The Channel: England, France and the Construction of a Maritime Border in the Eighteenth Century 1107039495, 9781107039490

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The Channel

Rather than a natural frontier between natural enemies, this book approaches the English Channel as a shared space, which mediated the multiple relations between France and England in the long eighteenth century, in both a metaphorical and a material sense. Arguing against the view that Britain’s insularity kept it spatially and intellectually segregated from the Continent, Renaud Morieux focuses on the Channel as a zone of contact. The ‘narrow sea’ was a shifting frontier between states and a space of exchange between populations. This richly textured history shows how the maritime border was imagined by cartographers and legal theorists, delimited by state administrators and transgressed by migrants. It also approaches French and English fishermen, smugglers and merchants as transnational actors, whose everyday practices were entangled. The variation of scales of analysis enriches theoretical and empirical understandings of Anglo-French relations, and reassesses the question of Britain’s deep historical connections with Europe. renaud morieux is a lecturer in British History at the University of Cambridge.

Cambridge Social and Cultural Histories Series editors Margot C. Finn, University College London Colin Jones, Queen Mary, University of London Robert G. Moeller, University of California, Irvine

Cambridge Social and Cultural Histories publishes works of original scholarship that lie at the interface between cultural and social history. Titles in the series both articulate a clear methodological and theoretical orientation and demonstrate clearly the significance of that orientation for interpreting relevant historical sources. The series seeks to address historical questions, issues or phenomena which – although they may be located in a specific nation, state or polity – are framed so as to be relevant and methodologically innovative to specialists of other fields of historical analysis. A list of titles in the series can be found at: www.cambridge.org/socialculturalhistories

The Channel England, France and the Construction of a Maritime Border in the Eighteenth Century Renaud Morieux Faculty of History, University of Cambridge and Fellow of Jesus College

University Printing House, Cambridge CB2 8BS, United Kingdom Cambridge University Press is part of the University of Cambridge. It furthers the University’s mission by disseminating knowledge in the pursuit of education, learning and research at the highest international levels of excellence. www.cambridge.org Information on this title: www.cambridge.org/9781107039490 © Renaud Morieux 2016 This publication is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception and to the provisions of relevant collective licensing agreements, no reproduction of any part may take place without the written permission of Cambridge University Press. First published 2016 Printed in the United Kingdom by Clays, St Ives plc A catalogue record for this publication is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloguing in Publication data Morieux, Renaud. The Channel : England, France and the construction of a maritime border in the eighteenth century / Renaud Morieux. pages cm. – (Cambridge social and cultural histories) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-1-107-03949-0 (hardback : alkaline paper) 1. English Channel – History – 18th century. 2. England – Relations – France. 3. France – Relations – England. 4. Maritime boundaries – England – History – 18th century. 5. Maritime boundaries – France – History – 18th century. 6. Acculturation – England – History – 18th century. 7. Acculturation – France – History – 18th century. I. Title. DA670.C4M67 2016 910.9163′3607–dc23 2015031746 ISBN 978-1-107-03949-0 Hardback Cambridge University Press has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for external or third-party internet websites referred to in this publication, and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.

Contents

List of figures List of tables Acknowledgements List of abbreviations

page vi ix x xii

Introduction

1

Part I The border invented

29

1

The impossibility of an island: before the Channel was a sea

31

2

When the sea had no name

60

Part II The border imposed

107

3

Defending the military frontier

109

4

Who owns the Channel? The overlap of legal rights

150

5

The fight for natural resources

184

Part III Transgressing the border

209

6

The fisherman: ‘friend of all nations’?

211

7

The game of identities: fraud and smuggling

248

8

Crossing the Channel

283

Conclusion

325

Bibliography Index

343 396

v

Figures

1.1 Deschamps-Vadeville, Geographer-Engineer. Map of Cotentin before its Invasion by the Sea. Source: L. Quénault, Topographie ancienne des côtes du Cotentin (Paris: Imprimerie impériale, 1865), n.p, Bibliothèque Nationale de France (Paris), PHS – 8 L17 18. page 52 1.2 Britannia reprimanding a naughty boy (3 May 1803). Source: Bodleian Library (University of Oxford), John Johnson Collection: French Wars and Revolutions, folder 5 (D b7). 58 2.1 Guillaume Postel, La vraye et entière description du royaume de France et ses confins . . . (1570). Source: Bibliothèque Nationale de France (Paris), Cartes et Plans, Res. Ge D 7668. 68 2.2 John Speed, ‘Gallia’, A Prospect of the Most Famous Parts of the World. Source: (London: William Humble, 1646), University Library (Cambridge), Map Department, Atlas.7.64.3. 69 2.3 Anon., Map of Brittany and Normandy (1594). Source: A. Ortelius, The Theatre of the Whole World. London 1606, BNU Strasbourg, D 2.042.4 (photography Pascal Disdier). 70 2.4a and 2.4b H. Jaillot, Le royaume de France (1690). Source: Bibliothèque Nationale de France (Paris), Cartes et Plans, Ge DD 2987 (699) B. 74 2.5 Robert Morden, A New Map of England Containing the Adjacent Parts of Scotland, Ireland, France, Flanders and Holland (1673). Source: University Library (Cambridge), Map Department, Atlas.3.68.4 (plate 2). 75

vi

List of figures

2.6 J.B. Nolin, Le royaume de France (1692). Source: Bibliothèque Nationale de France (Paris), Cartes et Plans, Ge DD 2986 (386) B. 2.7 P. Buache, Carte minéralogique où l’on voit la Nature et la Situation des terreins qui traversent la France et l’Angleterre. Dressée sur les Observations et pour un Mémoire de Mr. Guettard de l’Académie des Sciences. Par Philippe Buache de la même Académie (1746). Source: Mémoires de l’Académie Royale des Sciences, 1746, reprinted in Histoire de l’Académie Royale des Sciences. Année 1746. Avec les Mémoires de Mathématique & de Physique, pour la même Année. Tirés des Registres de cette Académie (Paris: de l’Imprimerie Royale, 1746), University Library (Cambridge), CP 340.2.48.63. 2.8 Plan of the triangles whereby the distance between the royal observatories of Greenwich and Paris has been determined. Source: William Roy and Isaac Darby, ‘An account of the trigonometrical operation, whereby the distance between the meridians of the royal observatories of Greenwich and Paris has been determined. By major-general William Roy’, Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society, LXXX (1790), pl. IX. 2.9 Le Petit Flambeau de la Mer, ou le véritable guide des pilotes côtiers. Source: (Havre de Grâce: G. Gruchet, 1731), p. 47, University Library (Cambridge), Map Department, Atlas 7.78.4. 2.10 A chart of the chops of the Channel. Source: The Channel Pilot, Comprehending the Harbours, Bays, and Roads in the British Channel: With the English and French Coasts (London: Robert Laurie and James Whittle, 1795), University Library (Cambridge), Atlas.2.79.19. 7.1 Roger Book’em, Custom House Dover. Source: Paris and Dover; or, to and fro; a Picturesque Excursion being a Bird’s-eye Notion for a few ‘Men and Things’ (London: Published by H. Fores, 1821), n.p. 8.1 Haut-relief at Mary Minet District Nurses’ Home, 10 Halsmere Road, London. Source: Photograph by Jon Newman. Source: Photograph by Jon Newman.

vii

76

87

97

99

100

271

290

viii

List of figures

Graphs 2.1 Typology of place names in French maps depicting the Channel. 8.1 Traveller flows during the Peace of Amiens.

64 313

Chart 6.1 Cross-Channel negotiation during the War of American Independence.

224

Tables

2.1 2.2 4.1 4.2 4.3 4.4

4.5

5.1 5.2 6.1 7.1

8.1 8.2

Maps depicting the Channel (1540–1599) page 66 Place names on English maps 1600–1750 78 Prizes in Anglo-French treaties 160 Variations in customs boundaries in English law 168 French smugglers seized by British customs in 1713 Source: TNA T1/164, Treasury Papers, September 1713. 171 French smugglers seized by British Customs in 1729 Source: Musée de la Douane (Bordeaux), Leducq Collection, D 29, LED322. XIIIB114 [7 July 1729–28 January 1730]. 173 Incidents between English smugglers and customs on the French coast in 1785 Source: ‘Excerpt from a brief addressed to Monsieur le Maréchal de Castries by traders from Boulogne’, [12] May 1785, TNA, T1/620, fo. 194. 179 Locations of fishing incidents according to the French 197 Locations of fishing incidents according to the English 200 The fishermen’s reversible arguments 242 Number of English smugglers in Dunkirk Source: register no. 35 of the Dunkirk Chamber of Commerce, fos. 217, 223, 224, quoted in R. de Bertrand, ‘Le port et le commerce maritime de Dunkerque au XVIIIe siècle’, Mémoires de la Société dunkerquoise, 10 (1864–1865), p. 176; register no. 40, fos. 39–40, quoted in A. de Saint-Léger, La Flandre maritime et Dunkerque sous la domination française: 1659–1789 (Paris: Ch. Tallandier, 1900), p. 375; register of 29 December 1811, quoted in E. Dejongue, ‘Les activités maritimes de Dunkerque de la rupture de la paix d’Amiens à la chute de l’Empire’, unpublished Diplôme d’Etudes Supérieures, University of Lille (1957), p. 34. 260 Distribution of passengers by state of origin 315 Passenger professions by state of origin 316 ix

Acknowledgements

This book is a markedly revised version of a book first published in French in 2008 (Une mer pour deux royaumes: La Manche, frontière franco-anglaise XVIIe–XVIIIe siècles, Presses Universitaires de Rennes, 2008). I have tried to hold the comparison more systematically, and to engage equally with French and British historiographical debates. Ian Barnett provided invaluable service by providing an English translation of Chapters 1–5, 7 and 8, which forms the basis of my text. I want to thank Colin Jones, the editor, with Margot Finn and Robert G. Moeller, of the ‘Social and Cultural History’ series at Cambridge University Press, who has ceaselessly supported this project. I am also grateful to Elizabeth Friend-Smith and Rebecca Taylor, my editors at Cambridge University Press. Research is a collective activity. The list of friends and colleagues to whom I am indebted has grown over the years, and I don’t have space here to thank them all. First of all, I owe a lot to Jean-Pierre Jessenne, who supervised the doctoral thesis from which this book originates. He always encouraged me, with enthusiasm and rigour, to take a large view rather than to be limited by narrow horizons. This research also reflects a personal and professional journey which has straddled the Channel from the outset, starting in Paris, through Rouen, London and Lille, to Cambridge. I was lucky to have many encounters that have deeply influenced my approach. Julian Hoppit supervised the first year of my doctoral research at UCL, and my weekly exchanges with him gave me a taste for British history. Alain Cabantous has constantly shared with me, with generosity, his knowledge and passion for the social history of maritime communities. I would also like to thank the examiners of the French thesis, Alain Cabantous, the late Gérard Gayot, Joanna Innes, Daniel Nordman and François-Joseph Ruggiu, for their many suggestions and support. Several people have agreed to read the English manuscript, and their critical remarks have certainly improved my text – even though, according to the usual expression, it remains my sole responsibility. Gareth Atkins, Colin Jones and Peter Garnsey have read the whole manuscript, and I am x

Acknowledgements

xi

immensely grateful to them; thank you also to Alison Bashford, Duncan Bell, James Davey, Catherine Delano-Smith, Quentin Deluermoz, Francis Herbert, Sam James, Julian Hoppit, Lawrence Klein, Sujit Sivasundaram and Jean-Paul Zúñiga, who have given their feedback on substantial parts of the text. I also want to thank those, and the list is far from exhaustive, with whom I have engaged into a friendly and stimulating conversation over the years, on both parts of the Channel and across the Atlantic: Hélène Blais, David Bell, Stephen Conway, Catherine Denys, Aaron Freundschuh, Grégoire Holtz, Isabelle Laboulais, Michael Ledger-Lomas, Valentine Leys, Antoine Lilti, Peter Mandler, Guillaume Mazeau, Philippe Minard, Isaac Nakhimovsky, Mark Philp, Denis Retaillé, Nick Rogers, Emma Rothschild, Peter Sahlins, Jason Scott-Warren, David Todd and Stéphane Van Damme. At Jesus College, I am fortunate enough to work in a congenial and exciting intellectual environment, and I would like to thank my colleagues Christopher Burlinson, James Clackson, Michael Edwards, Rebecca Flemming, Duncan Kelly, Mary Laven, Véronique Mottier, the late Michael O’Brien, and Frances Willmoth for many stimulating discussions. I would also like to thank my research assistant, Sara Caputo, and the staff of the Map Room of the Cambridge University Library, who have been immensely helpful. Several institutions have supported this research: the British Council, which awarded me a Chevening Scholarship; the Centre for History and Economics (Cambridge and Harvard); the CNRS; the Faculty of History (Cambridge); the GRHIS (University of Rouen); the Institut de Recherches Historiques du Septentrion (University of Lille); and the National Maritime Museum (Greenwich). Chapter 6 is a revised version of an article first published in Past & Present (‘Diplomacy from below and belonging: Fishermen and crossChannel relations in the eighteenth century’, 202 (2009), pp. 83–125), and I am grateful to the editors of this journal for authorising me to reproduce it. Parts of Chapter 8 have previously appeared in Mark Philp (ed.), Resisting Napoleon: The British Response to the Threat of Invasion, 1797– 1815 (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2006) (‘“An inundation from our shores”: Travelling across the Channel around the Peace of Amiens’, pp. 217–40). I would like to thank my family for giving meaning to everything I do, and for constantly reminding me that there is much more to life than books. Thank you to Philippine and Oscar who brighten my existence. This book is dedicated to the memory of my parents, Jean-Pierre and Katia.

Abbreviations

Archives and libraries ADC ADIV ADN ADPDC ADS ADSM AMAE AN BNF BNFCP BNFR BOP BL NLS SHD TNA

Archives départementales du Calvados, Caen Archives départementales d’Ille-et-Vilaine, Rennes Archives départementales du Nord, Lille Archives départementales du Pas-de-Calais, Arras Archives départementales de la Somme, Amiens Archives départementales de la Seine-Maritime, Rouen Archives du Ministère des Affaires étrangères, Paris Archives Nationales, Paris Bibliothèque Nationale de France, Tolbiac Bibliothèque Nationale de France, Cartes & Plans Bibliothèque Nationale de France, Richelieu Bibliothèque de l’Observatoire, Paris British Library, London National Library of Scotland, Edinburg Service Historique de la Défense, Vincennes The National Archives, Kew

Printed sources AP

GN HCJ LDRF MARS

xii

Archives Parlementaires de 1787 à 1860, recueil complet des débats législatifs et politiques des Chambres françaises, imprimé par ordre du Corps législatif sous la direction de MM. J. Mavidal et E. Laurent, première série (1789–1800) Gazette nationale ou le Moniteur Universel Journals of the House of Commons (1803 reed.) Lois et règlemens [sic] des douanes françaises, Paris, Pélicier, 1818 Mémoires de l’Académie royale des Sciences

List of abbreviations

PH PT

The Parliamentary History of England, from the earliest period to the year 1803, London, Printed by T. C. Hansard. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London (1683–1775) Periodicals

AAAG ABPO ADH AES AESC AHR AHS AHSS AJIL AN ARSS BCFC BHR BIHR BJHS BuHR CHR CLD DH EcHR EG EHQ EHR EJS ESJ FH GJ GR HEI HJ HPE HR HS H&T

xiii

Annals of the Association of American Geographers Annales de Bretagne et des Pays de l’Ouest Annales de démographie historique Archives Européennes de Sociologie Annales. Économie, sociétés, civilisations American Historical Review Annales Histoire Sociétés Annales. Histoire, Sciences Sociales American Journal of International Law Annales de Normandie Actes de la Recherche en Sciences sociales Bulletin du Comité français de cartographie Bibliothèque d’Humanisme et Renaissance Bulletin of the Institute of Historical Research The British Journal for the History of Science Business History Review Canadian Historical Review Cahiers Léopold Delisle Diplomatic History Economic History Review Espace géographique (L’) European History Quarterly English Historical Review European Journal of Sociology Earth Science Journal French History Geographical Journal Geographical Review History of European Ideas Historical Journal History of Political Economy Historical Research History of Science History and Technology

xiv

List of abbreviations

HWJ IJMH IM IH IHR IMR JAH JBS JGH JHI JHS JICH JIH JLH JMH JSAHR JWH MH MHR MIH N&N P&P RDM RH RHD RHDFE RHM RHMC RN RS SH SoH TH TRHS WMQ

History Workshop Journal International Journal of Maritime History Imago Mundi Information Historique (L’) International History Review International Migration Review The Journal of American History Journal of British Studies Journal of Global History Journal of the History of Ideas Journal of Historical Sociology Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History Journal of Interdisciplinary History Journal of Legal History Journal of Modern History Journal of the Society for Army Historical Research Journal of World History Maritime History Mediterranean Historical Review Modern Intellectual History Nations and Nationalism Past and Present Revue du département de la Manche Revue Historique Revue d’histoire diplomatique Revue Historique de Droit Français et Etranger Revue d’Histoire Moderne Revue d’Histoire Moderne et Contemporaine Revue du Nord Revue de Synthèse Social History Southern History Textile History Transactions of the Royal Historical Society William & Mary Quarterly

Measures 1 land lieue (of Paris) (1674–1793) = 2,422 land miles. 1 nautical league = 3 nautical miles.

Introduction

‘Nature has placed England and France in a geographical location which must necessarily set up an eternal rivalry between them.’1 In 1803, as war started again between France and Britain after a brief intermission, JeanLouis Dubroca, a propagandist in the pay of Napoleon, described the conflict as fated. The discourse on the two national models and the ancestral hostility between the two countries was a topos of travel narratives, economic literature and political propaganda alike in eighteenthcentury France and England. The continuing appeal of the notion of the eighteenth century as a ‘Second Hundred Years War’, which pitted France and England/Britain against each other between the 1688 Revolution and the Battle of Waterloo in 1815, reflects the same tradition. Coined in the nineteenth century, the expression treats this period as a continuum in Anglo-French relations. The historian J.R. Seeley (1834– 1895) was probably the first to use it in 1884: ‘The truth is these wars group themselves very symmetrically, and the whole period stands out as an age of gigantic rivalry between England and France, a kind of second Hundred Years’ War.’2 In the twentieth century, many historians have taken up the same argument3 or, while rejecting the expression as

1

2

3

‘La nature a placé l’Angleterre et la France dans une situation respective, qui doit nécessairement établir entre elles une éternelle rivalité’: [Jean-Louis] Dubroca, Mémoires pour servir à l’histoire des attentats du gouvernement anglais, contre toutes les puissances de l’Europe et particulièrement contre la France, depuis le commencement de la Révolution jusqu’à ce jour (Paris: Chez Dubroca and Rondonneau, Year 11 – 1802–1803), pp. vi–vii. J.R. Seeley, The Expansion of England: Two Courses of Lectures (London: Macmillan, 1883), p. 24. Seeley writes about ‘a new Hundred Years’ War of France and England’ which opens with the eighteenth century in his Growth of Foreign Policy (Cambridge University Press, 1903) (1st edn: 1895), vol. II, p. 343. See also A.H. Buffington, The Second Hundred Years War (London: Greenwood Press, 1976) (1st edn: 1929). J. Meyer and J.S. Bromley, ‘La seconde guerre de Cent Ans (1689–1815)’, in F. Bédarida, F. Crouzet and D. Johnson (eds.), Dix siècles d’histoire franco-britannique: de Guillaume le Conquérant au Marché Commun (Paris: Albin Michel, 1979), pp. 153–90. Hamish Scott’s review article is more nuanced than its title might indicate: H.M. Scott, ‘The second “hundred years war”, 1689–1815’, HJ, 35 (1992), pp. 433–69. A striking example being

1

2

Introduction

inaccurate, describe the relations between the two states in similar terms. Few historians have found fault with the expression.4 To sum up the relation between the two states as a quasi-permanent conflict is to neglect the fact that during half of the period the two countries were at peace. It privileges conflict over exchange, war over commerce, and draws far too neat a dividing line between war and peace. Although economic, cultural or scientific exchanges between the two countries, which kept going in wartime, have received attention,5 the stereotype lives on: France and England are still described, in an echo of contemporary propaganda, as ‘natural and necessary enemies’.6 Such an essentialist rhetoric reproduces an eighteenth-century belief in the naturalness of the competition between states and, by extension, nations. The long-standing opposition is often crystallised in geographical determinism. The two countries are divided by a physical barrier, constituting a political and cultural frontier: the Channel epitomises a variety of Anglo-French antagonisms. In other words, the mainstream historiographical model of Anglo-French relations, centred on hostility and hatred, revolves around the idea of the Channel as a barrier. This idea itself, however, is the product of history. The Channel has attracted the attention of many historians, both in France and in Britain, but rarely has it been studied for its own sake. Instead, reference to the sea has served other purposes, intellectual, ideological or simply rhetorical. It is the aim of this introduction to expound and explain the differences, but also the striking similarities, in

4 5

6

Linda Colley’s Britons: ‘Prime powers on sea and on land respectively, . . . [Britain and France] were at war between 1689 and 1697, . . . between 1702 and 1713, 1743 and 1748, 1756 and 1763, 1778 and 1783, 1793 and 1802, and, finally, between 1803 and the Battle of Waterloo in 1815. . . . The British and the French . . . could neither live together peacefully, nor ignore each other and live neutrally apart. The result was . . . one peculiarly pervasive and long-drawn out conflict’: Britons: Forging the Nation 1707–1837 (London: Vintage, 1996) (1st edn: 1992), pp. 1–2. See, however, F. Crouzet, ‘The second hundred years war: some reflections’, FH, 10 (1996), pp. 432–50. M. Cohen and C. Dever, The Literary Channel: The Inter-National Invention of the Novel (Princeton University Press, 2002); S. Conway, Britain, Ireland and Continental Europe in the Eighteenth Century: Similarities, Connections, Identities (Oxford University Press, 2011); J. Falvey and W. Brooks (eds.), The Channel in the Eighteenth Century: Bridge, Barrier, and Gateway (Oxford: Voltaire Foundation, 1991); J. Grieder, Anglomania in France, 1740–1789: Fact, Fiction, and Political Discourse (Genève: Droz, 1985); J.-Ph. Genet and F.-J. Ruggiu (eds.), Les idées passent-elles la Manche? Savoirs, représentations, pratiques (France-Angleterre, Xe–XXe siècles) (Paris: Presses Universitaires Paris-Sorbonne, 2007); A. Thomson, S. Burrows and E. Dziembowski (eds.), Cultural Transfers: France and Britain in the Long Eighteenth Century (Oxford: Voltaire Foundation, 2010). J. Black, Natural and Necessary Enemies: Anglo-French Relations in the Eighteenth Century (London: Duckworth, 1986). Jeremy Black actually shows the ambivalence of AngloFrench relations. See also his Convergence or Divergence? Britain and the Continent (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 1994).

