7
When the Revolution came, the merchants’ interests were of course not the nation’s foremost concerns, and the political arena was soon dominated by demands for rights and representation, for the granting of citizenship and the ending of privilege in all its forms: political and social as well as economic. In this regard, debate in the Atlantic ports was little different from that in the rest of the country: the collapse of the old order was primarily a story of political failure, a loss of faith in a system of government, a country-wide challenge to royal autocracy. Trading privileges were among those under attack, most notably the company monopolies that had been practised in commerce with the East and West Indies, but the main thrust of revolutionary rhetoric was political, focusing on abuses of power, noble privilege, and feudal exactions. There was a general sense of institutional crisis, a fear that local interests were harmed by creeping centralization, expressed in the pretensions of royal administration and the spreading tentacles of royal justice. The main issues of the immediate pre-Revolution were those of sovereignty and political legitimacy, institutional reform, and access to administration and justice. In many ways, they reflected the demands of the American colonists in 1776, which had become enshrined in the constitution of the United States. Across France the political debate echoed that in Paris, and, as Timothy Tackett has justly remarked, ‘both participants and outside observers were intensely self-conscious of the historical significance of the times in which they were living’.1
Political demands had been most forcibly expressed in the cahiers de doléances that were drawn up during the winter months of 1788 and the spring of 1789 in preparation for the meeting of the Estates-General at Versailles in May. From Guienne, for instance, the region around Bordeaux, there were demands for a new constitution for France; for regular, statutory meetings of the Estates-General; for a system of justice that guaranteed speedy hearings and entitled everyone to trial by jury; and for root-and-branch fiscal reforms that would bring an end to feudal dues and guarantee a fairer system of national taxation.2 There was nothing unusual in this: the drafting of provincial cahiers was left to lawyers and royal officials who adjudged what they thought to be important, and here as in most regions of France, these constitutional issues were retained for the final cahier sent to the King, whereas seemingly less important social and economic grievances that may have been peculiar to the area or limited to a particular sectional interest were often edited out. Demands for representation were widely shared across France’s population, and came from every province of the country. It is significant, too, that many political grievances were shared by all three estates, especially those which sought to limit royal power and involve local people in the political process. The need for some degree of political reform was something on which all three orders could unite, both in town and in the countryside. It was a moment when the transition from traditional local politics to modern national politics was given new impetus and a new kind of consciousness seemed to be developing. For, even in matters of taxation and forced payments, distinctions were drawn. It was, as Gilbert Shapiro and John Markoff note, ‘those burdens most often held to be essentially local – the payments to lord and Church – that were to be abolished’, whereas ‘the burdens that bound the village to the state were to be set right’.3
The initial response to the Revolution from the mercantile communities of the Atlantic ports might suggest a quiet satisfaction rather than alarm or apprehension about the future. Their views were largely in accord with the demands of the Third Estate for greater political rights and civil equality, they favoured moves away from company privilege in favour of economic liberalism, and many among them, like the Protestants of La Rochelle or the Jews of Bordeaux and Bayonne, benefited personally from the steps taken in the first months of the Revolution to guarantee their religious freedom. Moreover, if they had expressed some unease in the last years of the Ancien Régime about the potential impact of enlightened ideas and the future of the colonies, nothing had yet happened to threaten their commercial interests, as merchant vessels continued to leave from the Garonne and the Loire estuaries for West Africa and the Caribbean. They remained largely immersed in their business and family affairs, and their correspondence was generally devoid of politics. This should not surprise us, since the culture of merchant communities in the eighteenth century had been largely individualistic and strongly family-orientated, their values defined by family, commerce, and religion.4 In so far as they spoke with a collective voice their interests were represented by their chambers of commerce, and it would not be until the first municipal elections, in 1790, that they established a broader political presence, on the newly created municipal authorities. Or they might respond as religious communities. The Protestants of La Rochelle provide an interesting case study here. Following the decree on 24 December 1789 that granted them civil equality and access to all public offices—this after 160 years of exclusion—they quickly responded by standing in the municipal elections of the following month, providing one-third of the officiers municipaux (four out of twelve) and almost as high a proportion of the town’s notables (seven out of twenty-five).5 In 1791 a Protestant was elected as mayor; in 1792 another would command the city’s National Guard.6 In Bordeaux, where there had been far less of a history of religious persecution, Protestants were more inclined to concentrate on their commercial affairs, with the consequence that they were often less well prepared to respond to the political upheavals that followed.7
Though merchants did not always throw themselves into politics to the same degree as lawyers and members of the liberal professions, some of their number welcomed the Revolution as an opportunity for advancement. But the chance to do so was not equally available to all. In those cities, like Bordeaux, where there was a powerful legal fraternity, or where there were existing political institutions like an intendance or a parlement, it was perhaps inevitable that there was a ready-made political elite, men with legal minds who were naturally drawn to questions of civil rights and political representation, and to the defence of individual liberties through resort to the law. The parlements, in particular, had played a critical part in a region’s political life under the Ancien Régime, when they had stood up for local rights and traditions in defiance of the King, remonstrating with ministers in defence of provincial liberties and risking closure and exile for their pains. As a result, they had established themselves as the defenders of provincial interests, including, at times, those of commerce. During the 1780s, for instance, when the American Revolution posed a threat to Bordeaux’s colonial trade, the Parlement of Bordeaux had called on the government to take action in defence of the city’s privileges in the Antilles; and through such interventions it had harnessed a degree of popular support among the shopkeepers and artisans as well. As a consequence, when the parlementaires returned home from periods of internal exile, they were often greeted with joy and acclaim by the people, who celebrated by bedecking their houses and setting off fireworks.8 Over the century the provincial parlements attracted the services of the leading constitutional and commercial lawyers of the day, and they would figure among the foremost spokesmen for the Third Estate when, in 1789, their cities were called on to select deputies to send to Versailles.9
But among the Atlantic commercial cities Bordeaux was something of an exception, in that it was a centre not only of trade but also of the law, of royal administration, and of the Catholic hierarchy. In La Rochelle, Le Havre, Saint-Malo, or Nantes the merchants faced no such competition and in these cities commerce dominated public life to an extent that would have been impossible in Bordeaux. In La Rochelle, for example, the cultural life of the town was dominated by the greater merchants, the ‘seigneurs du comptoir’ like Daniel Garesché, who succeeded one another at the head of the Chamber of commerce and who collectively constituted the grande bourgeoisie rochelaise. Among them Protestants formed a tight and proudly defensive group, eager to stake their claim to social pre-eminence.10 In Nantes, too, the wealth of the merchant community and the place they occupied in the economic life of the nation gave the Île Feydeau an undisputed place among the city’s elite, and when it became known in 1788 that the King intended to call an Estates-General, the merchants of Nantes showed an immediate desire to be represented, asking that they be allowed to send two deputies to represent the commercial interests of the city and trying to rally other ports to support their cause. The campaign achieved some success, the King granting that there should be at least one merchant among the deputies elected for the Nantes region; and on 18 April they were duly rewarded when a merchant and former consul, Jacques-Nicolas Guinebaud, was duly elected to represent the trading interest at Versailles. The merchants also composed a list of forty-three grievances, the majority of which were incorporated in the cahier de doléances that was sent to Versailles. These covered four broad areas that were deemed to be of prime importance to the prosperity of the area: commercial administration, foreign and colonial trade, trade with the interior, and the financing of commerce. The merchants looked to the King to encourage commercial enterprise through a mixture of liberalization and protection.11
During the early months of the Revolution, it was still difficult for most merchants to see it as a major threat, as their commercial activities remained relatively secure and there was little in their personal experience to suggest the upheavals to come. They were well aware, of course, of events elsewhere in France, some of which could not but arouse fears: they heard the uncompromising language that was used against the rich, and observed the signs of hatred that were being shown towards the noble and privileged. They could not condone these outbursts; some of their number had spent a large part of their lives buying exactly that kind of privilege to gain access to the select society of what Paul Butel has termed ‘the patricians of commerce’.12 They could not regard everything they witnessed with equanimity. But revolution had not yet been translated into violence or disruption, and these were the things that the merchant community most feared. The La Rochelle merchant Pierre-Jean van Hoogwerff, who was originally from Holland, was speaking for many when he wrote to his brother in St Petersburg in 1789 with the reassuring news that if the Revolution had unleashed troubles and disorder in other parts of the country, ‘thank God, our province remains utterly tranquil’.13 He needed to offer reassurance, since for many the very concept of revolution spelt violence and disorder, and early reports of lynching and mob violence in Paris did little to calm fears. The absence of social disorder at home and the maintenance of peace abroad were their two principal objectives, and the preconditions on which they were dependent if their trade was to continue to flourish.
