, there could be no assumption of equality between different races: race was a subject for scientific research and anthropological inquiry, a means of building an understanding of the rest of humanity. He had the good grace to admit that Reason alone could not achieve this, since ‘we reason too much in accordance with our own ideas, and not sufficiently in accordance with theirs’.18
The arguments often lacked sensibility and emotional depth. They did not appeal to the sympathies of the reader or express a sense of shared suffering. As Jean Ehrard has pointed out, everyday life in France was often brutal and violent; in Alsace and other parts of the east forms of serfdom still lingered on; and justice was enforced through cruel and exemplary punishments, carried out in public places before crowds of baying onlookers. Executions were staged as public spectacles, the pain and suffering quite deliberately dramatized, as a deterrent, of course, but more critically as a harsh reminder of the power of the state.19 No one who witnessed the drawing and quartering of Damiens on the Place de Grève in Paris in 1759 would have been shocked by the tortures perpetrated on the bodies of slaves in the Antilles. He was not only to die for attempted regicide; he was to suffer, as an example to others:
On a scaffold that will be erected there, the flesh will be torn from his breasts, arms, thighs and calves with red-hot pincers; his right hand, holding the knife with which he committed the said parricide, burnt with sulphur; and on those places where the flesh will be torn away, poured molten lead, boiling oil, burning resin, wax and sulphur melted together; and then his body drawn and quartered by four horses, and his limbs and body consumed by fire …20
Against the background of such state-sponsored cruelty, how could people be expected to react to mundane acts of everyday cruelty, the beatings and hangings that were meted out to insubordinate or runaway slaves? In any case, this was not the dominant image of Caribbean slavery. ‘In contrast to these accustomed horrors,’ Ehrard explains, ‘in Versailles, Paris or the great ports along the Atlantic, colonial exploitation offered its most smiling face.’ What people encountered at court and in Parisian salons ‘was not its drivers brandishing their whips’ but ‘beautiful women toying with little black boys dressed in red’.21 The image of negritude and the reflection of the Caribbean that were most familiar to Frenchmen were carefully sanitized.
What seems lacking in most French writings on the slave trade is any expression of the enthusiasm or moral outrage that are to be found in the English abolitionists of the day, like William Wilberforce or Thomas Clarkson, little sense that opposition to the slave trade might one day mobilize public opinion in France or become a popular political cause in its own right. Indeed, when the abolitionist movement in France did become more militant and started to win over the public, it was often to English publications that it turned, overseeing their translation into French and citing their authors—particularly Clarkson—as pioneers and leaders of liberal opinion. Anti-slavery as a moral cause did not arouse the same level of indignation in Catholic France as in Protestant England, and where members of the clergy did comment on the slave trade in the port cities of western France, it was usually without any hint of condemnation. In 1765, for instance, the abbé Jacques-Olivier Pleuvri published a history of Le Havre which enjoyed considerable success. His coverage of the eighteenth century dismissed the slave trade in half a page within a chapter on the city’s commerce, treating it without emotion as an unexceptional part of mercantile life. Nothing about it caused him to express any repugnance or seemed to prick his clerical conscience.22
This lack of moral concern is not easy to explain. In France, those professing Christian beliefs played a full part in profiting from the slave trade, and there was little discernible difference between Catholics and Protestants, with both communities deeply implicated. Did it matter that France was at least nominally a Catholic state? While Britain, the United States, and other Protestant countries seemed prepared to give a lead on abolition, most Catholic states showed no desire to intervene. Perhaps it was because the great Catholic nations of Iberia, Spain and Portugal, were so deeply involved in the slave trade, and saw their interests threatened by abolition. Or perhaps it was because the Pope did not get round to condemning slavery until 1839, by which time, of course, the issue had ceased to be so contentious.23 But even then it is clear that politics continued to cloud the Vatican’s judgement, with Rome insistent that it could not be seen to defer to British pressure and that a proper condemnation would only result if, and only if, Britain requested it in concert with a Catholic power.24 The case for abolition was not couched, as it was in England, in religious terms or on a specifically Christian basis, appealing to spirituality and emotion, but was expressed, as we have seen, in the elitist philosophical language of the Enlightenment. The clerical authorities in France largely refrained from comment. They either approved of the institution of slavery, or else simply kept quiet, leaving a void for others to fill, with the consequence that the movement for religious anti-slavery evolved only slowly, largely after Napoleon’s reinstitution of the slave trade in 1802 or through the activities of organizations like the Société de la morale chrétienne.25 But that did not really take off until the 1820s. Until that time, the French Church would appear to have offered little by way of moral leadership. Even during the debates on American independence, inspiration for anti-slavery often seems to have originated in England.26 Non-conformists, and especially the Society of Friends, the Quakers, had a disproportionate part to play.27
Clarkson himself was not a Quaker, though he established strong connections with Quaker networks, which were vital to his activism and to his success in mobilizing a mass movement against the slave trade.28 He would attribute much of the popularity which he enjoyed in Britain to what he called the influence of ‘religious progress’, and particularly to the growth of Protestant groups like Methodists in the cities of the north of England. Even Britain’s slave ports, like Bristol and Liverpool, could galvanize abolitionist sentiment, with large crowds turning out to hear abolitionist speeches—and that despite the fact that the livelihoods of many in these cities depended on the prosperity that colonial commerce bestowed. Support for abolition came from all classes of society, not least from industrial workers in the midlands and the north. ‘To Christianity alone,’ said Clarkson, ‘we are indebted for the new and sublime spectacle of seeing men and women go beyond the bands of individual usefulness to each other; of seeing them associate for the extirpation of private and public misery; and of seeing them carry their charity, as a united brotherhood, into distant lands.’29 Of course, as a committed Christian himself, he may have exaggerated the importance of religious faith in explaining the growth of abolitionism as a popular cause. And politicians in England were more accustomed to look to the Scriptures than they were in France (though it is worth noting that in Britain, pro-slavery campaigners also cited the Bible in support of their claims).30 But where religious leadership was absent, as in France, it seems undeniable that the campaign remained rather low-key and that popular enthusiasm of the kind that was seen at English abolitionist rallies simply failed to materialize.
