One day in late November 1791, two years into the French Revolution, a provincial political club on the Atlantic coast of France treated multiple questions with global implications. A member, who had received correspondence from his brother ‘in America’Footnote 1 —in this case, the French Caribbean colony of Saint-Domingue—asked that the society write to its counterparts in Cap-Français (today Cap-Haïtien) and Port-au-Prince seeking ‘details’ on ‘what [was] happening in that country’.Footnote 2 The society then applauded a letter from the national guard of an even farther-flung French colony, that of Île de France (present-day Mauritius). Next, another member proposed that the society congratulate the National Assembly on its stringent new legislation against counter-revolutionary emigration. Finally, yet another member proposed a petition to the Assembly for the liberation of members of the Swiss regiment of Châteauvieux, whose mutiny had been brutally repressed in Nancy, in Eastern France, the year before, and asking that ‘foreign regiments’ be subject from then on to the ‘same discipline’ as French ones.Footnote 3
The society in question was that of Lorient, a Breton port city established scarcely more than one hundred years prior, as the seat of the Compagnie des Indes orientales, or French East India Company.Footnote 4 The society itself had been founded in September 1790 on the model of the Society of the Friends of the Constitution of Paris, better known as the Jacobin Club, evolving over the course of the Revolution into the republican Society of the Friends of Liberty and Equality in September 1792 and then into the ‘Montagnard’ Popular Society in November 1793, before its ultimate dissolution just over a year later. Such a busy schedule of discussion of foreign and colonial affairs was unusual even for the Lorient Society, but it was rare for several consecutive sessions to go by without treating at least one such subject.
Indeed, in the Society’s various incarnations, many of its members had ties to the world outside metropolitan France. Dominated at its founding by Lorient’s merchant elite, with commercial interests across the Atlantic and Indian Oceans and as far away as China, by 1793 it was increasingly attended by sailors, shipwrights, and other port workers, many of whom had travelled personally to those distant locales.Footnote 5 Individual participants—members or spectators—included two merchants of Germanic origin, and one who had lived in Amsterdam, two Swiss artisans,Footnote 6 and a plethora of clerks, soldiers, and others having lived in the Mascarenes, India or the Antilles.Footnote 7 A certain number of ‘people of colour’ (gens de couleur)—a term used to refer to people of both African and Indian origin—may have attended as well, although this is difficult to prove definitively.Footnote 8 The world outside metropolitan France was not an abstraction for these clubistes, but a concrete source of livelihood, personal connection, and sometimes lived experience. This article seeks to understand how this perspective may have shaped their actions within the framework of the revolutionary political society in which they participated, one whose stated raison d’être was from the beginning the defence of a Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen frequently at odds with the reality of global practices and institutions.Footnote 9
To answer this question, this article proposes the Lorient Society as a case study of the viability of a micro-spatial approach to global historyFootnote 10 in the context of the ‘Age of Revolution(s)’ of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. A geographically and chronologically flexible term, the ‘Age of Revolution(s)’ has increasingly decentred the American and French Revolutions, notably by integrating the previously ignored Haitian Revolution, but also Latin American Independence and movements of revolt and resistance in the Ottoman empire or throughout the Global South.Footnote 11 This, in turn, has led scholars to ask what this decentring means for our understanding of the French Revolution, now considered as one piece of a global puzzle. When confronted with the ‘global turn’, historians of this period have adopted several different perspectives, sometimes preferring—or integrating global history with—related concepts such as ‘transnational’, imperial, or Atlantic history, or indeed that of the ‘Age of Revolution(s)’ itself.Footnote 12 The present article interrogates the ways in which French revolutionaries understood and attempted to influence the relationship between revolution and the global.
Lorient and its political society need not have had an outsized influence on global political events, nor a level of autonomy that untethered them from local or national concerns, to be an object of interest to global history. Indeed, following Christian De Vito, the apparent opposition between the local and the global is not obvious. Rather, ‘each place is made by the crossing of multiple social networks’.Footnote 13 The pertinent context for the Lorient Society is not simply Lorient. This article seeks to better understand the ways in which the Society and its members navigated layered networks and institutions, contributing along the way to constructing ideas about the relationship between such concepts as ‘nation’ and ‘empire’ or between these concepts and that of the ‘Age of Revolution(s)’.Footnote 14 De Vito emphasises the pertinence of following historical actors’ own ‘practices’ and ‘categories’ to escape predefined paradigms which may lead to oversimplification.Footnote 15 Similarly, my objective is to understand to what degree participants in the Lorient Society saw themselves as implicated in global phenomena and acted accordingly. Indeed, the global is an emic category, as the Society proclaimed that ‘In every part of the Globe the French Constitution must have partisans and Friends.’Footnote 16
What could such a global perspective have meant for the Lorient Society’s conception of the French nation and later Republic, as well as for the broader cosmopolitan ‘patriot’ movement its participants were attempting to build, and for the reinforcement or contestation of imperial paradigms?Footnote 17 The concrete actions taken by the Society, in appealing to other clubs or to local or national authorities, result from its members’ conceptions of the global and their place within it, while also informing those conceptions. The Lorient Society can therefore show one way in which local actors constructed and participated in the global; not as a generalisable illustration ‘of universal value’, but as one example of the ‘exceptional normal’ of which historical processes are made.Footnote 18
The Lorient Society represents, in this way, one possible iteration of the ways in which this ‘exceptional normal’ was becoming increasingly entangled with the global. This had always been true of Lorient as with other early modern Atlantic ports as hubs of trade and empire, the impacts of which were felt far into the hinterlands by the end of the eighteenth century.Footnote 19 What changed with the ‘Age of Revolution(s)’, and what may be considered one of its most original aspects, is the attempt by new actors to take the political definition of the global into their own hands. The revolutionary Society of Lorient exemplifies this phenomenon for a port in search of its identity. Mirroring Lorient’s transition from commercial to naval and industrial port, the Society’s vision of the global evolved with its composition, as the local merchant elite’s influence waned. For the Lorient Society, the global had political, commercial, and racial dimensions. This article seeks to show how these dimensions sometimes worked together and sometimes conflicted, leading to tension between universal rights and particular or national interests, in the Society’s attempts to define a new global order.