Talk of the Rights of Man did not arouse great anxiety, at least initially. The issue was seen in terms of native-born Frenchmen, the equality of all, whatever their social status, to enjoy the same fundamental human rights, the same rights in law. And if the Declaration of the Rights of Man made all legally equal, it did not detract from property rights; property, indeed, was specifically guaranteed as one of the basic human rights that should be enjoyed by all, the final clause of the Declaration establishing, seemingly unequivocally, that ‘since property is a sacred and inviolable right, no one may be deprived thereof unless a legally established public necessity obviously requires it, and upon condition of a just and previous indemnity’.14 Of course, with hindsight, these two guarantees—of the civil rights of all men on the one hand, and of the inviolability of property on the other—could not fail to raise awkward questions about the legitimacy of slavery. In 1789 some local cahiers de doléances did insist that slavery was morally wrong, arguing that there could be no slaves on French soil or in France’s colonies in the Americas.15 It is true that Condorcet, Brissot, and like-minded political leaders published pamphlets urging the total abolition of slavery and the slave trade; and the Amis des Noirs had become an active pressure group for abolition. But, when compared to England, expressions of public outrage remained muted. There were no anti-slavery petitions in France of the kind that assailed the British parliament at this time, and the evidence of the cahiers suggests that the level of public concern about France’s role in the African slave trade was strictly limited.16 Abolitionism was a cause for the liberal elite.
The Declaration did not talk of equality in purely abstract terms. It recognized a truth that was unprecedented in European history, that every citizen, even the poorest and the least educated, was entitled to enjoy the same basic human rights as those who were well-born and believed they had entitlements. But this raised as many questions as it answered. Who should be considered a citizen? What constituted property? And how could the rights of black slaves be sustained without undermining the property rights—rights that were equally sacrosanct, it seemed—of the slave-owners? If in 1789 the constitutional monarchy was prepared to live with this apparent contradiction, by 1794, following slave insurrections in Saint-Domingue, the Republic would conclude that men had natural rights of which they could not be deprived, and that distinctions of race and ethnicity could no longer be allowed to prejudice the fundamental rights of all.17 In 1793 France’s commissioner in Saint-Domingue, Léger-Félicité Sonthonax, outlawed slavery in the northern part of the colony, and some months later his colleague Étienne Polverel extended the abolition to cover the rest of the island. The Convention then took the momentous step of formally abolishing slavery in all its colonial possessions, and that at a time when its European trading rivals were still free to engage in slaving. For the slaves it was a moment for rejoicing, but for the planters in the islands and the merchants of France’s Atlantic ports, it meant the enactment of their worst nightmare.18
But that was for the future. The year 1789 was characterized by a general enthusiasm among the revolutionaries for reform, with all, administrators and lawyers, merchants and liberal nobles, seemingly content to place their faith in the Estates-General. But what the majority favoured was moderate change, not radical action involving crowd violence, like the attack, in response to news of the assault on the Bastille, on the Château des Ducs de Bretagne in Nantes. They had no wish to overthrow the social order; rather they wanted to make it more flexible, and distinctions more porous, so that they could be allowed to play the role and to enjoy the prestige that they felt their talent merited. In a pamphlet on reforms to the social order, the Nantes merchant Mosneron aîné explained the extent of the changes he sought. He wished not to destroy the existing order, but rather to adapt it by removing the ‘distinction between a nobility that was able to receive all the honours, without needing to display any merit, and commoners seen as unworthy of consideration in spite of their value to society’. He urged the creation of a new order that would lie between the nobility and the common people, and would be defined by talent and usefulness, to be composed of ‘merchants, lawyers, doctors’ and ‘men of talent’. In other words, he wanted a social structure that reflected men’s functionality and rewarded education and ability instead of being obsessed with their birthright.19 He was effectively arguing for the existence of the bourgeoisie as a separate social entity, and for their recognition in law. He had no interest in sharing power with the unskilled, the crowd, or the mass of the population.
Yet within weeks of the elections that sent deputies to the Estates-General, word arrived from Paris of a very different kind of revolution, one dominated by crowd demands and popular violence, culminating in the fall of the Bastille and the march of the women from the Paris markets to pressurize the King at Versailles. In Bordeaux, news of the Bastille was brought by special courier, taking only forty-six hours to reach the city, and taking the form of a letter from Paul Nairac, one of their deputies whom they had mandated to report on developments.20 Nairac and his brother were members of a notable merchant family with vested commercial interests in both Bordeaux and La Rochelle; they had no reason to welcome radicalism or popular insurgency. His tone was sombre as he outlined the violence that had followed the King’s threat to curb popular representation, and listed the deaths that had followed. But the city’s reaction is interesting. Nairac’s report was taken as a form of reassurance, proof that the crisis was over and that stability had been restored in Paris. As a consequence, normal trading could resume. Bordeaux’s elite, it would appear, were less afraid of political radicalism in 1789—or even of Paris—than they were of a conservative reaction that might stifle or abort the entire revolutionary process.21 And, in the many elections during 1790 to fill the new local authorities—for the department, the district, the municipal council, to say nothing of elections to the various local offices which the Revolution created—they demonstrated time and again their willingness to participate and to assume responsibility in the public life of their city. They staffed the new clubs and popular societies, were elected to offices in the popular sections, and provided officers for the National Guard. Nor were they swept aside after the declaration of the Republic, as the same groups continued to provide political leadership in the years from 1789 to 1793.