Clarkson enjoyed an unusual level of popularity and exposure in France, and not just because he was a well-known English abolitionist. He had, among the English anti-slavery campaigners, a unique knowledge of the French Antilles, and he had admirers in France and throughout the French Caribbean. More importantly, perhaps, he was a superb publicist for the abolitionist cause. Before, during, and after the Revolution he argued against the slave trade and persisted in his demand that the slaving nations examine their consciences and press ahead with abolition. His argument was as much a religious as a political one. He saw abolition as a potent symbol of Britain’s Protestant morality, and he clamoured for action, unwilling to be ‘answerable for the guilt’ of doing nothing.31 But what appealed most strongly to abolitionists in France was the moral tone of his writings, the insistence that abolition was not only a dictate of Reason but a cry from the heart and a response to the suffering of Africa. Clarkson did what no French abolitionist had done: he made his cause a religious crusade, presenting it as a litmus test of Christian faith. His Society for the Abolition of the Slave Trade, founded in London in 1787, not only lobbied parliament for abolition. It also conducted research of its own which helped to expose the iniquities of the trade, research that was as relevant to France as it was to Britain and which would be fed into France’s own abolitionist campaign. In 1789, for instance, Clarkson was able to answer questions sent to him by Mirabeau on behalf of the Amis des Noirs, questions about the means that the French used to enslave Africans and about their condition before the arrival of the slave ships. He had a deep understanding of the question because he had built up a network of correspondents to whom he could turn. To Mirabeau he passed on information regaled to him by Geoffrey de Villeneuve, who had served for two years as aide-de-camp to the French Governor of Gorée in Senegal. He was better informed about French slaving than the foremost anti-slavery campaigners in Paris.32
Clarkson researched into the conditions in which the slaves were kept, investigating the dimensions and deck plans of slave ships sailing out of Liverpool in a bid to expose the demeaning conditions in which human beings were piled up on board. The result was what became perhaps the most effective single piece of propaganda against the slave trade, a plan of the slave ship Brooks, supposedly to scale, showing the dimensions of the ship and the way in which the slaves were piled on top of one another for the duration of the Atlantic crossing. It did not matter that the drawing may have lacked accuracy: it made a powerful appeal to the emotions, conveying something of the claustrophobia felt by the captives and suggesting that the heavy mortality during the voyage was linked to the way in which so many human beings were stuffed into an enclosed space. The image of the Brooks became instantly memorable. It had, says Marcel Chatillon, a ‘directness of gaze’ and a terrible sense of dramatic suffering the few pictures could equal, and in both Britain and France it became an iconic reminder of the cruelty and barbarism of the slave trade.33 In England it helped to sway opinion in parliament and in the country. In France it was reprinted by anti-slavery activists, not least by the newly established Société des Amis des Noirs in 1788 which valued the evidence of the English abolitionists all the more highly as no such research had been done on the slave trade in France; indeed their first wave of leaders had not even visited the slave plantations of the Caribbean.34 In the following year, Clarkson launched a coordinated campaign in Paris to try to win over the National Assembly, sending across 1,000 prints showing the cross-section of the slave ship with a comprehensive text in French, and though they did not sway a majority in the Assembly, they helped win over a number of prominent deputies to the cause of abolition, among them the abbé Grégoire.35 By then abolition had become a truly transnational cause.
Political debates conducted through pamphlets and the press were followed keenly in the provinces and in French colonies overseas, where arguments about the rights and wrongs of the slave trade had a particular resonance. Bordeaux, for example, had every reason to take an interest in the question of slavery, and in the questions of rights and ethnicity which it raised. And it had the intellectual infrastructure to do so. The city’s elite was not restricted to négociants and armateurs whose professional activities brought them into daily contact with the slave trade; it also contained liberal nobles, men of letters, and a powerful legal fraternity whose concern for the law naturally engaged with questions of rights and liberties. They had, moreover, multiple opportunities to meet and discuss ideas, including—in the city of Montaigne and Montesquieu—the philosophical ideas that were current at the time. By the outbreak of the Revolution, public affairs were being discussed in various overlapping institutions, as well as in the newspapers, pamphlets, and ephemeral publications that abounded in the 1780s. Men met socially in cafés and masonic lodges, in the Chamber of commerce, and in learned societies like the Académie de Bordeaux and the recently founded Musée. Most of these bodies had a fixed membership from whom they levied subscriptions; they were not open to all comers. But for that reason they were places where one could meet with like-minded people and discuss political matters in a relatively secure and harmonious atmosphere.
The most venerable intellectual society in the city was the Académie of Bordeaux, which had received its letters patent from Louis XIV in 1713 and continued to meet regularly throughout the century to discuss scientific, moral, and medical issues that were deemed to be of topical interest. The Académie brought together men from different legal estates and professions, though the dominant group were undoubtedly the parlementaires, men who shared a natural interest in the law and politics. This was, of course, the group to which Montesquieu himself belonged—in 1721 he spoke urging a greater spirit of intellectual inquiry36—and both he and Montaigne figured prominently on the Académie’s programme. But membership was not restricted to any intellectual clique or to the legal profession. Rather, its meetings brought together large swathes of the city’s elite: between 1713 and 1793, Charles Higounet identified 175 of its members, of whom fifty-six were nobles, thirty-two held offices under the Crown, thirty-two were clergy, and sixty-eight were bourgeois, among them a cluster of members of the medical profession.37 There were, however, few merchants among its membership. They preferred to foregather in the Chamber of commerce, where both public debates and private conversations were closely tied to economic and commercial questions, leaving the questions of slavery and human rights to those with a legal training.
