Dear Readers of the Journal of British Studies: bear with me. I'm just a French historian.

In March 1776, the merchants of Saint-Brieuc, Binic, and Portrieux—three ports clustered on the northern coast of Brittany—received long-awaited news. Months earlier, they had petitioned the French king for relief from an economic injustice. Their towns, the merchants had declared, were primed for a boom. Since the end of the Seven Years’ War thirteen years earlier, ship traffic had increased steadily. Saint-Brieuc's harbor now numbered among the region's busiest and safest, capable of sheltering oceangoing vessels of up to 400 tonneaux and, thanks to improvements by local authorities, were becoming more “commodious” every year. In addition to a bishop's seat, Saint-Brieuc also possessed proper maritime institutions: an admiralty court, a customs office, and a naval recruitment bureau capable of mustering up to three thousand sailors. Best of all, the three ports were closer than any others to centers of linen production such as Quintin, an inland village whose weavers churned out fine cloth most often shipped from Brittany to Cadiz, and from Cadiz to consumers throughout the Spanish Empire.

According to the petitioners, the trouble was that the linen trade with Spain had long been monopolized by a closed group of families, most of them from Saint-Malo, forty miles to the east. Statutes dating back to 1617 confirmed Saint-Malo's exclusive right to conduct such foreign trade, allowing those interlinked clans—Magon, de la Haye, Eon, and others—to establish commercial houses in Cadiz itself.Footnote ¹ Worse, lettres patentes in effect since 1717 authorized just thirteen French ports to trade with France's own colonies in the Americas. Saint-Malo made the list, as did Morlaix further west down the coast, but Saint-Brieuc, Binic, and Portrieux had not. Their “powerlessness” in the face of such obstacles and regulations, the merchants lamented, prevented them from “reaching new markets, facilitating consumption, increasing the production of the region, and augmenting the number of mariners.”Footnote ² They therefore asked the crown for commercial liberty in the form of legal equality with, and independence from, the privileged ports that surrounded them on the Breton coast.

Louis XVI agreed. On 14 March, the king's council of state issued an edict permitting the three towns to ship linen to Spain and trade with France's Caribbean colonies directly. The council's action stemmed in part from an unusual alignment of ministerial interests. The edict was signed by Antoine de Sartine, minister of the navy and colonies, and had been effectively greenlit by a positive report from Anne-Robert-Jacques Turgot, minister of finance. Sartine was a spendy proponent of revanchisme, a strategy that promised military revenge against Britain via aggressive naval expansion and investment in France's Atlantic empire. Turgot, by contrast, was a budget-slashing advocate of laissez-faire policies who hoped desperately to avoid another war with Britain, prophesying that in the absence of belt-tightening on all fronts “the first cannonball that is fired will force the state to a public bankruptcy.”Footnote ³ The plight of Saint-Brieuc, Binic, and Portrieux, however, united the two men. For Sartine, more seaborne trade equaled tighter bonds between the French Caribbean and the metropolis as well as more sailors in the merchant marine, which he envisioned as a stepping stone to service in the French navy. For Turgot, the merchants’ request served as a chance to promote free trade while attacking privileges such as those claimed by Saint-Malo—and, by extension, those that allowed provinces, cities, and the French nobility to avoid paying a fair share of taxes to an increasingly strapped crown.Footnote ⁴

This obscure petition and the council's decision reveal two key French connections to the American crisis. The first involved political economy. Tailoring their argument to suit Turgot's sensibilities, Saint-Brieuc's merchants tapped into a transatlantic circuit of ideas that had linked Paris, Edinburgh, London, Philadelphia, and Virginia since the 1750s. During and after the Seven Years’ War, the French physiocrats’ precocious (if not totally original) insistence on free trade prodded both Turgot and Adam Smith toward distinctive anti-mercantilist positions, while in North America a loose, eclectic group of thinkers, including Thomas Jefferson and Benjamin Franklin, adapted the economic thought that flowed from those exchanges to the politics of a fragmenting British Empire. The result was neither intellectual consensus nor an international movement. Yet by 1776, a bundle of concepts—that government ought to align with natural law, that natural law favored free trade, and that free trade went hand in hand with population growth, agricultural development, fiscal and military strength, and some degree of legal equality and self-rule—had taken root among reformers, from Brittany to the British colonies.Footnote ⁵