A society of merchants between the global and the national: Universal rights and commercial interests, 1790–93
Founded on 1 September 1790, by December 1790, the Lorient Society had ballooned from 16 to over 200 members and opened a public gallery for non-members,Footnote 20 with around 800 named members joining at one time or another.Footnote 21 However, up until mid-1793, many of the most active members were merchants with interests in overseas trade, including several belonging to the ‘elite’ at the summit of the Lorientais social pyramid.Footnote 22 Yet this was a club ostensibly founded for the defence of the constitution, notably the revolutionary principles enshrined in its Declaration of Rights. From its origins, therefore, the Society presented the potential for tension between commercial interests and political ideals. The first three years of its existence were momentous, with colonial unrest culminating in the great slave revolt of August 1791 in Saint-Domingue, marking the beginning of the Haitian Revolution, and with the advent in April 1792 of a war that would help precipitate the fall of the French monarchy in August–September 1792 before engulfing nearly all of Europe and its colonial possessions. Nonetheless, for the Lorient Society, the fundamental problem did not change, for it remained dominated by the same merchant elite, while the centrality of the rights of man and citizen persisted as France became a Republic. This section is concerned with the ways in which the tension between principles and interests informed the Society’s attempts to mediate between the global and the French nation, and how it shaped participants’ vision of the articulation of nation and empire.
Although the Compagnie des Indes lost its monopoly in 1790 before being liquidated in 1793, it cast a long shadow over Lorient. It shaped the city’s social composition: with little in the way of clergy or nobility, its elite was formed by merchants and high-ranking administrators, with a broad base of sailors, soldiers, and shipbuilders making up the majority of the population. It was also responsible for the enduring links between Lorient and the Indian Ocean, as well as Asian markets more broadly. Founded by and for the Company, Lorient did not possess the material and institutional assets of other French ports. Lacking a major river system, industry, and luxury products, it is not among the ports that Richard Drayton uses to ‘map the globalisation of France’.Footnote 23 Its population of around 20,000 was dwarfed by Marseille or Bordeaux, or even Rouen or Nantes.Footnote 24 As a ‘new city’, Lorient had not been a seat of power before 1789 and this did not change with the Revolution. Its merchants did not even benefit from a Chamber of Commerce.Footnote 25
By 1789, moreover, Lorient’s role as the hub of Indian Ocean trade was declining. In 1769, following France’s defeat in the Seven Years War and amid debates about ‘free’ trade and the role of non-state actors like the Compagnie des Indes in governmental functions, the Company’s monopoly had been suspended. This allowed for the establishment of independent merchants in Lorient, but also for competition from other ports. Then, in support of the American War of Independence, the French monarchy developed Lorient’s arsenal and chose the port to serve as the free trade zone with the United States created by the Treaty of 1778. This, along with the partial restoration of the Company’s monopoly in 1785, proved unpopular.Footnote 26 Lorient merchants blamed the economic downturn of the late 1780s on the free trade zone and the Compagnie des Indes, calling for the abolition of both.Footnote 27
By the time the Lorient Society was founded, Delaville-Leroulx, Lorient’s deputy to the Estates-General, and a lobby of three other future merchant club members, had already obtained both these objectives. They also succeeded in maintaining Lorient as the obligatory return port for Indian Ocean and Asian trade—along with Toulon.Footnote 28 The Society was therefore not established to obtain such concessions. Nonetheless, there were many merchants and shipowners among the most influential members of the society, whose interests shaped the club’s politics. Several belonged to Lorient’s ‘elite’, such as Esnoul Deschâteles, last mayor of Lorient before the Revolution; Cambry; Deschiens; or Bijotat. Other merchants, although prosperous, never fully integrated into elite circles, including Salomon (from Erfurt), Lapotaire, Arnoux, the Lanchon brothers, and Renaud. Though we lack detailed statistics from the Revolutionary period, those from the 1780s give us an idea of the originality of their commercial interests: nearly 70% concerned the Indian Ocean and Asia.Footnote 29 Only 10% of ships leaving Lorient were engaged in the slave trade, far fewer than from Nantes or Bordeaux, although Lorient’s Asian ventures were intertwined with it.Footnote 30 As Michael Kennedy observes, ‘[i]t is not customary to regard the Jacobins as an economic pressure group, yet, this was, at first, a major facet of their activities’.Footnote 31 More recently, Lauren Clay has shown how economic lobbyists instrumentalised membership in the Paris Society, among other tactics, to prevent the abolition of the slave trade.Footnote 32
Some members may have been motivated primarily by such objectives. However, the Lorient Society was not a Chamber of Commerce. Despite the potential for commercial instrumentalisation, political clubs had other objectives. This is reflected in the fact that many of the best-established merchants declined to join the Society, or as in the case of the ‘great Monistrol family’, adhered only nominally.Footnote 33 Moreover, even in 1790–91, several particularly active members were not merchants (from the priest Even to the lawyer Kerléro, the customs employee Laffilé, the apothecary Mouquet, or the naval engineer Ulliac). The pull of commercial interests, however strong, remained in tension with the Society’s commitment to revolutionary ideals.
While the Society faced the challenge of reconciling commercial interests with service to the nation, those very interests and the global ties they produced allowed the club to position itself as an intermediary between global concerns and national institutions. Through its petitions to the national authorities, as well as letters and addresses, the Society forged links with political societies and other correspondents outside metropolitan France, defended Lorient merchants’ interests by identifying them with those of the nation, and used its members’ knowledge of the global to justify advocacy for or denunciation of actors on global trajectories.
The Society’s attempts to cast itself as an intermediary can be partially attributed both to Lorient’s failure to profit from revolutionary administrative respatialisation and to the port’s rocky relationship with its surrounding territory. Statistically, most of Lorient’s population came from within a 40-kilometre radius, but it was nonetheless home to a sizeable foreign population. This was a city with its own culture, diverging professionally, linguistically, and religiously from that of the countryside.Footnote 34 Throughout its existence, the Society displayed a strong anticlerical bent, reflecting the sensibilities of liberal merchants as well as a certain indifference to official religion among sailors. While this may seem a purely local affair, it illustrates the interpenetration of Lorient’s global networks with its regional situation. The Society repeatedly fraternised with colonial troops which then marched to repress unrest in the Breton countryside.Footnote 35 Meanwhile, the anticlericalism, born in part from Lorient’s relationship to its region, inspired the Society to demand an end to public funding for missionary work in India in April 1791.Footnote 36
Lorient’s social structure also created internal tensions which, in the course of the Revolution, would threaten merchant dominance within and outside the Society. From 1789, there were periodic revolts among port workers over a combination of economic factors and distrust of administrators and merchants suspected of putting their private interests before the Revolution. These shaped the club’s social politics, now advocating for back wages to be paid, now denouncing certain workers’ ‘shiftlessness’.Footnote 37 Following the events of spring and summer 1792, which brought war with Austria and Prussia, early defeats, and royal treason leading to the overthrow of the monarchy, tensions came to a head. As the much bloodier September Massacres took place in Paris and elsewhere, in Lorient the merchant Jean Louis Gérard was assassinated by an angry crowd for seeking to export arms in wartime, leading to the massive arbitrary repression of port workers.Footnote 38 This affair reveals the biases of the merchant-dominated Society, which portrayed Gérard as the victim of an innocent mistake. The weapons were merely mislabelled, and moreover not of military calibre, but rather destined for the slave trade, the (il)legitimacy of which passed without comment.Footnote 39
Even before 1789, there had been competing visions for the French colonial empire, and the Revolution brought a new urgency to redefining its role. National sovereignty called into question the status of the colonies as royal possessions. The Declaration of Rights delegitimised slavery and the slave trade as well as the racial discrimination that had been developing throughout the eighteenth century, especially in the Caribbean. Meanwhile, the ideas of equality under the law and the rationalisation of institutions undermined colonial particularism. All these issues were the site of tensions, bloody struggle, and compromise of principle, ultimately leading to a configuration that has been described as ‘a nation-state with imperial extensions’.Footnote 40
While the Lorient Society did not produce detailed reports on members’ vision for the French colonial empire, we can get a sense of this vision by analysing which subjects they chose to address and their positions. Like the traders studied by Paul Cheney, the merchant-dominated Lorient Society adapted arguments from different currents to suit their needs.Footnote 41 Unlike the Chambers of Commerce, the Society did not defend the Exclusif, which limited colonists to trading almost exclusively with the metropole, perhaps believing the 8 March 1790 decree maintaining it in its ‘mitigated’ 1784 form had definitively settled the issue.Footnote 42 However, given that this was a point where the interests of metropolitan merchants and colonial planters diverged, it is interesting that the Lorient Society would insist, as it did in October 1790, that their correspondents in Saint-Domingue ‘never claimed to separate [their] interests from those of the metropole’.Footnote 43 In light of colonists’ near constant attempts to do just that, this reads as wishful thinking.