It was largely to fill this void and to provide the merchant families of the Chartrons with intellectual debate and stimulation that the Musée was founded in 1783. The Musée did not cater for the traditional elite of Bordeaux, the parlementaires and legal patriciate of the city. A membership list published in 1787 noted the high number of merchants (27.8 per cent of the total) and lawyers (20.6 per cent), with a further 16 per cent drawn from royal officials, ‘les officiers nobles de justice et de finance’. It included some of the leading merchants in the city, men with wealth and status such as Bonnaffé and Cabarrus, Dutasta and Laffon aîné, Nairac and Ravezies. The Musée was the also forum where many of the future Girondins and of those who would make their mark on the city’s revolutionary politics plotted, networked, and served their political apprenticeship.38 To take just one example, Marguerite-Élie Guadet, who would go on to be a founder member of the city’s principal republican club and to serve the Gironde in the Legislative Assembly, first spoke at the Musée.39 Two other future deputies, Vergniaud and Gensonné, also attended. In the years up to 1789, its members debated a wide range of matters linked to commerce and to the Antilles, and they were surely fully aware of the moral dilemmas involved. Yet—and despite the fact that several of its members are known to have engaged in the slave trade, Laffon de Ladebat and Paul Nairac among them—slavery was not a subject that figured greatly on the Musée’s agenda. This can only suggest that their silence was tactical, and that no one wished to disturb the calm and decorum in which the members took such obvious pride. It also signals the varied functions of the Musée, which was not primarily a debating society for the politically aware but a society in which men and women of taste could learn new skills or take their ease. If intellectual discussion was important to them, so were the arts, literature, and particularly music. It offered courses in modern languages, in mathematics, and in practical crafts.40 It also promoted concerts. Between 1784 and 1793, the Journal de Guienne advertised some seventy-five concerts in the Musée, many of them featuring leading musicians of the day and making a major contribution to the cultural life of the city.41 Its members went to be entertained as well as to be educated.
The Académie, in contrast, did devote a considerable amount of attention to the question of negritude, though, as a scientific society, its members showed more interest in biological than in political or economic issues. They were well aware of the presence of black men and women in their city, and they understood the degree to which Bordeaux’s prosperity was reliant on slavery. During much of the century, abolitionists did not make themselves heard at meetings, and the main focus of debates was the appearance and skin colour of Africans and the meaning that should be attached to their pigmentation. In this they were, of course, following a well-trodden path, in line with the concerns of scientists in Paris and other cities; but the interest they showed in the question also reflects the concerns of local notables in Bordeaux and its surrounding region. One of the major activities of the Académie was the setting of an annual essay competition, open to the public, on a selected theme, and it is interesting how regularly questions of trade and colonization recur. The Academicians looked for scientific analysis, and valued ideas that were founded on personal experience or medical diagnosis. Equally, they distrusted ideas that were presented as theological truth. This was shown in the judging of the competition of 1741—when no prize was finally awarded—on the subject of ‘what causes the colour of Negroes’. Of the seventeen entries, the judges preferred the submissions that based their argument on experience or observation, even if none of the arguments proposed convinced everyone. They quickly discarded those that talked of Africans as the descendants of Cain or which depended for their force on Biblical citation. They were also divided on the more ‘scientific’ explanations. Some propounded the fashionable argument that skin colour was determined by climate; others veered in the direction of nineteenth-century racial theories, claiming that there were incontestable genetic differences between white and black, though they were careful to avoid suggesting any hierarchy between races.42
Freemasonry flourished in all the Atlantic port cities, the lodges providing a meeting-place for merchants, investors, ships’ captains, and the many men who derived their living from the sea. The diversity of the maritime communities undoubtedly contributed to the popularity of the lodges, for in most of the ports the commercial elite contained men who had been attracted there by the trading opportunities they offered, men from different provinces of France and from across Europe, men of different religious creeds and none, men whose commercial activities meant that they were often on the move, mixing with people from different countries and with different thoughts and ideas. For many the lodges, with their traditions of freethinking, offered the perfect environment to meet others of like mind, as well as a place to welcome visitors who were members of lodges elsewhere. Some had especially strong ties with the merchant community: in Nantes, for instance, four of the city’s five lodges on the eve of the Revolution had a high merchant membership.43
Lodges also, it has been suggested, embraced traditions that made them especially accessible to those who worked at sea; in the words of two recent scholars of the subject, ‘by marrying festivity and reflection, and by favouring initiation rites and mutual help, the lodge was in effect upholding values which were those of seafaring communities’.44 It was perhaps especially valuable to those, like the Protestants of La Rochelle, who were discouraged from worshipping freely in their congregations. But it was also useful for merchants seeking to build friendships and associations with planters in the Caribbean, and, since they were often among the leading merchants in their respective ports, the négriers made full use of them. They corresponded with merchants and plantation owners in their sister lodges on Saint-Domingue, while in their own lodges they promoted leading slavers to positions of trust and responsibility. In Le Havre, a slave ship fitted out in 1787 was named Le Franc-maçon in a clear sign that there was no incompatibility between slaving and lodge membership, while ships from other Atlantic ports carried the names of masonic lodges or masonic symbolism (La Parfaite Union, La Concorde, L’Amitié, Les Vrais Amis). In Nantes in the 1780s, lodges specifically listed a member’s profession as ‘négrier’ on the certificates they issued to allow them to be received in lodges elsewhere.45 Freethinking clearly did not exclude slave-trading or profiteering from human misery, and there was no shame involved if one advertised one’s participation in the trade to others.
