by Hugh Thomas
Another French measure had similarly little effect. For example, the government allowed slaves to be introduced into the territory of the river Sénégal (which Britain only returned to France with Guyane in 1817), where they were immediately declared free and then placed under an engagement “à temps,” for fourteen years.XIII Some of these men and women subsequently served the French state in Cayenne and Madagascar. Many of them had been African slaves before they worked for the French empire, and their later conditions of employment scarcely differed from slavery. All the same, the concession was considerable in law, as it was in promise.
The slave trade as such was finally declared illegal in France in March 1818. The government was probably influenced by the intelligent Baron Seguier, consul in London, who argued that the way to outmaneuver the British was to reach even further than them in hostility to the traffic. However that may be, the minister of the marine, Count Molé, introduced a short, two-article, law on the matter in the National Assembly with a quotation from Montesquieu (the first time that that creative thinker had been quoted in the French legislature): “Why cannot the Princes of Europe, who make so many pointless treaties, make one in favor of charity and pity?” There was no dissent in the chamber on the matter. Molé wrote to the harbormasters in known slave ports requiring them to carry out the law prohibiting the traffic.
But this change, however well intentioned, converted the previously tolerated commerce into a clandestine one. A new generation of slave traders in the old harbors of France had become accustomed to the business in the three years since 1815, and they had sympathetic friends everywhere in the ministries and in the various port authorities. The trade from Nantes, illegal as it now was, was protected by the general approval of the local commercial and financial community: the Banque de Nantes, for example, and the Société d’Assurance de Nantes were dominated by slave interests. If the number of ships leaving French territory for slaves from Africa had been about thirty in 1818, it was nearly sixty the following year.
Molé, however, also established a French naval patrol to prevent the departure of slave ships from Africa, even if it was some years before it acted effectively. Still four ships (Le Moucheron, L’Iris, L’Ecureuil, and L’Argus) were dispatched, first to Saint-Louis in Sénégal, then to Gorée. They were to “visit” all French ships suspected of being slavers. (Another purpose was undoubtedly to reassert the French presence after the seven years’ occupation of the French colonies in Africa by the English.) But they were not expected to approach ships which had nothing to do with France.
The first “visit” which they carried out was nevertheless that to an English three-masted vessel in the river Gallinas. That did not result in a condemnation. But later they did stop and seize Les Deux Soeurs of Marseilles. In these affairs, only the captain could be charged. Neither the crew nor the owners had anything to fear. Many captains were interrogated but, for many months, none of the cases led to any other than formal denunciations. Further, a substantial number of French vessels were still going west to Cuba, as Pío Baroja recalled, in his admirable novel about Basque sailors, Los Pilotos de Altura. That was not even a crime. In 1821, the commissar-general of the marine in Bordeaux, Auguste de Bergevin, would write a letter to his minister, Baron Portal, that, “not for a year have I had occasion to take any sailor before the courts.” But Le Dauphin, belonging to the shipbuilder Audebert, took 300 slaves to Santiago de Cuba in 1820, and Le Mentor, belonging to the Spanish merchant Sangroniz, probably planned to do the same. Are we to assume that the complaisant attitude of the commissar-general was due to the recent marriage of his daughter with the widower of a Cabarrus? Or was there a tacit understanding between the minister, Baron Portal, himself a bordelais ex-shipbuilder, and an Anglophobe, and Bergevin? Benjamin Constant, then a liberal deputy, thought that the latter was probable. The author of Adolphe was, at that time, the most eloquent, as well as the most determined, enemy of the slave trade in the Chamber of Deputies.