Introduction

3

the ways in which French and Anglophone historians have written about the Channel across the centuries. Generations of scholars have agreed that the sea played a central role in the history of Anglo-French relations, but in their narratives, the role assigned to the Channel is ultimately to consolidate the notion of an essential difference between England (or Britain), and France, Europe or ‘the Continent’. For instance, the longstanding idea that Britain has always been spatially and intellectually segregated, and economically and culturally independent from its continental neighbours is part of its special ‘Island story’.7 As we will see, a similar picture of national exceptionalism is to be found in the writings of French historians who describe ‘La Manche’ as a separation rooted in nature. The purpose, methodology and conclusions of this book substantially differ from those of these works. The central theme is, on the contrary, that the maritime frontier of England and France was not built by nature alone, but was the result of a historical process, which crystallised between the late seventeenth and early nineteenth centuries. The sea is seen here as a common place as well as a metaphorical commonplace. By focusing on the period usually described as the apogee of national rivalry, this book paints a new and very different picture from previous works: the Channel was a maritime frontier, true; but it was also a border and a contact zone between the two countries and populations. The interactions that took place within this contact zone, as much as ideas about it, are integral to my argument. First then, it is necessary to rid ourselves of a number of assumptions about the relations between England and France in the eighteenth century, many of which are inherited from the nineteenth century. A long-standing historiographical myth: the Channel as a natural border Strikingly, the motif of the Channel as a historical and civilisational frontier, which distinguishes England from Europe, has survived the numerous ‘turns’ which the historical discipline has taken in the twentieth century. In Britain, despite the diversity of their aims, methods and approaches, historiographies as distinct as the ‘Whig’ history of the nineteenth century and the ‘New’ British history of the twentieth share the same view of the historical importance of Britain’s insularity: the sea

7

H.E. Marshall, Our Island Story: A Child’s History of England (London: T.C. & E.C. Jack, 1905).

4

Introduction

simultaneously marks it out from and connects it with the rest of the world. The so-called ‘Whig’ historians combined historical, cultural, religious, linguistic, ‘racial’ or environmental traits to tell the story of the making of the English national character. Following the impact of the 1848 revolutions in Europe, these historians tried to account for England’s distinctiveness and superiority from the Continent, and specifically France, without relinquishing the idea of a civilisational ladder that every nation could aspire to climb.8 Francophobia and Germanophilia were at their peak in Britain during Napoleon III’s Second Empire (1851–1870), and the celebration of the Anglo-Saxon past reached its climax in the same period.9 Edward Augustus Freeman (1823–1892), Regius professor of modern history in Oxford, was one of the proponents of this Teutonic interpretation of English history. For Freeman, one question raised by the Norman Conquest of 1066 was how a unified and ‘cohesive English nation’10 had emerged out of two waves of invasion of Britain, by the Saxons and the Normans. English thinkers going back at least to the seventeenth century had worried about the relationship between 1066 and the axiomatic continuity of the English polity.11 Freeman argued for continuity: the Norman Conquest was a mere episode in a grand national story – that of the emergence of an English identity which had been there since the Saxons had invaded England in the sixth century.12 British insularity played a double function in this reasoning: in the first phase it allowed the Saxons, a seafaring race, to export their institutions, language and moral qualities to England; in a second phase the sea acted like a shield against other foreign influences while Teutonism percolated through England. However, while a racist and a Francophobe, Freeman also retained some elements of an older universalist perspective, allowing for 8 9

10 11 12

P. Mandler, The English National Character: The History of an Idea from Edmund Burke to Tony Blair (New Haven, CT and London: Yale University Press, 2006), pp. 59–64. Since the 1820s, the thesis of the ‘reverse conquest’, i.e. the idea that the defeated ‘race’, the Anglo-Saxons, had successfully passed its free institutions and its main character to the English people despite being conquered, had been a scholarly preoccupation. C.A. Simmons, Reversing the Conquest: History and Myth in Nineteenth-Century British Literature (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1990); R. Horsman, ‘Origins of racial anglo-saxonism in Great Britain before 1850’, JHI, 37 (1976), pp. 387–410; Mandler, English National Character, pp. 59–105. Mandler, ibid., p. 241. J.G.A. Pocock, The Ancient Constitution and the Feudal Law: A Study of English Historical Thought in the Seventeenth Century (Cambridge University Press, 1957). M. Bentley, Modernizing England’s Past: English Historiography in the Age of Modernism, 1870–1970 (Cambridge University Press, 2006), pp. 28–9; Mandler, English National Character, pp. 89–93.

Introduction

5

comparison and hierarchy between European states and institutions.13 He explained the blend of the Normans and the Saxons in terms of the shared Teutonic nature of the two races.14 In appearance, the same phenomenon happened on both sides of the Channel: ‘as the Danes who settled in England became Englishmen, so the Danes who settled in Gaul equally became Frenchmen’. But the assimilation which took place in England did not work in quite the same way in France, where the mixing was incomplete due to the essential racial differences between Scandinavians and Celts: in Gaul the Normans ‘became Frenchmen on a far nobler and grander scale than other Frenchmen’.15 For all these thinkers, in the past as in the present, and unlike England and Germany, France and England remained divided by unbridgeable national, racial, cultural and linguistic differences. And the natural environment played a central part in this. In the 1870s, after the FrancoPrussian War of 1870, the project of building a tunnel under the Channel became concrete and digging even began in 1881 on both sides, but the fear of a French invasion killed the initiative.16 In this context, Freeman depicted in 1892 the British Isles as ‘another world’, an alter orbis, whose distinctive character would dissolve if the proposal went through: We dwell in an island great enough to have always had interests of its own, thoughts of its own – great enough to impress upon its people a distinct character directly as islanders, irrespective of any other features of character which belong to them through other causes, either of original descent or of later history. It is the 13

14

15

16

On Whig historians’ Francophobia and Freeman in particular, see J. Burrow, A Liberal Descent: Victorian Historians and the English Past (Cambridge University Press, 1983), pp. 140–2, 182; on Freeman’s racism, see the divergent accounts of C.J.W. Parker, ‘The failure of liberal racialism: the racial ideas of E.A. Freeman’, HJ, 24 (1981), pp. 825–46; V.L. Morrisroe, ‘“Sanguinary amusement”: E.A. Freeman, the comparative method and Victorian theories of race’, MIH, 10 (2013), pp. 27–56; Mandler, ‘“Race”’; T. Koditschek, ‘Past politics and present history: E. A. Freeman’s invention of racial tradition’, in G.A. Bremner and J. Conlin (eds.), Making History: Edward Augustus Freeman and Victorian Cultural Politics (Oxford University Press, 2015). Until the mid-nineteenth century, the term ‘race’ did not have a biological meaning, and was used in a non-systematic way, as a synonym for people, nation, or to denote a moral type: C. Blanckaert, ‘Le système des races’, in Le XIXe siècle: Science, politique et tradition (Paris: Berger-Levrault, 1996), pp. 21–41; P. Mandler, ‘“Race” and “nation” in midVictorian thought’, in S. Collini, R. Whatmore and B. Young (eds.), History, Religion and Culture: British Intellectual History 1750–1950 (Cambridge University Press, 2000), pp. 227–8. E.A. Freeman, The History of the Norman Conquest of England, Its Causes and Its Results, 6 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1867–1879) (2nd edn revised: 1870), vol. I, p. 149. On this, Burrow, Liberal Descent, p. 188 and chap. 8. Invasion scares revived in the aftermath of the Boer War (1899–1902) and persisted well into the twentieth century: K.M. Wilson, Channel Tunnel Visions, 1850–1945: Dreams and Nightmares (London: Hambledon Continuum, 1994), pp. 22–90.

6

Introduction

insular character of Britain which has, beyond anything else, made the inhabitants of Britain what they are and the history of Britain what it has been. We are islanders: and I at least do not wish that we should become continentals.17

In this quotation, the mode of enunciation, with the repetitive use of the ‘we’, brings together the historian, his readers and the whole national community, while the descriptive present states an eternal truth: Englishmen have always been different from the ‘Continent’, because of their insularity. Nationalism and geographical essentialism go hand in hand.18 There is no contradiction between emphasising the ethnic mix allowed by the proximity to the Continent and at the same time the evolution of the specific English national character, fostered by geographic isolation. The physical frontier with Europe was thus a key element in the Victorian discourse of exceptionalism, especially after 1880, when renewed colonial and naval competition with France and Germany put into question the superiority of the Anglo-Saxon ‘race’.19 In the late nineteenth century, the place assigned to the Channel by historians was premised on the idea that imperialism and sea power were the sinews of Britain. Insularity explained why the English had become a nation of seafarers and conquered the oceans. Starting in the sixteenth century and increasingly from the eighteenth century onwards, the expansion of ‘the English race’ beyond the oceans, rather than relations with Continental Europe, became the prime historical fact.20 This narrative was deeply ensconced in the new conceptions of time and space which emerged in British political thought in the second half of the nineteenth century, with the notion that oceanic distance could be overcome by modern means of communication.21 17

18 19 20

21

E.A. Freeman, ‘Alter Orbis’, in Historical Essays, 4th series (London: Macmillan, 1892), p. 221. See also E.A. Freeman, Comparative Politics (London, 1874), p. 352. See D. Bell, ‘Alter Orbis: Freeman on empire and racial destiny’, in Bremner and Conlin, Making History. P. Carrard, Poetics of the New History: French Historical Discourse from Braudel to Chartier (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992), pp. 14–15, 17. Mandler, English National Character, pp. 106–33. Despite their differences, this idea was widely shared by Victorian historians: J.R. Green, History of the English People (London: Macmillan, 1880), vol. IV, p. 270; E.A. Freeman, Historical Geography of Europe (London: Longmans, Green and Company, 1881), p. 547; J.A. Froude, Oceana, or England and Her Colonies (London: Longman’s, 1886). See Duncan Bell, The Idea of Greater Britain: Empire and the Future of World Order, 1860– 1900 (Princeton University Press, 2007); T. Koditschek, Liberalism, Imperialism, and the Historical Imagination: Nineteenth-Century Visions of a Greater Britain (Cambridge University Press, 2011). D. Bell, ‘Dissolving distance: empire, space, and technology in British political thought, c. 1770–1900’, JMH, 77 (2005), 523–62. See also S. Kern, The Culture of Time and Space, 1880–1918 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003).

Introduction

7

The historian who most famously expounded this idea was John Seeley, Regius professor of modern history at Cambridge. Rather than focusing on Whig constitutionalism or racial predisposition, Seeley told the story of the formation of the English nation state and the expansion of English civilisation to the rest of the world. For him, England’s superiority rested above all on its privileged geographical situation, which facilitated the fulfilment of imperial destiny and allowed, domestically, the building of an insular state by protecting England from continental disorders. These three scales of observation, British, imperial and European, were thus connected in a logical way. The first stage in this proud history was the loss of Calais to the French in 1558, which ‘seemed finally to shut us up in our island’.22 Maritime units occupied a special place in this narrative.23 Seeley used oceanic metaphors to describe the reordering of England’s relation to the world, which started with Elizabeth’s reign and accelerated in the eighteenth century. ‘Like a world-Venice’ or a ‘modern Carthage’, ‘Greater Britain’ had stopped belonging to Europe.24 Well into the twentieth century, the same motifs were used by a professed Whig historian, George Macaulay Trevelyan (1876–1962), in his classic History of England).25 The Norman Conquest, the Tudors and the eighteenth century were all linked in a teleological account in which the sea held the key to Britain’s past and future glory: The mingling of the armed races poured into Britain from the earliest times until 1066, and the national temper and customs which they developed in the shelter of the island guarded by the Norman and Plantagenet Kings, alone rendered it possible for five millions of people, ruled by Elizabeth, to lay hold on the splendid future offered . . . by the maritime discoveries. . . . If the hour then came, the men, too, were ready.26

Citing the political geographer Halford Mackinder, Trevelyan described the physical features of England as welcoming influences from Europe, in particular the mixing of ‘races’ which occurred during the early Middle Ages.27 After the Norman Conquest, by contrast, once a 22 23 24 25 26 27

Seeley, Growth, p. 347. P. Burroughs, ‘John Robert Seeley and British imperial history’, JICH, 1 (1973), pp. 196–7. Seeley, Expansion, p. 227; Growth, p. 381. First published in 1926, the same year he became Regius professor in modern history at Cambridge, and republished twenty-four times until 1973. G.M. Trevelyan, History of England, 1st edn (London: Longmans, Green and Co Ltd, 1926), p. xix. Ibid., chap. 1. H.J. Mackinder’s Britain and the British Seas (London: William Heinemann, 1902) was one of the books mentioned in the bibliography at the end of this chapter. See B.W. Blouet, Halford Mackinder: A Biography (College Station, TX: Texas A&M University Press, 1987); W.H. Parker, Mackinder: Geography as an Aid to

8

Introduction

strong state and unified people had started to cohere in England, the islands became safely insulated, thanks to ‘the barrier of the sea’.28 As in Freeman’s Conquest, the insular environment determined the characteristics of the nation state under construction. The connection with France slowly loosened as the Normans ‘became absorbed in the island atmosphere’.29 Notwithstanding his harsh assessment of Seeley’s Expansion of England (‘merely a clever and timely essay’),30 Trevelyan’s own text, just like his predecessor’s, is littered with geographic personifications, which underline the growing liberation of England from its continental attachments: until the Tudors, ‘England was not yet fully conscious of her life apart, nor of the full value of her island position’, but by becoming ‘oceanic – and American as well’, its ‘insular peculiarities’ could fulfil their potential.31 Placing himself in the footsteps of the American naval historian Alfred Mahan, Trevelyan highlighted the historical importance of sea power in explaining Britain’s rise to world domination.32 From the Hundred Years War ‘a distinct English nationality’ was starting to emerge, in which the Saxon roots were slowly enriched by external influences which took their distinctive character from ‘the island climate’.33 These wars were, Trevelyan argued, a crucial moment in the making of an ‘insular patriotism’, expressed in the ‘racial hatred of the French’ which ‘unified all classes of the nation’.34 By the time of the Tudors, the contrast between France and England could not be starker: the two civilisations ‘became not only separate but mutually repellent’.35 The two countries’ physiognomies were antithetical and determined their divergent political histories thereafter: ‘the square, unbroken mass of rural France, with its long land frontiers’ naturally led her to favour feudalism, a strong monarchy and an aggressive foreign policy in Europe; England’s ‘narrow, irregular outline, almost surrounded by a

28 29 30 31 32

33 35

Statecraft (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1982); G. Kearns, Geopolitics and Empire: The Legacy of Halford Mackinder (Oxford University Press, 2009). G.M. Trevelyan, History of England (London: Longman, 1973), new illustrated edn, p. 3. The passages quoted from this edition are not in the first two editions. Ibid., p. 161. G.M. Trevelyan, ‘Autobiography of an historian’, in An Autobiography & Other Essays (London: Longmans, Green and Co, 1949), p. 17. Ibid., pp. 163–4, 445. Trevelyan, History of England, 1973 edn, p. 579. Chapter 6, in an explicit debt to Mahan, was entitled ‘The Growth of English Sea Power’. See A.T. Mahan, The Influence of Sea Power upon History 1660–1783 (Boston, MA: Little, Brown and Company, 1890); Id., The Influence of Sea Power upon the French Revolution and Empire 1783–1812 (Boston, MA: Little, Brown and Company, 1892). Trevelyan, History of England, 1st edn, p. xix. 34 Ibid., pp. 225–6, 233. Trevelyan, History of England, 1973 edn, p. 320.

Introduction

9

well-indented coastline’, predisposed her to turn away from continental involvement and pay heed to maritime and commercial interests.36 For a long time, the historiography of the British state has tended to take as a given that Britain naturally turned its back on Europe.37 Tellingly, the few studies which apply the concept of frontier to British history are only interested in England’s frontiers with Scotland, Wales and Ireland, and never mention the Channel.38 ‘Atlantic historians’ also tend to favour the longitudinal approach and the links with North America. Reginald Hargreaves’s history of the Channel published in 1959 – the same year as the first volume of R.R. Palmer’s book on the Atlantic Revolutions39 – illustrates this tendency to ignore Britain’s persisting links with Europe in the eighteenth century: ‘The majority of the early colonists of North America were of British stock; and thus the history of the English Channel is the common heritage of both the British and the American peoples.’40 The very fact that France is not even mentioned is telling.41 Ultimately, the Channel, for British historians, is rarely described for itself and in its materiality: what really matters is Britain’s insularity. The Channel is a symbol of England’s exceptionalism and separatedness, certainly not a shared space, at least after 1066. In France, by contrast, the description of the symmetry of the two coasts is a stereotype which carries through the nineteenth century in the writings of historians and geographers alike. The genealogy of this theme can be traced back to one of the founding fathers of these two disciplines: Jules Michelet (1798–1874). In his Tableau de la France (1833), Book III of his Histoire de France, a section about the ancestral 36 37

38

39 40 41

Ibid., 1973 edn, p. 401. See, however, from the perspective of the history of international relations, B. Simms, Three Victories and a Defeat: The Rise and Fall of the First British Empire, 1714–1783 (London: Basic Books, 2008); A.C. Thompson, Britain, Hanover and the Protestant Interest (Woodbridge: Boydell & Brewer, 2006). D. Hay, ‘England, Scotland and Europe: The problem of the frontier’, TRHS, Fifth Series, 25 (1975), pp. 77–91; L. Colley, ‘The significance of the frontier in British history’, in W.R. Louis (ed.), More Adventures with Britannia: Personalities, Politics and Culture in Britain (Austin: University of Texas Press and London: I.B. Tauris, 1998), pp. 13–30. R.R. Palmer, The Age of the Democratic Revolution: A Political History of Europe and America 1760–1800 (Princeton University Press, 1959), vol. I. R. Hargreaves, The Narrow Seas: A History of the English Channel, Its Approaches, and Its Immediate Shores 400 BC-AD 1945 (London: Sidgwick and Jackson Limited, 1959), n.p. J.G.A. Pocock, the founding father of ‘new British history’, thus writes that ‘a history that takes place in an insular situation can for more than merely verbal reasons be studied in a degree of isolation’: ‘The limits and divisions of British history: in search of the unknown subject’, AHR, 87 (1982), p. 317. According to David Armitage, this is a reproduction of Seeley’s views: D. Armitage, ‘Greater Britain: a useful category of historical analysis?’, AHR, 104 (1999), pp. 427–45. See also R. Bourke, ‘Pocock and the presuppositions of the new British history’, HJ, 53 (2010), pp. 747–70.