The bodies which most directly spoke for the merchant community, however, were the chambers of commerce, and it is here that the collective voice of colonial traders was most stridently heard. The chambers had mostly been established during the eighteenth century, and they would remain the principal spokesmen for mercantile interests until their abolition, as privileged corporations, in 1791. Privileged they undoubtedly were in the eyes of the revolutionaries; yet it is difficult to argue that they were not representative of the trading community, bringing together a large number of those who sailed, fitted out, and financed colonial commerce. They also took responsibility for making political submissions on behalf of the merchants. In Bordeaux, when the merchants were asked to draft a cahier de doléances in the spring of 1789 in advance of the meeting of the Estates-General, it was the Chamber that called a meeting of all the ‘négociants-armateurs, assureurs, banquiers et commissionnaires’ working in the city, all those who cooperated in fitting out ships for the Antilles. The meeting was well attended: the register of the Chamber contains 509 names, including eleven listed as ‘négociants juifs’, Jewish merchants who as yet did not enjoy full civil rights but who, as major players in the port, were respected and listened to.46 The Chamber would prove a forceful mouthpiece for mercantile interests in the months that followed. In 1789, interestingly, it placed great emphasis on free trade and the abolition of company privileges; and it demanded the suppression of the various dues and taxes that fell on wine exports. However, it was silent on the question of slavery.47
One possible explanation for this silence is that, with the Revolution approaching, the Chamber was reluctant to expose itself to obloquy by coming out in support of the slave trade, even if the interests of many of its members were dependent upon it. Another is that it was genuinely divided on the issue, and that the writings of the Enlightenment and the debates in Bordeaux had altered the moral compass of at least a part of its membership. A third reason can be found in the strength of the conflicting lobbies to which the Chamber was exposed. As the months passed, it found itself caught between the demands of its members in France and the increasingly insistent calls for support from traders and planters in the Caribbean, many of whom retained close ties with family back home. Trade quickly gained the upper hand. Pamphlets circulated freely between the various chambers and city authorities in France, and a stream of petitions and protests arrived on returning ships from the Caribbean as the planters of Martinique, Guadeloupe, and Saint-Domingue piled moral pressure on their partners back home. In their eyes, justice was on their side. The planters had become victims of slave violence and aggression at the very moment when liberty, that most revolutionary of ideals, was being preached in France. They embraced liberty with alacrity, but not in the political sense that the Assembly intended. They thought rather of liberty from state intervention, the liberty to trade freely and exploit others in the name of profit.48
Unease among the merchant community was already growing in 1788—unease about the future of the colonies, of course, but also about the threats to prosperity which they saw all around them. A pamphlet of March 1788, for instance, talks of a decline in economic activity and a general malaise in Bordeaux. It was written by a merchant from eastern France and printed in Neufchatel, a merchant who knew the city’s reputation and had come expecting to find a booming port and full employment. He declared himself to be both disappointed and disturbed by what he saw. The rich bustling market he had expected to find had been replaced by tepid trading and half-empty docks. Bordeaux, more than Lyon, had suffered as a result of the Eden Treaty of 1786 with England, which had opened the French market to mass-produced English manufactures at a time when French domestic industry was still undercapitalized and in need of protection. The pamphlet expressed dismay that the terms of the treaty were entirely in England’s interest.49 The great fairs had declined; the surety of lenders had been sacrificed, with debtors ‘insolently’ ignoring their debts; unemployment had risen; construction had ground to a halt; and since there were reduced levels of money in circulation, landlords had been unable to rent their rooms. The city, in short, was facing, even before 1789, the reality of a downward spiral, an economic recession. Even when we allow for the author’s strongly pro-Bourbon prejudice, his reflexions would have made uncomfortable reading for many in Bordeaux. The golden goose of colonial commerce was, it seemed, threatened by yet another downturn in a trade on which they had, perhaps rather unhealthily, come to depend.50 And though the writer no doubt exaggerated the level of his alarm, his words confirmed the worst fears of many who traded on the Bordeaux waterfront. Merchants across the Atlantic world regarded the Revolution’s commercial policies with disquiet and not a little concern for the future of their colonial markets.
That does not necessarily mean that all merchants were entirely self-consumed, or that none expressed reservations about the morality of the slave trade. Some showed an awareness of the wider picture, and even of the political, economic and social problems which slavery posed. They understood that there were contradictions between the liberties they were claiming for themselves and those, the most fundamental, which they continued to deny those they enslaved.51 Even the ships’ captains who sailed for Africa and bought and sold their human cargoes could betray signs of humanity, indications that they, too, shared some of the moral doubts that were gaining support in humanist circles. Joseph Crassous, born in La Rochelle and son of a royal notary, was attracted from a very young age to life at sea, and, having failed to be accepted as an officer cadet in the navy, he threw himself eagerly into life in the merchant marine, sailing out of his home port on merchant vessels to the Caribbean. In 1772, on his return to La Rochelle, he was appointed as first lieutenant on the slaver Le Roy Dahomet, sailing to the coast of Guinea, and then on to Le Cap. In the course of this voyage, Crassous kept a very detailed ship’s log, which allows us not only to follow the day-by-day progress of the voyage but also to read some of his reflections on what he was witnessing. In it he described the raiding parties on the African coast and suggests that European slavers—he singles out the Dutch in particular—were deliberately fomenting conflict among African nations so as to lay their hands on more captives. Though common knowledge today, it seems to have surprised and appalled the young Frenchman that Africans would sell their own brothers and sisters into slavery in this way. ‘How surprising it is,’ Crassous argued while his ship was anchored off the Guinea coast, ‘to see men sell their liberties, their lives, and their fellow citizens as blindly as do these miserable blacks. Passions, passions and ignorance – what damage you inflict on humankind!’52
In the most exceptional cases, men who were themselves heavily involved in trade and shipping—and even in slaving—lent open support to the abolitionist cause. Among the most prominent of these was André-Daniel Laffon de Ladebat, whose family had made its fortune from fitting out vessels for the navy in Bordeaux; he campaigned against the slave trade in the last years of the Ancien Régime and was soon won over to the ideals of the early Revolution. Between 1788 and 1792, he produced a flurry of speeches and pamphlets condemning the slave trade. The most influential of these was read at the Académie in the city, of which Laffon was an enthusiastic member, pressing on his audience the urgent need for slave emancipation. It was the fault of Europeans, he told his fellow academicians, that 6 million Africans had been forcibly deported from their homes in the greatest forced migration of people in modern times. In condemning this injustice, he did not spare either France or those who had been charged with its government. They were responsible for so much that was wrong, he reminded them, most especially for despoiling a continent in pursuit of profit. ‘We have depopulated and demeaned Africa’, he declared, to satisfy greed and ambition; and it was not only Africa that had been wronged. ‘America, devastated, has folded under the yoke of our tyranny. We have established slavery there even although religion proscribed it in our own climes.’ This was, he believed, morally indefensible, one of the most heinous of the ‘crimes to which cupidity draws us’, and he poured scorn on the economic justifications so often heard for the maintenance of slavery.53
But his was undoubtedly a minority voice among the merchant community of the Atlantic ports, whose fortunes were so deeply enmeshed with the profits of the slave trade. Nowhere was this more evident than in La Rochelle, whose Huguenot merchants had turned with enthusiasm to slaving after the loss of Canada in 1763, a loss that harmed their port more than any of their competitors. The slave trade had become more and more important for the prosperity of the city as other forms of trade declined, until in the 1780s the number of slave ships leaving the harbour constituted 58 per cent of all shipping leaving for foreign destinations.54 Between the Peace of Paris and the early Revolution, a new generation of négociants fitted out 202 négriers for West Africa; in the same period, seven merchants from La Rochelle, five of them Protestants, purchased plantations on Saint-Domingue, living and working in the Caribbean while retaining family connections and business partnerships in their home city.55 The merchant communities on the two shores of the Atlantic remained closely linked, communicating regularly on trading matters as well as about family affairs. As a result, the Chamber of commerce in La Rochelle was kept keenly aware of the interests of the colons, and, as in other merchant communities, there was always a temptation to side with them against the ‘incorrigible’ philanthropists whom it was only too easy to deride as intellectuals, outsiders, Parisians, men ignorant of the ways of trade.
