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Cul de Sac
Patrimony, Capitalism, and Slavery in French Saint-Domingue
By Paul Cheney The University of Chicago Press
Copyright © 2017 The University of Chicago
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-226-41177-4
CHAPTER 1
Province and Colony
The French economy remained predominantly agricultural until well into the nineteenth century, so it is little wonder that members of the landed elite like the Ferron de la Ferronnays family, with their conservative investments and their essentially patrimonial ways of thinking and acting, retained the upper hand in eighteenth-century France. These same elites were nevertheless acutely aware of a commercial revolution that was thought to be transforming Europe beyond recognition. As international commerce linked hitherto remote parts of the world, states vied with one another to gain an increasing share of this trade; to integrate poor and isolated populations into this new economy; and to encourage and co-opt the merchants who dominated this activity. The rise of mercantile fortunes at the expense of landed wealth was part of a broader uncloistering of provincial worlds that linked previously isolated industries, social groups, or regions and reoriented them toward an expanding world of commerce. Saint-Domingue, with its massive exports of sugar, coffee, and indigo, lay at the cynosure of all these processes. The African captives who worked on its plantations were purchased in part with textiles procured by French traders in India; the wood that merchant ships were made of came from the Baltic; and the porcelain finery in which tropical luxuries such as coffee, sugar, and cocoa were served came from Limoges, deep in the heart of provincial France. The effects of the commercial revolution were not exclusively economic: altered patterns of consumption, the movement of peoples, the creation of new spaces of sociability, and the circulation of ideas were fundamental contexts for the development of the Enlightenment in France and elsewhere. Awareness of possibility piqued the appetite, which increased the rhythm of change. Not moving forward imparted a sense of falling behind.
If the effects of France's commercial revolution were widespread, they were not consistently felt, and the very unevenness of this progress had consequences of its own. France's non-European foreign trade increased 1,310 percent from 1716 to 1789, but people mainly experienced its effects in Paris and in the largest French port cities — Marseille, Bordeaux, Nantes, and La Rochelle. Rural dwellers could benefit if they had the good fortune to live in the hinterlands of ports like Bordeaux and Nantes; other rural areas were cut out of opportunities to produce export crops or manufactured goods — notably, textiles — and their residents focused more on subsistence than on new possibilities offered by the market. Lack of road or river transportation kept rural areas or smaller towns isolated from foreign markets; the division of France into a mosaic of competing customs zones did not facilitate the flow of goods either. Instead of selling tropical goods to poor peasants and artisans within their own country, French merchants in Bordeaux and Nantes largely re-exported them to consumers elsewhere in Europe. The penalty to French economic development was double: first, weak consumer demand inhibited industrial growth; and second, French producers and merchants remained excessively dependent on foreign markets, which were sensitive to competition and political disruptions. French merchants grew fabulously wealthy off this trade, and many French consumers did find their daily rituals and even outlook altered when they were put into contact with a new world of goods, but they did so in places like Paris, Saint-Domingue, Nantes, and Bordeaux. Between these islands of economic dynamism lay vast zones of economic traditionalism; although those left behind were not always poor, they glimpsed these broader transformations from a distance and were drawn only haltingly into the vortex of the modern economy. Linking new worlds through commerce meant also, fundamentally, creating new, more striking patterns of differentiation between the poor and the rich, the rural and the urban, the benighted and the educated, the traditional and the modern.
These conditions of increasing wealth, but also of social and geographic polarization, meant that family fortunes based on inheritance and the sleepy routines of French agriculture could no longer be assumed to last — let alone continue to serve as the basis for social and political dominance. The rapid growth of Atlantic commerce during the eighteenth century provided several possibilities for the nobility, faced with the relative decline of landed wealth, to participate in these transformations and to reinvigorate their family fortunes. Agricultural land could be planted with specialty crops for export; investments could be made in those local industries that supported or directly participated in foreign trade; convenient alliances could be forged with rich bourgeois families seeking social advancement within a status-obsessed society; and finally, nobles could make direct investments in overseas production and trade. Nobles' openness to new economic possibilities was determined by a number of things: proximity to markets; availability of investment capital; relative status within the local, regional, and national nobility; degrees of prejudice toward commerce and nonprivileged social groups; and family demographics. Whether pulled by opportunity or pushed by circumstances, the Ferronnays family moved beyond its provincial enclave in Brittany in two directions: eastward to the capital city of Paris, and westward to the overseas province of Saint-Domingue. As planters in Saint-Domingue, landed elites in the hinterland of the Atlantic port city of Nantes, and fixtures of the beau monde in Paris, members of this family were eyewitnesses to the modernization of eighteenth-century France's economy and society; but they took part in this process for reasons, and following a logic, that were eminently traditional.