10

Introduction

antagonism between France and England anthropomorphises the sea coasts: The grand political struggle of modern times has been between France and England. These two nations are placed facing each other, as if to invite contest. On their most important sides the two countries slope towards each other, or you may say that they form but one valley, of which the Straits of Dover [in the French edition: La Manche] are the bottom. . . . But England presents to France that portion of her which is German – keeping behind her the Celts of Wales, Scotland, and Ireland. France, on the contrary, . . . opposes her Celtic front to England. Each country views the other on its most hostile side.42

Such a depiction was underpinned by the ‘new tragic vision of the coast’ which had been emerging in France and Britain since the middle of the eighteenth century, and which Michelet popularised in his Tableau.43 From the 1820s onwards, Michelet became deeply interested in natural history, geology, embryology and comparative anatomy.44 Inspired by the work of his friend, the naturalist Etienne Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire, and beyond him by the Chevalier de Lamarck, his descriptions of nature abolished distinctions between the organic and the mineral, uncovering the transformations and metamorphosis which slowly gave birth to the national territory.45 Michelet’s methodology was also modelled on the natural sciences, starting with observation, then drawing analogies and comparisons before making generalisations.46 The comparison between France and England demonstrated the superiority of the French nation and territory: ‘England explains France, but by opposition.’47 Whereas France was a perfect and complex living organism, a ‘person’, England, like Germany or Italy, was presented as a monster.48 Thus, in a perfect reversal of the views of E.A. Freeman, Michelet ascribed to Britain’s insularity the persistence of distinct and antagonistic ethnic groups across the Channel. The German south-east of England and the western and northern regions (Ireland, Wales, Scotland), which remained Celtic, 42 43

44 45 46 47 48

J. Michelet, History of France, translation G.H. Smith (New York: D. Appleton & Company, 1847), vol. I, part I, p. 149. A. Corbin, The Lure of the Sea: The Discovery of the Seaside in the Western World, 1750– 1840, translation J. Phelps (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994) (French edn: 1988), p. 244. P. Petitier, La géographie de Michelet: Territoire et modèles naturels dans les premières œuvres de Michelet (Paris: L’Harmattan, 1997), pp. 103–44. E.K. Kaplan, Michelet’s Poetic Vision: A Romantic Philosophy of Nature, Man, & Woman (Amherst: The University of Massachusetts Press, 1977), pp. 13–57. Petitier, La géographie de Michelet, pp. 124–6. J. Michelet, ‘Introduction to World History’ (1831) (translation Flora Kimmich), in J. Michelet, On History (Cambridge: Open Book Publishers, 2013), p. 155. Petitier, La géographie de Michelet, pp. 145–8.

Introduction

11

were set against one another. This incomplete ethnic mix transformed the English into wild beasts, which would not rest until they had attacked their neighbours: ‘This amphibious race, after having long worried and torn each other in their ocean circus, cast themselves into the sea, and began to worry France.’49 On the other hand, France had reached a mature stage of development, which came to full fruition with the French Revolution; despite regional specificities races harmoniously merged on the national territory, a fact which gave this country a unique status among modern nations.50 The same elements which we identified among Victorian historians are present here, but their interpretation is reversed. Opposing the Celts and the Germans was not original at a time when republican Anglophobia was commonplace in France, and the French intelligentsia was Germanophile.51 It is remarkable how this stereotype of the Channel as a natural, cultural and political barrier was passed on to the French geographers influenced by Michelet. After the defeat at the hands of Prussia in 1870, reference to Germany took on a completely different meaning in the human sciences as elsewhere.52 In his Nouvelle Géographie Universelle, published in French in 1879, the anarchist geographer Elisée Reclus (1830–1905) borrowed from Michelet his internal delimitation of Britain and his mirrored description of the French and English coasts, characterising the Channel as a double ethnic frontier, with England and with Germany: Great Britain has been likened by Michelet to a huge ship which turns her prow towards France; and this prow is occupied by men of Teutonic origin, whilst the Celts are kept in the background, in remote peninsulas and in Ireland. The 49

50

51

52

Ibid., p. 178. The French text actually says, ‘they put their teeth into France’ [ils ont mordu la France]: J. Michelet, Notre France: Sa géographie, son histoire (Paris: C. Marpon et E. Flammarion, 1886), p. 268. The notion of antagonism between ‘two races’, the Normans and the Saxons, was popularized in France by Augustin Thierry. On the invention of the national narrative in the nineteenth century, see M. Gauchet, ‘Augustin Thierry’s Lettres sur l’Histoire de France’, in P. Nora (ed.), Rethinking France: Les Lieux de mémoire, 4 vols. (1999–2010), translation directed by D.P. Jordan, Histories and Memories (The University of Chicago Press, 2010), vol. IV; Id., Philosophie des sciences historiques: Le moment romantique (Paris: Seuil, 2002); A.-M. Thiesse, La création des identités nationales: Europe XVIIIe–XXe siècles (Paris: Seuil, 1999). J.-M. Carré, Les Écrivains français et le mirage allemand: 1800–1940 (Paris: Boivin, 1947), pp. 53–61. However, the French discourse on the Germans was ambivalent too, and during the same period the myth of the Gallic origins of French republicanism was directed against the Germans: M. Seliger, ‘Race-thinking during the Restoration’, JHI, 19 (1958), pp. 273–83. See C. Digeon, La crise allemande de la pensée française (1870–1914) (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1959). More specifically, on geography and the ambivalent relation to Germany after 1870: V. Berdoulay, La formation de l’école française de géographie (1870–1914) (Paris: CTHS, 1995) (1st edn: 1981), pp. 27–43.

12

Introduction

contrast between the two nations dwelling on either side of the Channel is sharp, and without ethnic transition. France formerly stood face to face with her enemy, whilst her natural allies of kindred races were far away, and often beyond reach, and never were wars waged with greater fury than those between the Saxon islander and the continental Gaul.53

Paul Vidal de la Blache’s Tableau géographique de la France (1903) was the foundation text of the French geographical school of the twentieth century; it was also published as the first of Ernest Lavisse’s Histoire de France in twenty-eight volumes, and was very influential on the work of French historians until the second half of the twentieth century. When dealing with the Channel, its author yet again resorted to the same rhetorical topos. From the arrival of the Anglo-Saxons in England, he wrote, the Channel put two historic races face to face: ‘It was, instead of the repressed Celtism, Germanism that France saw settle on the coast facing her. Thus a zone of tight contact between the Romanic world and Germanism formed on the threshold of the North Sea.’54 Vidal thus presented Anglo-French relations as the realisation of natural potentialities. Although Vidal broke in so many ways with the academic geography of his time, the trace of his predecessors is the most apparent in the sections on England.55 Vidal’s geography had an immense impact on historians, not least on Fernand Braudel, who appropriated Vidalian ideas of milieu, civilisation and circulation.56 In each of his major books, Braudel referred to the English Channel, to fulfil various rhetorical and argumentative purposes. In the Mediterranean (1949), an analogy, the ‘Mediterranean “Channel”’, designated the Western subregion, an ‘independent, narrow passage between the land masses, easily 53 54

55

56

E. Reclus, The Earth and Its Inhabitants, 19 vols. (New York: D. Appleton, (1881–1895), Europe, vol. IV, The British Isles (1881), p. 32. P. Vidal de la Blache, Tableau de la Géographie de la France (Paris: Hachette, 1908) (1st edn: 1903), p. 58. The first part of Vidal’s text was translated as The Personality of France (London: A.A. Knopf, 1928). Thus, in a passage clearly derived from Michelet, Vidal writes about the political consequences of England’s geography; for instance, how these people were driven to attack their French neighbours because they felt cramped in their island: Vidal de la Blache, Tableau, p. 60. Similar arguments were already present in a previous book, in which the English and the French are described as exact opposites: P. Vidal-Lablache, États et nations de l’Europe: Autour de la France (Paris: Librairie Charles Delagrave, 1889), pp. 262–3. On Vidal, see J.-Y. Guiomar, ‘Vidal de La Blache’s Geography of France’, in P. Nora (ed.), Realms of Memory: The Construction of the French Past, 3 vols. (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996–1998), translation A. Goldhammer, vol. II: Traditions (1997) (French edn: 1993), pp. 187–209. J.A. Marino, ‘On the shores of Bohemia: recovering geography’, in Marino (ed.), Early Modern History and the Social Sciences: Testing the Limits of Braudel’s Mediterranean (Kirksville, MO: Truman State University Press, 2002), p. 21.

Introduction

13

accessible to man’.57 Other metaphors emphasised the extent of the exchanges between African and European shores, depicting a sea which ‘does not act as a barrier . . . but rather as a river which unites more than it divides’.58 This analogy implied a way of seeing the English Channel as a natural link. In the second phase, water acted as a hindrance to human exchanges. The Channel now symbolised what separates. After the Muslim expansion, from the tenth century onwards, the Mediterranean Sea became ‘a long maritime ditch’59 between Europe and the Arabo-Muslim world, and the book highlights the political, cultural and religious divisions which now separated the two worlds.60 As we will see in this book, such an evolutionary perspective on frontiers, where phases of opening alternate with phases of closure, is not without problems: these functions were often simultaneous. In Civilisation matérielle, économie et capitalisme (1979), in which Braudel tackled the Channel head-on, the same causes produce the same effects. The significance he gave to geographic forms varied with the political relations of the states and the supposed superiority of one model over the other. After the Hundred Years War, ‘England [sic] became an island’ by losing its possessions in Guyenne, Normandy and the Pale of Calais. Thereafter geography consolidated the archetypal opposition of two national models of development: ‘From now on, the die was cast. The Channel, the Strait of Dover and the North Sea had become a barrier, “a floating bulwark” protecting the island.’61 Thus, England was viscerally hostile to the Continent: England ‘felt if not besieged, which is too strong a word, at any rate threatened by an 57 58

59 60

61

F. Braudel, The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II, Vol. I, translation S. Reynolds (London: Collins, 1972), p. 117. Ibid., p. 117. On Braudel’s use of metaphors and the Mediterranean as a ‘quasi-character’, see P. Ricoeur, Time and Narrative, vol. I, translation K. McLaughlin and D. Pellauer (The University of Chicago Press, 1984), pp. 104–5; Carrard, Poetics, pp. 201–2, 205–6. Siân Reynolds translates ‘un long fossé maritime’ by ‘this channel’: ibid., p. 118. Braudel’s analysis of a fractured relation between the two sides of the Mediterranean is clearly outdated, ignoring the variety of economic or cultural exchanges to focus on religious oppositions, a view which was informed by his readings: E. Paris, La genèse intellectuelle de l’œuvre de Fernand Braudel: La Méditerranée et le Monde Méditerranéen à l’époque de Philippe II (1923–1947) (Athènes: Institut de Recherches Néohelléniques, 1999), pp. 70–5; J.-L. Triaud, ‘L’Islam vu par les historiens français’, Esprit, 246 (1998), p. 13. For a compelling case study of the constant exchanges in the Middle Ages, see A. Christys, ‘Crossing the frontier of ninth-century Hispania’, in D. Abulafia and N. Berend (eds.), Medieval Frontiers: Concepts and Practices (Ashgate: Aldershot, 2002), pp. 35–53. See also J. Dakhlia, Lingua franca: Histoire d’une langue métisse en Méditerranée (Arles: Actes Sud, 2008). F. Braudel, Civilization and Capitalism, 15th–18th Century, vol. III, The Perspective of the World, translation S. Reynolds (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992), p. 353.

14

Introduction

unfriendly Europe, by a politically dangerous France’.62 Such a view, as Stephen Kaplan has argued, denoted a systematic contrast between the British success story, rooted in a dynamic commercial and maritime capitalism, and a timid and overcautious French agrarian capitalism.63 Finally, in The Identity of France (1986), the maritime frontier firms up: Studies devoted to frontiers rarely mention the sea. . . . And yet if a frontier means a break, a discontinuity in space, what traveller, leaving Calais, or arriving in Dover, could fail to think that he was leaving one frontier and meeting another? . . . Yet the sea exists, the coastline exists, and sailors and fleets too. And so do maritime frontiers, the most unarguably natural of all.64

Drawing on the works of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century nationalist historians of diplomacy, Braudel’s last book replicated their views on the ‘persistent hatred’ between the two countries,65 on the British nation’s ‘instinct’ to ‘ruin our naval power’ and colonies,66 and yet again, on the eighteenth century as the apogee of the Anglo-French ‘rivalry . . . which started in 1688 [and] has been like a sort of Hundred Years War’.67 The rest of this book will challenge this metanarrative about Anglo-French relations. At the same time, my approach has been greatly influenced by Braudel’s Mediterranean, and especially by the way in which the sea is set in different temporal and spatial scales. A transnational history from below Across generations and historiographical schools, the same motif survived. The point of departure of this book is to attempt another narrative, which does not place the rivalry between the two states and their populations at the heart of the study of Anglo-French relations. This entails a double methodological displacement. 62

63 64 65

66 67

Braudel, Civilization, vol. III, p. 354. François Dosse talks about the ‘vitalism’ of the Braudelian rhetoric, with its recurrent use of organic metaphors: L’histoire en miettes: Des ‘Annales’ à la ‘Nouvelle Histoire’, 2nd edn (Paris: Presses Pocket, 1997 (1st edn: 1987)), p. 134. S.L. Kaplan, ‘Long-run lamentations: Braudel on France’, JMH, 63 (1991), pp. 341–53. F. Braudel, The Identity of France, vol. I: History and Environment, translation S. Reynolds (London: Collins, 1988), pp. 323–4. A. Longnon, Leçons professées au Collège de France en 1889–1890 (Paris: Picard, 1922), quoted in Braudel, L’Identité de la France, vol. I: Espace et histoire (Paris: Flammarion, 1990) (1st edn: 1986), p. 349. J. Tramond, Manuel d’histoire maritime de la France des Origines à 1815 (Paris: Société d’Editions géographiques, maritimes et coloniales, 1947) (1st edn: 1916), p. 243. E. Bourgeois, Manuel historique de politique étrangère, vol. I: 1610–1789. Les origines, 5th edn (Paris: Belin, 1911), p. 579. Braudel praises ‘the always gripping Manuel historique de politique étrangère’: Identité, p. 330. All of these references are absent from the English edition.

Introduction

15

First, the term ‘nation’ must be historicised. The idea that the nation is the fruit of a historical construction, and of a specific political, economic and social context, has long been advanced. Without going too far back in time, one thinks of Ernest Renan’s classic definition of the nation, in the aftermath of the 1870 French military defeat against Prussia: More valuable by far than common customs posts and frontiers conforming to strategic ideas is the fact of sharing, in the past, a glorious heritage and regrets, and of having, in the future, [a shared] programme to put into effect, or the fact of having suffered, enjoyed, and hoped together. . . . Man is a slave neither of his race nor his language, nor of his religion, nor of the course of rivers nor of the direction taken by mountain chains.68

The idea has been taken up by some Marxist historians. Eric Hobsbawm suggested adopting ‘the view from below . . . i.e. the nation as seen not by governments and the spokesmen and activists of nationalist . . . movements, but by the ordinary persons who are the objects of their action and propaganda’.69 However, this has not had much impact on the historiography of the nation in the eighteenth century, which focuses above all on elites.70 When popular ideas of the nation are mentioned, it is usually in antithesis to the elites, following a form of sociological determinism criticised by Roger Chartier.71 Gerald Newman thus opposed the cosmopolitanism of the British aristocracy to ‘the contrary tradition of xenophobic and anti-French feelings, particularly strong at the bottom of society’, adding that ‘the insular and anti-French sentiments of the eighteenthcentury “mob” are legendary’.72 By contrast, the history of ‘national identities’, which took off in the 1990s, tends to play down the importance of social differences, which have been replaced by another dichotomy, namely, we-ness/other-ness.73 68 69

70

71 72

73

E. Renan, ‘What is a nation?’ [1883], in G. Eley and R.G. Suny (ed.), Becoming National: A Reader (Oxford University Press, 1996), pp. 52–4. E.J. Hobsbawm, Nations and Nationalism since 1780: Programme, Myth, Reality (Cambridge University Press, 1990), p. 11. Before him, Pierre Vilar had also shown the fruitfulness of such an approach: P. Vilar, La Catalogne dans l’Espagne moderne: Recherches sur les fondements économiques des structures nationales (Paris: SEVPEN, 1962). See for instance on eighteenth-century France: J.-Y. Guiomar, La nation entre l’histoire et la raison (Paris: La Découverte, 1990); D. Bell, The Cult of the Nation in France: Inventing Nationalism, 1680–1800 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001). R. Chartier, ‘Histoire intellectuelle et histoire des mentalities: trajectoires et questions’, RS, 111–112 (1983), p. 293. G. Newman, The Rise of English Nationalism: A Cultural History 1740–1830 (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1987), p. 37. This topos has been reassessed for previous periods: see for instance L.H. Yungblut, ‘Strangers Settled Here amongst Us’: Policies, Perceptions and the Presence of Aliens in Elizabethan England (London: Routledge, 1996). Here I am thinking of historians who take ‘identity’ as a historical given. The critique does not apply to historians of nineteenth-century France, who have, in the wake of Gérard

16

Introduction

For Linda Colley, hostility to France in Britain transcended social distinctions: ‘[The British] came to define themselves as a single people not because of any political or cultural consensus at home, but rather in reaction to the Other beyond their shores’.74 For Liah Greenfeld, it was ‘the resentment toward England . . . [which] shaped the ideological foundations of the French national consciousness’, while for Edmond Dziembowski, ‘France remains well and truly predominantly Anglophobic. French antipathy towards England goes well beyond the simple question of political convictions.’75 Anglo-French relations are thus frozen in hostile mode, and little effort is made to determine how much impact these stereotypes had and how meaningful they were socially.76 This must lead us to question the very relevance of the notion of ‘national identity’ for our analysis. The full implications of Rogers Brubaker and Frederick Cooper’s radical critique of the scholarly use of ‘identity’ have not been sufficiently addressed by historians. They point out a series of confusions between ‘subjective’ and ‘objective’ conceptions of identity, between identity as category of practice and as category of analysis, between the ‘soft’ meaning of identity, which is contingent and fluid, and the ‘hard’ meaning, which is stable through time and shared by many: these caveats have to be taken seriously.77 To get away from the ‘reifying connotations of identity’, Brubaker and Cooper suggest a more dynamic and processual understanding of social interactions. In their words, ‘how one identifies oneself – and how one is identified by others – may vary greatly from context to context; self- and other-identification are fundamentally situational and contextual’.78 Furthermore, the scale of analysis usually favoured in the study of Anglo-French relations must be changed. Comparisons of social hierarchies, political systems or cultural productions tend to fit into a

74 75 76

77

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Noiriel, highlighted the tensions between ‘latent’ identities, national sentiments and processes of state identification: G. Noiriel, La Tyrannie du national: Le droit d’asile en Europe (1793–1993) (Paris: Calmann-Lévy, 1991); Id., Population, immigration et identité nationale en France (XIXe – XXe siècle) (Paris: Hachette, 1992); Id., État, nation et immigration: Vers une histoire du pouvoir (Paris: Belin, 2001). Colley, Britons, p. 6. See also ‘Britishness and otherness: an argument’, JBS, 31 (1992), pp. 309–29. E. Dziembowski, Un nouveau patriotisme français, 1750–1770: La France face à la puissance anglaise à l’époque de la guerre de Sept Ans (Oxford: Voltaire Foundation, 1998), p. 17. See, however, for a more nuanced perspective, R. Tombs and I. Tombs, That Sweet Enemy: The British and the French from the Sun King to the Present (London: W. Heinemann, 2006). R. Brubaker and F. Cooper, ‘Beyond identity’, Theory and Society, 29 (2000), pp. 1–47. For a different criticism of ‘identity’, see P. Mandler, ‘What is “national identity”?: definitions and applications in modern British historiography’, MIH, 3 (2006), pp. 271–97. Brubaker and Cooper, ‘Beyond identity’, p. 14.