The Society sought to maintain global connections to extend and strengthen the network of partisans of the Revolution. This was particularly important in the French Caribbean and Mascarene Island colonies, where slave-owning and segregationist interests were at odds with the principles of the Declaration of Rights. A problem in and of itself for those who believed in these principles, it also presented a difficulty for those invested in the colonial system, should it encourage colonists to question their loyalty to France. Thus, the Lorient Society was keen to encourage the creation of a counterpart on Île de France, mediating between the ‘citizens of Île de France’ and the Paris Jacobins, starting in June 1791.Footnote 44
The Lorient Society’s positions placed it simultaneously at odds with the colonies with which it was attempting to maintain close ties and with the principles it purported to profess. The Constituent Assembly had already voted to maintain the slave trade by the time of the club’s formation, something Lorient’s extraordinary commercial deputies, all future club members, had supported.Footnote 45 By 1791, the central question was that of the rights of ‘free people of colour’. Excluded from exercising them by white segregationist colonists throughout the Caribbean, in Saint-Domingue the free people of colour took up arms in October 1790, forcing the metropole to confront the issue. The Society came to their defence, while insisting that slavery was, at least for the time being, a necessary evil.Footnote 46 Its arguments were particularly tortured in a January 1791 ‘address to all the clubs of France’: the ‘Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen’ was ‘not consecrated for a single class of individuals, but for all humanity’ and this is why free men of colour should not be deprived of their political rights if they otherwise met the criteria for ‘active’ citizenship. ‘However … the negro slaves are not yet fit to benefit from this act of humanity; because before enjoying rights one must first know the corresponding duties; and moreover, indefinite liberty accorded suddenly would cause the most violent dangerous commotion in commerce’.Footnote 47 This obvious inconsistency did not seem to bother the Society.
Indeed, the Lorient Society positioned itself in its early years as defending the prosperity of its port and the French nation through the defence of colonial commerce, and it was not alone in tying this to the preservation of slavery. In June 1791, the club addressed the Constituent Assembly, declaring the colonies as a ‘source of wealth’ that France needed to keep, because their ‘products feed our trade’, which would ‘soon’ lose its ‘energy (nerfs) and resilience (Ressorts)’ without them.Footnote 48 Though this address was concerned primarily with unrest in Martinique, it also came on the heels of the news of the repression of the revolt of the ‘free people of colour’ of Saint-Domingue and the breaking on the wheel of their leaders, Vincent Ogé and Jean Baptiste Chavannes. These events had been the catalyst for a major debate about this group’s rights in the Assembly, resulting in the compromise decree of 15 May 1791 guaranteeing political rights only to those born of free parents. The need to preserve the colonies by preventing further unrest, notably in the form of a slave revolt, had been at the centre of the debate, with deputies in favour of civic equality evoking not only revolutionary principles but also the dangers of fracturing the slave-owning class along colour lines, while those against alleged the importance of ‘colour prejudice’ for keeping the enslaved in line.Footnote 49
The Lorientais’ defence of free people of colour was not mere rhetoric. They proposed concrete modalities—including an embargo on all ships leaving metropolitan France for the colonies—to ensure the application of the 15 May decree.Footnote 50 Such advocacy allowed them to reconcile principle and interest. Free people of colour did not threaten the latter when it came to metropolitan merchants,Footnote 51 some of whom may have had ties with those categorised as such.Footnote 52 Indeed, Lorient was not unusual in this respect, as even the two major societies of the much more important slave-trading hub of Bordeaux congratulated the Assembly on the 15 May decree.Footnote 53
Among the most striking examples of the Lorient Society’s playing intermediary is its defence of ‘patriot’ soldiers deported from Martinique, which occupied many extraordinary sessions in summer 1791. The Society welcomed the soldiers upon their arrival in Lorient, investigated their complaints, then sent multiple petitions to the National Assembly on their behalf.Footnote 54 It attempted to enlist the entire French club network in this endeavour, to prove that this was ‘not the isolated wish of one city alone, but indeed the wish of all the citizens of the French empire (empire français)’,Footnote 55 an expression referring not to the colonial empire as distinct from the metropole, but rather to all territories under French control.Footnote 56
The situation in Martinique was complex, however, with white planters managing to pit the free people of colour and the white urban population of Saint-Pierre against each other. The latter had supported the Revolution from the beginning, while free people of colour remained divided between the planters of colour’s interest in maintaining slavery and the hope shared by all for an end to racial discrimination. When some slaveholders of colour threw in their lot with white planters, the ‘patriots’ of Saint-Pierre, primed by a racist social order, grew suspicious of people of colour as a group, leading to violent altercations. The General Assembly of white planters and the royalist governor took the opportunity of positioning themselves as protectors of people of colour even as the same Assembly manoeuvred to deny their political rights. Metropolitan troops stationed in the colony, fearing counter-revolution, sided with the ‘patriots’, while the governor harnessed the new enmity between ‘patriots’ and free people of colour to rally the latter. As a result, the ‘patriots’ were defeated and their defenders imprisoned for months before being deported back to the metropole.Footnote 57
While it makes sense that the Lorient Society would adopt the soldiers’ portrayal of themselves as victims of the ‘despotism’ of royalist governors, its failure to mention the opposition between free people of colour and ‘patriots’ in Martinique is significant. Either it shows the limits of the Society’s ability to obtain accurate information, or, more likely, it exemplifies its capacity to filter information inconvenient to its preferred narrative. The Lorientais had already shown themselves to be fierce advocates of free people of colour, declaring their insurrection ‘no more guilty than our own’.Footnote 58 It was equally inconvenient that ‘patriots’ could take part in racist attacks against free people of colour and that the latter could side with royalists. Part, then, of the Society’s role as an intermediary was knowing which information not to pass on.