An anonymous pamphlet of 1789 tried to respond to what it called ‘the cry of humanity and philosophy against the enslavement of negroes’, and denounced those who would make the removal of slaves from Africa into a moral fault.56 ‘Slavery’, exclaimed the writer, ‘this word produces the effect on philosophers that Circe’s liquor produced on the companions of Ulysses’, making them blind to the reality of the Africans’ lot once they were settled on the plantations. At this point, the pamphlet indulges in the sort of eulogy of the colons and the paternalism of the plantation economy which had become a commonplace of pro-slavery literature.
It is almost always the case that a feeling of pity stirs the hearts of the colons as strongly as the self-interest which, they would have us believe, is a crime. They are freed from the double slavery to which fate had condemned them, both in their country and in the ship which had brought them to the colonies. They are housed, they are clothed in a manner that fits the climate, they are allowed to rest and to acclimatize for six months before they are put to work.57
In short, the colons, men like themselves, can be trusted to treat the Africans well since it is in their interest to do so.
Pragmatism in merchant eyes meant two things; an awareness of the political and moral climate in which they lived, and a clear understanding of where the country’s interest lay. For most merchants in the Atlantic ports, that also meant a commitment to the colonial regime. The argument was primarily about the economy—about profit, of course, but also about the jobs they created and the wealth that flowed into France from the colonies. A pamphlet published anonymously in La Rochelle in 1789 put the commercial case forcibly, emphasizing that France’s aim in founding its colonies had been ‘to procure through the consumption of the planters greater industrial and cultural activity in metropolitan France, and to furnish the mother country, in return for the goods it sent out, with produce it could exchange with foreign countries that would bring greater benefits than the manufactures and production of the mother country itself’. But more than exports and imports were at stake. Without its colonies, the pamphlet continued, France would have little use for its merchant marine, which in turn would strip away the naval strength it needed to protect its coasts and fisheries. Without its colonies, in matters of foreign policy France risked being completely dominated by Great Britain and would lose its political influence in Europe. Without its colonies, industry would lose vital markets and workshops; factories would close, agriculture would be impoverished, and jobs would be lost, among them many of the 25,000 men employed as sailors and seamen. The picture would be grim, indeed: a picture of decline and economic desolation that would impoverish families and bring joy only to France’s rivals. All this, the author implied, would surely be sacrificed should the slave trade be abolished or slavery ended. It was, he insisted, in the economic interest of all to resist all calls for emancipation.58
The chambers of commerce were not slow to mobilize as the Revolution approached and they watched the threat of abolition grow. Their attitude was defensive in the face of what they saw as a potential disaster: the complete collapse and destruction of the colonial system on which their prosperity was dependent. They were temperamentally conservative, seeking to save the status quo from assault, wherever that assault might originate. And they increasingly identified a double threat. One was commercial, and lay in the desire of some planters to sell to the highest bidder and to free the islands from the obligation to sell to France or through the good offices of French merchants. The other was humanitarian, the threat that was posed by abolitionists and the anti-slavery lobby. There was recognition that merchant and planter interests did not always correspond, and more than one attempt to find a compromise that would serve the interests of both France and the Antilles. Pamphlets and addresses denounced fraud and tax evasion; others railed against connivance with the British which was prejudicial to France. Both the demands of the planters and those of the merchants demonstrated legitimate cause for complaint, and, as the chief judge of the commercial court in Nantes acknowledged, cried out for a settlement that brought benefits to both. Some at least recognized the need for progress and compromise.59
From this it followed that the commercial cities had every reason to cooperate, to share their fears and anxieties, and to lobby the National Assembly as a single interest group. Petitions were circulated from town to town and from chamber to chamber in a bid to strengthen their authority by speaking with a common voice. Often the enemy they picked out was the liberal elite, those who spoke for the Amis des Noirs and who made common cause with the black population. In the early months of the Revolution, their anger was focused on the campaign to offer full civil rights to men of colour, to the mulattoes who were already free but who did not yet enjoy full citizenship. A document that circulated in 1789 among the cities of the West attempted to define the terms in which all merchant communities might make common cause on the issue. They should engage in a frontal attack on the Amis des Noirs, ‘those men who for two years have been disrupting all our colonies, who spread in a host of writings and in the public prints the idea that the National Assembly will only succeed in bringing peace to the colonies by granting to men of colour the rights of active citizens’. Such a measure, in the merchants’ view, would lead to universal disorder, for the system of subordination on which the colonial system was built ‘cannot exist without an intermediary class between that which is engaged in the work of the plantations and that which can be called upon to administer public affairs’.60 Colonialism, they believed, could not survive without such inequality. And the prosperity of the west-coast ports could not outlive the fall of France’s colonial empire.