Introduction

17

predefined frame, that of the nation state, which is never questioned. It is necessary to break with ‘methodological nationalism’, which since the late nineteenth century has presented the nation and the state as the fundamental units of historical analysis. Since the end of the twentieth century, this approach has increasingly been perceived as problematic. The socalled ‘transnational turn’ expresses dissatisfaction with the focus on the nation state.79 The gestation of this book, which began in 2000 as a PhD and was published in French in 2008, coincided with the apogee of ‘transnational’ or ‘cross-national’ approaches. Although this is not the place to write a history of this booming field of research,80 it is necessary to explain how the construction of my own object of research proceeded from similar questions. The term ‘transnational’ has in many ways been a victim of its own success, and has become a ‘buzzword’ or a ‘brand’ in the human and social sciences.81 The term can designate a type of object as well as a perspective.82 At first, this approach originated in a desire to produce a study of international relations that was not focused on central governments. Historians have thus put non-governmental actors at the centre of their analysis, studying the flows of ideas, goods or persons which crossed the borders of nation states. In a second phase, under the influence of postcolonial and global studies, the very pertinence of the notions of state and nation, seen as products of a Eurocentric history, has been questioned.83 Attention has been given less to metropolitan states than to imperial margins, and to restoring the agency of local populations.84 Thus, taking the transnational perspective entails a change of approach. There is no reason why these methodological aims would not be relevant for writing a European history not centred on central states but on social and spatial peripheries.85 Moreover, in the 79

80

81 82 84

85

A. Wimmer and N. Glick Schiller, ‘Methodological nationalism and the study of migration’, EJS, 43 (2002), pp. 217–40; Id., ‘Methodological nationalism, the social sciences, and the study of migration: an essay in historical epistemology’, IMR, 37 (2003), pp. 576–610; K. Pomeranz, ‘Histories for a less national age’, AHR, 119 (2014), pp. 1–22. D. Cohen and M. O’Connor (eds.), Comparison and History: Europe in Cross-National Perspective (New York and London: Routledge, 2004); P.-Y. Saunier, ‘Transnational’, in P.-Y. Saunier and A. Iriye (eds.), The Palgrave Dictionary of Transnational History: From the Mid-Nineteenth Century to the Present Day (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), pp. 1047–55. C.A. Bayly, S. Beckert, M. Connelly, I. Hofmeyr, W. Kozol and P. Seed, ‘AHR conversation: on transnational history’, AHR, 111 (2006), pp. 1441, 1447. Saunier, ‘Transnational’, p. 1047. 83 Ibid., pp. 1051–2. A classic example is R. White, Middle Ground: Indians, Empires and Republics in the Great Lakes Region, 1650–1815 (Cambridge University Press, 1991). For a presentation of this field, see F. Furstenberg, ‘The significance of the trans-Appalachian frontier in Atlantic history’, AHR, 113 (2008), pp. 652–3. The social history of European nation-states since the nineteenth century is also going through its own ‘transnational turn’: see for example S. Conrad, Globalisation and the

18

Introduction

seventeenth and eighteenth centuries the terms ‘nation’ and ‘state’ did not have the meanings they would subsequently take on. Speaking of ‘nationalism’ or ‘national identity’ for this period raises a number of issues which cannot be simply ignored. One of the criticisms which has been levelled against transnational history is that it romanticises circulations and connections, and adopts a rose-tinted view of international relations, in which irenic exchanges, not conflictual ones, are the rule. In other words, it ignores issues of power.86 By the same token, in reacting against the sole focus on the central state and the neglect of non-state actors, these studies might have gone too far in the other direction, treating the state and the nation as mere irrelevances.87 Adopting a transnational approach does not necessarily entail paying no attention to international conflicts, to the nation and to the state: these different topics can be incorporated within the same framework, as Peter Sahlins’ pioneering study of the Cerdanya region in the Pyrenees demonstrated.88 By reframing and decentring two nation states, and by showing the historicity of their spatial delimitations at the border, Sahlins raises new issues. It is possible to follow a similar approach for the sea between England and France. Liquid borders The North Sea and the Black Sea, and the Indian and the Pacific Oceans have their historians, while the Mediterranean and the Atlantic have given

86

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Nation in Imperial Germany (Cambridge University Press, 2010); H.-G. Haupt and J. Kocka (ed.), Comparative and Transnational History: Central European Approaches and New Perspectives (New York and Oxford: Berghahn, 2010); S.W. Sawyer, ‘Ces nations façonnées par les empires et la globalisation: réécrire le récit national du XIXe siècle à aujourd’hui’, AHSS, 1 (2014), pp. 117–37; Q. Deluermoz, ‘Capitales policières, Etat-nation et civilisation urbaine: Londres, Paris et Berlin au tournant du XIXe siècle’, RHMC, 60 (2013), pp. 55–84. According to comparative historian Hans-Gerhard Haupt, the transnational approach overemphasizes the positive character of global integration and neglects factors hindering circulations: H.-G. Haupt, ‘Une nouvelle sensibilité: la perspective “transnationale”’, Cahiers Jaurès, 200 (2011/12), pp. 173–80. In fact, many practitioners of global and transnational history are aware of this danger and put power, economic inequality and exclusion at the centre of their work: Chris Bayly et al.’s remarks in ‘AHR conversation’, pp. 1452, 1457–8. P. Vries, ‘Writing the history of the global and the state’, in M. Berg (ed.), Writing the History of the Global: Challenges for the 21st Century (Oxford University Press, 2013), pp. 204–5. On the danger of confusing the criticism of methodological nationalism with the lack of relevance of the nation-state, see R. Brubaker, ‘In the name of the nation: reflections on nationalism and patriotism’, Citizenship Studies, 8 (2004), pp. 115–27. P. Sahlins, Boundaries: The Making of France and Spain in the Pyrenees (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989). See also J. Rüger, ‘Sovereignty and empire in the North Sea, 1807-1918’, AHR, 119 (2014), pp. 313–38.

Introduction

19

their names to historiographical trends.89 With regard to the Channel, there is a stark contrast between the way in which historians view this sea in Britain and in France. In Britain, public interest in the Channel has held firm in the second half of the twentieth century, and the timing of publication of books written for a wider audience has coincided with debates about Britain’s entry to the European Community and the construction of the Channel Tunnel.90 By contrast, the only histories of ‘La Manche’ written in French are regional, dealing with the department of the same name. Viewed from France, the Channel is only one of several borders, one which has aroused almost no interest among historians, unlike the Pyrenees, the Mediterranean or the Rhine.91 These contrasting representations of the same space have been historically constructed. They can only be explained in a comparative perspective which pays attention to the interactions between the two neighbouring countries.92 89

90

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See for instance A. Bang-Anderson, B. Greenhill and E.H. Grude (eds.), The North Sea: A Highway of Economic History and Cultural Exchange (Oxford University Press, 1985); C. King, The Black Sea: A Political and Social History (Oxford University Press, 2003); K. McPherson, The Indian Ocean: A History of People and the Sea (Oxford University Press, 1995); D. Armitage and A. Bashford (eds.), Pacific Histories: Ocean, Land, People (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014). In the second half of the twentieth century only, eight such books have been published: Hargreaves, Narrow Seas; J.A. Williamson, The English Channel: A History (London: Collins, 1959); E.D.S. Bradford, Walls of England: The Channel’s 2000 Years of History (London: County Life, 1966); G. Morey, The English Channel (London: Muller, 1966); N. Calder, The English Channel (London: Chatton & Windus, 1986); S. Harrison, The Channel (Glasgow and London: Collins, 1986); H. Smith, The English Channel: A Celebration of the Channel’s Role in England’s History (Upton-Upon-Severn: Images, 1994); P. Unwin, The Narrow Sea: Barrier, Bridge and Gateway to the World. The History of the English Channel (London: Headline, 2003). In 1959 the debate about the creation of the EEC was fierce in Britain, which formed the EFTA in 1960; in 1966 the British PM Harold Wilson considered applying to the EEC, which he did in 1967; in 1986 the construction of the Channel Tunnel began, and it was opened in 1994. The first studies on French frontiers were about the Rhine: G. Zeller, ‘La monarchie de l’Ancien Régime et les frontières naturelles’, RHM, 8 (1933), pp. 305–33 and ‘Histoire d’une idée fausse’, RS, 11 (1936), pp. 115–31; A. Demangeon and L. Febvre, Le Rhin: Problèmes d’histoire et d’économie (Paris: Armand Colin, 1935). Michel Mollat du Jourdin noted this difference: ‘The coastline of France, stretching over five thousand kilometres, rarely attracted the attention of historians of France’s borders’: ‘France, the coast, and the sea’, in P. Nora (ed.), Rethinking France, vol. II: Space (The University of Chicago Press, 2006), p. 27. On this historiography, see P. Sahlins ‘Natural frontiers revisited: France’s boundaries since the seventeenth Century’, AHR 95 (1990), pp. 1423–51; D. Nordman, Frontières de France: De l’espace au territoire XVIe–XIXe siècle (Paris: Gallimard, 1998), pp. 88–105. An approach which remains true to Marc Bloch’s programme for comparative history, which has too often been caricatured as being inattentive to exchanges across the units of comparison. See M. Bloch, ‘Pour une histoire comparée des sociétés européennes’, RS, 46 (1928), pp. 15–50, translated in English as ‘A contribution towards a comparative history of European societies’, in M. Bloch, Land and Work in Medieval Europe: Selected Papers (London: Routledge & K. Paul, 1967), pp. 44–81.

20

Introduction

Any comparison risks overstating or, more fundamentally, assuming the reality of the units being compared. The historian needs to reflect about the assumptions which make the act of comparing itself thinkable. Comparisons tend to presuppose the existence of a dividing line between two elements, which are well defined, distinct and separate. Rather than taking that separation for granted, it can become the main object of study. As we have seen, among the unquestioned assumptions of any AngloFrench comparison lies the idea of the Channel as a natural frontier, which validates the doctrine that nations are ipso facto distinctive. The idea of the sea as a natural frontier was long ago criticised by Lucien Febvre, who chose Britain’s insularity as a case in point: ‘Every “natural” frontier can be violated. The sea did not prevent William’s Normans from attacking Harold’s Saxons in their island.’93 If insularity is an undeniable physical fact, as geographers well know, its geographical effects on human societies result from a long historical process.94 As this book will demonstrate, the idea that divisions between states and nations are hard facts not even worth historical investigation emerged very slowly and was not prevalent in the eighteenth century. In order to put to the test the rhetoric about Anglo-French national hostility, our main field of analysis will be the zone of contact between the French and English people: this undefined, moving and changing frontier which is the sea. In consequence, rather than focusing on conflict, this analysis will examine the very conditions of possibility of the opposition between two national models. National comparisons traditionally presuppose the existence of a national frontier, identifying similarities and differences between either side of a nation state border. In order to understand the multiple interactions and transfers between France and England in the eighteenth century, we must straddle the border and choose the Channel as the focal point of our analysis.95 By bringing together the historiography of borderlands and the historiography of oceanic spaces, two sets of traditional questions can be reframed. First, as Lucien Febvre argued, the history of frontiers is 93

94 95

L. Febvre, ‘Frontière: le mot et la notion’, RS, 45 (1928), republished in Pour une Histoire à part entière (Paris: EHESS, 1962), p. 19. Febvre was defending geographical possibilism against Friedrich Ratzel’s determinism: L. Febvre, A Geographical Introduction to History: An Introduction to Human Geography (London/New York: Kegan Paul, 2003) (French edn: 1922), p. 309. For a historicisation of the Sea of Japan, see for example P. Pelletier, La Japonésie: Géopolitique et géographie historique de la surinsularité au Japon (Paris: CNRS, 1998). Sahlins, Boundaries. See also P. Sahlins, ‘The nation in the village: state-building and communal struggles in the Catalan borderland during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries’, JMH, 60 (1988), pp. 234–63. For a stimulating geographical study of the Channel in the twentieth century, see R. Gibbs, ‘The transnational frontier region: an Anglo-French case study’, unpublished D.Phil., University of Oxford (1986).

Introduction

21

intrinsically linked to the history of the state.96 The process of statebuilding in its territorial dimension can be understood by comparing their maritime peripheries. In the eighteenth century, the symbolic and juridico-political limits of European states started to coincide. Daniel Nordman showed that in the longue durée the process of settling territorial fringes was linked to changes in the geographical conceptions of the national space. If the territorial consciousness of France, as a coherent whole, was complete by the end of the seventeenth century, the ‘era of delimitation’ only began in the middle of the eighteenth century in the case of land borders.97 It is an open question how much the fixing of maritime borders followed the same chronological pattern. In Britain, the question of the delimitation of the state’s peripheries has not attracted the attention of historians, as if the country’s insularity had made this question irrelevant. Lewis Namier, the historian of the eighteenth-century British parliament, contended that ‘the historical development of England is based upon the fact that her frontiers are drawn by Nature, and cannot be the subject of dispute’.98 But a frontier is not only a periphery of the central state; it is also a zone of contact with other states.99 This book investigates how two distinct and always ongoing processes of state territorialisation met and interacted in the same maritime space.100 Second, the relations between the French and English people need to be studied afresh, beyond the rhetoric of national enmity which proliferated during the eighteenth century. The attitudes of border populations cannot be properly understood if the frontier is simply conceived as a line separating states. At the edge of the central state, the frontier is a social space structured by contacts, conflictual or not, with foreigners.101 On the one hand, as anthropologists Hasting Donnan and Thomas Wilson have shown, frontiers are zones of negotiation, which are not simple 96 98

99 100 101

97 Febvre, ‘Frontière’, pp. 17–18. Nordman, Frontières, pp. 283–359. He added that ‘a great deal of what is peculiar in English history is due to the obvious fact that Great Britain is an island’: England in the Age of the American Revolution (London: Macmillan, 1930), p. 7, quoted in H. Kearney, The British Isles: A History of Four Nations), 2nd edn (Cambridge University Press, 2006), p. 2. P. de Lapradelle, La frontière: Etude de droit international (Paris: Les Éditions internationales, 1928), pp. 14–15. Territorialisation here means the appropriation of a space by a political, economic or juridical power. In this sense, one does not have to choose between Turner’s and Kopytoff’s conceptions of the frontier, since a frontier can be both a zone of negotiation between the centre and the periphery, and a zone where the values of the centre are asserted more strongly: F.J. Turner, ‘The Significance of the Frontier in American History’ (1893), in The Frontier in American History (New York: Bolt, 1921), chap. 1; I. Kopytoff (ed.), The African Frontier: The Reproduction of Traditional African Societies (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1987).

22

Introduction

extensions of state sovereignty: they have their own ‘thickness’, their own history and culture, which may clash with those of the central state.102 Furthermore, as studies on early modern Mediterranean frontier societies have revealed, compromise with the central authorities or friendly relations with the official ‘enemy’ can coexist or alternate, at the level of social, economic or religious practices.103 On the other hand, frontiers are also violent spaces, most obviously because in time of war they are first exposed, but also because it is there that the imposition of state coercion can be felt more strongly than anywhere else. It is at the border that sailors are recruited, smugglers are chased and passports checked. If there are frequent connections between both sides of the border, transnational circulations can also be hindered, slowed down or blocked.104 Even when looked at from either side, frontier regions should not be conceived as homogeneous either: conflicts can run within the border zone itself. Indeed, as geographers have shown, frontiers create spatial differentiation and asymmetry, but they also connect: they can be barriers, interfaces or territories worth studying in themselves.105 Every frontier raises the question of physical as well as mental distance. Applied to the case of the Channel, this outline suggests a number of questions: Was the fact of living on the border, as defined by the state, sufficient to develop a feeling of difference vis-à-vis foreigners? Did the national/foreigner division have the same meaning everywhere on the state’s territory, or was the border an incubator where nationalism was first constructed? Or did these very categories lose their salience at the border? What are the implications for the local populations’ collective self-identifications when the state border is fluid and ill-defined? Was the distinction between the ‘French’ and the ‘English’ always and everywhere clear-cut, and did people necessarily have to choose between different affiliations? Far from being reified by physical geography or international relations, the maritime frontier is a dynamic zone, a fact that entails some methodological choices. As the Italian microstoria and its French emulators have 102 103

104

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T.M. Wilson and H. Donnan (eds.), Border Identities: Nation and State at International Frontiers (Cambridge University Press, 1998), p. 11. M. Bertrand and N. Planas, ‘Introduction’, in Bertrand and Planas (études réunies et présentées par), Les sociétés de frontières: De la Méditerranée à l’Atlantique (XVIe–XVIIIe siècle) (Madrid: Casa de Velazquez, 2011), pp. 1–20. On the need to bring back ‘power’ into global history, see M. Finn, ‘“Frictions” d’empire: les réseaux de circulation des successions et des patrimonies dans la Bombay coloniale des années 1780’, AHSS, 65 (2010), pp. 1175–204; J. de Vries, ‘Reflections on doing global history’, in Berg, Writing, pp. 41–2; Vries, ‘Writing the history of the global and the state’, ibid., p. 204. J. Levy, ‘Frontière’, in J. Levy and M. Lussault (dir.), Dictionnaire de la géographie et de l’espace des sociétés (Paris: Belin, 2003) (http://espacestemps.net/document840.html).