Meanwhile, the Lorient Society never forgot its privileged role regarding Asia. In this, it ran counter to general trends noted by historians: certain actors may have seen a decline in Asian trade as a reason to turn toward new colonisation projects in Africa, but Lorient merchants had a vested interest in preserving the former and showed none in the latter.Footnote 59 On 21 January 1792, the Lorient Society petitioned the National Assembly to restore the Indian Comptoir of Pondicherry, which French troops had evacuated in 1789.Footnote 60 This was not a statement of the superiority of commercial over territorial empire so much as a defence of Lorient’s commercial interests, which, like the Chambers of Commerce, they conflated with French national and even global interests: when the French tricolour floats above Pondicherry, this will be a ‘symbol of our Constitution which must one day make a single family of all the inhabitants of the Globe’.Footnote 61
As this declaration indicates, the Lorient Society had an explicit vision for the global order and the place of the French nation (and its colonies) within it. In November 1791, although already apprised of the slave revolt in Saint-Domingue, it opened a letter addressed to two clubs there with this similarly optimistic assertion:
In every part of the Globe the French Constitution must have partisans and Friends: everywhere where philosophy makes itself heard, the rights of man must be revered, and soon liberty will enflame the Lapp and the Chinese man.Footnote 62
As recent historiography has recognised, the traditional separation of intra-European affairs from questions of empire and the broader world is an artificial one.Footnote 63 Participants in the Lorient Society did not themselves view these arenas as separate. France’s European neighbours were also global imperial rivals and although possessing their own particularities, colonial situations also existed within Europe (as in Corsica or Ireland).Footnote 64 Prejudices about the inferiority of non-European peoples were not as broadly unquestioned as they would become in the nineteenth century, allowing for the problem of the legitimacy of colonisation to participate in a larger Enlightenment debate about just war and conquest.Footnote 65
The Lorient Society’s confidence in the inevitability of the global spread of revolutionary principles is interesting for several reasons. For one, it is not limited to ‘white’ Europeans. The ‘Lapps’ (Sámi) and the Chinese are not, however, an unusual choice for this kind of rhetoric, which illustrates a classic hierarchical scheme in Enlightenment thought: the ‘Lapps’, as an indigenous people who did not practice agriculture, were seen as less civilised, while China was regarded as despotic but highly civilised, by some more so than Europe.Footnote 66 The French Revolution introduced a new hierarchy following the criterion of the recognition of the natural rights of man and citizen, with nations that did so at the top, followed by those who were merely ignorant, and, at the bottom, those who knew but rejected the idea of natural rights.Footnote 67 ‘Lapland’ (Sápmi) and China occupy the middle rank in this hierarchy, with revolutionary enthusiasm bringing the letter-writers to claim that their joining the ranks of free peoples was not only possible but inevitable.
Nonetheless, in this letter, the omissions speak as loudly as the affirmations. The Lorient Society was writing to clubs upholding slavery and racial segregationFootnote 68 of their shared dedication to ‘defending and supporting the rights of man’.Footnote 69 Once again, this does not extend to the enslaved. Rather, the Lorientais allusively suggest that these common principles meant that white colonists should put aside their differences with free people of colour to suppress the slave revolt. Rhetoric about the spread of liberty to all nations continued to coexist uneasily with self-interested acceptance of literal enslavement.
The arrival of war would have a major, though not always straightforward, impact on attitudes to foreign peoples. The victories following the establishment of the Republic in September 1792 seemed to confirm the idea of a war of ‘liberation’, which the Lorientais had supported. In November 1792, the Lorient Society wrote enthusiastically to inhabitants of occupied Nice and Savoy as well as the ‘Popular Society’ of occupied Mainz, inviting them to self-government and respect for natural rights.Footnote 70 Following referenda, Nice and Savoy would be integrated into the French Republic, and a short-lived Republic of Mainz would be founded. However, the war did not ultimately unfold according to the hopes of its advocates.Footnote 71 When it came to French views of the peoples they were supposed to be liberating, the defeats and betrayals of the summer of 1792, and even more so of March 1793, led to a heightened suspicion of the subjects of Coalition powers and ultimately to the imprisonment of many of them as ‘suspects’.Footnote 72
Meanwhile, the list of peoples who were considered ‘free’ shrank. In February 1792, the Lorient Society organised a festival where the ‘English, American, Polish, and French flags’ were displayed together in a sign of unity among ‘free peoples’, following similar ceremonies at the Paris and Bordeaux clubs.Footnote 73 The Society’s views on the Swiss Confederation were more ambiguous, dependent on each canton’s policy on harbouring French émigrés.Footnote 74 Its Swiss members may be responsible for such precise judgments, in contrast with general perceptions of Swiss liberty. Meanwhile, Poland’s free status did not survive the Second Partition of 1793, the same year that the British took the helm of the Coalition against the French Republic.
The British case is particularly interesting both because it is the only one in which another nation was considered to have abandoned the cause of liberty, and because Britain had been and continued to be France’s primary imperial rival. Studying the Lorient Society’s evolving views on the ‘English’Footnote 75 is key to understanding its perspective on liberty and empire.Footnote 76
Without even considering the importance of British historical models,Footnote 77 the British club movement was a major source of inspiration and early collaboration for French political societies.Footnote 78 In November 1791, the Lorient Society debated a proposal to send a deputation from all French clubs to those of England to avoid war over the Nootka Sound Affair. This was a territorial dispute regarding the north-west coast of North America, which threatened to push France into declaring war on Britain on behalf of Spain, due to the familial alliance between the Bourbon kings of France and Spain.Footnote 79 Dynastic loyalties no longer justified war, especially between ‘free peoples’. A few weeks later, the Society also applauded two letters by Dr Richard Price of the London Revolution Society.Footnote 80
Through 1792, the British were still regarded as friends and free people(s), despite the hostility of their government. The Lorient Society did not find the rumour of a planned British invasion implausible during the crisis of the king’s flight in June 1791, but it made a clear distinction between people(s) and government.Footnote 81 As late as the autumn of 1792, the Lorient Society applauded a letter from the London Society of Constitutional Whigs and decided to invite them to adhere to the French club network to ‘make common cause’, although nothing seems to have come of it.Footnote 82 As we shall see, the Society’s Anglophilia would not survive the start of hostilities.