Brittany, Anjou, Saint-Domingue
The Ferronnayses occupied a doubly charmed circle within a French nobility riven by inequalities of wealth and status. This family had roots extending to 1160 — a distinction that only the top fifth of the Breton nobility to which they belonged, among the oldest in France, could pretend to at the end of the seventeenth century. The military nobility (noblesse d'épée), of which the Ferronnayses were a part, generally enjoyed higher status than the administrative nobility (noblesse de robe), a group that had assimilated into the aristocracy by purchasing offices and performing administrative and juridical functions in an expanding absolutist state. Some wealthy bourgeois purchased offices that did not entail any real service to the state, but nevertheless entitled them or their heirs to nobility. Over the course of the eighteenth century, the ranks of the French nobility as a whole grew by at least one-quarter, so that the Ferronnayses found their relative seniority, and therefore status, further enhanced by this process of dilution.
If the Breton nobility was among the oldest in France, it was also among the poorest. Cadets (younger sons) were in particular plagued by the Breton custom of préciput, which allowed two-thirds of family property to go to the eldest son, while the siblings, languishing in poverty, were left to cherish impressive-sounding titles: "Most powerful and mighty Lord of a dovecote, a toad's burrow [crapaudière] and a rabbit warren," joked the son of just one such impoverished Breton clan, François-Réné Chateaubriand, an ally of the Ferronnays family under the Restoration of the Bourbon monarchy. Étienne-Louis issued from the upper crust of the Breton nobility, judging by tax payments made in the family seat at Saint Mars la Jaille by the father for the capitation — a direct wealth tax levied on the nobility and townspeople. (Saint Mars la Jaille lies in Ancenis at the southeastern extremity of Brittany, next to the province of Anjou, which is centered on the city of Angers [see map 3]).
There is no exact rule for extrapolating from capitation payments to annual income, but in 1748 the Ferronnayses enjoyed about 19,000l.t. in income and 17,000 in 1752 (graph 1). (A skilled artisan in the eighteenth-century Parisian building trades earned about 500l.t. per year; at midcentury, 19,000l.t. were worth about 800 English pounds sterling of the same epoch.) Although the family was situated on the border between rich and merely prosperous during the early decades of the eighteenth century, by the 1740s they had vaulted into the top 5 percent of taxpaying noble households in the bishopric of Nantes, there to remain until the end of the Old Regime.
Within France as a whole, the Ferronnays family was situated comfortably among the rich provincial nobility, a group of 3,500 families whose wealth placed them in the upper 13 percent of the aristocracy. (The French nobility was about 300,000 strong, or 1 percent of France's total population of 25 million.) These were definitely not the poor nobles facing professional and social exclusion and the cause of official concern — even charity — starting in the middle of the eighteenth century. With their kind of wealth, the Ferronnays family built one of the many rococo jewels that still ornament the Loire River valley. Their chateau at Saint Mars la Jaille was flanked by a pleasure garden laid out in a delicate counterpoint of fishponds, manicured hedges, and sculptures; from the center, a stairway descended to a reflecting pool that imparted a sense of space, of symmetry, and of command to the ensemble. The eighteenth-century chateau and gardens reprised the aesthetics of the royal chateau at Versailles on an appropriately reduced scale — a tacit allusion to the Ferronnayses' source of prestige as officers in the military of the modern Bourbon kings; tucked away behind this recent installation stood a sixteenth-century dovecote, a visual reminder of the Ferronnayses' more ancient, independent origins.