A similar pattern can be observed in all the major Atlantic cities, as members of their bourgeois elite profited from the ending of noble privilege and took the reins of municipal governance. Freed from the social and legal constraints of the Ancien Régime, they sought to control politics locally and to steer the Revolution on a moderate course. The figures speak for themselves. In Bordeaux, the elections of 1790 produced a municipality drawn from a relatively narrow social base. Of the twenty officiers municipaux, ten were merchants and four lawyers, with the others drawn from professional or business circles. The forty-two notables repeated the pattern, with fourteen (or a third) coming from the legal profession, and sixteen from the merchant community (a figure that rises to nineteen if we include a sugar-refiner, a shipbuilder, and the commercial agent of a shipping company).22 In La Rochelle, the results were not dissimilar. The newly elected mayor was Goguet de la Sauzet, a négociant-armateur, and the officiers municipaux included fourteen other merchants, both Protestant and Catholic, who would ensure that the city’s commercial interests were not ignored.23 Similarly in Nantes, the merchant community played a significant role in the first months of the Revolution, dominating the permanent committee elected to run the city in 1789; but from 1790 the merchants had to share power with lawyers, doctors, and other members of the liberal professions, with merchants providing two-thirds of the officiers municipaux (twelve out of eighteen) and half of the notables (eighteen out of thirty-six). Significantly, however, it was not only members of the old merchant families who stood for political office. The revolutionary years were ones of social mobility, when new men joined the ranks of the mercantile elite and younger merchants, driven by personal ambition, arrived on the waterfront. The mayors who led Nantes in this period, Baco and Kervegan, typified this broader social group, men born into commercial families but not personally involved in Atlantic trade.24
But the urban elites did not have things all their own way. The new division of the territory in 1790, with its redistribution of administrative and judicial responsibility, set town against town in a competition for status and resource which generated inter-urban feuds and exaggerated longstanding rivalries. Such rivalries were exploited to challenge the concentration of too much power in a small number of large commercial cities, and the argument was made that a more equal distribution of administrative authority would be more egalitarian and hence more revolutionary. Many of the smaller towns emphasized their central position in their department and their close ties to the land, and they drew attention to their value as markets for the surrounding countryside.25 Across the west and south-west of the country, petitions revealed the extent of anti-commercial feeling in many rural areas, and a resentment of the Atlantic port cities that emphasized their irrelevance to peasants and to the rural economy of their hinterland. Towns that were centrally positioned in the interior, or to which country people were in the habit of going on business or to market, could amass greater support because they were perceived as being useful to the population at large, a point that was repeatedly made in appeals to the constitutional committee in Paris. Legal centres claimed precedence over Atlantic ports on the grounds that country dwellers went there to settle matters like land ownership and inheritance, custom commanding greater loyalty than commerce.26
So, while Nantes and Bordeaux were sufficiently dominant in their new departments to ensure their choice as chef-lieu, other ports faced more of a struggle. And even Bordeaux had to shrug off a plausible challenge from the market town of Libourne, which argued that it needed to retain its independence if it was not to be smothered by its larger neighbour. Bordeaux, the petition alleged, ‘completely stifles Libourne, eclipsing it with its shadow and devouring it to the extent that, if Libourne were to remain part of this department, it would never be able to emerge from its obscurity’.27 In this case, the petition was rejected, but a number of Atlantic ports experienced difficulty in staking their claims. The choice of Pau and Tarbes as centres for departments in the Pyrenees meant that there was nothing for Bayonne; even its claim for a district was dismissed in favour of Ustaritz. In the Charente-Inférieure, a department built out of the Ancien Régime provinces of Aunis and Saintonge, Saintes won out over La Rochelle, though Napoleon finally reversed the decision in 1810. To the people of the Charente, Saintes had all the hallmarks of a regional capital, while La Rochelle was a mere commercial appendage, irrelevant to local farmers, its attention transfixed by the colonies and the sea.28 Similarly, Marseille had to give way to the historical precedence and inland position of Aix-en-Provence in its bid to be chef-lieu of the Bouches-du-Rhône; again, this would later be reversed in Marseille’s favour.29 And in Normandy, where Rouen was given the chef-lieu of the new department of the Seine-Inférieure, Le Havre struggled to gain any administrative function, being passed over for a district in favour of the small market town of Montivilliers. Once again, the arguments centred on its irrelevance to the local economy and its perceived failure to redistribute its commercial wealth to local people. As the villages of the surrounding area explained in a petition to the Assembly, Le Havre ‘is properly speaking nothing more than an entrepôt for goods brought in from abroad to be sent on to all parts of the kingdom’. Its merchants were uninterested in agriculture and set only on maximizing their own profits; it was a city of ‘rich capitalists well versed in speculation’.30 Commercial ports that looked out to the ocean were regarded with suspicion and often with hostility by the inhabitants of the surrounding countryside, who saw their much-flaunted prosperity as irrefutable proof of their ingrained egotism.
But it is too easy to equate commerce with mercantile self-interest. The Atlantic ports were also centres of activism and of the political sociability on which the spread of revolutionary ideas was dependent. Cities like Nantes and Bordeaux produced their own newspapers and had a flourishing print culture, publishing political pamphlets that reported on national politics and increasingly challenged Paris in their news coverage. From the rather bland advertising sheets of the late 1780s, the local press evolved to offer a range of political opinion, from the clerical and monarchist to the radical and Jacobin. They had their own bookshops, printing presses, and a tradition of debate fostered in cafés, salons, and masonic lodges. After 1789, these were joined by a range of clubs and political societies where the local elite could meet with like-minded people to discuss revolutionary politics and plan political campaigns. Politics also infiltrated the theatre, with new plays staged on themes of current political or patriotic concern: the Bordeaux stage hosted productions with titles like L’Heureux décret, ou la suppression des titres, which openly gloried in the abolition of feudal titles, though they formed a small minority of the plays on offer: only in 1791 did plays with an overtly political theme exceed 10 per cent of the productions on offer.31 The audiences, it appeared, preferred more classical productions.
More important than the stage, however, were the clubs and popular societies which sprouted in every town in provincial France, and in many villages as well, and which, along with the sections that were established to take charge of local politics in the larger cities, provided an outlet for political ambition and popular outrage. There is little doubt that they represented significant sections of public opinion, or that they sprang spontaneously from genuine partisanship. Many of them started as simple salles de lecture where people could catch up with the Paris newspapers; some clubs in smaller towns, indeed, devoted entire sessions to reading the latest news.32 Or they began life as meetings in cafés, part of an urban sociability that had developed in the eighteenth century, where friends and people of similar views would read the papers and discuss politics. Others evolved, apparently seamlessly, from masonic lodges: some even held their meetings in the premises vacated by the freemasons, with the same men who had run the lodges installed as the society’s office-holders. Though freemasonry was very unequally distributed across the country in the eighteenth century, two of the five regions where it was most popular were close to the Atlantic coast: the area around Nantes and Angers in the Loire valley and in the Aunis and Saintonge between La Rochelle and Bordeaux.33 Here lodges were to be found in small country towns as well as in the major cities.