This led them to make a further allegation, that those factions that sought to deny the principle of ethnic inequality were not true liberals or sons of the Enlightenment, but men of treasonable intent, men in the pay of foreign governments who had an interest in undermining French prosperity, possibly for their own gain. At the top of the list of suspects, as ever, was their main commercial rival, Britain, the country which was responsible for circulating so many abolitionist tracts in the pre-revolutionary years, and which was France’s principal rival along the north Atlantic shipping lanes. Nantes’ loss, it was assumed, must necessarily be Liverpool’s gain, especially in the wake of the Eden Treaty which was widely blamed for slowing French economic growth, again to Britain’s long-term advantage. There was no altruism in England’s desire to abolish the slave trade, they insisted. Abolition was yet another weapon in a cynical English assault on France’s colonial possessions, an assault that already extended across a number of fronts, and the first months of the Revolution did nothing to reassure them. In particular, they were concerned that the National Assembly would cease to offer protection to the colonies or to provide resources for their defence. The Assembly had decreed that ‘the French nation renounces all wars made for the purpose of conquest, and that it will never deploy its forces against the liberty of any people’.61 That might seem to rule out any return to the foreign policy aims of the eighteenth century, to redefine the very function of war. Did it, they wondered, leave French territories exposed to attack? The decree made no provision for the defence of essential interests, and, declared the merchants of Nantes in a collective address to Paris, ‘it has not disarmed England, which, we have no doubt, aspires to exercise a despotism over the seas and over commerce’. Merchant communities had long memories, and they remembered the serious losses they had suffered at British hands during the Seven Years’ War. Once more their colonies seemed particularly vulnerable: ‘our merchant vessels sail unprotected; our colonies in the Americas have received no orders to prepare their defences, and their garrisons are barely on a peacetime footing; India has been abandoned; the coasts of Africa are exposed to all kinds of provocation.’62 Already the merchants of France’s Atlantic ports viewed the future with alarm. War and abolition were twin threats to which they demanded an effective response.
In many of their addresses we can detect a level of sympathy for the colons’ cause that went beyond shared economic interest. Among the merchants of La Rochelle and Nantes were men who had sent their sons to Le Cap or Basse-Terre, who owned plantations or shipping businesses in Saint-Domingue, who had spent a substantial part of their careers in the Caribbean. They did not consider themselves different people when they returned to France, or see their interests as conflicting with those of the colons, and they shared many of the same responses when it came to slavery and the slave trade. As the Revolution progressed, they were of course subject to continual pressure from associates and family members in the Antilles, a pressure that was political as well as personal, since the colonists were well aware of the influence they might have on the politics of the Atlantic ports. In La Rochelle, most famously, they established a pressure group in October 1789 to serve colonial interests, the Société des Colons Franco-américains de la Rochelle, a society which made no secret of its aims and methods, bringing to local politics the art of lobbying even as the institutions of these politics were being established and new political practices invented. It was to ‘bring together all those owning property in the Antilles who were resident in the généralité of La Rochelle’, to put pressure on the local authorities in the city and work closely with the newly established Club Massiac, which represented the interests of the colons in Paris. To join the society required payment of a subscription; the club’s membership list contained twenty-seven names, though there may have been around thirty in all.63
Almost all, it appears, owned land or had business interests in the Caribbean, and these served to mould them into a single constituency. For in other respects they might seem to have had little in common: they included members of noble families from the Aunis and Saintonge; long-established merchants, some of them ennobled, who counted slaving voyages among their commercial activities; and young, thrusting merchants, arrivistes who had only recently set up business in the port. What they shared was a common focus on colonial trade and especially on Saint-Domingue, and a gnawing insecurity over the future. During the months of the society’s existence they lobbied intensively in La Rochelle, and most especially among its merchant community, warning of the threats to their well-being and the dangers the port faced should ideas about the rights of man be extended to people of colour. In particular, they warned of the corrosive propaganda of those they regarded as trouble-makers, ‘to thwart the execution of the plans hatched by ill-intentioned individuals [des gens mal-intentionnés] aimed against our peace of mind and our properties’.64 There was no doubting whom they had in mind. They shared a distrust of ‘philosophy’ which was a commonplace of conservative thought, and they identified as their enemies all those who sided with the Amis des Noirs or who campaigned against the slave trade. Over the months that were to follow, as the Revolution became more radical, they would become much more persistent in their demands and would pose a greater and more immediate threat to their vested interests. For many in the merchant community, 1789 heralded a period of massive disruption which would destroy their businesses and transform their relationship with the colonies forever. For some, indeed, it spelt a new beginning, involving them in new waves of migration and tortuous journeys around the Atlantic world, journeys that in some cases would stretch from the French Atlantic ports to the Caribbean, to Port-au-Prince or Le Cap, then on to Havana or Santiago-de-Cuba, before moving on again to the United States, to New Orleans or Baton Rouge, Baltimore or Charleston, Norfolk or Philadelphia. By the end of the 1790s, a generation of Frenchmen—whether they had come directly from France or indirectly via the colonies—had spread themselves far across the eastern seaboard of the Americas.
1 Jean Tarade, ‘Is Slavery Reformable? Proposals of Colonial Administrators at the End of the Ancien Régime’, in Marcel Dorigny (ed.), The Abolitions of Slavery: from Léger Félicité Sonthonax to Victor Schœlcher, 1793, 1794, 1848 (Oxford: Berghahn, 2003), 101–2.
2 Yves Benot, ‘Diderot, Pechmeja, Raynal et l’anticolonialisme’, in Roland Desné and Marcel Dorigny (eds), Les Lumières, l’esclavage, la colonisation (Paris: La Découverte, 2005), 107.