In its first years, the Lorient Society was one of contradictions, uneasily attempting to balance commercial interests in colonial empire and slavery with a belief in the universality of the principles of natural rights, and desire for fraternity among peoples with support for offensive war. In the following section, we will examine how the evolving geopolitical, national, and local context affected the nature and composition of the Lorient Society, and the ways in which both that context and those changes in objectives and membership led to new ways of perceiving the global.
The Popular Montagnard Society and its shifting global priorities, 1793–94
The years 1792 and especially 1793 brought with them a series of important turning points both for the Lorient Society and for France’s place in the world. The advent of the Republic in September 1792, with the convening of a new National Convention, would reframe the question of the relationship between nation and empire.Footnote 83 The French definition of the Republic, ‘one and indivisible’, binding the nation together under the same laws, threatened the colonies’ special status. Then, in February–March 1793, France extended its declaration of war to its maritime and colonial rivals Britain, Spain, and Holland. Adrift in a sea of hostile monarchies,Footnote 84 France urgently needed to frame a new republican diplomacy. Meanwhile, the expansion of the war necessitated a new recruitment drive, sparking anti-revolutionary revolts in, among other places, Brittany and adjoining regions, notably the Vendée, where it would fester into civil war. Among the revolutionaries themselves sociopolitical tensions erupted in the so-called ‘Federalist’ Revolts of spring and summer 1793, which shook multiple regions, including Brittany, even as the insurrection of 31 May–2 June 1793 ousted right-wing ‘Girondin’ leaders from the National Convention. In the aftermath, the Convention, now dominated by the left-wing ‘Montagnards’, sent deputies known as ‘représentants en mission’ and other agents to repress the revolt and ‘purify’ the clubs, resulting in the refoundation of that of Lorient in November 1793 (Brumaire Year II of the newly adopted republican calendar). This new ‘Popular Montagnard’ Society opened its doors to more and more sailors, port workers, and artisans, while merchant influence waned. Meanwhile, though not a mere ‘cog’ in the machine of the revolutionary government, the Society took on a more official role—for example, vetting candidates for office, under the (sporadic) tutelage of représentants en mission and agents of the central authorities.Footnote 85 Given these evolutions, the Society’s relationship to the global necessarily changed as well.
When Committee of Public Safety agent Marc Antoine Jullien re-founded the Society in Brumaire Year II (November 1793), members had to justify their conduct and participants in the ‘Federalist’ Revolt were eliminated.Footnote 86 At the same time, the new ‘Popular’ Society attempted to broaden its recruitment.Footnote 87 With few exceptions—Macé (uncle and nephew), Renaud, Henry de la Blachetais (alias Brutus), and, more surprisingly, Lorient’s first deputy, Delaville-LeroulxFootnote 88 —merchants no longer figured among the most active members. Now shopkeepers and artisans filled out the Society’s ranks, along with clerks, notaries, teachers, and artists; surgeons and apothecaries; sailors and naval officers. Some of these were new members, but many had belonged to the Society from its earliest days. They were not necessarily poor, several having paid the 10 livres in direct taxes required to be eligible for office in 1790,Footnote 89 but their lack of status meant they had been shut out of local power and influence—and would be again under the Thermidorian Reaction. Although some of them had travelled to ‘India’ (Montplé), had family in the Caribbean colonies (Robic), or hailed from abroad (Géwiss, a clockmaker from Berne, Switzerland), they largely lacked the direct commercial interests of their predecessors.
Of course, war had already radically modified trade priorities. These were now feeding the population and provisioning the army and navy. As in previous wars, the Exclusif was put aside, replaced by neutral trade and privateering. In January 1793, the Minister of the Navy wrote to the political societies of France’s major ports in anticipation of naval hostilities.Footnote 90 In reply, the Lorient Society mentioned opportunities for privateering, but the focus remained political. Damaging enemy commerce would serve mainly to turn private interests, and therefore opinion, notably in Britain and the Dutch Republic, against the war with France provoked by their ‘Ministers’ intrigues’.Footnote 91 Though Lorient’s shipbuilders armed few corsairs compared with those of Nantes or Saint-Malo, among those that did were the Lanchon brothers, active members of the ‘Popular’ Society.Footnote 92
As famine loomed due to a combination of poor harvests and the greater demand and lesser supply resulting from foreign and civil war, making sure basic necessities entered France and did not leave was a top priority. In September 1793, the Lorientais denounced smuggling of grain out of the country.Footnote 93 Above all, the Society celebrated the arrival of neutral ships and those captured by privateers,Footnote 94 and advocated for an acceleration of judgments of the validity of captures, citing concerns that perishable items were being left to rot in the meantime.Footnote 95 Privateering and neutral trade were part of a larger political strategy, but, when it came to private interests, they were viewed less through the lens of the investor than that of the consumer—and the sailor.
Indeed, sailors and their families became a central priority for the Lorient Society in the Year II. At the beginning of the year (October 1793), it petitioned for an exchange of French prisoners of war captured by the British, citing the deplorable conditions in which their compatriots were being held,Footnote 96 to which the Convention responded favourably.Footnote 97 In Germinal Year II (March 1794), the Lorient Society also considered petitioning the Convention for aid for the families of sailors taken prisoner while serving on privateering vessels,Footnote 98 as would that of Cherbourg two months later,Footnote 99 but it seems to have contented itself with représentant en mission Prieur of the Marne’s decision to grant this aid on the departmental level.Footnote 100
Advocacy on behalf of sailors and their families was not limited to those serving the Republic. Sailors often engaged in small-scale pacotille commerce on the vessels on which they served.Footnote 101 The Malabar, transporting such pacotille goods purchased in India, arrived in Lorient at the beginning of summer 1794, but at that time, all ships were immediately sealed off to allow the authorities to make requisitions before opening the rest of the merchandise to general sale.Footnote 102 In the meantime, the families of those sailors were in a potentially uncomfortable position: their wives petitioned the Society, which in turn petitioned the Executive Commission of Commerce and Provisioning on their behalf, a common pattern.Footnote 103
Nor did the Lorient Society lose sight of broader geopolitical objectives. With Britain firmly at the helm of the Counter-Revolutionary Coalition, the Lorient Society’s view of the ‘English’ soured. When the Lorientais learned in September 1793 that royalists in Toulon had invited the British in, they denounced ‘English’ ‘perfidy’ in accepting such terms, along with their ‘cruelty’ toward the inhabitants.Footnote 104 This was the realisation, in a major Mediterranean port, of the Lorient Society’s fears for its own port and coastline.
