Introduction

France in the eighteenth century still retained much of the political and military ambition that had characterized the age of Louis XIV. It was both a major European power, critically involved in every major war on the European land mass, and the centre of a global empire second only to that of Great Britain. In the Americas alone France had founded and settled some fourteen colonies during the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, stretching from Canada to French Guiana.¹ And if after the Peace of Paris her presence here was more limited, with Quebec lost to the British, France still remained a major player in the Atlantic world, with a foothold in Louisiana (which still gave access to great swathes of the American West), and possessing in Saint-Domingue (the future Haiti) the richest of the Caribbean sugar islands, far outstripping the production of Jamaica or Barbados. There was a French presence in India, too, though a much-reduced one after 1763, and in the East Indies. It was in 1664 that Colbert had established a French East India Company to vie with the Dutch in shipping cloth and colonial products back round the Cape of Good Hope to the company’s headquarters in Lorient, injecting large amounts of state funding in the process.² But the company had failed and Lorient fallen into decline, until in 1785 Calonne tried to revive its fortunes by a fresh injection of capital.³ Colonial trade was now vital to France’s economy. France’s commercial fleets ploughed the world’s oceans from the Straits of Malacca to the Antilles, bringing colonial produce back to the great port cities of the Mediterranean and the Atlantic coast before selling them on to markets across Europe, while huge profits were made from slavery and the triangular trade between Nantes, West Africa and the Caribbean.