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“The“ Surcouf legend ”: an individual adventure in the service of a collective destiny”

2022-01-07T14:50:17.718Z


FIGAROVOX / INTERVIEW - Professor Michel Vergé-Franceschi publishes a biography of Robert Surcouf, “Surcouf. The end of the privateer world ”. A work that traces the tumultuous trajectory of a legendary Saint-Malo privateer, at the crossroads of two pivotal worlds, the Ancien Régime and the era ...


Michel Vergé-Franceschi is professor emeritus of universities, specialist in the history of the French navy of the 17th and 18th centuries.

He chaired the French Society for Maritime History until 2005.

FIGAROVOX. -

In this new biography of the most famous of the French corsairs, you are directly interested and with a certain courage in the question of the slave trade in which Surcouf took part. At the end of a wide-ranging reflection, you show the paradoxes of the advent of the Enlightenment. Surcouf, to be a man of his time, convinced by "new ideas", was nonetheless a slave trader How to explain this obvious contradiction?

Michel Vergé-Franceschi. -

Yes Surcouf (1773-1827) is a sort of synthesis of contradictions and these are those of his time. It was born under Louis XV, shortly before the death of the King, at the time of a monarchy which one qualifies "absolute", but which is especially "administrative", at a time when his contemporaries begin to consume massively the products. food or others, from

globalization

which continues to grow since 1492. The European of the 1780s no longer takes cabbage soup for breakfast, with stale soaked bread, sprinkled with milk in the North of the Loire, or wine, in the South . Coffee became widespread as Mme Palatine, Louis XIV's sister-in-law, began her day at 6 am with a good “souscroute” (sauerkraut) washed down with beer. This coffee is bitter. Adding sugar became a necessity. Our café au lait was born in 1750. The earthenware and porcelain makers had to make cups and saucers. They are hot. The pedestal table was born, ancestor of our living room coffee tables, in order to put them down. Today, antique dealers sell these “hot water tables” with a marble top that is less fragile than rosewood. What the goldsmiths made were placed on it:chocolate pots, coffee pots and silver sugar bowls. The heavy Louis XIII and Louis XIV armchairs disappeared. Louis XV armchairs-convertibles replaced them. Lightweight, they were fitted with two wheels, under the front legs, to bring them closer to the pedestal table! A century appeared.

A consumer society. Economic globalization.

The wars of the 18th century (1740-1748) and (1756-1763) are “sugar wars”. The

Royal Navy

snatched the "sugar islands" from France (Martinique and French Guadeloupe from Richelieu). This wonderful product, soft and white, imposes a tragedy, slavery, hard and black. Philosophers wonder. Others are indignant. Societies

of

Friends of Blacks

appear.

Olympe de Gouges (1748-1793) rose up and campaigned for the abolition of black slavery.

On November 3, 1793, at the age of 45, she climbed the scaffold.

That year, Surcouf was 20 years old and colonial foodstuffs (tobacco, cotton, coffee, sugar, cocoa, etc.) represented roughly half of French foreign trade.

This is what will generate his own contradictions and those of his contemporaries.

Besides, you don't overwhelm him.

Is he, for you, the avatar of a time when the question of slavery did not arise in the same way as today?

Today, the issue of slavery highlights only one thing

: skin color.

As in 45 years of teaching, from the ZEP to the University, I have never taken into account either the color or the religion of my students and then of my students, it saddens me.

History is not there, and the Historian even less, to oppose Men.

Explaining does not mean excusing.

Far from there.

To explain is quite simply to try to make people understand.

Louis XV's Parc aux Cerfs in Versailles was made up of a hundred teenage girls intended for the pleasure of the sovereign. His first valet "bought" them from their Parisian mothers (milliners, wigmakers, lace-makers). They were white. The construction of the Canal du Midi under Louis XIV cost thousands of workers (admittedly free) as did the construction of the port of Rochefort, from 1665: 100,000 dead; they were white. As a Corsican, I reread several times this sentence of Marshal Rochambeau at the very start of the American War (1778-1783) when young Corsicans enlisted by the dozen in the

City of Paris

and the ships of the Count of Grasse and Admiral d'Estaing:

"The Corsicans do wonders in the West Indies because they are resistant to the climate".

Corsicans are white.

Skin color

is a parameter. Another is

resistance to hot climates

. The third parameter is the most important of all: Europe is a

civilization of wood

. This obviously does not give any superiority to the White Man, as heartbreaking and unenlightened minds have wanted to claim. But the vessel is made of oak and its masts made of fir. Europe, supported by the Alps, the Pyrenees, the Massif Central, the forests of Scandinavia, the woods of Sweden (less brittle than the pines of the Pyrenees), the Russian taiga, the Portuguese hills of Leiria or the massifs of the Ligurian Apennines, simply had a chance. A climatic chance that the Maghreb, leaning on the Saharan sands, did not have. With 110/120 gun ships, the European was able to cross the Atlantic. The Algerian brigantine, the Tunisian chebec, the corsair of Salé could not do it any more than the canoes of the heart of Africa or the Amazon where the jungle had only to offer its hollow baobabs.That Geography has imposed a human tragedy on the world is obvious. But History is not there, and the Historian even less, to oppose Men.

Explaining

does not mean

excusing

.

Far from there.

To explain

is quite simply to try to make people

understand.