The capture of Toulon was illustrative of a larger point: in making war on a sovereign people in order to take away their liberty, but also by the means employed to this end, the British government was guilty of crimes against humanity (lèse-humanité). On 7 August 1793, the French National Convention declared British Prime Minister William Pitt the Younger an ‘enemy of the human race’.Footnote 105 The Lorient Society adopted this perspective, further citing British violations of the rights of neutral powers and targeting of civilians. It denounced the massacre of the crew of a French frigate in the neutral port of Genoa as ‘despicable’, as well as British attempts to starve the French population into submission by treating foodstuffs transported by neutral merchants as contraband, against the established norms of the law of nations.Footnote 106
Why blame the ‘English’ people for this, and not merely their government? As the reasoning went, this was not a people who were ignorant of liberty, but who seemingly chose to turn their back on it and support tyranny, at home and abroad.Footnote 107 And while an increasingly persecuted radical movement continued to exist in Britain, French observers were not incorrect: the British government enjoyed broad support.Footnote 108 The identification of the English with their government was never fully complete, however. Lorient tends to confirm Renaud Morieux’s remarks on continued transnational practices and their case-by-case ‘negotiation’.Footnote 109 For example, the Society vouched for Dr Milo Burk, an English doctor established in Lorient, who had been imprisoned as a British subject, ultimately winning his freedom.Footnote 110
Even when it came to the people of England as a whole, the Society did not lose hope. In Ventôse Year II (February 1794), the Society proclaimed that it was France’s intention to ‘snatch the means of supporting the Cause of thrones from the Slaves of England’ but also to ‘break the irons of those among them who love liberty’.Footnote 111 And though the Lorientais had greeted the infamous take-no-prisoners decree of 7 Prairial Year II (26 May 1794) with cries of ‘death to the last Englishman and Hanoverian’, a little over a month later, the Society opined that ‘panic has taken hold of the English, and the public spirit is beginning to be Enlightened regarding their Ministers’.Footnote 112
When no massive revolutionary movement materialised in Britain, the French Republic had to look for friends elsewhere. This took two overlapping forms: the idea of the French Republic as defender of the rights of neutral powers against British pretensions to ‘rule the waves’ and that of the constitution of a league of ‘free peoples’, starting with France, the United States, and Switzerland.
Manuel Covo has argued that projects and decrees presented from the right and left of the French National Convention shared a common focus from December 1792 to September 1793 and beyond: that of an ‘empire of liberty’ based on commercial diplomacy and joining France and the United States around the fulcrum of Saint-Domingue.Footnote 113 In theory, the two republics were to give each other reciprocal commercial advantages while refusing to trade with the British. Meanwhile, the French colonial empire would be ‘republicanised’ by removal of internal customs duties. The US declaration of neutrality of 22 April 1793 modified the terms of such projects only slightly, with the French Republic promising by the decree of 27 Brumaire Year II (17 November 1794) to respect American neutrality while continuing to honour its obligations as an ally.Footnote 114 In practice, these visions of friendship based on reciprocal commercial and political interests would founder on trade lobbyists’ reintroduction of regulations resembling the Exclusif, rendering French proposals incoherent to Americans.Footnote 115
Such projects also initially presupposed the quick repression of the slave revolution of Saint-Domingue in order to guarantee trade. This was not to be, as ‘general liberty’ was proclaimed in Saint-Domingue in August 1793, and the Convention would officially extend the abolition of slavery to all French possessions on 16 Pluviôse Year II (4 February 1794). Ironically, this would be a major factor in the failure of the ‘empire of liberty’. Fears of the spread of slave rebellion—along with those of losing British markets without gaining sufficient advantage in French Caribbean ones—would ultimately push the United States into the arms of its former metropole, signing Jay’s Treaty in November 1794.Footnote 116 Neither the failure of some form of solidarity among ‘free peoples’ nor the impossibility of integrating the formerly enslaved citizens of Saint-Domingue among them was a foregone conclusion, however. Restoring the economy of Saint-Domingue at the expense of the enslaved would perhaps have been the most reassuring step for the United States, but it was not the only way forward.
To what extent did the Lorient Society adhere to the Convention’s various plans for commercial diplomacy with neutral powers and ‘free peoples’, foremost among whom were the United States? By the autumn of 1793, a certain ambivalence towards the United States had crept in, but this was countered by the desire to maintain ties of friendship. On 23 September 1793, the Society rejected a proposal that the US flag should no longer fly alongside the French.Footnote 117 Doubts about the American government never extended to its people and there is nothing in the Lorient Society’s conduct that suggests a desire to undermine US commercial interests, unlike the Society of Honfleur, which successfully lobbied the Convention to allow enemy cargo on American ships to be considered contraband.Footnote 118 All this speaks to hopes for friendly diplomatic and commercial relations, but does not necessarily suggest that the Lorientais saw Saint-Domingue as pivotal to them. This was likely because the situation in the French colonies was rapidly evolving, along with the Society’s views on slavery.
The session of 16 Brumaire Year II (6 November 1793) is particularly instructive in this regard. That day, the Society enthusiastically welcomed Joseph Leborgne, secretary to the first revolutionary civil commission to Saint-Domingue and ally to the ‘civil commissioners’ who would proclaim the abolition of slavery there in August 1793. Leborgne arrived from Martinique, charged by a local club with informing the metropole about Caribbean affairs.Footnote 119 Committee of Public Safety agent Marc Antoine Jullien, who was presiding the Lorient Society that day, replied in its name, to the ‘bravos’ of those present.Footnote 120
Illustrating the anachronisms often created by distance, Leborgne’s speech seems to align with Brissot’s December 1792 vision of the ‘empire of liberty’, which imagined the civil commissioners would, far from abolishing slavery, swiftly repress the rebellion and go on to ‘liberate’ Latin America and integrate it into the Franco-American alliance.Footnote 121 Leborgne announced that Martinique was in dire need of ‘help from the mother country’, but continued that on ‘the continent of South America’, ‘the peoples subjugated by the Spanish wait only for the moment to shake off their irons’. Such uprisings for independence would serve the commercial interests of the French Republic and help destroy British control over the seas. It is unclear whether, like Brissot, Leborgne envisioned French troops aiding in this endeavour, though the rhetoric of projects to be ‘realised’ suggests as much. Further suggesting his adherence to Brissot’s plan, Leborgne failed to mention the issue of slavery. Indeed, neither he nor the Lorientais yet knew of its abolition in Saint-Domingue.