It is perhaps no accident that these were areas where revolutionary clubs were also particularly numerous, especially across the south-west and the hinterland of Bordeaux, or where the Protestant religion was widely practised.34 Protestants figured among those most attracted to freemasonry, with its tradition of freethinking, and some of the Bordeaux lodges, particularly those of L’Amitié and L’Étoile, recruited massively from the Protestant merchant houses of the Chartrons, among both Bordeaux residents and merchants from Northern Europe.35 After 1789, many of these same men would take their places in local clubs and popular societies, concerned to exercise an influence on public affairs that had been denied them in earlier periods because of their religion, and fearful that they might be seen as standing aloof from the Revolution in their community. Indeed, many Protestants became activists in the club movement, or gave proof of revolutionary patriotism in other ways. A former pastor, Jean-Paul Bétrine, was one of the founders of the Société des Amis de la Constitution in La Rochelle, and its president in 1791.36 Two members of Bordeaux’s Protestant merchant community, Laffon de Ladebat and Jean-Pierre Sers, were among the ten deputies the city returned to the Legislative Assembly.37 And Protestant merchants—even among those who were politically conservative—gave generously to the national cause in response to a series of patriotic appeals. Garesché and Van Hoogwerff were among those who made notable contributions to the cost of defence in La Rochelle, with Demissy making a loan of 150,000 livres to the city authorities without any guarantee that it would ever be reimbursed.38
By the end of 1789, club life was an established part of political sociability, and there was a sufficient range of clubs to accommodate revolutionaries of every stripe. In Nantes, for instance, there were already nine societies or reading circles where the literate and politically aware could meet and discuss the affairs of the day. They were scattered across the city and appealed to men of the legal and mercantile professions, those with the interest to join and the money to pay the annual dues. They generally took their names from the streets where they stood or the buildings where they met: like the club du Port-au-Vin, de la rue Dauphine, de la rue Goyon, the club du Café, or the club des Cours Unis. Or else they advertised themselves as reading rooms where newspapers were made available and debate staged: such were the Chambre de lecture du Soleil, the Chambre du Port-au-Vin, the Chambre Nouvelle, or the Chambre de la Ville.39 As the months passed they became increasingly political, subscribing to the Paris newspapers that best accommodated their views and attracting a clientele that was exclusively radical, or moderate, or, in rare cases, monarchist. But if they could enthuse at the views coming from Paris, they could be quickly disillusioned when they felt that their interests were undermined. In March 1790, the 130 members of the Chambre du Soleil wrote to Brissot to complain of the ‘pernicious morality’ that had come to dominate the columns of his newspaper, the Patriote Français, with its regular advocacy of the cause of abolition. Scathingly, they urged him to change the title of his paper, since there was nothing patriotic about it. In their eyes, Brissot, ‘Monsieur l’Ami des Noirs’, was really no one’s friend, ‘condemning thousands of men, your brothers, to misery and despair’. He preached abolition with no regard for the ‘inevitable’ consequences for the people of Nantes, and they angrily cancelled their subscription. ‘Keep your paper for your friends the Africans, but don’t take the trouble to send it to us in future.’40 Though slavery was not the principal focus of revolutionary politics, Nantes’s merchants found it difficult to divorce politics from commerce and from their dependence on the slave trade.
New clubs and popular societies were created in all the Atlantic ports during the early months of the Revolution, with the aim of piling pressure on the authorities. Typical of these were the Amis de la Constitution in Nantes, set up in May 1790 in the buildings of the former Capuchin monastery in the merchant quarter of the city. Its initial aim was to promote the cause of moderate revolution, but, very quickly, the society faced an internal crisis, splitting into conservative and radical factions, with the radicals going on to win overall control. The new office-holders were less beholden to the city’s merchant elite; they actively sought out a more popular membership and opened the club’s doors to a wider cross-section of the citizenry, who could attend meetings as spectators in the public gallery. A somewhat disillusioned member left a clear, if rather jaundiced, account of what he had witnessed when, on a single day, the Club decided to admit more than 150 new members, at a stroke transforming the character of the meetings and creating what he regarded as a noisy, chaotic atmosphere, with members shouting each other down and constant interruptions from the public gallery. He was dismayed to hear one of the orators addressing the people in the tribunes, telling them that they were the new masters and that they must at all times hold the officers to account. He himself, unsurprisingly, did not return.41
By 1791, Bordeaux was home to a variety of popular societies representing a wide range of opinion and frequented by large numbers of those who went on to engage in a political career in the city. Some remained small, proved short-lived, or merged with bigger societies as revolutionary politics evolved. The Surveillants de la Constitution, for instance, were known for their moderation and commitment to legal process: their minute-books indicate support for the rights of man and for measures against those it regarded as the republic’s enemies, especially royalists and refractory priests. And the Société Patriotique de la Merci, another of the more conservative clubs in the city, started as a reading circle for artisans, shopkeepers, and lesser merchants. By 1792, both had closed or had been forced to merge. The more durable Bordeaux clubs, and the ones that went on to dominate the city’s political landscape, were the Amis de la Constitution (later renamed the Amis de la Liberté et de l’Égalité), which, despite being affiliated to the Paris Jacobins, took a more moderate political course and supported the city’s deputies in national politics, while the rival Club National took up the cause of the more radical leaders in Paris. The Club—or the Club du Café National, as it had begun life—had, like so many others, been set up as a gathering-place for men of a republican persuasion, including some of the lesser merchants, traders, lawyers, doctors, and members of the liberal professions.42 But by 1793 it had extended its social base to the more popular classes and had forged alliances with the radical sections of the city, those of a more egalitarian persuasion and less attuned to the needs of commerce. It was castigated by its opponents as a mouthpiece for the radical Jacobin Club in Paris and for deputies sent on mission from the new republican assembly, the National Convention.
But Bordeaux was not a radical city. Its elites remained intensely suspicious of the Paris Jacobins, and, even more, of the popular radicalism of the Paris streets. Of the city’s twenty-eight sections, only half a dozen identified with the Jacobin radicals, the group now known as the Montagne in the Convention. The others took the side of the more moderate republicans in the chamber, those who supported Roland’s administration in the early months of the Republic and were known as ‘Brissotins’ or ‘Girondins’, this last because of the strength of their representation in Bordeaux and its immediate hinterland in the Gironde. For them, as for Bordeaux’s legal and mercantile establishment, the political coup of June 1793 which brought the Jacobins to power in the Convention was more than a minor irritant. They had no interest in provoking social turmoil and advocated a degree of social conservatism. They would continue to control the principal administrative bodies, the department and district authorities, the municipal council, and the majority of the sectional assemblies, throughout most of the revolutionary decade.
They were also active in the debates at the Amis de la Liberté et de l’Egalité, a society that was also known as the Club des Récollets after the former Franciscan monastery where they held their meetings. The politics of the Amis were resolutely republican, and they provided a forum for deputies and municipal officials as well as for members of the city’s elite and revolutionaries of a liberal persuasion.43 Pierre Sers, the future president of the department, was one of their founder members, as were six of the men who went on to form the core of the Girondin group that represented the department in the Convention: Vergniaud, Gensonné, Guadet, Grangeneuve, Ducos, and Boyer-Fonfrède. Three of them, indeed, had assumed the presidency of the Society in the summer of 1790. The club continued to exert considerable influence both with the city authorities and across the wider department. The popular societies that were set up in the smaller towns of the Gironde, such as Libourne, Blaye, or La Réole, sought close ties with the Bordeaux society and looked to it for a lead, and so, through assiduous correspondence, the Amis were able to build a powerful network of support across the department. That support would prove valuable to them in moments of crisis. In June of 1793, when the Girondins became entangled in the so-called ‘federalist revolt’ against the Jacobin majority in the Convention, twenty-nine of those most implicated were men who had served their apprenticeship in the Society.44
The years of constitutional monarchy represented the high point for diversity and freedom of expression. With the declaration of the republic in 1792, the range of opinion that was tolerated was reduced as first royalists and then constitutional monarchists found that their views had become unacceptable. In some cases their printing presses were seized and their editors arrested. Royalism became equated with counter-revolution, and those holding royalist meetings or publishing monarchist tracts risked charges of sedition. But most of the trading communities were not royalist. The principal division was between conflicting versions of republicanism, between moderates and radicals, Girondins and Jacobins. Clubs and popular societies found themselves forced to take sides, especially once the Paris Jacobin Club set out to build a network of like-minded societies up and down the country. Affiliation to the Paris Jacobins brought material advantages: local societies would be showered with favours in the form of pamphlets and speeches from leading Jacobins in the Legislative Assembly or the Convention. Rules of affiliation remained unchanged until the end of 1792, and the Paris society would not allow more than one affiliate in any town or city. Yet by the summer of 1791, before the mass secession of moderates in July, 439 clubs across France and beyond had received certificates of affiliation from Paris.45 That secession changed the character of the Jacobins, and though initially members could join several clubs at any one time and debate with a range of republican opinions, this abruptly ceased when the Jacobins forbade dual affiliation. In cities with several clubs, like Bordeaux, members had now to choose where their loyalties lay, and to choose in a very public way at a time when such choices could have fateful consequences. Nor did the Jacobins tolerate deviation from the agreed political agenda. When the Amis’ language was adjudged too provocative, in February 1793, the Paris Jacobins had no compunction about returning their address and cancelling their affiliation.46 Between Paris and the Girondin-led councils of many provincial cities there was little mutual trust. Tensions often seemed on the point of boiling over.
