Bordeaux and the Triangular Trade

Between the 18th and 19th centuries, Bordeaux transformed. In the early 1700s much of the downtown city was still medieval in appearance, but from 1715 onwards a vast building programme began, with large warehouses erected along the waterfront and old buildings replaced with the elegant streets and squares that still stand today. Bordeaux became the most important port city in France, growing famous for its ‘Golden Age’ – and for a time was the second-largest port in the world after London. 

The reason for much of this prosperity was commerce, and much of it came specifically from the triangular trade. The city was deeply entrenched, to the extent that it was for a while France’s most important slave trafficking port. Yet it’s only relatively recently that the part this played in the city’s prosperity is being recognised.

I recently met with Karfa Sira Diallo, founder of Mémoires & Partages, an association that has been pivotal in redressing the balance – whether through organising walking tours that take visitors to the places around Bordeaux most connected to the triangular trade, or through lobbying for streets named after slavers to be equipped with explanatory panels so that their role in the trade is no longer hidden.

Here you can watch a short (14 minute) documentary where Diallo talks about Bordeaux’s history and role as one of Europe’s main protagonists in slavery, and how the city was able to take full advantage of both its location and its in demand wines.

This documentary, The History of the Slave Trade in Bordeaux, was filmed for 67 Pall Mall TV (just click on the link here to be taken to the 67 Pall Mall site, where you can watch the film for free).

But I also wanted to record the conversation here, and to expand on the role of the city, particularly in Saint Domingue, where there were 500,000 slaves, and 30,000 colonists, of which 40% came from Bordeaux and the surrounding region.

Diallo recounts in the documentary:

• There were two big periods of expansion in Bordeaux wine – in the 17th-18th century, and again in the 19th century. Both were connected to colonial commerce, and both were linked to the slave trade.
• Even the financing that was used to drain the Médoc wetlands and therefore unleash the commerce of the big Médoc estates partly originated from Bordeaux négociants that had set up plantations in America or Saint Domingue, or who remained in Bordeaux but lived off the trade.
• There are still 20 streets in Bordeaux that are named after slave owners, or plantation holders who exploited slaves, or ship captains involved in the slave trade in some way. After many years of lobbying, Bordeaux became the first city in France, in June 2020, to put up explanatory panels talking about the story behind the street names. You can see them on five streets – Rue Mareilac, Passage Feder, Rue David Grades, Rue Gramont and Rue Desse. ‘We didn’t want to get rid of the steet names,’ says Diallo, ‘but to explain them, and ensure future generations have proof of what happened. It was a victory to convince a bourgeois city such as Bordeaux to do this, and directly linked to the Black Lives Matter movement globally’.
• There is a confusion between the triangular trade and the plantations of Saint Domingue. There were around 500 slave ships that set out from Bordeaux between the late 17th and early 19th century, similar in number of those from La Rochelle and Le Harvre, compared to over 1,700 ships from Nantes. However Bordeaux benefited more than any other city from the plantations in Saint Domingue, because many were run by merchants from the city.
• Bordeaux benefited in several ways. Firstly due to its geographic location, as the port closest to the Caribbean and North America, meaning English, Dutch and Danish ships got used to delivering merchandise to Bordeaux, which is why the merchants here built huge warehouses along the quays (like the one that is now the CAPC Museum of Contemporary Art). Secondly, the quality of the wines that surrounded the city made Bordeaux an essential part of the lifestyle of the colonialists. They had a certain lifestyle that they wanted to uphold when overseas, and for that they imported Bordeaux wine. And thirdly the merchants themselves were often directly slave holders, possessing land in the richest French colony of the 18th century – Saint Domingue (present day Haiti/Dominican Republic, a French colony from 1659 to 1804).
• ‘This is why it is so difficult for modern-day Bordeaux to confront its past with the slave trade,’ says Diallo, ‘because the people who supported it were prominent citizens who shaped the city in many ways’.
• ‘This work is not meant to assign blame, or to demonise the history of Bordeaux, which itself has been tarnished by the history of this crime, and certainly not to blame the people of today, but it is to recognise our heritage, and to commit to resolving the inequalities that still exist as a result’.

Background

It was Jean-Baptiste Colbert, minister of finance under Louis XIV, that the Compagnie Priviligiée des Négociants de Bordeaux was established in 1671. Its first ship, La Ville de Bordeaux, was built in the Chartrons quarter of the city, in the shipyards of merchant François Saige. Colbert had a few years earlier rebuked the Bordeaux parliament over its merchants’ reliance on Dutch ships to export their wine and grain instead of running things themselves, and the shipyard was opened in response.

The first known triangular voyages went from Bordeaux to the West Indies, then on to Quebec. From there were regular expeditions, and vast fortunes were created. Ships on these trading routes rode the prevailing winds from Europe down to Africa, then the Trade Winds to the West Indies and North America, and then back to Europe on the North Atlantic Westerlies.

There were early signs that Bordeaux would resist; in 1571, a Normandy captain sailed into the city’s crescent-shaped Port de la Lune. He took a berth on the Chartrons quays with slaves on board that he was planning to sell, until the city’s Parliament issued an order for him to be expelled and the slaves to be freed. But by the trade’s height in the 1700s, Bordeaux chartered an average of 18 ships per year to the African coasts – 16 per cent of the slaving vessels cleared by French ports. Bordeaux négociant and ship-owner Pierre-Paul Nairac alone launched 25 slaving expeditions between 1740 and 1792.

In the mid-18th century around 40 ships were sailing a year. It is thought around 200,000 slaves were transported  in these ships over the course of the trade.

The 1777 census of the general Bordeaux area reported 208 black slaves, 160 of them men, and 94 ‘free Blacks’, 49 of whom were men. Of these, the majority of slaves were domestics, cooks, and wig-makers, a third of free blacks also held these occupations, while the others included a landlord, an innkeeper, two soldiers and a seamstress.

A statue of Toussaint l’Ouverture, one of the heroes of the abolition of slavery, can be found on the Right Bank of Bordeaux city opposite the Chartrons quayside, looking down-river to the Atlantic Ocean. The statue, by Haitian artist Ludovic Booz, was given to Bordeaux by the Republic of Haiti in 2005.

You can also see a permanent exhibition on the Atlantic slave trade in the Musée d’Aquitaine, and a second statue that stands in front of the Bourse Maritime in Chartrons, one of the site’s that would have collected taxes from ships bringing in goods such as sugar, coffee, arms and spices. This is by another Haitian artist Filipo, and depicts a woman born Al Pouessi in East Africa in 1765 who was captured when she was young, and bought sometime around 1780 by two Bordeaux brothers, Pierre and François Testas, who owned a business in the city and a plantation in Saint-Domingue. She became known as Modeste Testas, given the name by François Testas. On his death she was freed, and went on to marry another former slave, living to the age of 105. Her grandson François Denys Légitime later became president of Haiti.