It is all the more striking then that Jullien insisted on this point, proclaiming that although the colonies were ‘precious divisions of the Republic’ and that ‘here’ the Martiniquais would find ‘brothers and defenders’:
The country you have left has been soiled by slavery. There, men have dared to treat [other] men like beasts of burden, like vile animals, and just because their skin is of a different colour; but does the negro’s heart not beat for liberty like that of the white man? The prospect of imminent liberty for the blacks announces imminent peace.Footnote 122
Jullien’s abolitionist stance complicates the ‘empire of liberty’ project as presented within the Convention. Certainly, the very fact that Jullien could hold such a position must be credited first and foremost to the enslaved people of Saint-Domingue and their revolution.Footnote 123 Although an anti-slavery movement did exist among French revolutionaries, it is highly unlikely to have advanced very far in the absence of such a massive slave revolt.Footnote 124 Some have argued that the Convention’s decision to abolish slavery had nothing to do with ideology or principle. It was simply a pragmatic necessity, to enlist the help of the formerly enslaved in fending off the British and Spanish, in straightforward continuity with earlier and later imperial rivalries.Footnote 125 Most French revolutionaries, including Leborgne, Jullien, and the Lorient Society that applauded them, undeniably wished to defend their colonies from the British. It is less obvious that revolutionary events had changed nothing about their view of colonial empire or that it is so easy to separate principle from pragmatism. If anything, it could be argued that Jullien’s contention that the abolition of slavery would bring peace errs on the side of naïve idealism, given that the white colonists of Martinique would defect to the British in order to preserve slavery.
As we have seen, the events of the ‘Age of Revolution(s)’ gave new urgency to the already controversial question of the nature of colonial empires. However, before and after 1789, most reform projects for the French colonies took colonialism itself for granted, which likely explains why many historians have avoided posing the question of anti-colonialism. Those who have considered it have often dismissed it as anachronistic, conflated it with abolitionism, or identified it uniquely with independence movements.Footnote 126 If anti-colonialism can only mean colonial independence, this last is a plausible objection to the presence of anti-colonial themes in French Revolutionary discourse. Eighteenth century calls for independence came from white slaveowners and, in the context of war with Britain, it was difficult to imagine any independence that did not end with British control. Given this context, it is worth examining whether it was possible to question the logic of empire without championing colonial independence.
Florence Gauthier has identified some voices calling for redefining the relationship between colonies and metropole as one of an ‘alliance between free peoples’.Footnote 127 Jullien’s use of the term ‘brothers’ to describe the relationship between Martiniquais and Lorientais could be interpreted this way. Referring to the colonies as ‘divisions’ of the ‘French Republic’ would in this case be a mere statement of fact, rather than an endorsement. His rejection of racial hierarchy and slavery already signified a break with the existing system of colonial domination. But his speech could also plausibly conform to the assimilationist model, a version of which had been proposed by the Physiocrats before the Revolution, and which would be adopted at least in theory by the Directory: the colonies should remain French, but the same rights and laws should apply throughout the empire.Footnote 128 On the other hand, there is no evidence that Jullien, or anyone else in the Lorient Society, subscribed to another major element of this model, the foundation of new agricultural colonies, and there is potentially a world of difference between protecting existing colonies and advocating for new conquests.
This is especially true in the context of rivalry with the British, transformed into a global contest between Revolution and Counter-Revolution, as the speech Prieur of the Marne gave to the Lorient Society two days later shows. Prieur decried the British empire and its dealings in many countries around the world. Notably, likely informed by the Abbé Raynal’s bestselling Histoire des Deux Indes,Footnote 129 he denounced the British policy of starvation in ‘India and Bengal’. He overoptimistically proposed that the French drive the British from India and that instead of taking their place, they offer to trade with the local peoples.Footnote 130 Unrealistic as this plan was, it cannot simply be placed in continuity with pre-revolutionary projects to develop a commercial empire in India as a consolation prize for the loss of a potential territorial empire.Footnote 131 That was an argument from a position of weakness, whereas Prieur was hypothesising a position of strength: even if France could conquer India, it should not. This does suggest a real critique of imperialism, one that aligns with the ‘liberal, even utopian’ thread of Diderot’s contribution to the Histoire des Deux Indes at the expense of its ‘cyclical pessimism’—even as Britain could no longer be imagined as cooperating.Footnote 132
Did the Lorient Society independently come to similar conclusions in the absence of representatives or their agents? The Society’s reception of the ‘tricolour’ deputation of Saint-Domingue suggests as much. It was these deputies’ arrival in Paris that triggered the abolition of slavery throughout all French territories, and the Lorient Society facilitated it. The deputies had to overcome many obstacles, travelling via the United States to avoid capture by the British, where they narrowly escaped being lynched by white colonial refugees. They only made it to France thanks to the ‘reluctant’ protection of US Secretary of State Thomas Jefferson, and once there, colonial lobbyists attempted to have them arrested in Lorient and briefly succeeded in Paris.Footnote 133 But there was nothing reluctant about their welcome by the Lorient Society:
Three deputies, one white, one black, and one mulatto, sent to the National Convention by the northern part of Saint-Domingue, arrive in the midst of the Society, which welcomes them with keen satisfaction and believes it sees in them its brothers, inhabitants of far-off countries that direct a gaze eager to see the dawn of happiness and independence toward our shores. The same sentiments, interests, and wishes unite them with us. The president shows the deputies the joy the Society feels at their presence and gives them a fraternal embrace in the name of the people. The deputies speak energetically of the republican principles that are triumphing in Saint-Domingue and of the union that should bring together the equal and free citizens of two distant continents and make the immense interval separating them disappear.Footnote 134
Remarkably, though many other societies would celebrate the abolition of slavery after the fact, that of Lorient had now twice proven its independent commitment to abolitionism: first before the Saint-Domingue proclamation, and again here, in the absence of any outside authority, even taking an active role in facilitating the general abolition.Footnote 135 The now relative absence of direct commercial interests in slavery and the slave trade allowed its members to be more coherent in their principles, although it is perhaps no coincidence that such actions were taken in a port whose stake in the slave trade had never been as significant as that of Nantes or Bordeaux.