Despite Constant’s speeches, the illicit trade both from and to Martinique and Guadeloupe in particular continued: and in 1820, Sir George Collier, from his cruiser off Africa, reported that, in the first six months of that year, he saw twenty-five or thirty slave ships flying the French flag. The year had begun too with the disagreeable incident of the British cruiser H.M.S. Tartar, which pursued a slaver from Martinique, La Jeune Estelle. The captain of the latter, Olympe Sanguines, who had obtained on the “Pepper Coast” fourteen slaves, was determined to avoid both pursuit and condemnation. He accordingly threw overboard a number of barrels, in each of which two girl slaves, aged about twelve to fourteen, were placed. The affair shocked the British navy, but French opinion blamed “the enemy,” to use the phraseology of the minister of the navy, Baron Portal. When the incident was raised in the National Assembly by Benjamin Constant, he was shouted down by fellow members, who accused him of calumniating the nation. Baron Portal was not, to say the least, an enthusiast for naval patrol, even by France. For example, in 1822 he abandoned a possible action against Captain Pelleport, shipbuilder as well as master of La Caroline of Bayonne, because that officer was the brother of Pierre Pelleport, the commander-in-chief in Spain.40
Still, the cause of antislavery was becoming fashionable in some salons of restoration Paris: the return of Madame de Staël, a fervent admirer of Wilberforce, in 1816 initiated the cult of “le bon nègre,” in intellectual circles.XIV The marquis of La Fayette, sole survivor of the prerevolutionary Société des Amis des Noirs, attacked the slave trade in the House of Peers in 1819. Pamphlets were published which had considerable force, even though most of them were largely based on material obtained from England—even, in the case of the Abbé Giuidicelly’s Observations sur la traite of 1820, from British naval captains’ reports (though the abbé had himself been in Sénégal). Joseph-Elzéar Morenas, a Provençal traveler in Africa (he had been agriculteur-botaniste in Sénégal), in his Pétition contre la traite of 1820, reported that the chief pilot at Saint-Louis had used his position to buy and sell slaves. The Abbé Grégoire, a veteran abolitionist who had signed the death sentence on King Louis XVI, in 1822 published his Des Peines infamantes à infliger aux négriers, in which he launched a famous denunciation: “I call négrier not only the captain of the ship who steals, buys, chains, barrels, and sells slaves . . . but also every individual who, by direct or indirect cooperation, is an accomplice in these crimes.” These idealists allied with a new society, that of “Christian Morals” (Société de la Morale Chrétienne), which set out to have the same broad backing as that which the committee against the slave trade of the 1780s had in England. Beginning as a purely Catholic organization, it gathered the support of many Protestant pastors, as well as politicized professors such as Guizot, businessmen such as Lesseps, and philosophical monarchists such as Maine de Biran. Auguste de Staël was the most active of members, conducting himself as the Thomas Clarkson of France. This body financed thousands of petitions, organized meetings, collected information, and distributed propaganda of every kind.
A major change in France was marked by the coming to power of the duke of Broglie as prime minister. This nobleman owed his fortune to his descent from Antoine Crozat, the monopolist of Louisiana under Louis XIV, but his principles to his wife. As a member of this new Society of Christian Morals, he opened his prime-ministership with a speech in the House of Peers as important in its way as Pitt’s had been in England in 1788. It was the longest oration made till that time in that chamber.41 He wanted to absolve the English of the reputation of a contemptible Machiavellianism of which they had been so often accused. He talked of the scandals of the commerce, above all that of La Jeune Estelle, which seemed a scandal as terrible in French eyes as the Zong had been in English. He talked of the 30-percent profits usually made, much higher than those earned in conventional voyages. He wanted to make any involvement in the trade a crime, and to embark on the Christianization of Africa—an anticipation, no doubt, of France’s
civilizing mission in that continent.
The consequences were less considerable than the abolitionists hoped. Broglie thought that the existing laws were adequate—they had only to be fulfilled. It is true that the fleet off Africa did receive orders to act forcefully against French slave traders. But all the same, the conduct of Broglie was only the beginning of a national campaign, not its conclusion; and the French navy covered effectively a mere two hundred miles, between Saint-Louis and Gorée.
