Abstract
This is a history of maritime activity in what is now France from the confrontations of the Plantagenets and Capetians up to contemporary times. The importance of sea power in the history of France was evident at least as early as the Viking invasions, the establishment of the duchy of Normandy, and the Norman Conquest of England in 1066. This volume begins about a century later with the reign of Philippe Auguste (1180) and in seven chapters takes us to our contemporary period. The most substantial treatment is of the sixteenth through the nineteenth centuries. The medieval period is covered in 50 pages and the twentieth and twenty-first centuries in some 30-plus pages, brief but worthy commentaries.
This is very much a story of human choices and interventions. Mr. Coutansais is unequivocal that French maritime expansion depended upon ‘le facteur humaine, chez nos souverains’ (p. 11). He sees political decisions as turning points in this ongoing story, but on the basis of his text, a great many humans other than kings and great nobles contributed to le facteur humaine. In keeping with his thesis, his favourites are kings and ministers: Louis XI, Jacques Coeur, Richelieu, Fouquet, Louis XVI, and Napoleon III. Coutansais is of two minds about Colbert, whose policies of state initiative and state intervention, he argues, were as often as not counterproductive. Men of business, of whom Jacques Coeur was one in his earlier career, do not figure prominently in his pantheon. The narrative unfolds on two interconnected levels: merchants, seamen, and manufacturers building up their own networks of trade, hence the growth of their cities, of a merchant fleet, and of colonies; and on a political level, kings helping, or taking the lead, in this process with a broad vision of what French trade could be or, on the contrary, hindering or ignoring it.
This volume catches that blue note often found in French and Francophile writers disappointed with France’s maritime performance. They convey a feeling that France, in spite of its maritime accomplishments, missed the wave that carried England/Great Britain to greatness. Thus, Coutensais’s major turning points in the book are negative. The first is the death of Louis XI. His successor, Charles VIII, turned his attention from the Atlantic towards Italy. The author sees this as choosing the past over the future. (Much the same could be said of François I’s obsession with Italy, which left Jacques Cartier’s discovery of Canada in limbo.) The second turning point is Louis XIV’s war against Holland, which opened a generation of continental warfare. It diverted France from a more open trade using Dutch networks and capital to a policy of French imitation of Dutch trading monopolies beyond France’s capacity to maintain. It was a choice much encouraged by Colbert, who saw international trade as a kind of warfare. The third turning point is 1870, and the fall of Napoleon III. Elements of free trade (especially in treaties with Great Britain and the United States), of infrastructural innovation (railways, ports, financial institutions) and encouragement of trade beyond the old colonial base gave way without the emperor’s vision to a dependence on France’s colonies, ‘devenant l’unique horizon du secteur maritime’ (p. 15).
The meat of this volume is the economics of empire. There is little discussion of ideas of empire as something political or ideological. Yet these were important aspects. Here are two examples from the Canadian corner of empire. Richelieu clearly envisaged a religious dimension to French intervention in North America. The support of Catholic missionaries and institutions remained an essential aspect of policy regarding New France throughout its history. Was it not this cultural purpose that made New France an imperial project rather than a mere trading venture? Richelieu’s vision might be considered the first iteration of the mission civilisatrice of later centuries, also omitted from these pages. Secondly, if it is conceded that the French established themselves on the St. Lawrence River mainly to exploit its resources and to find a short trade route to the Far East, by the mid-eighteenth century they had come to see Canada from the perspective of power politics. They supported a money-losing fur trade and subsidized Indian tribes to keep them from the British orbit. As a governor, La Galissonière, stated, having Canada was like having a fleet and battalions permanently stationed across the Atlantic.
This history strays little from the metropole. Look elsewhere for the history of colonies and colonials (colonists or colonized). Yet what was the French empire, even in the narrowest economic sense, without slaves and planters, fur merchants and coureurs de bois, trading factories, and alliances with the colonized? Still hewing to the economic sense of empire, on the metropolitan side we miss adequate discussion of the remarkable French prowess in shipbuilding in the age of wooden ships, the state of the merchant marine, the French Navy, the system of classes maritimes that for a long period supported it, and the fundamental North Atlantic fishery.
This handsomely-produced volume presents itself as an atlas, but in fact it is no such thing. The bulk of its pages is given over to text, albeit supported by many maps and historical pictures. By agglomerating numerical material into graphs or tables (as is common in atlases), and reducing the text, centrality could have been given to the maps. More of them in larger format could have told much of the story. A bibliography and notes would have been welcome. As it stands, it is difficult to know for what audience this history has been written. However, no book can be all things to all readers, and in spite of omissions, the coverage of the present volume is impressive. There is much scholarship in it, and every reader will find something new and useful in these pages.