Is he, in this matter, an isolated case or the representative of a generation, of a social class and, why not, of most privateers?

Surcouf is at the crossroads of two eras: the Ancien Régime (1492-1792) and the contemporary era (1792 to the present day). Like Colbert (who is criticized for the

Black Code),

like Napoleon (who is criticized for the reestablishment of slavery), like Louis XIV (who we find too absolute), or Pascal Paoli (who is said to be insufficiently democratic) you have to approach it with a quote in mind, that of Cato the Elder whom I really like:

“it is painful to have to give an account of one's life to men of another century than the one in which we has lived ”

. Representative of a

"social class"

no. It would no longer be opposing

whites

and blacks,

but the Rich and the Humble. But the poor - they too - needed this colonial and slave world in order to live. The poor girls who wrapped American tobacco in cigarette paper in the

tobacco factories

in Le Havre, for example, were not the wives of rich colonists or rich Bordeaux or Nantes shipowners. But they needed their meager salary so as not to be reduced to prostitution that the 19th century would call

"the 5th quarter of the day".

Napoleon did not

"reestablish"

slavery for pleasure or to please Joséphine born in Martinique! It would be more correct to say that he was "

forced" to do so.

by the riots that the abolition of the slave trade or slavery caused and by the desire not to scuttle the economy of the kingdom become Empire for the benefit of the Invincible Albion.

Every man and every subject belongs to a context from which one cannot escape without generating errors, falsehoods and sterile polemics.

To read also In Martinique, the Empress Joséphine, daughter of the country who became a symbol of slavery

Another major interest of the book, and subject rarely studied, that of the state of mind of the Enlightenment relative to distant countries, to "elsewhere". You show that while being a great century of discoveries and maritime adventures, of scientific progress, the eighteenth century was nonetheless steeped in aberrant and surprising ideas relative to the South, Africa for example, and to the East?

Surcouf comes from a Norman family established in Saint-Malo around 1640 when the Norman Barefoots were poor, starving and toothless brethren.

They died in 1690 at the Hospice de Saint-Malo.

Having become caulkers, then sailors, then lieutenants and good merchant captains, they began the slave trade with Surcouf's great-grandmother.

A young widow, laden with children, and a good Catholic, she is far from our so-called "values ​​of the past".

It is the first of the name to embark on the "commercialization" of blacks like many Malouins.

In her time, no Malouine had surely seen a black man!

In Dunkirk, in 1690, the nuns were allowed to go to the gates of the cloister because black Algerians had arrived at the port where no one had ever seen!

In Dunkirk, in 1690, the nuns were allowed to go to the gates of the cloister because black Algerians had arrived at the port where no one had ever seen! His son, Surcouf's grandfather, was a wealthy Malouin. Father of fifteen children his succession was so divided between them that Surcouf, from the age of 16 (in 1789), wanted to "remake" himself. He practiced racing and trading, but also the slave trade in the Indian Ocean at a time when the greatest voices of the time, including that of Condorcet, condemned the race, assimilated to a piracy of another time. But

"we must leave time for time"

.

Surcouf died in 1827 although a man of enlightenment can in no way be the predecessor of Victor Schoelcher.

When Surcouf was born, Bernardin de Saint-Pierre still wrote that God had invented the tides to facilitate the entry of ships into port.

It was believed that God had salted seas and oceans to prevent them from becoming unhealthy lakes.

And the people of Bordeaux were terrified in 1784 under the pretext of a false attack by whales with red eyes set with brilliants!

Liberal, convinced by the Revolution, loyal to Napoleon, decorated with the Legion of Honor, it is a Surcouf that we want to describe as typical French of the turn of the eighteenth century and the nineteenth ...

Liberal, convinced by the Revolution, loyal to Napoleon, decorated with the Legion of Honor, it is a Surcouf that we want to describe as typical French of the turn of the 18th century and the 19th century, almost an archetype where, between the chaos of changes in political regime, loyalty to France, its power and its influence remains. Against all odds. Is it that, basically, which explains the “Surcouf legend” and defines it at best? An individual adventure in the service of a collective destiny?

All of your terms are a true surcouf scalpel. This Malouin is commoner, little cousin of Duguay-Trouin, also born commoner. The Revolution, the Masonic lodges, the New regime, Napoleon - also a soldier out of line - tempt him in the midst of revolutionary "chaos" which admits in 1796 that

"the laws are temporary"

and must bow

"to the national munificence. "

(Conseil des Cinq-Cents 1797) when Surcouf violates them to destroy English trade while building his immense fortune: he will leave his children Breton and Norman castles, a thousand hectares, tobacco plantations in Brittany, the equivalent of 4 castles of Combourg. He, his father and his brothers had moreover been in business on several occasions with the Chateaubriands, the writer, his father, his brother and his father-in-law, director of the Compagnie des Indes. The sea is a world which separates and brings together at the same time, this is why we find in the biography of Surcouf as well Condorcet as Chateaubriand, Duguay-Trouin that Jean Bart, Napoleon that Louis XVIII is a series of men, of sword or feather,that their contemporaries admired and that their posterity believes - wrongly - often authorized to judge - in their absence - which has always seemed to me to be an unfair fight.

Surcouf, La fin du monde corsaire

, Michel Vergé-Franceschi, Passés Composés, 2022, 21 € Passés Composés, January 5, 2022.

Source: lefigaro

All news articles on 2022-01-07

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