The Society’s letter congratulating the Convention for abolishing slavery reinforces both the sincerity of its commitment to anti-slavery and the ambiguities of its stance on colonialism. This decree was an ‘act of justice’ in favour of ‘outraged humanity’ as well as an ‘homage to Equality, without which there is neither happiness nor a republic’. But the Lorientais warned the Convention that enforcing the decree would not be easy: those sent for that purpose must be ‘men whose philanthropy and republicanism are ironclad’, while ‘any individual who may have any property in the islands or who may have ties to the Enemies of the Blacks’ as well as ‘any intriguer’ should be deported from the colonies. They were particularly concerned about the Mascarene Island colonies, where ‘the Egotism and Cupidity of the Merchants and plantation owners’ would be a formidable obstacle,Footnote 136 and they were correct: the colonists would successfully resist abolition there.Footnote 137 The letter still employs expressions such as ‘our colonies’ and closes by evoking ‘means of preventing the evil that our enemies can still do to us in such precious possessions’, with the unavoidable implication that the Society still viewed the colonies as French assets.Footnote 138 Nonetheless, the abolition of slavery had become a priority on par with preserving the colonies themselves.Footnote 139
Some final caveats. Although the Lorient Society ended up championing the cause of the enslaved, we do not hear their voices, or indeed, as far as we know, those of any ‘people of colour’ present. Even when a ‘virtuous man of colour’ was invited to preside at the Society’s ‘festival of equality’ in Floréal Year II (April 1794), we do not learn his name, and if he made a speech, it is not recorded.Footnote 140 Similarly, when the Society helped a ‘female citizen (citoyenne) of colour’ find a job in the port shortly thereafter, it once again failed to identify her by name.Footnote 141
Perhaps more significant is the Lorient Society’s silence on slavery and abolition in connection with the United States. Doubtless, club members were aware that the French Republic was in no position either to force the issue or to break ties with a fellow ‘free people’. Nonetheless, this deliberate blind spot meant the Lorient Society was unable to reflect on the practical obstacles presented by its vision of an alliance of ‘free’ peoples where some of those peoples were composed (at least in part) of the formerly enslaved and others of enslavers. Covo argues that despite structural obstacles, the deterioration of US–French relations was due to a multitude of contingencies, suggesting that perhaps a solution could have been found.Footnote 142 It would doubtless be unfair to place the responsibility for finding it on one provincial club, but the Lorient Society’s inability to reflect on the problem is symptomatic of a broader failure of imagination.
The Lorient Society’s abolitionist turn is the most obvious result of its sociopolitical transformation of mid-to-late 1793. Its views on empire and France’s relationship with its colonies remain more ambiguous. However, the critiques of the British empire’s misdeeds on a global scale taken together with a newfound global commitment to ending slavery and with a persistent enthusiasm for the self-determination of peoples on multiple continents, undermine justifications of conquest and imperialism as they had existed up until that point. The lack of critical awareness regarding wars of ‘liberation’, remaining possessiveness concerning ‘our colonies’, and the inability to integrate Saint-Domingue and the United States into a coherent vision of an alliance among free peoples, act as a limit on this perspective as an alternative paradigm, but there is nothing to suggest that these committed revolutionaries invoked the principles of liberty, equality, and the rights of man cynically. Short of proposing to abolish empire, they were at least redefining it, albeit not necessarily with the results they might have preferred.
Conclusion
The ‘micro-spatial’ approach holds that ‘large historical questions’ may be best answered through ‘highly contextualized studies’ which pay close attention to the ‘practices and strategies of historical actors’ navigating multiple structures and networks.Footnote 143 This article has sought to demonstrate that such a study of the political society that met in Lorient from 1790 to 1794 gives us a unique window onto French revolutionary connections to and views of the global. Lorient owed its very existence to early modern commercial globalisation, which continued to play into the Lorient Society’s revolutionary politics. Meanwhile, that same Society was attempting to contend with the clash of European empires on a global scale.Footnote 144 Participants in the Lorient Society were self-consciously ‘global’ actors, explicitly identifying the global with a project of universal liberation, even as they initially excluded the enslaved from that project. The geography of the global is not ‘predetermined’ here.Footnote 145 Rather, it was contingent upon club members’ particular networks, themselves linked to the historical spatialisation of Lorient. This was a globe in which Asia weighed more heavily than much of Europe, the Middle East was non-existent, and Africa only present through its captives. Nonetheless, the Lorient Society’s networks did span continents, and it used its situation within them to position itself as an intermediary between the global and the national, both by relaying the concerns of distant connections to the national authorities and by proposing its own expertise regarding the management of commercial, diplomatic, and political relationships between different national and imperial entities.
Intertwined developments in the trajectory of the French and Haitian Revolutions, as well as events elsewhere in the world, affected the Society’s views on global issues, particularly slavery, and would ultimately transform them along with the Society’s composition. From the beginning, the Society envisioned the spread of revolutionary principles within all French territories as well as around the globe as the way to re-found both the French colonial empire and relationships between France and other nations on the basis of political affinity and promotion of trade. However, fundamental incoherencies emerge, as promotion of ‘trade’, ostensibly in the public interest, primarily served that of Lorient’s continued commercial prominence and the survival of the French colonial empire, albeit one now ideally characterised by civic and racial equality among the free population. This involved explicit exclusion of the enslaved from the benefits of the new global order but also ignored the problem of diverging commercial interests as both a centrifugal force within colonial empires and a source of imperial rivalry.
No longer dominated by the merchant elite, the 1793–94 Society did not wait for events to force its hand to adopt an anti-slavery stance. Moreover, it was now open to critiques of colonial domination in the name of universal rights and evoking if not developing the idea of mutually beneficial trade agreements among ‘free peoples’ and even those which had previously been reduced to targets for colonial subjugation. Ironically, however, preserving the French colonial empire became imperative, at least in the short term, to combat the British-led Coalition. If the abolition of slavery was necessary to that end, preserving French control over the colonies also became necessary to maintaining abolition. Meanwhile, the Society failed to grapple with the wedge that abolition could place between the French and American Republics.
Viewing the global from a French port like Lorient could therefore allow for an increasingly inclusive universalism, built in part on Society members’ far-flung personal and professional networks, while simultaneously feeding into a certain myopia—whether self-interested or altruistic—regarding the interests of other political and commercial actors, to the detriment of the realisation of those universalist goals. In keeping with the idea of the ‘exceptional normal’, such a conclusion is perhaps not generalisable, but therein lies its interest. It reveals perspectives a macrohistory of the French Revolution in global context might gloss over precisely in order to make sufficiently representative generalisations.
Acknowledgments
The author would like to thank the participants at the Global History and Governance Workshop of the Scuola Superiore Meridionale, and in particular Dr Daniela Luigia Caglioti, for their insightful remarks and suggestions on an early draft of this article, as well as the three anonymous reviewers assigned by the Journal of Global History.
Financial support
Funding for the present research comes exclusively from the Scuola Superiore Meridionale.
Competing interests
The author declares none.
Suzanne Levin is a specialist on the Age of Revolution(s) of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, with a particular focus on the French Revolution, with a doctorate in Early Modern History from the Université Paris Nanterre. She is currently a postdoctoral research fellow in the Turin Humanities Programme (Fondazione 1563), associated with the University of Turin. The present article is drawn from her previous fellowship in Global History and Governance at the Scuola Superiore Meridionale in Naples, focusing on ‘Revolutionary Lorient: An Atlantic Port at the Crossroads of Global History, 1790–1795’. Her doctoral thesis was published in 2022 under the title La République de Prieur de la Marne. Défendre les droits de l’homme en état de guerre, 1792-an II.
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