The second involved war. Although Saint-Brieuc's merchants focused on the local effects of Atlantic trade, military conflict with Great Britain undergirded both their petition and the monarchy's response. Since the mid-1760s, the French crown had toyed with illicit links between France's Caribbean colonies and British North America in order to, in Benjamin Franklin's words, “blow up the coals” of Anglo-American discontent with British interventionism.Footnote ⁶ For post-Seven Years’ War ministers such as the Duc de Choiseul, the Comte de Vergennes, and Sartine, however, trade served dynastic ends. In seeking to unleash the potential of three marginal ports by connecting them to the Atlantic, the Saint-Brieuc petition also promised to boost a French Caribbean economy whose products (sugar, coffee, indigo, cotton, and more), pass-through French goods (including Breton cloth), and needs (lumber and flour, for example) aligned nicely with consumption and production in the new United States. The French islands could function as a siege engine, battering the walls of British mercantilism into rubble while rendering war with the mother country plausible for the American rebels. Having budgeted 20 million livres for warships in 1776, Sartine appreciated the petitioners’ nod to an energized commercial fleet as a feeder for Saint-Brieuc's naval bureau. But in the broadest sense, the merchants also knew that trade between France, the French Caribbean, and the United States was the crown's primary instrument of war with Great Britain.

The Saint-Brieuc case, then, reveals some of the ways in which the events of 1776 in North America and France—and the language used to make political claims during those events—shared common origins and a common context. More important transatlantic ties, however, may be found in the case's subtext. The Bretons’ plea, the crown's response, and, in ways we are only beginning to appreciate, the conduct of the American rebellion, were all informed by the same, often unacknowledged precondition: the rapid, brutal, staggeringly profitable expansion of slavery in the French Caribbean. From Saint-Brieuc to the rebelling colonies, calls for independence spouted by commercial elites were made possible by the violent subjugation of enslaved Africans and the forms of racial discrimination imposed on people of color in Guadeloupe, Martinique, and especially Saint-Domingue.

The trade that delivered African captives to those shores had exploded after 1763. That year's Treaty of Paris stripped France of Senegal, and thus official access to the slave trade along the Senegal and Gambia rivers. It did not matter. By the late 1760s, France's sprawling, illicit trade on the Loango Coast, north of the Portuguese colony of Angola, delivered thousands of Kongolese captives to the French Caribbean each year; thousands more arrived via France's long-standing connections on the Gold Coast, or in vessels from other European nations. The statistics are jarring. In 1763, as the maritime disruptions of war faded, two thousand enslaved captives reached the ports of Saint-Domingue. By the early 1770s, that annual number had jumped to fifteen thousand, an increase of more than sevenfold, which planters described as inadequate. As the Anglo-American crisis approached its breaking point, the enslaved population of the French Caribbean raced past four hundred thousand, their coerced labor producing roughly half of the world's coffee and more sugar than Jamaica, Cuba, and Brazil combined. Statistics, of course, do little to convey the experience of enslavement in that frenzied moment. Enslavers did not care to document that experience, but its outlines emerge inadvertently from the surge of bureaucratic documentation that accompanied so much growth. Ship manifests, runaway slave advertisements, council minutes, and postmortem inventories depict a landscape of deprivation, alienation, and pain.Footnote ⁷

Meanwhile, buoyed by rising commodity prices, the planter class of the 1760s and 1770s reaped record profits. Those profits registered not just on plantations, but in towns such Cap Français and Port-au-Prince in Saint-Domingue, Fort-Royal on Martinique, Basse-Terre on Guadeloupe, and even far-off Cayenne in Guiana, where investment, construction, and migration from France rose alongside the enslavers’ returns. One indication of the opulence slavery yielded in France itself now sits in the Getty Museum in Los Angeles. It is a paneled room from the late eighteenth century, removed piece by sumptuous piece from a house on the rue Saint-Georges in Paris during the 1890s. Its dazzling wallpaper features Greek goddesses and mythical griffins, but also a Tupi woman holding aloft a trompe-l'oeil woodcut of a Native American gathering, an oblique hint at the New World money that paid for it. The house's owner, Jean-Baptiste Hosten, also owned a Saint-Domingue sugar plantation. Over two hundred enslaved African men, women, and children worked so that Hosten could afford the capital's finest interior decorators, who turned his reception room into a gilded celebration of Caribbean wealth and metropolitan leisure.Footnote ⁸

