Nantes and the Atlantic trade

What was Nantes like around 1715?

Nantes sits on the River Loire, about 50 kilometres from the Atlantic. Around 1700 it was home to roughly 40,000 people. For centuries its ships had carried salt, wine and grain along the coasts of France and Europe, and its shipowners had been importing sugar from the French Caribbean since the 1640s.

The river was the city’s great road but also its problem. The Loire was shallow, so large, heavily loaded ships could not easily reach the city quays. Many stopped downriver at Paimbœuf, where cargoes were moved into smaller boats for the last stretch. Even so, by the early 1700s Nantes had become France’s leading port for fitting out ships.

What was the Exclusif?

France ran its colonies under a system later called the Exclusif, meaning “the exclusive”. Colonies such as Martinique, Guadeloupe and Saint-Domingue were meant to buy only from France and sell only to France, and only in French ships. Colonists were forbidden to trade with foreigners, though many smuggled anyway: in 1717 officials in Martinique seized foreign ships trading secretly in the bay.

Royal letters patent (written orders from the king) of April 1717 named thirteen French ports allowed to trade with the colonies, and Nantes and Bordeaux were among them. A ship had to come home to the same port it had left from, and colonial goods paid a small duty. Nantes was one of the biggest winners.

How did Nantes become France’s biggest slave-trading port?

The city museum dates the first slaving voyage from Nantes to 1657, but the regular trade began in the early 1700s. A ship often called the first of this new trade, the Hercule, was fitted out in 1707 by René Montaudouin, from one of the city’s leading merchant families. Off the coast of today’s Côte d’Ivoire it was attacked by a Dutch ship, and 38 of its crew were killed. Between 1707 and 1711, Nantes and its nearby harbours sent out about three-quarters of all French slaving voyages.

By law the French slave trade belonged to royal monopoly companies, which held the sole right to it. Between 1713 and 1721 eight ports, Nantes among them, won the right to trade with Africa by paying a fee to the monopoly company. From 1715 the main destination for French slave ships was Saint-Domingue, the western part of the island of Hispaniola, today Haiti, one of whose main ports was Cap-Français.

How did a slave voyage from Nantes work?

A Nantes ship sailed for West Africa loaded with goods that African traders wanted: printed cotton cloth from India, cowrie shells used as money, brandy, guns and gunpowder, metal tools, glass beads and tobacco. The cloth and shells came through the French East India Company at Lorient, not far away on the Breton coast.

On the African coast the ship might spend three to six months moving from one trading post to another, buying captives from African merchants and rulers. In 1709 the Duc de Bretagne left Ouidah, the port English sailors called Whydah, with 592 captives and reached Saint-Domingue that July. The crossing usually took about two months, and the national library of France estimates that about 13 per cent of the people on French slave ships died on the way.

In the islands the survivors were sold to work on plantations, above all sugar plantations, where the work was very hard and many people died. Other Nantes ships sold captives in Martinique, whose busiest town was Saint-Pierre.

What did the ships bring back, and who grew rich?

The ships came home with the crops that enslaved people had grown, above all sugar, as well as indigo dye and, later in the century, coffee and cotton. Much of the raw sugar was cleaned and hardened into white sugar in the city itself, and by about 1750 Nantes had some fifteen sugar refineries.

The profits went to a small group of merchant families, such as the Montaudouins. The historian Gaston Martin wrote that hardly a single big Nantes shipowner between 1714 and 1789 stayed out of the slave trade. Profits were uncertain: on average they were only about 5 to 6 per cent, but a lucky voyage could make a fortune and a bad one could ruin an investor. Gérard Mellier, mayor from 1720 to 1729, spoke up for the merchants and defended the trade. Over the 1700s rich merchants built tall stone houses on the Île Feydeau and the Quai de la Fosse, with warehouses below and family rooms above.

Did Black people live in Nantes?

Yes. An old French principle held that anyone who set foot in France became free. From 1716, however, new rules let colonists bring enslaved people to France and keep them in slavery, as long as they declared them to the authorities. That same year Gérard Mellier, a royal official in Nantes who later became its mayor, wrote a report on the legal position of enslaved Black people in France.

Records are thin for the game’s years, but later counts show a real community: in 1777 about 700 people of colour were recorded in Nantes, many of them working as servants in merchants’ homes. Few of their own words were ever written down.

How does Nantes remember the slave trade today?

For a long time Nantes said little about this part of its past. From the 1980s the city decided to face it. Galleries on the slave trade opened in the history museum at the Château des ducs de Bretagne in 2007. In 2012 the Memorial to the Abolition of Slavery opened on the Quai de la Fosse, where slave ships once tied up. Designed by the artist Krzysztof Wodiczko and the architect Julian Bonder, it carries glass plaques naming 1,710 ships and their dates of departure.

Historians count about 1,700 slaving voyages from Nantes between 1707 and 1793, more than 40 per cent of the French total. Estimates of the number of Africans carried on them range from about 450,000 to more than half a million.