The campaign continued. In 1823, the Académie Française declared the Abolition of the Slave Trade the theme of its prize poem, while the number of slave traders was 42 percent less than the previous year. In 1824, Bergevin, who had ceased to be harbormaster of Bordeaux and was now a deputy for Brest, sought imprudently, in a speech, to put the blame for any surviving slave trade in Bordeaux on “Spanish firms settled in France . . . sending Danish or Swedish ships.” The idea was surrealistic, though the mere fact that Bergevin showed himself so defensive suggested that abolitionism was beginning to be effective. The same year, the duchess of Duras, a daughter of a Martiniquaise and granddaughter of a sugar planter (she had herself lived in Martinique, as well as in London during the great days of the slave-trade debates in the 1790s), published her romantic story, Ourika, in which a black slave girl adopted by the mysterious Madame de B——— is the heroine. It met with an extraordinary success: Humboldt, Walter Scott, Talleyrand, and Goethe loved it.42, XV In 1825, Auguste de Staël openly purchased slave equipment, such as chains and manacles, in Nantes (which sent forty-eight slave ships to Africa that year, more than in 1790), and he ensured that attention was paid to these objects when he exhibited them in Paris. A year later, Victor Hugo published his Bug-Jargal, in which he recalled the memories of his grandfather, Jean-François Trébuchet, a captain of Nantes who spent most of his life as a slave captain. Again the central figure is a black, but this time a revolutionary of imagination.43 Morenas’s serious but tedious history of the slave trade appeared in 1828, based on travels in Haiti as well as in the Sénégal. Its impact was lessened by its impolitic dedication to President Boyer of Haiti, head of state of a regime founded on a massacre of French colonists. The best of all these literary works was, however, Mérimée’s brilliant and ironical Tamango, of 1829, about a successful slave revolt in the open sea. The number of French naval cruisers rose to six, and between 1823 and the end of June 1825, these “visited” twenty-five suspected slavers off the Ile de Bourbon in the Indian Ocean as well as the French Antilles and the African coast (now going as far to the south as Old Calabar and Bonny). Of these, eleven were condemned.
Still, much would have to happen before the slave trade from France ended, much less before France abolished slavery itself. For twenty years after the publication of Tamango, deputies and journalists in Paris would continue to rail, as did the duke of Saint-James in the House of Peers against the hypocrisy of the English in giving a moral excuse for their desire to rule the world; and a number of French writers, such as the playwright Edouard Mazères and the naturalist Jean-Louis Quatrefages, sustained the opposition to change, with increasingly anti-African diatribes, the mere repetition of which, in the twentieth century, might cause a scandal.
Despite the support of intellectuals, statesmen, and writers in Paris, the business of catching slavers was not popular. The law of 1818 did not specify very severe penalties. Chateaubriand, as foreign minister, explained to the duke of Wellington in 1822 that, if an “appalling sentence” were attached to conviction of this crime, it would be unfulfilled. French captains, demoralized by the purges carried out in their service after Waterloo, were reluctant to carry out what still seemed, despite the speech of Broglie, to be the policies of the English. About thirty French officers expelled from the Napoleonic navy after the Restoration had taken to the slave trade. Some of these sailors of fortune confronted, outmaneuvered, or bribed their old comrades acting inside the Restoration navy. (For example, Captain André-Joseph Anglade was captain of L’Amélie, a French slave ship destined for Santiago de Cuba, seized by Captain Delassale d’Harader, in the naval frigate Sapho. After $600 had passed from one officer to another, Delassale allowed his old comrade to sell his slaves in Puerto Rico.) Monarchist officers did not have their hearts in the pursuit, much less the capture, of such men. In 1830, Nantes still had eighty ships engaged in the slave trade, mostly 130-ton schooners, and the French flag was still often carried by captains from other nations desirous of avoiding the British busybodies. If a British naval vessel were to seize a suspected slaver, the chances would be that a French flag would be found on board, for use in the event of a capture. A sixth of the long-distance shipping in Nantes between 1814 and 1833 was probably engaged in the slave trade, and nearly all the shipowners of that harbor at that time invested at least once in the traffic. Of the shipbuilders, the most important in Nantes were new names—Vallé et fils, Pierre-Thomas Dennis, and Willaume—which sent, in the years 1818 to 1833, respectively thirty, seventeen, and fourteen slaving expeditions. Only the Mosneron-Dupins remained, and they on a small scale, of the shipping families which had been prominent in the trade before 1794.44