Matters came to a head in the summer of 1793, when a Jacobin coup, supported by the Paris sections, overthrew the Girondin administration and took control of government at the very moment when relations between the centre and many of the commercial cities were degenerating into open conflict. A number of departments moved to challenge the government’s authority, a few declaring that they no longer recognized the Convention’s legitimacy and setting up their own sovereign bodies, often called Commissions of Public Safety, to rule their part of the Hexagon. But they had no coherent ideology. Theirs was an act of defiance, sometimes backed up by armed force, which the Jacobins condemned as seditious; and it helps explain why, in the summer of 1793, participation in such movements—what the Jacobins termed ‘federalism’—was seen as the most serious of political crimes.47 A number of the ports were implicated, not least Bordeaux and Marseille, both of which had sent Girondins to the Convention and which counted their deputies among the twenty-nine Girondin leaders arrested and put on trial for their lives. They voted to take back their part of national sovereignty, and even to send their national guards to Paris to liberate the Convention from anarchist control. But they did not wish to break up the republic. That there was, in the strict sense of the term, no such ideology as federalism, that the deputies had no desire to destroy national unity, or that their quarrel was more often with the Paris popular movement and those who defended the September Massacres, was seen as immaterial. Provincial politicians had dared to defy Paris and the Convention in which all sovereignty had been concentrated. Bordeaux had not just responded to the desperate appeal of its deputies when it set up its popular Commission and disowned Paris. Its defiance, as Paul Hanson has emphasized, was born out of the crucible of local politics: it was, he insists, ‘an integral part of the debate over sovereignty that had been waged over the past three years at both national and local levels’.48 But that would not save the city from savage repression during the Terror that followed. A Commission Militaire was established to dispense military justice and to purge the authorities that had led the department into rebellion. In all, 302 death sentences were passed, and though the Commission was especially brutal in its treatment of those adjudged to be aristocrates (a charge that resulted in 160 executions), fifty-three of the death sentences were passed on those convicted of ‘federalism’.49
The other Atlantic ports were less tempted by the siren voices of federalism. In Nantes, as in many other provincial towns, the municipality reacted with alarm when they heard news of the Jacobin coup, and for a moment seemed inclined to offer support to Breton departments like the Finistère and the Morbihan in their opposition to Paris. But wiser counsels soon prevailed, and their backing was almost immediately retracted.50 The picture was very similar in La Rochelle. Here the departmental authorities first expressed support for the federalist demand that a rival assembly to the Convention be set up in Bourges, but then quickly rescinded their motion, while the clubs in La Rochelle, Rochefort, and Saintes were united in their support for the Paris Jacobins and their condemnation of Bordeaux’s initiative.51 In truth, by the summer of 1793 neither Nantes nor La Rochelle could afford to focus its attention on federalism when there was a source of danger, and of counter-revolution, much closer at hand. The previous March had seen the beginning of the rising in the Vendée that would engulf five or six departments of the west of France —and much of the territory separating the two cities—in a civil war between republicans and royalists, supporters and opponents of the Revolution. The rebels were led by local nobles and enjoyed strong support from the Catholic clergy; for many, indeed, the uprising had some of the ideological intensity of a Christian crusade. Towns hesitated to join the insurrection, and both Nantes and La Rochelle would remain republican strongholds in a bitterly divided region, urban centres that stayed loyal to Paris and strove to restore order amid the confusion and violence of their rural hinterland. When military levies were imposed in the spring of 1793 to increase the strength of the armies, both cities filled, and even exceeded, their quotas without difficulty. Their focus during the summer months was necessarily on the Vendée, their anger reserved for the royalist nobles and refractory priests who, in their view, were the principal fomenters of the revolt.
News of the insurrection spread fast. The first the cities knew of the uprising was in early March, when troops under General Marcé advanced on the affected areas with orders to quell the rebellion. The force included regular units from Rochefort, along with National Guards from the immediate region, among them around 400 men from La Rochelle. At first there seemed little reason to panic, as it was assumed that the troops would have no difficulty in defeating poorly armed peasants, but when news came on 20 March that the army had been routed near Pont-Charrault, with the losses including some twenty of the town’s National Guards, La Rochelle was left fearful and traumatized. As retreating soldiers found their way to the city, panic spread, and the popular mood turned ugly. Danger lurked at every corner. The rebels, it was claimed, had descended on the little town of Marans and were closing in on the gates of the city itself. They were ‘within a day’s march’, said one report, another that they were about to be invaded by ‘brigands’.52 Then paranoia took over. The counter-revolutionaries were commanded, it was rumoured, by priests, the customary villains in the republican narrative. La Rochelle became tense and vengeful, and, following the example of the Paris Jacobins, the authorities looked for scapegoats for an ‘inexplicable’ defeat. The unfortunate Marcé was accused of treason and, put on trial for his life, taken to Paris to appear before the Revolutionary Tribunal. On 21 and 22 March the anger of the crowd focused on six priests who were passing through the port on their way to being deported. On the quayside insults were hurled and stones rained down on them, and as the National Guard withdrew, the authorities stood by while they were stripped and disembowelled, and had their heads impaled on sticks and borne aloft through the town. And if four people were put on trial out of the hundreds who had been present at the massacres, three were acquitted; the fourth, a twenty-eight-year-old wigmaker, was sent to prison but later freed on appeal. He was adjudged to have become involved only because of the events of the Revolution, which meant that his violent excesses were excusable.53
It was no accident that the crowd should have vented their anger on priests, whom many saw an undercover agents for royalism and counter-revolution. Anticlerical feeling was strong from the very beginning of the Revolution, with the monastic orders attacked for their greed and wastefulness, the tithes which ordinary people paid to support their upkeep a major source of anger. Here, as in other areas of the country, anticlericalism was fuelled by the refusal of large numbers of clergy to take the constitutional oath imposed by the Civil Constitution of the Clergy in 1791. In La Rochelle, for instance, the best indication we have is that around 40 per cent of the clergy (thirty-seven out of ninety-three) took the oath; in Nantes 23 per cent (twenty-one out of ninety-two); and in Bordeaux 37 per cent (seventy-three out of 197); while in the smaller port towns to the north, such as Vannes, Rochefort, or Ploërmel, the proportion taking the oath seldom reached double figures.54 Many of the refractories refused to leave, taking shelter with former nuns in Catholic safe-houses and continuing to hold services in isolated hamlets or outdoors on hillsides. As the war in the Vendée dragged on, they were accused—often with good reason—of spreading subversion and offering succour to the ‘royal and Catholic army’ against the Republic. Jean-Baptiste Carrier, writing to the Convention from his mission to the West, was unapologetic in his condemnation of priests. ‘Reason raises men to the level of the Revolution,’ he wrote, ‘prejudices, superstition, fanaticism fade before Philosophy’s torch.’ He noted how Minée, who had once been a bishop and was now president of the Department, had spoken out against the errors of the priesthood, and found comfort in the fact that five priests in the diocese had followed his example and ‘paid the same homage to Reason’. In the same letter, he informed the deputies that ninety refractory priests had been herded on to a ship and drowned in the Loire.55 He reported the news without any comment or suggestion of regret. Refractory priests were enemies of the Revolution; in Carrier’s view they deserved no better.