Introduction

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stressed, changing the scale of observation modifies the ‘quality’, the characteristics and the limits of the object being observed.106 The variation of scales of analysis can enrich theoretical and empirical understandings of Anglo-French contacts. Thus, by looking at the ways in which the local, the regional, the national and the international were interlocked, one can grasp and understand phenomena which have often escaped the attention of historians.107 The French and English coastal populations could interact in many ways, by fishing, privateering or consuming smuggled goods, by being captured as prisoners of war or bombarded. The focus on everyday social and economic practices which linked both sides of the Channel provides an opportunity to revise fundamentally the narratives mentioned above. This approach resonates with recent shifts from imperial history to ‘entangled’ history, which aim at displacing the emphasis on empires as closed geographical units, focusing instead on interconnections between ‘contiguous societies’.108 Studies of borderlands have also challenged traditional assumptions about the power of the centre over the periphery, emphasising the margin of autonomy of populations living at the periphery vis-à-vis the state.109 106

107

108

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G. Levi, ‘On microhistory’, in P. Burke (ed.), New Perspectives on Historical Writing (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2001), pp. 100–2; J. Revel (dir.), Jeux d’échelles: La microanalyse à l’experience (Paris: EHESS, 1996); B. Lepetit, ‘Espace et histoire’, in Carnet de croquis: Sur la connaissance historique (Paris: Albin Michel, 1999), pp. 129–41. R. White, ‘The nationalization of nature’, JAH, 86 (1999), pp. 976–86; de Vries, ‘Reflections’, pp. 32–3. For a compelling attempt to connect the macro and the micro at the transatlantic level, through the focus on Scottish imperial families, see E. Rothschild, The Inner Life of Empire: An Eighteenth-Century History (Princeton University Press, 2011). E.H. Gould, ‘Entangled histories, entangled worlds: the English-speaking Atlantic as a Spanish periphery’, AHR, 112 (2007), p. 766 and ‘Entangled Atlantic histories: a response from the Anglo-American periphery’, AHR, 112 (2007), pp. 1415–22; see also by the same author ‘Zones of law, zones of violence: the legal geography of the British Atlantic, circa 1772’, WMQ 60 (2003), pp. 471–510. On the uncertain limits of sovereignty in imperial peripheries, see L. Benton, A Search for Sovereignty: Law and Geography in European Empires, 1400–1900 (Cambridge University Press, 2010). Without using the term ‘entangled’, many studies have bridged the gap between global and local approaches by focusing on areas where political sovereignty is blurred and cultures overlap, such as the interstitial and liminal zones connecting empires, or on the go-betweens which link different societies. See R. Bin Wong, ‘Regions and global history’, in Berg, Writing, chap. 6; D. Lombart, Le carrefour javanais: Essai d’histoire globale (Paris: EHESS, 1990); S. Schaffer, L. Roberts, K. Raj and J. Delbourgo (eds.), The Brokered World: Go-Betweens and Global Intelligence, 1770–1820 (Sagamore Beach: Science History Publications, 2009); White, Middle Ground. Sahlins, Boundaries; Furstenberg, ‘The significance’; M. Baud and W. Van Schendel, ‘Towards a comparative history of borderlands’, JWH, 8 (1997), pp. 211–42; J. Adelman and S. Aron, ‘From borderlands to borders: empires, nations-states, and the peoples in between in North American history’, AHR, 104 (1999), pp. 814–41 and the critique by J.R. Wunder and P. Hämäläinen, ‘Of lethal places and lethal essays’, AHR, 104 (1999), pp. 1229–34; N.J. Citino, ‘The global frontier: comparative history

24

Introduction

The question of the coherence of our area of study thus comes to the fore. In the longitudinal perspective, the Channel is an arm of the Atlantic Ocean, traversed by East–West circulations connecting America to the Baltic, the North Sea to the Mediterranean or the Indian Ocean. However, one might argue that the specificity of the Channel as a sea would be lost and somehow diluted by trying to fit it to too big a frame. By definition maritime frontiers do not simply involve two states confronting each other:110 it is not just the French and the English who sailed through and across the Channel but also Spaniards, Dutchmen, Danes and Americans. Although the subjects of these different countries appear in this book, the perspective chosen here is different. The story we want to tell is that of a European and maritime frontier. The choice of a regional scale of analysis does not mean that the limits of the sea are taken for granted. This is not simply a question of geographical classification. From the perspective of the Channel populations, knowing where the sea ‘ended’ and where the ‘land’ began, where they entered the Atlantic Ocean and left the ‘Narrow seas’, carried practical economic, political or legal consequences. Far from being taken for granted, therefore, the limits and scale of the Channel will vary with the questions addressed. Putting the Channel at the centre of Anglo-French relations brings together two objects of study: the history of a maritime space and the history of transnational relations. This entails writing at the same time a history of the Channel and a history in the Channel.111 In turn, this implies adopting a double reading of the relations between the maritime environment and humans. While Anglo-French political, economic or social relations influence the perceptions of space and its uses, the sea imposes its own rhythm on human actions. There are many reasons for arguing that the Channel was an integrated geographical space in the eighteenth century. Geographical representations could be mentioned here and occupy a central place in the book, but in itself, the intense traffic of ships, goods and ideas which linked the French and English coasts at any one time suffices to make the Channel as a whole a coherent unit of analysis. In this sense, one can take inspiration from Braudel’s characterisation of the Mediterranean as a sea with ‘no unity but that created by the movement of men, the relationship they imply and the routes they follow’, and his notion that ‘the whole Mediterranean consists

110 111

and the frontier-borderlands approach in American foreign relations’, DH, 25 (2001), pp. 677–93. Y. Lacoste, ‘Littoral, frontières marines’, Hérodote, 93 (1999), p. 14. On this distinction, see P. Horden and N. Purcell, ‘The Mediterranean and “the new thalassology”’, AHR, 111 (2006), pp. 729–32.

Introduction

25

of movement in space’.112 The Channel was an Anglo-French sea, a region unified by cross-border flows. In particular, in its eastern half, between the Cotentin Peninsula and the Strait of Dover, the sea narrows. Centring the analysis on this porous border allows the historian to pay attention to the intersected, shared or intertwined history which connected southern Britain and northern France for long periods, in wartime as in peacetime. To what extent did the relationship to the sea, as a space of specific economic and social practices, bring the coastal populations closer together, both within the same state and across the sea? Did the fact of living in proximity to the same physical element transcend loyalty to the state? It is possible to argue that many groups living on the shores of the Channel might have had more in common with each other than with their own ‘compatriots’ living inland. In many ways, littoral societies share characteristics which distinguish coastal areas from inland areas, in terms of economic activities, social structures, interrelations with foreign worlds, diets, environmental hazards and religious beliefs.113 But one must not go too far and exchange one geographic determinism (the sea as discontinuity) for another (the littoral as a waterproof border totally isolated from the hinterland). As Alain Cabantous has argued, living near the sea does not necessarily make you a seafarer or a maritime people: ‘the contiguity of a land and of an ocean does not necessarily create intimate relations, lasting or mingled ventures.’114 The analysis must therefore be conducted at different levels, in order to take into account the variety of physical milieus and social practices. It is clear that the physicality and topography of the Channel facilitated or complicated human exchanges. Due to its relatively small size and its shallowness, the Channel, with a combination of strong winds and frequent storms, violent currents, short steep waves and very high tides, was notoriously difficult to navigate. At the same time, communications were quicker, cheaper and more efficient between the two countries than within them: in sheer geographic distance, Calais was half as far from London as from Paris, Cherbourg was three times as far from Paris than from Portsmouth and Brest was, similarly, three times as far from 112 113

114

Braudel, Mediterranean, vol. I, pp. 276–7. A. Cabantous, Les citoyens du large: Les identités maritimes en France (xviie–xixe siècle) (Paris: Aubier, 1995); M. Pearson, ‘Littoral society: the case for the coast’, The Great Circle, 7 (1985), p. 4; M.N. Pearson, ‘Littoral society: the concept and the problems’, JWH, 17 (2006), pp. 353–4. Cabantous, Citoyens, pp. 22–3, and ‘L’histoire maritime: objet de recherche ou leurre historiographique ?’, in É. Villain-Gandossi and E. Rieth (dir.), Pour une histoire du ‘fait maritime’: Sources et champs de recherche (Paris: CTHS, 2001), pp. 39–40.

26

Introduction

Paris as from Plymouth.115 Rather than looking for similarities across both shores, it is the interconnections between them which will hold our attention. Our investigation will proceed in three stages, each with its own temporal and spatial frame. Since we aim at challenging the rhetoric of the Second Hundred Years War, we need to adopt a time frame which is not constrained by this political narrative. It is first essential to understand when the Channel became an Anglo-French sea, in the sense of a fundamental element of subdivision between the two states. For centuries, far from being described or invoked as a natural frontier between England and France, the Channel was not even conceived as a singular geographical object. The slow process which saw this geographical representation assert itself will be the focus of Part I, ‘The Border Invented’. The central idea is to show the specificity of the way in which it was perceived in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Considering the Channel as a barrier was only one of many discourses: what were the alternative theories, economic, theological or geological, which insisted on the natural connections between England and the Continent? (Chapter 1). French philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty differentiated geometrical and anthropological space, arguing that ‘there are as many spaces as there are distinct spatial experiences’:116 by the same logic, the naming, mapping and demarcating of the Channel were politically and socially produced (Chapter 2).117 An eighteenth century whose limits are purposely left fuzzy for the moment will constitute the main chronological frame of the next two sections. Part II, ‘The Border Imposed’, examines the maritime frontier as a space of projection of state ambitions. The prevailing narrative about the construction of state frontiers, from the fuzzy to the precise, cannot be easily applied to the Channel. Indeed, at sea the blurriness of state limits persisted well into the eighteenth century and beyond. Was this uncertainty deliberately maintained, or was it the result of insoluble contradictions? The problem of the state’s sovereignty at sea, both vis-à-vis 115

116

117

Abbé Expilly, Description historique-géographique des îles britanniques ou des Royaumes d’Angleterre, d’Ecosse et d’Irlande (Paris: Bauche, 1759), pp. 435, 439, 440. In the mideighteenth century, while it took a Parisian traveller two weeks to go to Bordeaux by coach, it took her less than half that time to go to London: G. Arbellot, ‘La grande mutation des routes de France au dix-huitième siècle’, AESC, 28 (1973), p. 790; Abbé Expilly, Le géographe manuel, contenant la description de tous les pays du monde, 2nd edn (Paris: Bauche, 1747), p. 307. M. Merleau-Ponty, Phénoménologie de la perception (Paris: Gallimard, 1976), quoted in M. de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, translation S. Rendall (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984) (French edn: 1980), pp. 117–18. See H. Lefebvre, The Production of Space, translation D. Nicholson-Smith (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 1991) (French edn: 1974).

Introduction

27

other states and over its own subjects, surfaced everywhere. The delimitation of maritime space precipitated social and economic conflicts, in which local, national and international issues were often intertwined. It is thus necessary to foreground the study of state policies on their maritime peripheries and the analysis of how local actors appropriated, reinterpreted and influenced them. One central question is thus to understand how, in their everyday lives, populations could be embroiled in state struggles. Were there differences between the French and English ways of defining and defending the frontier from a military point of view? And what were the social consequences of the creation of spatial discontinuities at the local level (Chapter 3)? How was maritime sovereignty defined, from both a theoretical and a practical viewpoint, in France and in Britain? To support their claims about prizes of war, customs limits or the right of the flag, the two governments resorted to antagonistic legal theories throughout the period, which illustrate a fundamental difference in their definitions of the maritime frontier. In practice, there were no formal treaties between the two countries regarding the limits of their sovereignties at sea: in consequence, the seafarers’ languages of legal justification have a particular significance (Chapter 4). Likewise, Chapter 5 addresses the problem of the distribution and appropriation of moving maritime resources, such as fish and seaweed, paying attention to the arguments used by different actors to justify their claims. The conflict between custom and contract in establishing fishing rights in the Channel is analysed through a study of disputes between French and English fishermen. Abandoning the essentialist foundations of the national character makes it possible to rethink the opposition of the peoples. What were the social and political consequences of this fuzziness of the limits of the Channel? Was the Channel a frontier between nations? Answering this question necessitates changing again the scope and scale of analysis. Part III (Transgressing the Border) thus focuses on borderland inhabitants and describes the complex social relations between populations living in close proximity to that indefinite and ever-changing liquid space. Investigating cross-Channel mobility and following the migrants in their journeys entails delineating a new frame of reference, which does not replicate juridical, political or military limits. It transpires that transnational relations ‘from below’ often operated outside the rules laid down by governments. This perspective enables us to rediscover long-term connections which have been forgotten and erased by the drawing of international borders. The last three chapters draw attention to the discrepancies between state policies and the languages and practices of local actors, both in

28

Introduction

wartime and in peacetime. Fishermen lived directly from the sea. They also paid the heaviest price for eighteenth-century wars. What strategies did they use to continue their activities during wartime (Chapter 6)? And how did smugglers manage most of the time to capitalize on the rivalry of the two neighbouring kingdoms to keep trading (Chapter 7)? How successful were the states in their attempts to check and monitor the traffic of migrants across the Channel (Chapter 8)? Facing state policies which increasingly tended to control their movements and define their identities, French and English populations were never passive. They knew how to exploit the blurriness of this liquid frontier to their own advantage.

Part I

The border invented

1

The impossibility of an island Before the Channel was a sea

The idea that physical obstacles like seas, mountains or rivers form natural boundaries between states and peoples was a commonplace among philosophers such as David Hume and Jean-Jacques Rousseau.1 Geographer Jean-Nicolas Buache de La Neuville (1741–1825) shared the same view that an unchanging topography would eternally dictate constraints on human societies: ‘Nature herself had parcelled out the globe since its beginning; she had divided up its surface into an infinite number of parts and had separated them from each other by barriers that neither time nor human intervention can ever destroy.’2 In the second half of the eighteenth century, nations were described in the same way, as in Robinet’s Dictionnaire universel (1778): ‘National character ordinarily has the same limits as the state: when crossing a river, when going over a mountain, one finds, with a new government, new mores.’3 But such geographic essentialism, which made divisions between states, peoples and nations a natural phenomenon and a blunt fact unworthy of discussion, was slow to establish itself. There were other ways of interpreting geographical divisions in the modern era. The Bible remained the indisputable foundation of all human knowledge for most scholars until at least the mid-eighteenth century. Compliance with religious orthodoxy entailed first interpreting earthly relief according to Genesis: the proximity of the French and English coasts was the result of divine providence, and this encouraged the dispersal of nations and the 1

2

3

D. Hume, ‘Of National Characters’ (1748) and J.-J. Rousseau, Extrait du projet de paix perpétuelle de l’Abbé de Saint-Pierre (1761), cited in P. Sahlins, ‘Natural frontiers revisited: France’s boundaries since the seventeenth century’, AHR, 95 (1990), p. 1436. J.-N. Buache de la Neuville, Essai d’une nouvelle division politique, ou moyen d’établir d’une manière fixe et invariable les bornes des possessions entre les différents royaumes (n.d.), quoted in D. Nordman, Frontières de France: De l’espace au territoire XVIe–XIXe siècle (Paris: Gallimard, 1998), pp. 111–12. J.-B. Robinet, Dictionnaire universel des sciences morale, économique, politique et diplomatique (Londres: Libraires associés, 1779), ‘Caractère national’, vol. X, p. 563.

31

32

The border invented

rapprochement of peoples. Moreover, there is a long list of authors, from the Greek geographer Strabo and the Roman historian Tacitus to Jean Bodin in the sixteenth century, who claimed that England was once attached to the Continent by a chalk bridge. In the controversy over the formation of the Earth, which began in the mid-seventeenth century, it was not so much the historicity of the Flood that sparked debate as its effects.4 Where the Channel was concerned, the question of when, how and why England’s separation from the Continent took place divided scholarly opinion. The advocates of a literal reading of Genesis saw the divide of the Strait of Dover as a consequence of the Flood; others stressed post-diluvian changes, erosion, earthquakes; still others postulated that the Flood was just the latest in a series of disasters that wrought changes across the surface of the Earth. In all cases people were assumed to have witnessed the separation, and the Channel to be younger than humankind. By this logic the ancestors of the English and the French were neighbours because they were related. But the meanings of the Channel came and went with times and tides. In the seventeenth and the eighteenth centuries nature itself was historicised. The search for origins – humanity’s, but also the Earth’s – was an obsession of the Enlightenment man. And the Channel was no exception to this ‘conquest of the historical world’,5 which can be summarised in a question: how long had the Channel been there? The same problem can be formulated differently: how long had England been an island? The naturalist, the geologist, the antiquarian and the historian did not agree because their time frames did not coincide. The major epistemological watershed of the second half of the eighteenth century was the idea of geological change, free of biblical chronology. The Earth, and hence the formation of the Channel, thereafter appeared to be far older than the first people and nations. Finally, by dating the existence of the isthmus to prehistoric times, geology confirmed a contrario that men had always known this sea, this natural partition, and a political interpretation of geography then became possible. The Channel as a footbridge between related peoples: ethnic theology 1600–1770 European scholars in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century France and England reflected on the peopling of the Earth by the different nations 4 5

R. Rappaport, ‘Geology and orthodoxy: the case of Noah’s flood in eighteenth century thought’, BJHS, 11 (1978), p. 8. From the expression of E. Cassirer, La philosophie des Lumières (Paris: Fayard, 1990) (1st edn: 1966).

The impossibility of an island: before the Channel was a sea

33

after the Flood. Their arguments were always drawn from the same source: the Bible.6 Several passages in Genesis mention the dispersion of nations after the Flood and the Tower of Babel. According to the sacred text, all the Earth was populated by the descendants of the three sons of Noah: Shem, Ham and Japheth: ‘These are the families of the sons of Noah, after their generations, in their nations: and by these were the nations divided in the Earth after the flood’ (Genesis 10:32). It is in this intellectual context, studied by Colin Kidd, that we need to place the interpretation of the proximity of the English coast to France.7 Various theories were formed to validate a single basic premise: the uniqueness of the human species. In this context the proximity of the two coastlines is no coincidence: it can only be explained by providence, which has thus favoured the mixing of people. Sacred history was severely challenged by European ‘discoveries’ of the world in the sixteenth century, which called into question the universality of the Flood. How could Mosaic orthodoxy, according to which all of humanity was descended from the offspring of Noah, be reconciled with the presence of Indians in America? The discussion about the populating of England was just another way of expressing the same problem, so much so that the two debates were often linked in the argument. The question of the origin of Indians was widely discussed in seventeenthcentury England and France.8 Most authors adopted the idea of the migration of Tartar or Scythian tribes from Northeast Asia. Against the backdrop of the theological disputes engendered by the Pre-Adamitæ of Isaac de Lapeyrère (1655), former chief justice Matthew Hale (1609–1676) wrote, for example, a Primitive Origination of Mankind (1677) to prove that the presence of Indians in America did not contradict the Mosaic account. The author attempted to demonstrate that Americans were derived from successive waves of migration.9 The approach taken to explain the settlement of the New World was then extended to the British Isles: ‘We have reason to believe that we of this island are not aborigines, but came hither by migrations, colonies, or plantations from other parts of the world.’10

6

C. Kidd, British Identities before Nationalism: Ethnicity and Nationhood in the Atlantic World, 1600–1800 (Cambridge University Press, 1999), pp. 9–10. Ibid. 8 See L.E. Huddleston, Origins of the American Indians: European Concepts, 1492–1729 (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1967), pp. 110–43. 9 P. Rossi, The Dark Abyss of Time: The History of the Earth and the History of Nations from Hooke to Vico (The University of Chicago Press, 1987) (Italian edn: 1979), pp. 29–33. 10 M. Hale, The Primitive Origination of Mankind, Considered and Examined according to the Light of Nature (London: Printed by William Godbid, 1677), pp. 194–5. 7

34

The border invented

Other authors did not hesitate to consign to the dustbins of history myths regarding the spontaneous generation of the British Isles’ inhabitants, such as the teleology of Diodorus Siculus (90 BC–30 BC). Plagiarising William Camden (1551–1623), André Du Chesne (1584–1640) doubted ‘that in the first age of the world men were drawn out of earth, like pumpkins or mushrooms that are born of moisture in woods or forests’.11 The thesis of an exogenous populating of the British Isles by successive waves of migrants was therefore universally acknowledged, but the identity of those first settlers was far from settled. One tradition in particular placed the emphasis on the filiation between the ancestors of the French and the English. Patriotic humanists in both France and England in the second half of the sixteenth century sought to ground national origins in reliable sources. Julius Cæsar’s Gallic Wars and Tacitus’s Agricola were the two books always cited on the ethnic origin of the Britons. Cæsar was the first to describe Britain, in the first century BC, and to propose a genealogy for the peopling of the island: ‘The interior portion of Britain is inhabited by those of whom they say that it is handed down by tradition that they were born in the island itself; the maritime portion by those who had passed over from the country of the Belgæ for the purpose of plunder and making war.’12 Tacitus, in 97–98 AD, was less categorical about the geographical origin of the Britons and evoked the theory of climates: Who were the original inhabitants of Britain and whether they were indigenous or immigrant is one which, as one would expect among barbarous people, has never received attention . . . Those peoples, again, who adjoin Gaul are also like Gauls, whether because the influence of heredity persists, or because when two lands project in opposite directions till they face each other the climatic condition stamps a certain physique on the human body.13

The idea in these two texts that Britons and Gauls were part of the same ethnic group has a long history.14 Without breaking with sacred history, 11

12 13

14

A. Du Chesne, Histoire générale d’Angleterre, d’Escosse et d’Irlande (Paris: Jean Petit-Pas, 1614), pp. 33–4. The extract quoted is in W. Camden, Britannia (1607 edn), translated from the Latin by P. Holland in 1610. On this founding text of British geography, see S. Piggott, ‘William Camden and the Britannia’, in R.C. Richardson (ed.), The Changing Face of English Local History (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2000), pp. 12–29 (1st edn: 1957); F.J. Levy, ‘The making of Camden’s Britannia’, BHR, 26 (1964), pp. 70–97. Caesar, De Bello Gallico and Other Commentaries of Caius Julius Caesar, translation W.A. Madevitt (New York: Cosimo, 2006), p. 89. Tacitus, Life and Character of Agricola, in Agricola. Germania.Dialogue on Oratory, Loeb Classical Library 35, translation M. Hutton, W. Peterson, revised by R.M. Ogilvie, E.H. Warmington, Michael Winterbottom (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1914), pp. 46–7. See for instance David Hume: ‘All ancient writers agree in representing the first inhabitants of Britain as a tribe of the Gauls or Celtae, who peopled that island from the

The impossibility of an island: before the Channel was a sea

35

the antiquaries of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries were part of this intellectual tradition. Colin Kidd has forged the notion of ‘ethnic theology’ to characterise ‘the Scriptural exegesis of racial, national and linguistic divisions’.15 Scholars interested in the origin of European nations assembled family trees of astonishing complexity in order to graft their nation onto the original trunk and root their national history in biblical soil. Even if it showed a tendency to decline after 1750, this school of thought, which asserted humanity’s single origin after the Great Flood, was an abiding one.16 From the beginning of the seventeenth century, authors in France and England highlighted the common origin of Celts, Goths and Gauls, who, by descending from Japheth’s son Gomer, stemmed from the same Noachic branch.17 The vagueness of ethnic categories up to the last quarter of the eighteenth century allowed such groupings.18 When it came to demonstrating common origins, the Ancients were still models for the Moderns, and the 1772 edition of William Camden’s Britannia drew on Cæsar and Tacitus when practising a comparative ethnology of the Gauls and the Britons: ‘I do not despair to prove, that our Britons are really the off-spring of the Gauls, by arguments taken from the name, situation, religion, customs, and language of both nations: For in all these, the most ancient Gauls and the Britons seem to have agreed, as if they had been but one people.’19 The Channel was no obstacle to mobility in these descriptions. Quite the reverse, the question of migrants’ ‘material’ passage to the islands was a mere consequence of England’s ‘situation’ (Camden again): in other words, its close proximity to the Continent. The reading, description and naming of the maritime space were therefore intended to link the mainland and the islands by referring back to an erstwhile ethnic continuity. Finalism, the teleological conviction that the world was shaped according to final causes, helped to explain why the Gauls migrated to England:

15 17

18 19

neighboring continent. Their language was the same, their manners, their government, their superstition; varied only by those small differences which time or a communication with the bordering nations must necessarily introduce’, in The History of England from the Invasion of Julius Caesar to the Revolution of 1688 (1754), new edn, 6 vols. (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 1983), vol. I, p. 4. Kidd, British Identities, p. 11. 16 Ibid., pp. 51–2. In the eighteenth century, the thesis that Bretons were themselves Gauls was common, in F. de Mezeray, Histoire de France avant Clovis (Amsterdam and Liège: J.-F. Broncart, 1700), p. 7; or [J. Le Brigant], Dissertation . . . sur une nation de Celtes nommés Brigantes (Breghente: dans le Tirol; [Paris: Briasson], 1762), pp. 89–90. A similar interpretation has existed in Britain since the beginning of the seventeenth century: see S. Kliger, The Goths in England: A Study in Seventeenth and Eighteenth Century Thought (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1952), p. 292. Kidd, British Identities, p. 242. W. Camden, Britannia . . . Translated into English, with Additions and Improvements; by Edmund Gibson, Late Lord Bishop of London, 2 vols. (1772), vol. I, p. 7.