Passing about a mile from Hosten's street, the Seine was only one of many French rivers to register the planters’ new riches. From the coast deep into the French interior, Caribbean fortunes flowed along the Loire, Garonne, and Rhône as well as their tributaries, while communities beyond their influence—from country villages to once-dominant ports such as Saint-Malo, whose modest river, the Rance, simply could not compete—risked decline. On the backs of the enslaved, Caribbean trade had become, as one observer put it, “the principal branch, and might be the trunk, of the whole realm's commerce.”Footnote ⁹ Little wonder then that the merchants of Saint-Brieuc believed that forging their own bonds with the French islands was a matter not just of fairness, but of survival.

Enslavers’ wealth created conundrums for the French crown. On one hand, their capital produced disloyalty. The planters of Guadeloupe, after all, had given up their island to the British navy in 1759, while those of Martinique had done the same in 1762, offering what many deemed token resistance before capitulating and plugging into the British slave trade for the rest of the Seven Years’ War. In 1764 and 1765, after France recommitted to the closed-loop mercantilist policy known as l'exclusif and reinstated a muscular form of military government in the Caribbean, a planter-inspired jurists’ revolt had swept through Saint-Domingue's courts. Like their counterparts in British North America, these rebels couched their objections in terms of liberties and limitations on royal power; and like so many Anglo-Americans familiar with human bondage, they also described their political condition as “slavery.” But like many in those days, Louis XV himself saw little more than the planters’ intent to “one day, and perhaps soon, escape from France” in pursuit of free trade.Footnote ¹⁰

By the late 1760s, however, an uneasy rapprochement had taken hold. It hinged on white supremacy. As their judicial rebellion fizzled, planters shifted to making common cause with the monarchy by promoting a rigid version of the “one drop rule.” Describing any African ancestry as an indelible stain that merited discrimination and disenfranchisement, the planters sought to exploit rising concerns over the presence of people of color in France itself while shoring up the racial boundary on which both slavery and their status depended. The crown followed suit in domestic policies, but its representatives in the Caribbean retained a sense that free people of color, including rich mixed-race planters and militiamen, should be held in some esteem, if only to counter either an independence movement launched by their white counterparts or a slave revolt triggered by their cruelty.Footnote ¹¹

On the other hand, the monarchy recognized that some free trade in the context of the American rebellion might serve its interests. The demand was there. Rum-distilling, tea-drinking New Englanders were, to quote one planter, the “natural consumers” of his sugar and molasses; Anglo-Americans smuggled one million livres’ worth from the French islands in 1765 alone. Although merchants in France objected to any violation of l'exclusif, minister-whisperers in the planters’ lobby at Versailles touted the capacity of legalized trade “to detach the colonies from England.” The British tried their own version of that gambit, opening four Jamaican ports to free trade in 1766, overtly aiming to reconnect with old partners on Guadeloupe to stoke a French imperial crisis. The following year, France responded by taking a calculated risk, opening all of Sainte-Lucie and Guiana's ports, as well as Môle Saint-Nicolas on Saint-Domingue's northern coast, to foreign vessels. In first two years of that arrangement, Môle Saint-Nicolas alone received American goods totaling 2.3 million livres while shipping out 4.5 million livres in molasses and spirits. At Versailles, ministers crossed their fingers, hoping that their deliberate breaching of l'exclusif would widen cracks in the British Empire while allowing their own to mend.Footnote ¹²