Revolutionary propaganda was insistent that the Vendée was backward, with a peasantry who were both fanatical and barbaric.56 And the clergy themselves did little to deny their influence in the struggle. Many of the bishops had gone into exile following the Civil Constitution, communicating with their clergy from the safety of Italy or Spain, the majority unrepentant in their rejection of both revolutionary politics and Enlightenment philosophy. They greeted the Vendée as a symptom of moral regeneration and hoped that it signalled the end of the revolution in France. The Bishop of La Rochelle, de Coucy, showed a typical intransigence in his condemnation of everything the Revolution stood for. He had left France for Spain in June 1791, where he settled in the diocese of Toledo. From there he had fulminated against the Revolution, condemning any measure of compromise, from the oath of liberty and equality in August 1792 to submission to the laws of the Republic in May 1795. From Guadalajara in August 1795, he wrote to the former priests of this diocese, condemning the Revolution for its attacks on Catholicism and for its indifference to religion, for which he blamed the baneful influence of Luther, Calvin, and Jansen, before lambasting it for ‘the absurdities of paganism’ and ‘pure atheism or the god of Spinoza’. He urged them to make no compromise with revolutionary law, since no law can exist in a society that does not recognize God; to recognize the laws of the Republic could only be an act of ‘folly’.57 Like many of the upper clergy, de Coucy identified wholly with the Counter-revolution, the local nobility, and the monarchy. For him, the Republic was anti-Christ, especially after the closure of Catholic churches and the criminalization of the clergy.
Nantes’ proximity to the Vendée meant that here the Terror was principally turned against those who had taken up arms against the Republic, been captured, and been brought to the city for trial before the criminal tribunal and a series of military commissions. The majority of those accused were country-dwellers from the villages and small towns of the bocage; while some may have had friends and relatives among the accused, the people of Nantes were seldom directly implicated in the insurrection. Yet the scale of the repression could not fail to make an enduring impression on them, as those who had fought in the Vendean army were convicted on simple identification and thousands of death sentences were handed down. In his classic study of the Terror, Donald Greer claims that 3,548 death sentences were passed in the Loire-inférieure, the highest number of any French department, including the Seine.58 But that is an official figure that greatly underestimates the numbers killed, many without recourse to the law. As prisoners were brought to Nantes after Vendean defeats, the judicial process proved too slow, and the guillotine, installed on the traditional place of execution on the Place du Bouffay, too cumbersome for the task before it. As a consequence, the guillotine was soon supplemented by an unofficial Terror, with batches of suspects taken from the city’s prisons—many from the old Entrepôt des Cafés which had been requisitioned and turned into a jail—to be mown down by gunfire in the Carrières de Gigant or bound together and drowned in the Loire. Few citizens could have remained unaware of what was going on, as tumbrils rolled through the streets, rotting bodies floated on the river, and the sound of the nightly firing squad reverberated through the city.59 Many of the prisoners, piled in insanitary cells and denied any form of medication, died of their wounds, fevers, and disease. When these deaths and the mass executions are included in the figures, Jean-Clément Martin has concluded that the total number of deaths in the first six months of 1794 was around 12,000. As well as insurgents, many of whom were simple peasants, they included nobles and refractory priests, around ninety of whom were drowned in the waters of the Loire.60
The list of victims included relatively few merchants or ship-owners, since they were not deeply implicated in the revolt. In La Rochelle, for instance, the merchant community was relatively unaffected by an essentially political Terror. But in cities farther removed from the Vendee, merchants risked becoming a target for Jacobin hatred as committees of surveillance investigated their business dealings and deputies on mission from Paris ordered their arrest. Their wealth invited resentment, while commerce was too easily confused with greed and speculation at a time when it was seen as a citizen’s duty to put the public interest ahead of private profit. The pattern across the Atlantic ports was uneven, with the degree of persecution dependent on the priorities and personality of individual terrorists. In Nantes, though the authorities had a list of mercantile fortunes and could have used it to destroy the merchant elite, they showed little desire to do so. It is true that thirty-six merchants—of whom fifteen were engaged in fitting out ships for Atlantic trade—were included among the 132 citizens of Nantes whom Carrier despatched for trial to the Revolutionary Tribunal in Paris. But most were magistrates and nobles, and none was executed. Moreover, of the thousands condemned to death in Nantes itself, only four were merchants or the relatives of merchants, and they were condemned not for trading, but for supporting the insurrection in the Vendée.61
The picture in Bordeaux was very different, especially after the arrival on mission of Marc-Antoine Jullien, who had a passion for egalitarianism which he shared with the more extreme Parisian sans-culottes. Jullien arrived in Bordeaux with a mission to reverse what he saw as the lax administration of his predecessors, Ysabeau and Tallien, to punish those who had participated in the federalist revolt the previous summer, and to purge the elite of a city he believed to be corrupted by greed, a foyer de négociantisme. The two months he spent in Bordeaux marked the peak of the terror in the city: 198 people were executed on the Place Nationale, two-thirds of the total for the entire revolutionary era.62 Jullien unleashed a campaign of systematic persecution against Bordeaux’s merchants for economic as well as political crimes. Of course he had some excuse for this, in that so many merchants had been implicated in the federalist revolt and had given their support to the Girondin cause; they were politically compromised in a way that the majority of Nantes merchants were not. But that was not his sole motive. Even those merchants who had supported the Revolution were suspect as men whose goal was less to work for the cause of liberty and equality than to replace the nobility as the dominant social and political class in the city. ‘There have been many mercantile cabals here,’ he wrote to Robespierre, ‘and liberty has become venal. I am on the trail of the guilty parties, and the Committee of Surveillance will help me in my search.’63 It did a thorough job: of the 279 merchants who were arrested, 119 appeared before the Commission Militaire, and twelve received death sentences.64 Some were charged with no political crimes; the only charges against them were of speculation and profiteering.
Though the judges were particularly interested in their political affiliations and their reaction to the federalist revolt, their economic dealings were also scrutinized, and those who could not demonstrate that they had made sacrifices for the Revolution were treated as suspect. Merchants who could point to service in the National Guard or contributions to the war effort could expect to be acquitted, and those who had just continued trading for their personal profit generally escaped with a fine or a short period of imprisonment. But these were years when commercial ventures could easily assume a political connotation, and there trouble lay. A merchant on the rue Sainte-Cathérine, Jacques Henri, was seemingly careless in the goods he handled; convicted of selling woollen products bearing royalist insignia and jewellery engraved with monarchist symbols, he was sentenced to death.65 Maurice Albert, a thirty-year-old commis-négociant, was unwise enough to speculate in currency on behalf of his firm, buying specie at an excessive price and thus undermining the value of the assignat. For that, too, he went to the guillotine.66 Passing money abroad, refusing to use paper currency, corresponding with sons or agents in foreign ports—these were areas where commercial and political crime merged, and where economic transactions could have counter-revolutionary connotations.