3 Ehrard, Lumières et esclavage, 151.
4 Ibid., 152.
5 Daniel P. Resnick, ‘The Société des Amis des Noirs and the abolition of slavery’, French Historical Studies, 7 (1972), 561.
6 Philippe Steiner, ‘Slavery and French Economists, 1750–1830’, in Dorigny (ed.), The Abolitions of Slavery, 134.
7 Jonathan Israel, Radical Enlightenment: Philosophy and the Making of Modernity, 1650–1750 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), 274.
8 Jean-Jacques Rousseau, The Social Contract (London: Penguin, 1968), 58.
9 Joachim Schwartz (pseudonym, Marie-Jean-Antoine-Nicolas Caritat, Marquis de Condorcet), Réflexions sur l’esclavage des Nègres (Neuchatel, 1781).
10 Edward Derbyshire Seeber, Anti-slavery Opinion in France during the Second Half of the Eighteenth Century (Baltimore, MD, 1937), 67–8.
11 Hans-Jürgen Lüsebrink and Manfred Tietz (eds), ‘Lectures de Raynal: l’«Histoire des Deux Indes» en Europe et en Amérique au 18e siècle: actes du colloque de Wolfenbüttel’, Studies in Voltaire and the Eighteenth Century, 286 (1991), passim.
12 Cecil Courtney and Jenny Mander, ‘Introduction’, in Cecil Courtney and Jenny Mander (eds), Raynal’s Histoire des deux Indes: Colonialism, Networks and Global Exchange (Oxford: Voltaire Foundation, 2015), 6.
13 Matthias Middell, ‘France, the Abolition of Slavery, and Abolitionisms in the Eighteenth Century’, in Damien Tricoire (ed.), Enlightened Colonialism: Civilization Narratives and Imperial Politics in the Age of Reason (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017), 249–50.
14 Diderot and d’Alembert, Encyclopédie, ou Dictionnaire raisonné des Sciences, des Arts et des Métiers, entry on ‘Nègres’, vol.11, 76–80.
15 Muriel Brot, ‘La couleur des hommes dans l’Histoire des deux Indes’, in Sarga Moussa (ed.), L’idée de «race» dans les sciences humaines et la littérature, 18e et 19e siècles (Paris: L’Harmattan, 2003), 91.
16 Buffon, ‘De l’homme’, in Silvia Marzagalli et al. (eds), Comprendre la traite négrière atlantique (Bordeaux: SCÉRÉN-CRDP Aquitaine, 2009), 228.
17 José-Michel Moureaux, ‘Race et altérité dans l’anthropologie voltairienne’, in Moussa (ed.), L’idée de «race», 46.
18 Simone Carpentari Messina, ‘Penser altérité: les «races d’hommes» chez Volney’, in Moussa (ed.), L’idée de «race», 117.
19 Pieter Spierenburg, The Spectacle of Suffering: Executions and the Evolution of Repression from a Pre-industrial Metropolis to the European Experience (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), 43.
20 This graphic description, drawn from a contemporary account (Pièces et procedures du procès fait à Robert-François Damiens, published in Paris in 1757) is famously reproduced in Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (New York: Vintage Books, 1995), 3.
21 Jean Ehrard, ‘Slavery before the Moral Conscience of the French Enlightenment: Indifference, Unease and Revolt’, in Dorigny (ed.), The Abolitions of Slavery, 112.
22 Hervé Chabannes, ‘Entre prise de parole et occultation: les intellectuels havrais, la traite des Noirs et l’esclavage’, Revue du Philanthrope, 4 (2013), 146.
23 Apostolic letter In supremo apostolates, 3 December 1839.
24 Paul Kielstra, The Politics of Slave Trade Suppression in Britain and France, 1814–48 (Basingstoke: Palgrave MacMillan, 2000), 198–9.
25 Marie-Laure Aurenche (ed.), Le combat pour la liberté des Noirs dans le Journal de la Société de la Morale Chrétienne (2 vols, Paris: L’Harmattan, 2011). The Society was one of the few specifically Christian organizations in France to play an active role in the campaign against the illegal slave trade after 1820.
26 Marie-Jeanne Rossignol, ‘The Quaker Anti-slavery Commitment and How it Revolutionized French Anti-Slavery through the Crèvecoeur-Brissot Friendship’, in Brycchan Carey and Geoffrey Plank (eds), Quakers and Abolition (Urbana-Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 2014), 180–93.
27 James Walvin, The Quakers: Money and Morals (London: John Murray, 1997), 126–8.
28 Dee E. Andrews and Emma Jones Lapansky-Werner, ‘Thomas Clarkson’s Quaker Trilogy: Abolitionist Narrative as Transformative History’, in Carey and Plank (eds), Quakers and Abolition, 194.
29 Christopher Leslie Brown, ‘Christianity and the Campaign against Slavery and the Slave Trade’, in Stewart J. Brown and Timothy Tackett (eds), The Cambridge History of Christianity, vol. 7, Enlightenment, Reawakening and Revolution, 1660–1815 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 517.
30 Michael Taylor, ‘British proslavery arguments and the Bible, 1823–1833’, Slavery and Abolition, 37 (2016), 139–58.
31 Ellen Gibson Wilson, Thomas Clarkson: A Biography (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1989), 125.
32 Françoise Thésée, ‘Au Sénégal, en 1789: Traite des nègres et société africaine dans les royaumes de Sallum, de Sin et de Cayor’, in Serge Daget (ed.), De la traite à l’esclavage: Actes du Colloque International sur la traite des Noirs (2 vols, Nantes: Centre de recherche sur l’histoire du monde atlantique, 1988), vol. 2, 222–4.
33 Marcel Chatillon, ‘La diffusion de la gravure du Brooks par la Société des Amis des Noirs et son impact’, in Daget (ed.), De la traite à l’esclavage, vol. 2, 136–7.
34 Resnick, ‘The Société des Amis des Noirs and the abolition of slavery’, 560.
35 Chatillon, ‘La diffusion de la gravure du Brooks’, 141.
36 Pierre Barrière, L’Académie de Bordeaux, centre de culture internationale au 18e siècle, 1712–92 (Bordeaux: Bière, 1951), 10.
