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William Doyle, Bordeaux et les Etats-Unis 1776–1815. Politique et stratégies négociantes dans la genèse d’un réseau commercial, French History, Volume 31, Issue 2, 1 June 2017, Pages 248–250, https://doi.org/10.1093/fh/crx019
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Extract
One of the enduring clichés in the economic history of revolutionary and Napoleonic France is the commercial collapse of Bordeaux. The greatest boom town of eighteenth-century Europe, whose wonderful architecture can still be seen because more prosperous times never returned to knock it down and update it, was abruptly pitched from glittering prosperity to stagnation by upheavals in the Caribbean and maritime war against Great Britain. The economic shrinkage of a city whose population fell by almost a quarter in a generation can scarcely be disputed. But, argues Sylvia Marzagalli, the fall in the port’s activity was not as severe as once thought, and its merchants found ways of circumventing adverse conditions by way of increasing trade with and through the United States.
Most significant is the first of two parts, setting out the changing circumstances of trade between Bordeaux and the ports of the North American seaboard from the thirteen colonies’ declaration of independence down to the War of 1812. After an initial spurt when the merchants of France’s greatest port rushed to support and supply the rebel colonists, commercial relations between the two sides atrophied for a decade. There was deep disappointment in France when the newly independent Americans, while ruthlessly flouting metropolitan monopolies dear to Bordeaux in the French West Indies, redoubled their trading links with their former British rulers. Although there was a ready French market for American tobacco, cotton and (at times of poor harvest such as 1788) grain, France, though not her colonies, offered little that the Americans wanted in return. But the outbreak of war between revolutionary France and the British, fought mainly at sea, brought golden opportunities for neutral traders. The British waged economic warfare on French shipping from the start, and although they reserved the right to seize French or French-bound goods even if carried by neutrals, it was still less risky to use neutrals like the Americans than to trade directly under the French flag. Bordeaux profited from the fact that British privateers were easier to avoid in the Bay of Biscay than in the approaches to the Channel ports. Colonial traffic could also be diverted via American ports, and there was renewed demand in France for imported grain during the famine years of 1794 and 1795. With opportunities like these, American overseas trade took off. American vessels even established themselves in French coastal trade. Permanent commercial links were forged, and although they fell away during the quasi-war of 1798–9, they resumed vigorously under the consulate, when Marzagalli convincingly shows that far more American vessels passed through the Gironde than previously thought. They saved Bordeaux as a port from seizing up entirely. Only the more ruthless Anglo-French commercial conflict beginning in 1807 once more squeezed neutral flags from both sides until open war between the British and Americans revived earlier synergies with France.