Commercial activity alone seldom incurred a death sentence, but merchants had to tread carefully. They were routinely subject to arrest and imprisonment, seals were placed on their registers, and their correspondence was scoured for evidence of wrongdoing. Merchants passed across frontiers, even into war zones. They traded in many different currencies, and the temptation to speculate—in assignats, in hard currency, even in national lands—was something that came naturally to them. And the colonies offered particular temptations. As one Bordeaux merchant, François Bonnaffé, explained in a letter to his agent at Le Cap, the colonies provided opportunities for rich pickings, which many could not resist. He talked of a rush of speculation in the Caribbean, as merchants sought to trade paper for hard currency before the paper lost all its value. But, he added, it should not be undertaken lightly. ‘In the present circumstances, it is a dangerous operation for anyone engaging in it. One would be seen as a currency speculator, which is a bad reputation to have at this time.’ A few months later, writing to an associate in Port-au-Prince, he again warned that trade should only be conducted in assignats, despite the huge losses incurred when 170 francs of paper bought only 100 francs in coin.67 Commerce, too, had to be conducted with politics in mind.
For the merchant community, surviving the revolutionary years took a degree of guile, as trade could easily be confused with speculation and the accumulation of profit was seen by the more extreme revolutionaries as an act of selfishness that rendered merchants instantly suspect. The president of the Commission Militaire in Bordeaux, Jean-Baptiste Lacombe, had little doubt that rich merchants were a privileged elite who did nothing for the public good and concentrated single-mindedly on their business interests. Those who appeared before his court were frequently accused of an ‘égoïsme’ that was demonstrated by their success in making money. They had, it was inferred, neglected their duty towards others, to the state, and the defence of the public weal, and all for personal profit. In his judgement of one merchant, Jean-Louis Baux, Lacombe was explicit in his condemnation not just of Baux, but of the entire ‘caste’ he represented. Lacombe insisted that the tribunal could only applaud the arrest of Baux, ‘for he belongs to a caste which, like that of priests and nobles, has made every effort to overthrow the Republic, has grown fat on the pure substance of the people, and has seemed to support Liberty only to impose its despotism more clinically on the debris of the aristocracy’.68 In his eyes, merchants’ greed and cupidity condemned them, for they went hand-in-hand with contempt for others and a lack of concern for the welfare of the mass of the citizenry. The degree of their guilt might differ, but it was well-nigh impossible to be a good merchant and a good citizen.
Foreign merchants in the Atlantic ports had additional reasons to exercise caution, especially in their correspondence with relatives abroad. Many, of course, had welcomed the Revolution, whether as bourgeois opposed to noble privilege, as traders eager to end company monopolies, or as Protestants grateful for their new-found liberties. And some, despite the threat which the Revolution presented, continued to identify with the Republic even through the months of Terror, fulfilling their civic duties and expressing quiet support for the revolutionary authorities. Jacob Lambertz, a German merchant long established in La Rochelle, was scrupulous in this regard, and his journal, which he wrote up practically every day from 1784 until 1801, is an enduring testimony to his loyalty and good sense.69 He was careful to remain uncritical of government policy, and where he discussed the war in the Vendée, it was as a patriot, supporting the revolutionary cause, taking pleasure in reporting rebel defeats, and participating in public celebrations of victory. In his professional life, he avoided the most obvious pitfalls. He did not trade in currency on European markets and took no part in colonial traffic or the slave trade, concentrating on the brandy trade and sales to the Baltic. He therefore saw no reason to get involved in the squabbles between the Amis des Noirs and the Club Massiac that so disrupted the merchant community. He was careful to contribute to successive dons patriotiques, modestly and unostentatiously; he handed over his silverware and his wife’s jewellery as a gift to the Nation; and he duly joined the city’s Garde Nationale.70 He attended all the festivals held in La Rochelle during the Revolution, joining in the celebrations and public balls to show his support. He rejoiced when the republic was declared in 1792, and fraternized with ‘good sans-culottes’ at a civic banquet in the Year II. He fully understood that he must be seen to be integrated into the social and political fabric of the city, and was eager to conform. But there were times when it was wise to stand back, to remain an outsider on the fringes of the Revolution. He refused to stand for the municipal council, for instance, even though the council was led by his close friend and fellow-merchant Samuel Demissy. Lambertz insisted that this was the right thing to do, citing his belief that ‘a man born outside the territory of the Republic should abstain from taking any position of public office’.71 It was also a matter of self-preservation in a political climate he did not fully understand.
Like many others, Lambertz made the judgement that it was prudent to concentrate on his business affairs. It was his way of negotiating a revolution that repeatedly questioned the values and the commercial ethic of the merchant community, and which, on so many occasions, tempted men into political choices that they might live to regret. But the Age of Revolution brought other challenges, too, challenges emanating from overseas and from the wider Atlantic world. For many merchants in the west-coast ports, as for the planters and agents in the West Indies, political demands at home would soon be dwarfed by an even greater threat, as the country was plunged into a war that cut the trade routes on which their business depended, and as revolution spread from France to the Caribbean, leading to slave insurrections, plantation-burning, massacres, and expulsions on an unimagined scale. Slavery would be abandoned, and the slave trade decimated. Saint-Domingue would be lost, first to the Spanish and British navies, then to Toussaint Louverture and the world’s first black revolution. Within a few years, the merchants’ comfortable world would be shaken to its foundations, and their companies and their ports condemned to decades of decline.
1 Timothy Tackett, Becoming a Revolutionary: The Deputies of the French National Assembly and the Emergence of a Revolutionary Culture, 1789–90 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1996), 4.
2 Charles Higounet (ed.), Histoire de l’Aquitaine (Toulouse: Privat, 1971), 392.
3 Gilbert Shapiro and John Markoff, Revolutionary Demands: A Content Analysis of the Cahiers de Doléances of 1789 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1998), 409.
4 Daniel Roche, ‘Introduction’, in Franco Angiolini and Daniel Roche (eds), Cultures et formations négociantes dans l’Europe moderne (Paris: Editions de l’Ecole des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales, 1995), 11–24.
5 Olga de Saint-Affrique, ‘Les protestants rochelais pendant la Révolution’, in La Rochelle, ville frontière: actes du colloque des 28 et 29 avril 1989 (La Rochelle: Rumeur des Âges, 1989), 140.
6 Jean-Noel Luc (ed.), La Charente Maritime: l’Aunis et la Saintonge des origines à nos jours (Saint-Jean d’Angély: Bordessoules, 1981), 295.
7 Séverine Pacteau de Luze, Les Protestants et Bordeaux (Bordeaux: Mollat, 1999), 117–19.
8 John Rylands Library, Manchester, Récit de ce qui s’est passé à Pau en Béarn les 19, 20 et 21 juin 1788.
9 Doyle, The Parlement of Bordeaux and the End of the Old Regime, 203–14.
10 Claudy Valin, ‘La bourgeoisie rochelaise dans la Révolution’, in La Rochelle, ville frontière, 55–64.
11 Michel Le Mené and Marie-Hélène Santrot (eds), Cahiers des plaintes et doléances de Loire-Atlantique (4 vols, Nantes: Conseil Général de la Loire-Atlantique, 1989), vol. 1, 157–62.
12 Paul Butel, Les dynasties bordelaises de Colbert à Chaban (Paris: Perrin, 1991), 111.
13 Brice Martinetti, ‘Les résistances du négoce rochelais et la première abolition de l’esclavage’, Revue du Philanthrope, 4 (2013), 156–7.
14 John Hall Stewart, A Documentary Survey of the French Revolution (New York: Macmillan, 1950), 115.
15 Le Mené and Santrot, Cahiers des plaintes et doléances, vol. 1, 159.
16 Seymour Drescher, Capitalism and Antislavery: British Mobilization in Comparative Perspective (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987), 54.