37 Louis Desgraves and Charles Higounet, ‘La vie intellectuelle et musicale’, in François-Georges Pariset (ed.), Bordeaux au dix-huitième siècle, 79.
38 Maïté Bouyssy, ‘Le Musée négrier’, Lumières, 3 (2004), L’esclavage et la traite sous le regard des Lumières, 109–10.
39 BM Bordeaux, MS 829(3), Musée de Bordeaux, list of members for 1784 and of officers for 1788.
40 Musée d’Aquitaine, Bordeaux au 18e siècle: Le commerce atlantique et l’esclavage (Bordeaux: Musée d’Aquitaine, 2010), 31.
41 Michel Hild, ‘Les concerts à la fin du 18e siècle d’après le Journal de Guienne’, in Patrick Taïeb, Jean Gribenski, and Natalie Morel-Borotra (eds), Le Musée de Bordeaux et la musique, 1783–93 (Rouen: Publications des Universités de Rouen et du Havre, 2005), 123–37.
42 Marie Bové, ‘Mémoires présentés à l’Académie de Bordeaux au 18e siècle: «La cause de la couleur des nègres»’, Institut Aquitain d’Etudes Sociales, bulletin, 76 (2001), 144–74.
43 Jean-Marc Masseaut, ‘Les milieux négriers et la franc-maçonnerie à Nantes’, in Cécile Révauger and Éric Saunier (eds), La Franc-maçonnerie dans les ports (Bordeaux: Presses Universitaires de Bordeaux, 2012), 207.
44 Cécile Révauger and Éric Saunier, ‘Introduction’, ibid., 11–12.
45 Eric Saunier, ‘Les francs-maçons français, la traite des Noirs et l’abolition de l’esclavage: bilan et perspectives’, in Jacques de Cauna and Cécile Révauger, La société des plantations esclavagistes. Caraïbes francophone, anglophone, hispanophone: regards croisés (Paris: Les Indes savantes, 2013), 143.
46 AD Gironde, C 4438, Chambre de Commerce de Guienne, ‘Répertoire contenant les noms de MM les négociants-armateurs, assureurs, banquiers et commissionnaires, convoqués à l’Assemblée qui doit avoir lieu, le 2 mars 1789, dans l’Hôtel de la Bourse’.
47 AM Bordeaux, AA 26, cahier de doléances de la ville de Bordeaux, sent to the Assemblée du Tiers Etat de Guienne, 6 April 1789.
48 Hélène Sarrazin, ‘Comment peut-on défendre l’esclavage?’, Institut Aquitain d’Études Sociales, bulletin, 76 (2001), 182.
49 For a contemporary British view of the treaty, see ‘A short vindication of the French treaty, from the charges brought against it in a late pamphlet, entitled, A view of the treaty of commerce with France, signed at Versailles, Sept. 28, 1786, by Mr. Eden’ (London, 1787).
50 AD Gironde, Fonds Bigot, 8J 703, Chambre de Commerce de Bordeaux, ‘Tableau alarmant de la ville de Bordeaux, par un négociant (Neufchâtel, 1788).
51 Jean Tarrade, ‘Les colonies et les principes de 1789: les assemblées révolutionnaires face au problème de l’esclavage’, in Tarrade (ed.), La Révolution Française et les colonies (Paris: L’Harmattan, 1989), 9–33.
52 Alain Yacou, Journaux de bord et de traite de Joseph Crassous de Médeuil: De La Rochelle à la côte de Guinée et aux Antilles, 1772–76 (Paris: Karthala, 2001), 99–100.
53 AD Gironde, 8J 707, Laffon de Ladebat, ‘Discours sur la nécessité des moyens de détruire l’esclavage dans les colonies’, adresse à l’Académie de Bordeaux, 25 August 1788.
54 Jean-Michel Deveau, La traite rochelaise (Paris, 1990), 44.
55 Brice Martinetti, Les négociants de La Rochelle au 18e siècle (Rennes: Presses Universitaires de Rennes, 2013), 233.
56 AD Gironde, MI 80004/41, «Mémoire sur l’affranchissement des nègres et en épigraphe quod vidi, testor»; Hélène Sarrazin, ‘Comment peut-on défendre l’esclavage?’, passim.
57 Sarrazin, ‘Comment peut-on défendre l’esclavage?’, 175–7.
58 BM La Rochelle, 11877 C, ‘Précis sur l’importance des colonies et sur la servitude des Noirs’ (La Rochelle, 1789), 1–12.
59 AD Loire-Atlantique, 1 ET A 27, ‘Mémoire sur la nécessité d’unir de la manière la plus avantageuse les intérêts des Colonies et du Commerce et celui des Colons et des Commerçants, par M. Joubert du Collet, Juge en chef du Consulat de Nantes, 20 novembre 1789’.
60 AD Loire-Atlantique, 1 ET A 27, ‘Bases d’après lesquelles doivent être rédigées les adresses des Communes des villes maritimes de Commerce et des Manufactures du Royaume à l’Assemblée Nationale’, n.d.
61 Archives Parlementaires, première série (1789–1800), vol. 15, pp. 661–2.
62 AD Loire-Atlantique, 1 ET A 27, ‘Adresse à l’Assemblée Nationale’ from the merchants of Nantes, delivered by Mosneron Dupin and dated 15 September 1790.
63 Marcel Dorigny, ‘Les colons de La Rochelle se mobilisent contre les Amis des Noirs: procès-verbaux de la Société des colons franco-américains de La Rochelle, 14 octobre 1789 – 27 août 1790’, in Augeron and Caudron, La Rochelle, l’Aunis et la Saintonge face à l’esclavage, 223–30.
64 Claudy Valin, ‘La filiale rochelaise de la Société des colons franco-américains’, in Augeron and Caudron (eds), La Rochelle, l’Aunis et la Saintonge face à l’esclavage, 231–2.