36

The border invented

Those ancient Gomeri might probably at first cross the channel into this our island, which lay so near them, that they could easily discern it from the continent. For reason itself tells us, that every country must have received its first inhabitants, rather from neighbouring, than from remote places. Who would not judge, that Cyprus had its first inhabitants from Asia, next to it; Crete and Sicily, from their neighbour Greece . . .; In like manner, why should we not think that our Britain was peopled by the Gauls, which were our next neighbours, rather than that the Trojans, Italians, Albans, or Brutians, who lie at such a vast distance, were the first inhabitants?20

Many authors expressed the same idea at the time: the respective situations of lands and seas were the fruit of divine providence, which promoted commerce among peoples.21 Whether it was simply ignored, as by the Ancients, or whether the emphasis was placed on how narrow it was, the Channel was seen as a natural gateway that facilitated the movement of people. The same idea of continuity is found in the quarrels that divided antiquarians over certain etymologies of the term ‘Britannia’. A first etymology linked the name to Brutus, king of Troy and nephew of Priam, who defeated the former inhabitants of the British Isles, the Giants, before settling there and giving them his name.22 In the second half of the sixteenth century the legend of Trojan origins was dismantled.23 Many French scholars defended a Gaulish genealogy of the word.24 This interpretation was still being defended in the mid-eighteenth century by the Benedictine monk Jacques Martin in his Histoire des Gaules. Borrowing the etymology of ‘Britannia’ from Pliny the Elder’s Historia Naturalis, Martin claimed the name was derived from a ‘people of the Gauls called Britanni, who no doubt were the first there, and took possession of it. This people occupied a stretch of land in the vicinity of the sea, which served as a passage from the coasts of the Gauls to those of England.’25 20

21

22 23 24 25

Ibid., p. 8. For a similar interpretation, which stresses Camden’s humanist wish to harness Britain to the Continent, see R.J. Mayhew, Enlightenment Geography: The Political Languages of British Geography (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 2000), pp. 25–32. J. Viner, ‘The Providential Element in the Commerce of Nations’, in The Role of Providence in the Social Order: An Essay in Intellectual History (Princeton University Press, 1972), pp. 32–40, 44–7; C. Duflo, La finalité dans la nature de Descartes à Kant (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1996). A.B. Ferguson, Utter Antiquity: Perceptions of Prehistory in Renaissance England (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1993), pp. 84–113. T.D. Kendrick, British Antiquity (London: Methuen, 1950). A. Duchesne, Histoire générale d’Angleterre, d’Escosse et d’Irlande (Paris: Jean Petit-Pas, 1614), p. 61. D.J. Martin, Histoire des Gaules, et des Conquêtes des Gaulois . . . continué par Dom JeanFrançois De Brezillac (Paris: Imprimerie Le Breton, 1752), vol. I, pp. 158–60.

The impossibility of an island: before the Channel was a sea

37

According to Michel Foucault, in the classical age the idea of the ‘continuity of nature’ and the notion of the unity of species were rooted in the same ‘epistemological foundation’.26 Whether the intention was to show the universality of the Flood or merely the kinship of the Gauls and Britons, the oneness of the human race remained a mental horizon. Consequently the Channel could be nothing but a natural link. Simultaneously, and in contrast to the theory of the Gallic origins of the English and the French, an ‘insular chauvinism’ developed in Hanoverian England.27 The Germanic genealogy of the English, founded on Tacitus’s Germania, was thus expressed in Francophobic propaganda.28 The rise of political radicalism in the 1770s, which revived the theory of the ‘Norman Yoke’, was also a way for polemicists to express their hatred of France in terms of ethnic differences.29 The Scot John Pinkerton (1758–1826), author of a Dissertation on the Origin of the Scythians or Goths (1787), drew an impassable line between Britons and Gauls and criticised those who wanted ‘to show Gaul the parent country of modern nations in Europe, and thus to support the French dream of universal monarchy’.30 Far from insisting on the common parentage of the two peoples, these authors made British insularity the living proof of the immeasurable distance between them. Other scholars chose to explain the genesis of the word ‘Britain’ by geographical formations. According to the antiquarian John Twyne (c. 1505–1581), the British Isles were originally a promontory attached to the Continent: when the isthmus broke off, they became an island, named ‘Britannia’, from the ancient Breton brit, or ‘separate piece’.31 This type of explanation was easily reconciled with biblical narrative: in his Historiarum Britanniæ insulæ (1597), the Roman Catholic Richard White (1539–1611), who ended up in Louvain after being educated in Oxford, described how the giants escaped the rising waters of the Flood by taking refuge in ‘Anglia, then an extremity of the Continent and the most remote angulus of the world’.32 26 27 28

29 30 31 32

M. Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archeology of the Human Sciences, translated from the French (London: Routledge, 1970) (1st edn: 1966), pp. 147–50. Kidd, British Identities, p. 213. On this question, see ibid., pp. 233–45. H.D. Weinbrot, ‘Politics, taste, and national identity: some uses of Tacitism in eighteenth-century Britain’, in T.J. Luce and A.J. Woodman (eds.), Tacitus and the Tacitean Tradition (Princeton University Press, 1993), p. 177. G. Newman, The Rise of English Nationalism: A Cultural History 1740–1830 (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1987), pp. 190–1. Quoted in ibid., p. 115. J. Twyne, De Rebus Albionicis Britannicis atque Anglicis (1590). On this author, see Kendrick, British Antiquity, pp. 105–7. Quoted in Kendrick, ibid., p. 74. The same image appears in John Milton’s poetry: see The History of Britain (London: James Allestry, 1670), p. 11.

38

The border invented

Can elephants swim? Fossils and the Anglo-French isthmus The comparative study of French and British scientific theories is hindered by the national segmentation of historiographies. Roy Porter’s classic work, The Making of British Geology, has no equivalent in French and makes no connection between British and continental geologies.33 This is all the more regrettable because they did not develop in isolation from each other – for there were continual exchanges between the two. A further difficulty is that British and French intellectual chronologies differ. The debate about fossils first arose in late seventeenth-century England and Scotland before fading into the background until the 1780s, while the key moment in France came in the mid-eighteenth century, when the dispute over the origins of the globe centred on Buffon. Richard Verstegan (c. 1550–1640) was one of the first to put geological observation to use to address the relation of Britain to the Continent. In the seventeenth century the same men wrote about antiquities, fossils and etymologies.34 In 1605, under his original name of ‘Richard Rowlands’, this English Catholic, exiled in Holland, then in France, was the first to write a systematic ‘Gothic’ genealogy of England in his A Restitution of Decayed Intelligence.35 Valuing the Saxon heritage above the British past, this author drew on every source, both from the ancient literary pantheon and from his European contemporaries. His methodology was representative of a school of antiquarians including William Camden and John Speed, who linked religious and geohistorical arguments. Citing ancient and modern authors Verstegan noted that England had been connected to the Continent. Unlike them, however, he backed up this hypothesis with geomorphological arguments. First he noted the geographical proximity of the coasts of France and England, with Dover and Calais separated by just a few nautical miles. The white cliffs were, moreover, perfectly aligned opposite each other and were almost the same length. The very nature of the rocks, chalk or flint, was similar on either side, and the continuity of the layers seemed to indicate a break in a continuum. Verstegan concluded that these were 33

34 35

R. Porter, The Making of Geology: Earth Science in Britain 1660–1815 (Cambridge University Press, 1977). See also A. Corbin, The Lure of the Sea: The Discovery of the Seaside in the Western World, 1750–1840 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994), translation J. Phelps (French edn: 1988), chap. 4. C. Schneer, ‘The rise of historical geology in the seventeenth century’, Isis, 155 (1954), pp. 256–68. A Restitution of Decayed Intelligence in Antiquities. Concerning the Most Noble and Renowmed [sic] English Nation. By the studie and travaile of R. V. (Antwerp: Robert Bruney, 1605). See G. Parry, The Trophies of Time: English Antiquarians of the Seventeenth Century (Oxford University Press, 1995), pp. 49–69; Kidd, British Identities, pp. 61–3, 86–7, 218–19.

The impossibility of an island: before the Channel was a sea

39

great arguments to prove a conjunction in time long past, to have been between these two countries; whereby men did pass on dry land from the one unto the other, as it were over a bridge or isthmus of land, being altogether of chalk and flint, . . . in breadth some six English miles or thereabouts, whereby our country was then no island but peninsula, being thus fixed unto the main continent of the world.36

Verstegan also tried to reconstruct the time of the rift. Because the work of God was supposed to be necessarily perfect, the separation could only have taken place after the Creation. And above all, it was not the Flood that created the British Isles – a highly original claim for the time. Ethological arguments compressed the time span: until their general destruction ordered by King Edgar in the tenth century there were still wolves in England. Sheltered by Noah in his ark, this species had survived the Flood. But, unless men were mad enough to transport them to an island, it had to be deduced that ‘these wicked beasts did of themselves pass over’37 on dry land, since England was not yet an island. However, the Anglo-Dutch scholar did not go on to explain how the rift occurred: But now whether the breach of this our isthmus, were caused by some great earthquake, whereby the sea first breaking through, might afterward by little & little enlarge her passage, or whether it were cut by the labor of man in regard of commodity by that passage, or whether the inhabitants of the one side or the other by occasion of war did cut it; thereby to be sequestred and freed from their enimyes, must remain altogether uncertain.38

Nature in Verstegan was inconceivable without the presence of men. There were certainly witnesses to this event in the regions concerned, but the transmission of such knowledge was lost in ancient times, and oral tradition kept no record of it. So, because the conventional sources were unsatisfactory, this antiquarian turned to material evidence, in particular fossils, which he was certainly the first to reproduce in a printed work.39 In the latter half of the seventeenth century ‘fossils’, a term which refers to any material found in the ground,40 were the object of intense speculation among European scientists. The discovery of fossils in the form of petrified shells, bones or teeth, found almost everywhere in Europe, spawned several types of interpretation. It had first to be established whether fossils 36

37 40

R. Verstegan, A Restitution of Decayed Intelligence in Antiquities. Concerning the Most Noble and Renowmed [sic] English Nation. By the studie and travaile of R. V. (Antwerp: Robert Bruney, 1605), pp. 97–8. The book was republished five times in the seventeenth century. It was still widely read in the eighteenth: see for instance J. Ray, Three PhysicoTheological Discourses, 3rd edn (London: William Innys, 1713), pp. 207–9. 38 Verstegan, ibid., p. 111. Ibid., p. 111. 39 Parry, Trophies, p. 62. A. Pluche, Le Spectacle de la Nature, 8 vols. (1732–1750), vol. III (Paris: Vve Estienne, 1735), p. 303.

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were the remains of living organisms and, if so, which ones, or whether they were made up of minerals in the form of animals. If they were organisms, their presence under the Earth – and sometimes even embedded deep in the bedrock – had to be explained. What divided opinion was the role of the Flood.41 In England in the 1660s Robert Hooke (1635–1703), a member of the newly-founded, put the case for the organic origin of these shells, remnants of extinct life forms, against the fixity of species asserted in Genesis.42 He also questioned whether the Flood had been responsible for sweeping them across Europe, for in that case it would be difficult to explain their presence on mountain tops. Land forms had altered a great deal since the Creation, and land and sea had even switched places. Like mountains, the British Isles themselves were unquestionably the result of earthquakes and submarine eruptions. In the 1680s Hooke used his works on fossils to wind the age of the Earth back beyond biblical chronology, thus explaining the thickness of geological strata.43 Hooke’s Discourse of Earthquakes, posthumously published in 1705, mentioned the findings of William Somner (1598–1669).44 This ‘Gothicist’ antiquarian was the author of a Saxon dictionary and grammar (1659) and of The Antiquities of Canterbury (1640).45 In a pamphlet published in 1669, Somner recounted the discovery of fossilised teeth by his brother John in September 1668. Digging a well in his garden in the village of Chartham, near Canterbury, he unearthed four teeth, ‘almost as big . . . as a man’s fist’,46 buried at a depth of seventeen feet. The Chartham teeth were found alongside bones that could not be human. Somner conjectured that these remains were those of ‘some 41

42

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R. Rappaport, When Geologists Were Historians, 1665–1750 (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1997), pp. 112–19; Rossi, Dark Abyss, pp. 3–6; E. Stokes, ‘The six days and the Deluge: some ideas on earth history in the Royal Society of London, 1660–1775’, ESJ, 3 (1969), pp. 16–21. Rossi, Dark Abyss, pp. 13–17; Y. Ito, ‘Hooke’s cyclic theory of the earth in the context of seventeenth-century England’, BJHS, 21 (1988), pp. 295–314; D.D. Oldroyd, ‘Geological controversy in the seventeenth century: “Hooke vs Wallis” and its aftermath’, in M. Hunter and S. Schaffer (eds.), Robert Hooke: New Studies (Woodbridge: The Boydell Press, 1989), pp. 207–33. Ito, ‘Hooke’s cyclic theory’, p. 303. W. Somner, Chartham News: Or a Brief Relation of Some Strange Bones There Lately Digged Up (London: T. Garthwait, 1669), reedited in PT, vol. XXII (1700–1701), pp. 882–93. It is not clear if Hooke himself had actually read Somner, since his ‘Discourse of Earthquakes’ was written in 1668, but the 1705 posthumous edition mentioned him: R. Hooke, The Posthumous Works of Robert Hooke (London: Richard Waller, 1705), p. 313. Hooke might have obtained information from Somner in his lifetime. G. Parry, ‘An incipient medievalist in the seventeenth century: William Somner of Canterbury’, in L.J. Workman, K. Verduin and D.D. Metzger (eds.), Medievalism and the Academy (Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 1999), pp. 58–65. Somner, Chartham News, p. 883.

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Marine, or Sea-bred Creature’ whose presence at such a distance from the coast needed to be explained. How to determine ‘Whether . . . the Sea did ever actually insinuate itself so far as to this place, and when?’47 Like the good antiquarian he was, the author first explored ancient sources, but Cæsar’s testimony indicated that the topography of Kent was unchanged since Roman times. The change was therefore very ancient: The world is very aged, many thousand years old, and many and manifold are the alterations, changes and mutations, which time hath made in several parts and quarters of the world, to the notice and discovery whereof no written Record, or unwritten Tradition at this day, can reach or direct us . . . Of such a nature they conceive may this of the Æstuary be, so very ancient, as time hath quite worn out the memory of it.48

The formation and subsequent disappearance of this estuary was explained by a natural obstacle on which the sea water broke: ‘[an] Isthmus, or neck of land, between Gaul and Britain, rendering the latter of the same Continent with the former’.49 In support of this thesis Somner quoted authors we have already encountered: Camden, Verstegan and Twyne. Gradually worn down, then broken up by marine erosion, the isthmus had left traces: the teeth, covered by accumulated alluvia. But this theory rested on the idea that fossils were organic in origin, which was not self-evident. Furthermore, such an explanation dispensed with the Flood. It was on these two issues – the nature and transportation of fossils – that the controversy with authors who preferred strict fidelity to the biblical text hinged. One of the bastions of orthodoxy was the Oxford Philosophical Society. Among the first wave of opponents to Hooke was the antiquarian, naturalist and historian Robert Plot (1640–1696), curator of the Ashmolean Museum. Plot conceded the organic origin of fossils for the large bones found in Cornwall, but reconciled this thesis with the Bible.50 If some authors attributed these fossils to elephants, ‘brought hither during the Government of the Romans in Britain’,51 Plot thought they were human in origin, the teeth and bones of giants, in line with the Goliaths and children of the Titans attested by the Bible.52 The debate was never settled and people went on arguing about whether the teeth belonged to elephants, horses, hippopotamuses or giants until the late 47 50 51 52

49 Ibid., p. 885. 48 Ibid., p. 890. Ibid. R. Plot, The Natural History of Oxford-shire, 2nd edn (Oxford: Printed by Leon. Lichfield, 1705) (1st edn: 1677), pp. 103–14. Ibid., p. 134. Ibid., pp. 132–40. On this passage, see Rappaport, When Geologists, pp. 113–14. On the myth of giants, see A. Schnapper, ‘Persistance des géants’, AESC, 41 (1986), pp. 177–200.