17 Pierre Serna, Comme des bêtes: Histoire politique de l’animal en Révolution, 1750–1840 (Paris: Fayard, 2017), 306.
18 Frédéric Régent, La France et ses esclaves, de la colonisation aux abolitions, 1620–1848 (Paris: Grasset, 2007), 247.
19 Pétré-Grenouilleau, Nantes, histoire et géographie contemporaine, 106–8.
20 Michel Lhéritier, Liberté: les Girondins, Bordeaux et la Révolution Française (Paris: La Renaissance du Livre, 1947), 13–14.
21 Forrest, The Revolution in Provincial France: Aquitaine, 1789–99, 62.
22 AM Bordeaux, K16, Maires et officiers municipaux de Bordeaux, 1790; Alan Forrest, Society and Politics in Revolutionary Bordeaux (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1975), 37–8.
23 Claude Laveau, Le monde rochelais des Bourbons à Bonaparte (La Rochelle: Rumeur des Âges, 1988), 199–200.
24 Pétré-Grenouilleau, Nantes, histoire et géographie contemporaine, 112–13.
25 Ted W. Margadant, Urban Rivalries in the French Revolution (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press 1992), 442.
26 A wide range of municipal petitions can be found in AN, series D IV bis, papers of the Committee of Division, 1789–90; Alan Forrest, ‘Le découpage administratif de la France révolutionnaire’, in Centre Méridional d’Histoire, L’espace et le temps reconstruits: la Révolution Française, une révolution des mentalités et des cultures? (Aix-en-Provence: Publications de l’Université de Provence, 1990), 3–12.
27 AN, D IV bis 8, petition from the town of Libourne, 1790.
28 AN, D IV bis 5, petitions of La Rochelle and Saintes, 1790.
29 AN, D IV bis 5, petition from the deputies of Provence in favour of Aix-en-Provence, 1790.
30 AN, D IV bis 17, petition from the towns of the District in favour of Montivilliers, 1790.
31 Henri Lagrave, Charles Mazouer, and Marc Regaldo, La vie théâtrale à Bordeaux des origines à nos jours (Paris: Éditions du CNRS, 1985), vol. 1, 376–9.
32 Michael L. Kennedy, The Jacobin Clubs in the French Revolution: The First Years (Princeton, NJ; Princeton University Press, 1982), 55.
33 Gérard Gayot (ed.), La franc-maçonnerie française, textes et pratiques, 18e–19e siècles (Paris: Gallimard, 1980), 45.
34 See, for instance, Ran Halévi, Les loges maçonniques dans la France d’Ancien Régime aux origines de la sociabilité démocratique (Paris: Armand Colin, 1984).
35 Séverine Pacteau de Luze, Les protestants de Bordeaux), 112.
36 Laveau, Le monde rochelais, 207.
37 Pacteau de Luze, Les protestants, 122.
38 Olga de Saint-Affrique, ‘Les protestants rochelais’, 142.
39 Dominique Costa, La Révolution à Nantes et la Vendée Militaire: Catalogue des collections départementales (Nantes: Musée Dobrée, 1967), 11.
40 Letter from the Chambre de lecture du Soleil, Nantes, 13 March 1790, in Léon Brunschvicg, Souvenirs de la révolution à Nantes, ou la mémoire d’un Bleu, ed. Jean-Clément Martin (Nantes: Reflets du Passé, 1982), 52.
41 Alfred Lallié, Les sociétés populaires à Nantes pendant la Révolution (Nantes: L. Durance, 1914), 15–16.
42 Jeanne Melchior, ‘Histoire du Club National’ (thèse de doctorat, Université de Bordeaux, 1951), 16–18.
43 AD Gironde, 12L 19, list (undated) of 419 members of the Amis de la Constitution.
44 Alan Forrest, Society and Politics in Revolutionary Bordeaux, 65–6.
45 Michael L. Kennedy, The Jacobin Clubs in the French Revolution: The Middle Years (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1988), 5.
46 AD Gironde, Amis de la Constitution, minute of 25 February 1793.
47 Alan Forrest, ‘Federalism’, in Colin Lucas (ed.), The Political Culture of the French Revolution (Oxford: Pergamon, 1988), 309–27.
48 Paul Hanson, The Jacobin Republic under Fire: The Federalist Revolt in the French Revolution (University Park, PA: Penn State University Press, 2003), 244.
49 Pierre Bécamps, Les suspects à Bordeaux et dans le Département de la Gironde, 1789–99 (Paris: Imprimerie Nationale, 1954), 176.
50 Pétré-Grenouilleau, Nantes, histoire et géographie contemporaine, 116.
51 Jean-Marie Augustin, La Révolution Française en Haut-Poitou et pays charentais (Toulouse: Privat, 1989), 193.
52 Jacques Péret, ‘La Rochelle et la Vendée’, in La Rochelle, ville frontière, 226–9.
53 Pierre Lemonnier, ‘Les journées des 21 et 21 mars 1793 à la Rochelle’, Bulletin de la Société des Archives Historiques: Revue de la Saintonge et de l’Aunis, 32 (1912), 203–10.
54 Timothy Tackett, La Révolution, l’Eglise, la France: le serment de 1791 (Paris: Le Cerf, 1986), 359, 375, 385, and 397.
55 Letter to the Convention, 17 November 1793, in E.H. Carrier (ed.), Correspondence of Jean-Baptiste Carrier during his Mission in Brittany, 1793–94 (London: Bodley Head, 1920), 120.
56 Anne Rolland-Boulestreau, Les colonnes infernales: Violences et guerre civile en Vendée Militaire, 1794–95 (Paris: Fayard, 2015), 49–71.
57 François Uzureau, ‘L’évêque de La Rochelle en 1795’, Bulletin de la Société des Archives Historiques de la Saintonge et d’Aunis, 41 (1926), 109.
58 Donald Greer, The Incidence of the Terror during the French Revolution: A Statistical Interpretation (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1935), 147.
59 Bruno Hervé, ‘Noyades, fusillades, exécutions: les mises à mort des brigands entre justice et massacres en Loire-inférieure en l’an II’, La Révolution Française: Cahiers de l’Institut d’histoire de la Révolution française, 3 (2011), 1–13.
60 Jean-Clément Martin, La Loire-Atlantique dans la tourmente révolutionnaire (Nantes: Reflets du Passé, 1989), 88.
61 Pétré-Grenouilleau, Nantes, histoire et géographie contemporaine, 118–19.
62 Forrest, Society and Politics, 238.
63 Pierre Bécamps, La Révolution à Bordeaux, 1789–94: J.-M.-B. Lacombe, président de la Commission Militaire (Bordeaux: Éditions Bière, 1953), 188.
64 Victor Daline, ‘Marc-Antoine Jullien, après le 9 thermidor’, Annales historiques de la Révolution française, 36 (1964), 161.
65 AD Gironde, 14L41, Commission Militaire, dossier Jacques Henri.
66 AD Gironde, 14L4, Commission Militaire, dossier Maurice Albert.
67 AD Gironde, 13L18, Comité de Surveillance de Bordeaux, dossier François Bonnaffé.
68 Philippe Gardey, Négociants et marchands de Bordeaux. De la guerre d’Amérique à la Restauration, 1780–1830 (Paris: Presses Universitaires de Paris-Sorbonne, 2009), 199.
69 AD Charente-Maritime, 4J 1808, Journal de Jacob Lambertz (MS, 4 vols, 1784–1801); Emmanuel Garnier and Frédéric Surville (eds), Climat et révolutions: Autour du Journal du négociant rochelais Jacob Lambertz, 1733–1813 (Saintes: Le Croît vif, 2010), 269–526.
70 Garnier and Surville, Climat et révolutions, 32.
71 Ibid., 35.