A list of slaving expeditions from France after the formal abolition of the trade in 1818 suggests that about 500 expeditions to buy slaves sailed from French ports between then and 1831; six voyages seem to have set out from Bayonne, thirty-nine from Bordeaux, twelve from Honfleur, four from La Rochelle, forty-six from Le Havre, one from Lorient, eighteen from Marseilles, 305 from Nantes, and nine from Saint-Malo. Each voyage from Nantes perhaps made an average profit of 180,000 to 200,000 francs: considerably higher than in the eighteenth century. Expeditions which began in the Antilles included forty-three from Guadeloupe, and even eight from Danish Saint Thomas, though those were still basically French enterprises (for example, Captain André Desbarbès of Bayonne’s La Vénus of 1825). Thirteen expeditions began in one port or another on the Sénégal, and fifty-five from the Ile de Bourbon.45
These journeys were complicated. No captain, no shipowner, and no shipbuilder would now admit that he was shipping slaves. A master would insist, when leaving Nantes or Honfleur, that he was setting off for legitimate trade in Africa, or for somewhere more exotic: Sumatra, for example.XVI At the same time, complicity of officials was frequent, whether because they had money in the business themselves (such as Governor Schmaltz in Sénégal, or the governor of the Ile de Bourbon, General Count Boubet de Lozier) or whether, like so many, they opposed anything which Britain supported, and so could be easily bribed: among them, no doubt, the customs officer at Port Louis in Guadeloupe who, in 1820, lazily observed, at two in the afternoon, the arrival of a ship from Le Havre, the Fox, with 300 Ibo slaves from Bonny. Sometimes the complicity of officials went further than just corruption: some civil servants in Saint-Louis were owners of captiveries.
Many of these vessels made for Cuba (especially after the formal abolition of the slave trade by Spain) or for Brazil, rather than for French colonies. There was also a shift in French interest, so far as Africa was concerned, to the area north of the equator such as Bonny.
The French government was seeking to control these activities without conceding to Britain the right to intervene. Richelieu, Broglie, and Molé had their hearts in the right place, but they were ineffective. Then, in 1822, a new minister of the navy, an ex-cavalryman, the marquis of Clermont-Tonnerre, either on the insistence of his able civil servants or on his own initiative, decided to take the crusade against the slave trade seriously and, given the shortage of naval ships, promised cooperation with England. The Cour de Cassation in 1825 ordered the pursuit of slave traders “in the sacred interest of humanity.” From 1825, crews in the French navy were rewarded with a hundred francs for every slave freed. In 1826, a special commissioner was even sent to Nantes to investigate suspected slave merchants and captains. A further antislave law was passed in 1827, declaring those who practiced this “réellement infame” commerce to be criminals.XVII One French co
mmander of the enlarged West Africa Squadron, Auguste Massieu de Clairval, a Protestant from Normandy, not only ordered his staff to treat freed Africans at Cayenne with compassion, but also told the captains in West Africa to present themselves at Freetown.
The seizures by the French squadron in West Africa became more and more frequent, other ships were held after their return to France, investigations of captains and seamen followed, consuls and other officials were charged to report suspicious events, and even the sceptical English abolitionists came to accept that official France was at last taking the pursuit of French négriers, both ships and men, seriously.
Eventually, after 1830, the bourgeois king, Louis-Philippe, an Anglophile, and himself a member of the Society of Christian Morals, agreed with a recommendation of another enlightened officer, Captain Alexis Vilaret de Joyeuse, to make trading in slaves a crime. A third abolitionist law was then prepared and introduced by a new naval minister, Antoine, Count Argout, an ex-Bonapartist and old friend of the duke of Broglie. He was only minister for four months, but that was enough to conclude what one historian has named “seventeen years of tautology, bad faith, good reasons and countertruths.”46 Henceforth an attempt to carry out the traffic would be as severely punished as the act itself. Slave merchants would be imprisoned for two to five years if their ships were seized in France, for ten to twenty years if they were caught on the high seas, and would receive ten years of hard labor if apprehended after the slaves had been bought. Freed slaves would be given liberty in the American colony for which they had been intended. The bill was carried with only six opponents in the House of Peers, and in the Chamber of Deputies the vote was 190 to 37.