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eighteenth century. Depending on the professed interpretation, the landbridge theory was more, or less, indispensable. John Wallis (1616–1703), whose position reflected that of the Oxford Philosophical Society, took up Somner’s geological ideas and developed them in his reflections on the erosive power of marine currents. However, with respect to chronology he was far less adventurous. The breach probably dated from ‘many hundreds of years before that time’,53 before Cæsar, not thousands of years as Somner claimed. Besides the topographic criterion, ‘the unity of language between the Ancient Gauls and Britons’54 suggested that the two communicated with each other. Wallis proposed a literal reading of the history of Atlantis. The ancient tradition about the submersion of an island had been distorted across the generations. The original happening had become blurred in the memories of men, but not totally erased: ‘Long before Plato’s time, there had been some such dissolution or rupture of an isle or isthmus, somewhere in the Atlantick Ocean, of which there were some symptoms yet remaining in Plato’s time.’55 England was Atlantis. The diluvian explanation was called into question seriously at the beginning of the eighteenth century, which saw the permanent establishment of the land-bridge theory. In 1745 at the Royal Society, the natural philosopher Henry Baker (1698–1774) delivered a report on a fossil tooth and some elephant bones found in Norfolk. The presence of such tropical animals ‘must either imply their having been placed here by Providence, originally, or, that this Island must, heretofore, have been contiguous to the Continent’.56 But even so it had to be explained why elephants would have left warm latitudes for England: Baker posited large-scale climate change caused by a tiny shift in the Earth’s axial tilt. So the tropical climate prevailing in England at the time explained how elephants had been able to survive there. It was only at the end of the eighteenth century that the progress made in comparative anatomy, notably the work of George Cuvier (1769–1832) in the Muséum d’Histoire Naturelle, allowed scientists to break with the idea of a great migration of elephants to Northern Europe, America or Central Europe. In various papers published between 1795 and 1812 Cuvier tackled the problem from another angle: the very ‘position’ of the British Isles seemed to suggest they ‘cannot have received many living elephants’.57 Yet there were a 53

54 56 57

‘A Letter of Dr. John Wallis, . . . Relating to that Isthmus, or Neck of Land, which is supposed to have joined England and France in former Times, where now is the Passage between Dover and Calais’, PT, vol. XXII (1700–1701), p. 973. 55 Ibid., p. 968. Ibid., p. 975. ‘A Letter from Mr. Henry Baker, F.R.S. to the president, concerning an extraordinary large fossil tooth of an elephant’, PT, vol. XLIII (1744–1745), p. 332. G. Cuvier, ‘Eléphans vivans et fossiles’ (1806), translated in M.J. Rudwick, Georges Cuvier, Fossil Bones, and Geological Catastrophes: New Translations and Interpretations of

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great many fossils there. The founder of vertebrate palæontology then showed that the fossils belonged to ‘an extinct species’, which resembled the elephant. These bones had therefore not been transported by man or water, for they were ‘already in the places where they are found, when the liquid came and covered them’. These animals ‘inhabited and were alive in the countries where their bones are found today’.58 Unless one assumed that mammoths could swim, the inevitable conclusion was that the British Isles had at some point been attached to the European continent. The example of elephants illustrates the success of the isthmus theory, which in the mid-eighteenth century won out over the providentialist interpretation of the history of the Earth. The formation of the Strait of Dover was to remain a bone of contention in the great geological debates of the eighteenth century. To James Hutton (1726–1797) at the end of the century,59 the similarity of the cliff-faces of Cap Blanc Nez and the North Downs proved that the formation of the Strait was the result of subsidence. The ‘Neptunist’ Jean-Claude de La Métherie (1743–1817) attributed the Strait’s formation to marine erosion and contested the continuity of layers.60 Such theories were not confined to the scientific community. The idea of England once being joined to France became popular in the second half of the eighteenth century, at least in informed opinion. The description of the cliffs became a mandatory passage in English travel writings on France and vice versa.61 Geographical dictionaries also made a point of mentioning these debates in the first decades of the nineteenth century. The Royal Geographer Robert alternated between sea erosion or ‘some great catastrophe of nature’ when explaining the formation of the Strait of Dover.62

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the Primary Texts (University of Chicago Press, 2008), pp. 93–4. An earlier and shorter version of this essay appeared in 1796 (translated in ibid., pp. 18–24). The first quote is directly translated from Cuvier, ‘Mémoire sur les espèces d’éléphans vivans et fossiles’, Mém. de l’Institut des Sciences et des Arts, 7 (1799), vol. II, pp. 1–22; or, ‘Eléphans vivans et fossiles’, pp. 265–9. Ibid., pp. 137–9. To explain the extinction of the mammoths, Cuvier used a catastrophist explanation of the changes which the surface of the Earth experienced, in particular violent variations of the sea level. J. Hutton, Theory of the Earth with Proofs and Illustrations (Edinburgh: Cadell & Junior, 1795) (reedited in Verlag von J. Cramer, 1972), vol. II, p. 285. J.-C. de La Metherie, Théorie de la Terre (Paris: Maradan, 1795), vol. III, p. 389. ‘Neptunist’ scientists argued, after the German Abraham Gottlob Werner (1749–1817), that the Earth had originally consisted of water, which had in different phases precipitated in sedimented rocks. P. Readman, ‘“The cliffs are not cliffs”: the cliffs of Dover and national identities in Britain, c. 1750–c. 1950’, History, 99 (2014), p. 246. On the journeys of tourists and scientists along the sea-coasts, see Corbin, Lure of the Sea, pp. 111–20. While the first edition of his Dictionnaire was still hesitant, the second explanation prevailed in the third edition of 1825: F. Robert, Dictionnaire géographique (Paris:

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Two centuries later debates on this region’s geomorphological formation are divided along the same lines. Geologists explain England’s structural separation from the Continent in two different ways. The first hypothesis is that of a ‘chalk bridge’ attacked by erosion, perhaps due to the overflow from a glacial lake. The second hypothesis gives a prominent role to tectonics, to the movement of the fault lines which traverse the eastern Channel.63 The prehistoric Channel, or the past lasts forever The discrepancy of times It is today a commonplace to place geological and palæontological events on the same timeline. Planet Earth came into existence approximately 4.5 billion years ago; ‘modern’ man, homo sapiens sapiens, is 100,000 years old; the Strait of Dover is the result of rising sea levels, which connected the Channel and the North Sea following the melting of the Scandinavian and Canadian glaciers (the ‘Flandrian transgression’) during the Holocene Interglacial, between 9,000 and 8,500 years ago; the presence of the first populations of the British Isles dates back to the third millennium BC. Until the mid-eighteenth century, while the Bible was considered the main source of knowledge, this chronology would not have made sense. According to Genesis, God created the universe and humankind in the same week. On the second day he created the Earth and the sea, while the first man was created on the sixth day. A literal reading of the Mosaic narrative quite logically precluded the idea of evolution, and above all a discrepancy between the age of the Earth and that of humans. Despite the absence of evidence or memories of the breach, and despite La Peyrère’s Pre-Adamitæ (1655) and the debates on non-biblical chronologies (which called into question biblical chronology), most British scholars remained, until the end of the seventeenth century, biblically orthodox when it came to describing the phenomena of erosion.64 In Britain these

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Eymery, 1818), vol. I, p. 70; Robert, Dictionnaire géographique, 3rd edn (Paris: Bouquin de Lasouche, 1825), vol. II, p. 377. The same two hypotheses are still being discussed by geologists; see S. Gupta et al., ‘Catastrophic flooding origin of shelf valley systems in the English Channel’, Nature, 448 (2007), pp. 342–45. J. Roger, Buffon: Un philosophe au Jardin du Roi (Paris: Fayard, 1989), p. 140; G.L. Davies, ‘The concept of denudation in seventeenth-century England’, JHI, 27 (1966), pp. 278–84; S. Toulmin and J. Goodfield, The Discovery of Time (New York: Harper Row, 1965). Matthew Hale accepted the possibility of land bridges which would have permitted the passage of animals and humans from one continent to the other, and before disappearing ‘within a period of 4000 years’, in Hale, Primitive Origination, p. 193.

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issues would be forgotten for nearly a century until James Hutton’s Theory of the Earth appeared in 1795. In France, however, the middle decades of the century saw a profound renewal of interest in theories about the Earth. One of the books that started the argument was Telliamed, ou Entretiens d’un philosophe indien avec un missionnaire françois sur la diminution de la mer (1748).65 Its author, Benoît de Maillet (1656–1738), moved the origin of the universe a long way back, to before the account of Genesis. This subversive, Cartesian work, which adopted a long chronology for the globe (a million years) and refuted the role of the Flood in the depositing of fossils, triggered the anger of the devout. The controversy regained momentum with Buffon’s Histoire et théorie de la terre (1707–1788), the first volume of his Histoire naturelle générale et particulière (1749).66 Nature in Buffon was organised in a coherent system, and his description of terrestrial forms stressed regularities and continuities. Terrestrial and submarine mountains were the result of sedimentation and erosion, phenomena made necessary by ‘the general order of nature’.67 The universal Flood did not explain the physical history of the Earth. While he apparently remained cautious about biblical chronology in order to protect himself from censorship,68 he nevertheless suggested that ‘the history of the Earth has been infinitely longer than the history of mankind’.69 The writings of Maillet and Buffon faced a general outcry in the Sorbonne70 but also among the philosophes. Voltaire, for example, who became a convert to Newtonian final causes, defended a non-organic conception of the origin of fossils to demonstrate that the form of the Earth had not fundamentally changed since the Creation. His Dissertation sur les changements arrivés dans notre globe (1746) targeted, among others, Maillet and Buffon.71 Voltaire reworked several of Buffon’s demonstrations to show that they were based on risky 65

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It was first translated into English in 1750 in Benoît de Maillet, Teliamed, or Conversations between an Indian Philosopher and a French Missionary on the Diminution of the Sea, translated and edited by A.V. Carozzi (Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1968). G.-L. Comte de Buffon, Histoire et théorie de la terre (Paris: Imprimerie Royale, 1749). Ibid., p. 95. 68 Roger, Buffon, p. 148. 69 Ibid. N. Broc, La géographie des philosophes: Géographes et voyageurs français au XVIIIe siècle (Paris: Ophrys, 1975), p. 196. Voltaire, Dissertation sur les changements arrivés dans notre globe, et sur les pétrifications qu’on prétend en être encore les témoignages, written for the Bologna Academy in 1746, published in French in 1749, in Oeuvres complètes de Voltaire (Paris: Hachette, 1892), vol. XXIV, p. 131. On Voltaire’s position vis-à-vis the ‘new science’, see Rossi, Dark Abyss, pp. 90–4; M. Carozzi, ‘Voltaire’s attitude towards geology’, Archives des Sciences et compte rendu des séances de la société, 36 (1983), pp. 1–145; M.S. Seguin, Science et religion dans la pensée française du XVIIIe siècle: Le mythe du Déluge universel (Paris: Honoré Champion, 2001), pp. 150–3; R. Morieux, ‘Des montagnes sous la mer: la géologie du dix-huitième siècle et l’impossible distinction entre mers et montagnes’, in A. Cabantous, J.-L. Chappey, R. Morieux, N. Richard and F. Walter (eds.), Mers et montagnes dans la culture européenne XVIe–XIXe siècles (Presses Universitaires de Rennes, 2011), pp. 127–45.

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assumptions. The following extract illustrates Voltaire’s taste for paralogisms that mocked the premises of scientific reasoning by appropriating the vocabulary of misleading proof and objectivity: The hills about Calais and Dover are rocks of chalk: therefore these hills have been formerly undivided by water. The soil about Gibraltar and Tangiers is nearly of the same nature: therefore Africa and Europe were formerly joined, and there was no Mediterranean Sea. The Pyrenees, the Alps, and the Apennines, have been thought by several philosophers to be the ruins of a world that has undergone a number of changes. This opinion was strongly maintained by the whole Pythagorean school, as well as by many others. They likewise affirmed that the earth we at present inhabit was formerly a sea, and that the sea was for a long time dry land.72

These discussions found a considerable echo well beyond solely scholarly circles. The Histoire et théorie de la terre was one of the bestsellers of the eighteenth century.73 In this intellectual context, which foregrounded questions regarding the origin of the world, the Amiens Academy organised an essay prize in 1751, the subject of which was the following question: ‘Has England been part of the continent of the Gauls?’74 The winning dissertation is well known: it was the work of Nicolas Desmarest (1725–1815), one of the founders of French geology. Nicolas Desmarest’s Dissertation on the Ancient Junction of England to France (1753) The Dissertation sur l’ancienne jonction de l’Angleterre à la France was the only monograph on the Channel to be published in the eighteenth century.75 This youthful work holds little interest for historians of geology, being hardly original and lower in profile than the more innovative thinking of the day: it is precisely because it is an ‘average’ work that this tentative synthesis merits attention.76 72 73

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Voltaire, Dissertation (1746), in Oeuvres Complètes de Voltaire (Paris: Hachette, 1892), vol. XXIV, p. 131. D. Mornet, Les sciences de la nature en France au XVIIIe siècle (Paris: Slatkine, 2001) (1st edn: 1911), p. 9; Y. Laissus, ‘Les cabinets d’histoire naturelle’, in R. Taton (ed.), Enseignement et diffusion des sciences en France au XVIIIe siècle (Paris: Hermann, 1964), p. 664. Unfortunately, the only surviving folder from the Academy archives only deals with the period after 1760: ADS, D138. N. Desmarest, Dissertation sur l’ancienne jonction de l’Angleterre à la France, Qui a emporté le prix, au jugement de l’Académie des Sciences, Belles-Lettres et Arts d’Amiens, en l’année 1751 (Amiens: Veuve Godart, 1753). Historians have mostly been interested in the second half of Desmarest’s career, once he had become a respected and influential scientist. This Whiggish tendency is most obvious in Sir A. Geikie, The Founders of Geology, 2nd edn (London and New York: Macmillan, 1905), pp. 140–75. See, however, K.L. Taylor, ‘La genèse d’un naturaliste: Desmarest,

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Desmarest’s approach in demonstrating the prior existence of an isthmus between England and the Continent stands at the confluence of the two traditions we have been examining. He first places himself in the field of history, demonstrating that Gauls and Britons were once one and the same people, before presenting the physical ‘proofs’. The second part explains the processes whereby this spit of land disappeared. As was typical in eighteenth-century natural science, Desmarest articulated both lines of argument without any awareness of contradiction.77 An enthusiastic student of the ‘new physics’,78 Desmarest saw in nature an underlying organisation, and the scholar’s job was to decipher it. Like Buffon, he put the case for actualism, that is, the idea that the causes of past changes continue to act in the present. The breach of the isthmus was due to cycles of erosion and sedimentation, favoured by the strength of marine currents. Desmarest traced this development back from soundings of the seabed taken by the Neptune français, an atlas of marine charts from Norway to Gibraltar, commissioned by Colbert and published in 1693.79 He was also inspired by topographical maps of the English Channel made by Philippe Buache (1700–1773), in particular the Carte physique et profil du canal de la Manche et d’une partie de la Mer du Nord, où se voit l’état actuel des profondeurs de la Mer, avec les terrains de France et d’Angleterre. An argument also arose with Buache, Premier Géographe du Roi, over who was the first to have scientifically demonstrated the former junction of England with the Continent.80 Desmarest claimed a Newtonian affiliation, and his insistence on the idea that ‘everything is connected in the mechanism of the universe’ led

77 78 79 80

la lecture et la nature’, in G. Gohau (ed.), De la géologie à son histoire (Paris: CTHS, 1997), pp. 61–74. The book was republished in the nineteenth century, at the time of heated discussions about the Channel tunnel: Nicolas Desmarest, L’Ancienne jonction de l’Angleterre à la France ou Le Détroit de Calais. Sa formation par la rupture de l’isthme. Sa topographie et sa constitution géologique. Ouvrage qui a remporté le prix au concours de l’Académie d’Amiens en l’année 1751 (Paris: Isidore Liseux, 1875). Taylor, ‘La genèse d’un naturaliste’, p. 67. According to the expression of J. Ehrard, L’idée de nature en France à l’aube des Lumières (Paris: Albin Michel, 1970), p. 115. J. Bourgouin, ‘Hydrographie et cartographie françaises de 1800 à nos jours’, BCFC, 113 (1987), p. 31. When presenting to the Académie des Sciences, in 1752, his bathymetric map of the Channel, Buache claimed he had drawn it back in 1737: P. Buache, ‘Essai de géographie physique où l’on propose des vues générales sur l’espèce de charpente du globe’, MARS, 1752 (Paris, 1754). But this precision was probably aimed at establishing the anteriority of Buache’s discoveries against Desmarest: L. Lagarde, ‘Philippe Buache (1700–1773), cartographe ou géographe?’, in D. Lecoq et A. Chambard (eds.), Terre à découvrir, terres à parcourir (Paris: L’Harmattan, 1998), pp. 148–9. Desmarest countered by accusing Buache of having stolen his findings: Desmarest, ‘Avertissement de l’auteur’, in Dissertation, n.p.

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him to a religious cosmogony.81 While rejecting miracles and the supernatural, he also referred to the ‘universal Flood’82 and offered an orthodox dating for the breach of the isthmus: ‘By allowing eleven hundred and twenty-five years for the removal of the isthmus, we give the peoples the time to spread across Gaul, and to go to settle in England; & we move the event back far enough for it to have been quite unknown to the Phœnicians and Pytheas.’83 If English periodicals did not mention Desmarest’s book – no doubt because he was merely parroting debates known across the Channel84 – the Dissertation was the subject of several reviews in French. The book’s uneven reception in France helps us piece together the intellectual fault lines.85 The Journal des Sçavans was the least critical; it merely summarised Desmarest’s historical content, while underlining the fact that ‘this induction, albeit specious, nevertheless simply is nothing more than an ingenious hypothesis’.86 For all that he accepted Desmarest’s overall explanation, the reviewer put his finger on the contradiction between the purported slowness of erosion phenomenon and the short chronology proposed by the Dissertation: ‘If one assumes progress to be always at the same rate, it would have taken approximately 45,000 years for the sea to destroy an isthmus that would have been just two short leagues in length.’87 The Jesuit Journal de Trévoux was not wholly persuaded by the idea of an earlier land connection: ‘There is in all this well-supported speculation: that is all that one can hope for on such a subject.’88 The harshest criticism was found in Elie Fréron’s journal, L’Année littéraire, which engaged in a formal demolition of the book and called into question not just the very hypothesis of the isthmus, but the interest of such research into the origin of the forms of the Earth: ‘What is the point of seeking the causes of this alleged severing [ruption], when it is not yet proven that the isthmus has ever existed? . . . The question is pure fancy and presents no advantage to the Society [of Jesus].’89 81 82 84

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Desmarest, Dissertation, p. 69. On this, see Ehrard, L’idée de nature, pp. 40–51. 83 Desmarest, ibid., p. 105. Ibid., p. 154. The Critical Review (1755–), the London Chronicle (1757–) and The Annual Register (1758–) appeared after this period, and the book is not cited in A. Forster, Index to Book Reviews in England, 1749–1774 (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1990). Besides the periodicals mentioned in the text, I have also consulted the Journal Encyclopédique, which only starts to be published in 1756, and does not mention Desmarest. Nor are Grimm’s Correspondance littéraire and Barruel’s Lettres Helviennes. 87 Journal des Sçavants (September 1753), p. 590. Ibid., p. 592. Journal de Trévoux ou Mémoires pour servir à l’histoire des sciences et des arts (Geneva: Slatkine Reprints, 1969) (1st edn: 1753), vol. LIII, p. 621. L’Année Littéraire ou suite des lettres sur quelques écrits de ce temps par Fréron (1754), vol. VI, p. 349.

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In the mid-eighteenth century the Dissertation was too daring for the devout, but was actually less adventurous than Buffon. In fact, in those days it was possible to defend both Genesis and geology. The idea of an Earth without men still met with many misgivings in the Christian apologetics of this period. In the last quarter of the century, however, with the appearance of the Additions à la Théorie de la Terre (1772) and, above all, the Époques de la nature (1778), Buffon drew out the geological timescale and separated the history of men and that of the Earth. The globe had begun to cool down 75,000 years before our time, but the temperature remained too high for the emergence of life. The first animals – the most primitive shellfish and fish – appeared just 35,000 years later. Elephants, rhinoceroses and reindeer inhabited the northern regions of America, Europe and Asia 15,000 years before Buffon was writing.90 The presence of fossils in these regions showed that the three continents were still joined at that time. Their separation occurred in what Buffon called the sixth age: ‘It is to the date of approximately ten thousand years, counting backwards from today, that I would place the separation of Europe and America; and it is approximately in this same time-period that England separated from France, Ireland from England, Sicily from Italy, Sardinia from Corsica, and both from the continent of Africa.’91 The first men appeared only after this separation, in the seventh and last age. Following the logic of Buffon’s argument, ‘England’ was an island before it was populated. Whether one opted for fidelity to the biblical text or chose the longue durée, the end result was the same: by pushing back the isthmus’s existence to a prehistoric period, Buffon confirmed a contrario that men had always known this sea. Buffon’s scientific analysis was a far cry from the political propaganda used in wartime. Yet Buffon shared one presupposition with propagandists: the sea has separated France and England for all of human eternity. The Channel Islands: a separation in historical time? On the larger scale there were parts of the Channel that, to the eighteenthcentury mind, were formed only after the breach of the Strait of Dover. The complex history of the Channel Islands, which have changed sovereignty so often, was confirmed by geological theories, which made them chunks of land broken off from the Continent at a later stage. L’Archipel de la Manche, a short essay appearing in 1883 as an introduction to Victor Hugo’s Travailleurs de la mer, opens with a geological interpretation of the 90 91

G.-L. Buffon, Des époques de la nature, supplement of Histoire naturelle générale et particulière (Paris: Imprimerie Royale, 1778), pp. 169–80. Ibid., p. 206. See Rossi, Dark Abyss, pp. 107–12.