The evolution of Môle Saint-Nicolas illustrates the reciprocal ties that bound the North American crisis to French Caribbean slavery. Despite its strategic location on the strait separating Saint-Domingue from Cuba, Môle remained almost entirely undeveloped until 1764, when it played host to, of all things, an anti-slavery experiment. Envisioning a combination naval base and agricultural settlement, the French crown sent hundreds of Acadians—white, Catholic refugees expelled from what are now the Canadian Maritimes during the Seven Years’ War—to the site that spring. Administrators tapped Acadians for many reasons: because Môle was too important to leave to fickle planters; because, unlike the enslaved, Acadians would not attract wartime raiders and could defend themselves with arms if they did; because they had no wealth to muddle their loyalty to the crown. The experiment failed. Many Acadians died in appalling conditions, leading some to leave Saint-Domingue for Louisiana after 1765. The rest witnessed an ironic transformation. By 1766, Acadian men were leading teams of enslaved loggers, fanning out from Môle to clear land for new towns: Plateforme, Jean Rabel, Bombardopolis, and Mirebalais. After Môle became a free port in 1768, American trade spurred the integration of the once-remote peninsula into Saint-Domingue's roaring economy, leading to the introduction of enslaved labor on an unprecedented scale. They might not have known it, but those slaves—the strikingly named trio of Proserpine, Minerve, and Junon, for example, all of whom toiled as cooks in Môle—were both driving and being driven by the imperial politics of what would become the American Revolution.Footnote ¹³

As 1776 drew near, the John Adams quote runs, “thirteen clocks were made to strike together” in British North America. Following the metaphor, historians have long searched for the internal “mechanism” that pulled the fractious, diverse patriots together: Lockean liberalism, New Light religion, republican ideologies, socioeconomic class, consumerism, kneejerk racism. Fair enough. But given how slapdash and tenuous revolutionary coalitions at all levels now appear to have been, it is worth pairing that search with greater attention to the external forces that pushed the rebels together by making the abandonment of Britain's mighty “empire of goods” conceivable. The lives of Proserpine, Minerve, and Junon, along with hundreds of thousands more enslaved people whose unfree labor spun the dynamo of the French economy, numbered among the most critical of those external forces.Footnote ¹⁴

Thinking past 1776 (and 1778, when France formally entered the American War of Independence), the crisis of the British Empire guaranteed that a contradiction would continue to haunt the French Empire. Legal trade with the American rebels offered France the opportunity to win its greatest geopolitical victory since Louis XIV was a young king, even as that same legal trade threatened to embolden Caribbean planters to make their own break for independence—or worse, to deliver their colonies to Britain, as they had done on two occasions less than a generation earlier.Footnote ¹⁵ That contradiction in turn ensured that questions of race and subjecthood would remain open and relevant across the French Caribbean. Denied the full benefits of French subjecthood on the basis of Black ancestry (or, in rarer cases, their own status as former slaves) free people of color seemed to many royal officials to be the empire's ace in the hole, a source of loyal strength to pit against their potential common enemy: the potentially treasonous white planter elite.Footnote ¹⁶ Such tensions coursed through the French colonial politics of the 1780s. That decade witnessed a raft of royal attempts to, as one official in Guiana put it, “temper the official degradation” endured by free people of color.Footnote ¹⁷ Planters invariably said no. Their arguments, like those of the Saint-Brieuc merchants in 1776, assumed the existence of the French Caribbean's enslaved people while glossing over their capacity for independent action. Their error would become clear soon enough.

In 1791, the enslaved rose on Saint-Domingue's Northern Plain, triggering a colony-wide revolt that, after two years of bloody fighting, produced the first abolition decrees of the modern age, swinging Black and mixed-race insurgents to the French revolutionary government's side. The shock registered across the Caribbean. As a British officer on Sainte-Lucie exclaimed in 1794, the combination of “the Guillotine” and “the Note of Emancipation” made France a new kind of threat: a multiracial republic capable of terrorizing whites and mobilizing people of color.Footnote ¹⁸ With the rightward turn that led France to the Directory and the Napoleonic Consulate, however, came racial retrenchment, and the failed invasion of Saint-Domingue that led to Haitian independence in 1804.

Amid these transformations, the bonds that connected the French Caribbean to North America and Great Britain endured. In the United States, they produced inspiration and action among enslaved and free people of color while feeding white Americans’ aggressive defense of slavery on white supremacist grounds, making Haiti a key catalyst for the sectional politics that sparked the Civil War. In Great Britain, the example of Haiti haunted proceedings as Parliament abolished the slave trade in 1807 and slavery itself in 1833. Yet writing the French Caribbean's people of color out of important events proved just as alluring for nineteenth-century Britons as it had for Saint-Brieuc's merchants and independence-seeking American patriots in 1776.Footnote ¹⁹