Land was the source of this imposing wealth, and the Ferronnays family held one of the largest portfolios in the area around Nantes. These were not innovating agriculturalists who made investments to improve farm buildings, roads, or soil productivity on their estates; the structure of their landholdings and the way they exploited them remained essentially unchanged throughout the eighteenth century, which resembled nothing so much as the two previous centuries. Like many of their fellow nobles, around the mid-eighteenth century the Ferronnayses began to get serious about increasing their revenue. To this end, they hired specialists in feudal law to draw up terriers, voluminous documents that summarized the assets and income within a given seigneurie. (By virtue of owing a collection of lands called a seigneurie, the lord [seigneur] exercised a set of profitable economic rights over landholding peasants; dispensing certain kinds of justice within the seigneurie was also a source of profit and prestige.) Using these terriers as a basis, noble landowners worked with their estate stewards to determine the highest plausible rents for their tenants and to uncover as well as to increase, wherever possible, the other obligations owed to them by landowning peasants on their estates. What has been dubbed the "feudal reaction" on the part of noble seigneurs was unquestionably a form of rational management; but if it was capitalism it was of the most conservative kind, maximizing revenues available within existing technical and contractual arrangements rather than reinvesting profits in an economically transformative fashion.
In 1744, the family patriarch, Pierre-Jacques Louis Auguste Ferron de la Ferronnays, had a terrier drawn up for the seigneurie of Saint Mars la Jaille. This document lists no less than 1,485 separate seigniorial obligations relating to properties sprinkled over nineteen bailiwicks. The feudal rents specified in this terrier — those owed by peasants who technically owned their land — were often quite trivial, but among other benefits accruing to the landlord, the Breton institution of domaine congéable imposed heavy fees, payable to the feudal landholder, upon the renewal of a lease or transfer of land. Peasants owed their lords payments in kind, labor, and free services of every description that went under the general heading corvée seigneuriale. The seigneurie also included several large holdings that the Ferronnays family leased out directly in a form of sharecropping called métayage, which usually entitled the landlord to half the harvest. By both arrangements, produce flowed in from cereal fields, chicken coops, fishponds, dovecotes, and apple orchards, while local monopolies on windmills and water mills squeezed revenue from peasants needing to grind their grain. Complant, a sharecropping arrangement for vineyards unique to the county of Nantes, assured one-quarter to one-third of the produce to the landholder, while leaving the risks and burdens to the cultivator. With this lucrative system, viticulture accounted for about one-third of all landed revenue in the Ferronnayses' county of Nantes. The Ferronnays family possessed a number of such seigneuries, which, taken together, could easily account for a large portion of its income of 17,000l.t. per year. The agricultural practices in Brittany and the county of Nantes were profitable for landholders such as the Ferronnayses, but within set limits: local inheritance and property-leasing practices (domaine congéable and complant) made this region particularly resistant to the sort of wholesale reorganization that may have transformed agricultural productivity — and hence landed fortunes.
Although based in the countryside, Pierre-Jacques Louis Auguste also owned a pied-à-terre in Nantes, on the Îsle Gloriette, situated among rich slave-trading merchants residing in the chic commercial neighborhood of La Fosse. Members of the military nobility doubtless brought social luster to this milieu, but their wealth paled in comparison with nearby merchants who, earning as much as 82,000l.t. per year, vied with the richest 250 noble families of France. This commercial aristocracy remained a distinct social group up until the French Revolution, but in many outward senses they began to meld with the nobility. Merchants bought venal — purchased and therefore heritable — offices, which gave them a juridical foothold in the nobility and set their families on the path to social recognition. All of Ferronnays' richest neighbors had purchased what contemporaries sneeringly termed "soap for scum," preferring the office of Secretary to the King because, while they enjoyed noble tax exemptions, a small but steady return on their investment, and the possibility of selling their office later on at a profit, secretaries did not perform any substantial duties that could distract a busy merchant from trade. And after twenty years in office, the holder attained complete and heritable nobility. The overwhelming majority of successful Nantes merchants purchased landed property in the environs of Nantes not to renounce trade but as a hedge against the fluctuations of international trade; these estates were also more easily passed along to heirs than the shares merchants owned in complicated business partnerships. Rural estates were intended as profitable investments, but also helped merchants — who hunted, made improvements, and observed the landed aristocracy's seasonal transhumance between city and country — to project the air of living nobly. At well-appointed tables in the city, landed bourgeois served delicacies culled from their fields, woods, or pastures. As with any dominant social group, members of this set usually intermarried to reinforce and extend existing advantages; by this tactic, merchants pooled available investment capital and strengthened their credit networks. A small minority took the path of exogamy into the nobility by concluding marriages with old aristocratic families. When a successful merchant looked in the mirror, he hoped to see a noble visage staring back at him.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Cul de Sac by Paul Cheney. Copyright © 2017 The University of Chicago. Excerpted by permission of The University of Chicago Press.
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