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formation of the Channel and describes the violence of the marine erosion that eventually isolated the Channel Islands: ‘In 709, sixty years before Charlemagne came to the throne, a heavy swell cut off Jersey from France.’92 This interpretation was not merely a fantasy.93 The view was commonly held in the 1880s by French and English scholars alike. At the beginning of the twentieth century the geographer Camille Vallaux set out to deconstruct such popular myths, tales and legends.94 This magical geography, inherited from ancient religious beliefs, was nourished in the long term by a series of scientific theories. Today geologists believe that the last phases of formation of the Normandy-Brittany Gulf date back to the ‘Flandrian Transgression’, the name given by geologists to the episode which saw, at the end of the last glacial period (around 12,000 to 10,000 years ago), the melting of glaciers in Europe.95 However, a constant reshaping of the coastline was (and still is) at work due to the strength of the tides, storms and currents. In the late seventeenth century, in his important local monograph on Jersey, the historian and clergyman Philip Falle (1656–1742) stated his belief that the rift occurred in the Middle Ages: ‘In the parish of St. Ouen, the sea has within these 350 years swallowed up a very rich vale, where to this hour, at low-water, the marks of buildings appear among the rocks, and great stumps of oaks are seen in the sand after a storm. The records of the Exchequer make mention of a people inhabiting this tract.’96 Trees buried in the sand or ruined buildings embedded in rock, the signs were no different two centuries on. In the 1860s, as the celebration of local and regional memories reached its peak in France, two members of the Normandy Society of Antiquaries, Léopold Quénault and Théodore Le Cerf, developed an interest in the Channel Islands.97 One of their models was a book by John Ahier, a Jersey author, which in turn 92 93

94 95 96 97

V. Hugo, Œuvres complètes. Roman. X, Les travailleurs de la mer, vol. I (Paris: J. Hetzel, 1883), p. 8. This essay is not translated into English. For a literary interpretation of this text, see F. Lestringant, ‘L’“Archipel de la Manche”, ou l’Insulaire de Hugo’, Studi francesi, 47 (2003), pp. 267–74; K.M. Grossman, The Later Novels of Victor Hugo: Variations on the Politics and Poetics of Transcendence (Oxford University Press, 2012), pp. 43–51; M. Roman, ‘Les Iles anglo-normandes: insularité et communauté dans Les Travailleurs de la mer’, in L. Charles-Wurtz (ed.), Victor Hugo 6: L’Ecriture poétique (Caen: Minard, 2006). C. Vallaux, L’archipel de la Manche (Paris: Hachette, 1913). See H. Elhai, La Normandie occidentale entre la Seine et le golfe normand-breton: Étude morphologique (Bordeaux: Imprimerie Bière, 1963). P. Falle, An Account of the Isle of Jersey, The Greatest of Those Islands that Are Now the Only Remainder of the English Dominions in France (London: John Newton, 1694), p. 79. S. Gerson, The Pride of Place: Local Memories and Political Culture in Nineteenth-Century France (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 2003). On Normandy specifically, see F. Guillet, Naissance de la Normandie: Genèse et épanouissement d’une image régionale en France, 1750–1850 (Caen: Annales de Normandie, 2000).

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took its inspiration from Camden and Desmarest in claiming ‘that at a time which dates back to 1,200 years B.C., England, joined to Ireland, was a peninsula’.98 According to these scholars, in the Roman era a vast forest covered an area stretching from the current peninsula as far as the west of Chausey and Jersey. The Forest of Scissy, in the Mont SaintMichel Bay and its submerged roots of birch, oak and chestnut, was one such mythical place on which the romantic imagination thrived.99 Amidst the undersea foliage one could just make out fifth-century monasteries that had been swallowed by the sea. So when did the breach come about? Léopold Quénault was inclined to favour, just like Hugo, a formidable tide of March 709, ‘that would have insularised Chausey, Jersey, Tombelaine and Mont Saint-Michel’.100 The main source used by these authors was a map by DeschampsVadeville, an ingénieur-géographe, the obscure origin of which became the source of this disjunction of mythical proportions [Figure 1.1]. The map was alleged to have been passed on to him by a monk from Mont SaintMichel in 1714 and to date from the thirteenth century.101 The undulating tide channels between the islands and France were no obstacle to the movement of people, who in these legendary accounts negotiated them by means of simple wooden planks. The map tallies with ‘popular tradition’, according to which ‘before 709 Jersey was separated from the mainland only by a stream’: this is the meaning of the place name ‘La Planche’ (literally, The Plank) on the route between Portbail and Jersey.102 This imaginary geography enabled ecclesiastical institutions to claim longstanding connections to the area. Although the islands had been annexed to the English Crown in 1204, they nevertheless came within the diocese of Coutances until as late as 1568.103 This was the route taken by the bishop of Coutances to visit his flock in Jersey in 709.104 According to John Ahier, 98

99 100 103

104

J. Ahier, Tableaux historiques de la civilisation à Jersey: Résumé philosophique des mœurs, lois et coutumes de l’île, depuis les temps les plus reculés jusqu’à la moitié du dix-neuvième siècle (Paris: C. Le Lièvre, 1852), p. 92. Ahier also mentioned the work of an Englishman, William Musgrave (1655–1721), who made the hypothesis of an ancient isthmus, which he backed up with a quantity of soundings: ‘Guilhelmi Musgrave Regiae Societatis Socii, de Britannia quondam poene Insula, Dissertatio’, PT, vol. XXX (1717–1719), p. 593. L. Quénault, Topographie ancienne des côtes du Cotentin (Paris: Imprimerie Impériale, 1865), pp. 6–9; Le Cerf, L’Archipel des îles normandes (Paris: Henri Plon, 1863), pp. 12–13. 101 Quénault, ibid., p. 3. Ibid., p. 11. 102 Ibid. É.-A. Pigeon, Vies des saints du diocèse de Coutances et d’Avranches, 2 vols (Avranches: A. Perrin, 1891–1898). In 1568, the Channel Islands were transferred to the diocese of Winchester. M. Lecanu, Histoire des évêques de Coutances, depuis la fondation de l’évêché jusqu’à nos jours (Coutances: Imprimerie de J.V. Voisin, 1839), p. 21. The geographer Camille Vallaux mentions similar anecdotes for the other islands, which always involved churchmen, such as the ‘plank put at low ebb’, which allowed the priest of Saint-Sampson, in Guernsey, to celebrate mass on Herm Island: Vallaux, L’archipel, p. 15.

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The border invented

Figure 1.1 Map of Cotentin before its invasion by the sea, by DeschampsVadeville, Geographer-Engineer

writing in the mid-nineteenth century, the ‘historical authenticity’ of this tradition was in no doubt, and he gave the exact location of ‘the plank’: ‘in the place called Le Saut-du-Bœuf, today Les Beuftins, a rock uncovered at low tide’.105 Again, in 1882 Deschamps-Vadeville’s map enabled Alexandre Chèvremont to propose a historical date for the separation: We are inclined to see in the so-called plank toll an exaggerated form of the ancient tradition of union, or at least of the transition which for many centuries marked the shift in nature from peninsula to that of island. Had the situation been permanent and normal, there is no doubt that a fixed bridge, of the kind that gave its name to a neighbouring town (Petreus Pons, Port-Bail), had been built in Roman times. We can 105

Ahier, Tableaux historiques, pp. 103–4. Here, as well, L. Quénault and T. Le Cerf were merely paraphrasing Ahier, who was relying, among other sources, on M. Hermant, Histoire du diocèse de Bayeux (Caen: Pierre F. Doublet, 1705).

The impossibility of an island: before the Channel was a sea

53

better understand the plank which the archdeacon trod, if this was only a matter of crossing . . . a gully made in an isthmus by the advance of the sea.106

Depending on representations of time,107 the Channel was therefore described as a natural barrier or link between peoples, with reference to the Bible, pagan legends or ancestral memory. By stretching the geological temporal scale as Buffon did, the history of the sea and the peopling of England were kept apart. Conversely, explaining the separation of the Channel Islands from the mainland by a medieval tidal wave made the kinship between the Islanders and the Normans more understandable. The first mention of the phrase ‘Anglo-Norman’ in English seems to be in Andrew Ducarel’s Anglo-Norman Antiquities, published in 1767.108 The term appeared in French only in 1776, with reference to the history of the law of the Channel Islands.109 But it was not until the nineteenth century, at a time of reflection on the mixing of races in the French or English melting pots, that the term spread. In these intellectual traditions, the point of reference was a distant past, even before the formation of the English and French nations, and this past influenced the reading of the present. Persuaded of the fundamental oneness of the human species, until the late eighteenth century, scientists and theologians found evidence of it in land forms. The approach taken in political speeches was the opposite: speakers delivered them in the present tense, with the Channel serving as an argument to prove the natural friendship or hostility of the French and English people in the eighteenth century. Geographical essentialism and political propaganda: the example of the ‘French Wars’ Theories of the Earth’s formation devised between the sixteenth century and the end of our period usually bore only tenuous links with the political context.110 However, geographical providentialism quickly became part of 106 107

108 109 110

A. Chévremont, Les mouvements du sol sur les côtes occidentales de la France et particulièrement dans le golfe normanno-breton (Paris: Ernest Leroux, 1882), pp. 411–12. R. Koselleck, Futures Past: On the Semantics of Historical Time, translation Keith Tribe (Columbia University Press, 2004) (German edn: 1979); F. Hartog, Regimes of Historicity: Presentism and Experiences of Time, translation Saskia Brown (Columbia University Press, 2015) (French edn: 2003). It was only in the 1830s that the expression ‘Channel Islands’ appeared, in H.D. Inglis, The Channel Islands; Jersey, Guernsey, Alderney, etc., 2 vols. (London: [s.n.], 1834). M. Hoüard, Traité sur les coutumes anglo-normandes qui ont été publiées en Angleterre depuis le XIe jusqu’au XIVe siècle (Rouen: Le Boucher le jeune, 1776). Although some chorographers did have a political agenda, like the royalist author Aylett Sammes, who denied that Britain had ever been joined to ‘the Continent of France’: ‘It was ever the Glory and Safety of great britain to be environed by the sea, and to command

54

The border invented

the language of politics. In 1694, when the Nine Years War opposing the Anglo-Dutch monarchy and the France of Louis XIV was at its height, George Savile, the marquess of Halifax (1633–1695), wrote in a pamphlet: We are in an Island, confined to it by God Almighty, not as a Penalty, but a Grace, and one of the greatest that can be given to Mankind. Happy Confinement, that hath made us Free, Rich, and Quiet; a fair Portion in this World, and very well worth the preserving; a figure that ever hath been envied, and could never be imitated by our Neighbours.111

Then in the ‘Country’ opposition, Halifax praised the virtues of a maritime policy and of the English navy, against those who defended land warfare.112 Expressed in the language of religion, science or history, this type of discourse gave rise to many flights of the imagination about the relationship between France and England. The use of a ‘rhetoric of scientificity’ was a standard way of producing what Pierre Bourdieu calls a ‘truth effect’.113 The two countries’ geographical situations were used as the basis of ‘scientific’ arguments. These interpretations of the world culminated a century later, at the time of the French Revolution in the theory of natural frontiers.114 To study the genesis and subsequent expansion of that theme as applied to the sea, we have to take into account the specific contexts, the identity of the speakers and the types of texts in which such a discourse was expressed, for geographical representations were socially and politically situated. Anglo-French propaganda during the Revolution is a subject well charted by historiography.115 But what place did the English Channel occupy in this rhetoric? In France a number of members of the Convention made comments hostile to England after the declaration of war on 1 February 1793.

111 112 113 114

115

those Waters that encompass it.’ For the same reason, Sammes also distanced himself from those theories which made the Gauls ancestors of the Britons: A. Sammes, Britannia Antiqua Illustrata: Or, The Antiquities of Ancient Britain, Derived from the Phoenicians (London, 1676), pp. 36–7, quoted in J. Scott, When the Waves Ruled Britannia: Geography and Political Identity, 1500–1800 (Cambridge University Press, 2011), p. 108. Halifax, marquis of, A Rough Draft of a New Model at Sea (London: A. Banks, 1694), p. 4. Ibid., pp. 4–5. P. Bourdieu, ‘Le Nord et le Midi: contribution à une analyse de l’effet Montesquieu’, ARSS, 35 (1980), pp. 21–5. For another example of the recourse to history, national character types and geography in political discourse, see R. Morieux, ‘Les nations et les intérêts: les manufacturiers, les institutions représentatives et le langage des intérêts dans le traité de commerce francoanglais de 1786–1787’, in C. Charle and J. Vincent (eds.), La concurrence des savoirs: FranceGrande-Bretagne, XVIIIe–XIXe siècles (Presses Universitaires de Rennes, 2011), pp. 39–74. S. Wahnich, L’impossible citoyen: L’étranger dans le discours de la Révolution française (Paris: Albin Michel, 1997); N. Hampson, The Perfidy of Albion: French Perceptions of England during the French Revolution (London: Macmillan, 1998); E.M. MacLeod, A War of Ideas: British Attitudes to the Wars against Revolutionary France, 1792–1802 (Aldershot: Ashgate, 1998).

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The virulence of the speeches reached a peak in the spring of 1794. In his famous report of 7 Prairial, Year 2 (26 May 1794) ‘on the crimes of the English government’, Bertrand Barère (1755–1821) piled on all the elements of classic propaganda, merging references to history and geographical determinism. His diatribe against the perfidious Englishman, ‘a descendant of the Carthaginians and Phœnicians’, and the British nation, ‘speculative and mercantile’, had its geographical counterpart in the evocation of the Strait of Dover: ‘Citizens, national hatred must be declared; for commercial and political communications, there must be a vast ocean between Dover and Calais; young Republicans must suck the hatred of the name English with the milk of their nurses.’116 The main elements of Barère’s diatribe were taken up in numerous addresses sent to the Convention by popular societies, beginning in Messidor, Year 2 (July 1794),117 as with this address from the Jacobin club of Semur on 25 Messidor, Year 2: ‘Nature had relegated the loathsome Englishman to an isle, as if to separate him from the rest of the world of which he is the shame and enemy.’118 This language from the summer of 1794 articulated what Sophie Wahnich has called the ‘sacralisation of national territory’ and the ‘territorialisation of the enemy’.119 The English people is at once locked away on its island, which demonstrates its inhumanity, and adjacent to the French coast, making it the natural enemy of the French. Most members of the Convention had no intention of making England a sister republic, but Barère’s speech struck terror on the other side of the Channel. Edmund Burke (1729–1797) brought up at every available opportunity the threat embodied by the theory of natural frontiers, which made the Channel not a protective barrier, but a stepping stone to the conquest of England.120 Highlighting the threat of contagion by the ideas coming out of France, Burke described the proximity of the coasts, a closeness that justified Britain’s right to intervene in French politics in accordance with the principles of the Declaration of Whitehall of 29 October 1793. And, because the struggle was an ideological one, there could be no natural barrier between the two countries: ‘It is with an armed doctrine, that we are at war. It has, by its essence, a faction of opinion, and of interest, and of enthusiasm, in every country. To us, it is a Colossus 116

117 118 120

R. de Barère, ‘sur les perfidies et tous les genres de corruptions et de crimes employés par le gouvernement anglais’, AP, vol. XLIII (26 May 1794). In 1798, Barère used the same metaphor in La liberté des mers, ou le gouvernement anglais dévoilé, 3 vols. (n.p., n.d., Year 6 [1798], vol. I, pp. xlv–xlvii). Wahnich, L’impossible citoyen, pp. 318–24. 119 AP, vol. XCIII, p. 113, quoted in ibid., p. 323. Ibid., pp. 324, 327. ‘Fourth letter on a regicide peace’ (1795), in P. Langford et al. (eds.), The Writings and Speeches of Edmund Burke (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1981–1991), vol. ix, p. 92; ‘First letter on a regicide peace’ (1796), in ibid., p. 239.

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The border invented

which bestrides our channel. It has one foot on a foreign shore, the other upon the British soil.’121 This refusal to harness nature to justify political divisions was compatible with a conception of international order in which states were interdependent.122 The threat of invasion which was fantasised in this way became very real under the Directory (1795–1799), and especially during the Consulate (1799–1804).123 In some authors the narrowness of the Strait of Dover became the best physical evidence of the danger from the Continent. In a letter of 4 November 1801 the radical-turnedconservative William Cobbett (1762–1835), then director of The Porcupine and Anti-Gallican Monitor newspaper, denounced the Peace Preliminaries of London using the same rhetorical device: The Peace furnishes our neighbour with ports in abundance before the mouth of the Thames. From the top of his masts, of his vessels anchored in these ports, he can see the seashore where he wishes to land; and this seashore is no more than one hundred and twenty, no more than sixty, and, in some places, no more than forty miles from London.124

France’s territorial expansion on the Continent multiplied inland bases for a French landing. After the resumption of hostilities in May 1803 the possibilities of a French invasion became concrete. With the Napoleonic troops massing in Boulogne, an explosion of iconographic, musical and written propaganda occurred. Caricatures were one of the key engines in this war of ideas, as they had been during the 1798 invasion fear.125 Out of a total of at least 250 visual satires published in 1803,126 twenty cartoons depicted the Channel. A typical drawing would put Napoleon on the French coast and John Bull on the British coast hurling abuse at each other.127 The Bodleian Library alone has fifty-four images dating from 1796 to 1815 121 122

123

124 125

126 127

Ibid., p. 199. J.M. Welsh, Edmund Burke and International Relations: The Commonwealth of Europe and the Crusade against the French Revolution (Oxford: St. Martin’s Press, 1995), pp. 108–14; M. Bélissa, Repenser l’ordre européen, 1795–1802: De la société des rois aux droits des nations (Paris: Kimé, 2006). E. Desbrière, Projets et tentatives de débarquement aux îles britanniques, vol. I: 1793–1805 (Paris: R. Chapelot, 1900); M. Philp (ed.), Resisting Napoleon: The British Response to the Threat of Invasion, 1797–1815 (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2006). Quoted in J. Dechamps, Les îles britanniques et la Révolution française (1789–1803) (Paris: La Renaissance du Livre, 1949), p. 143. P. Dupuy, ‘La caricature anglaise face à la France en révolution (1789–1802)’, Dixhuitième siècle, 32 (2000), pp. 307–20; A. Franklin, ‘John Bull in a dream: fear and fantasy in the visual satires of 1803’, in Philp, Resisting Napoleon, pp. 125–39. Franklin, ‘John Bull’, p. 126. The Channel was always represented in its double meaning as a barrier separating the two peoples and so easy to cross for French armies: A. Franklin and M. Philp (eds.), Napoleon and the Invasion of Britain (Oxford: Bodleian Library, 2003).

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representing the sea separating France and England.128 When any topographical elements were introduced, they were always Calais and Dover, with the invading armies massing near Boulogne [Figure 1.2]. During the Revolution the Channel was thus reduced to this narrow stretch of sea, a visual synecdoche for the whole Channel. But geography could be bent in different ways to fit one’s intellectual or political agenda. Johann Gottlieb Fichte (1762–1814) was closely aligned with the cause of revolutionary France and criticised Britain’s aggressive attempt to reach commercial supremacy through its ‘dominion of the seas’ and its imperial conquests.129 Writing in 1800, he argued that ‘certain parts of the earth’s surface, together with their inhabitants, have been visibly determined by nature to form political wholes’.130 Thus, nature had not intended the British Isles to be an autonomous entity, but to be ‘only an appendix’ which would, ‘properly understood, belong to the mainland of France’. The contiguity of the two countries and the ‘unnatural’ commercial and military competition between two states which were complementary and should have been confined within the same natural borders led to hostility between their populations: ‘Hence, a national hatred among both peoples that is all the more vehement since both were destined to be one.’131 By the end of the eighteenth century, geological theories about the past junction of France and England had passed into common language and were used in children’s books in order to couch rhetorical arguments or draw moral lessons.132

*** Rather than postulating that the physical divisions between states are written in geomorphology, I have placed these very divisions at the core of my inquiry. The way one thought about the Channel was linked to 128 129 130

131 132

I thank Alexandra Franklin for the discussion about this. I. Nakhimovsky, The Closed Commercial State: Perpetual Peace and Commercial Society from Rousseau to Fichte (Princeton University Press, 2011), pp. 83–100. J.G. Fichte, The Closed Commercial State, translation A.C. Adler (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2012), p. 169. I would like to thank Isaac Nakhimovsky for drawing my attention to this text. Ibid., pp. 201–2. In Charlotte Smith’s Minor Morals Interspersed with Sketches of Natural History, Historical Anecdotes, and Original Stories (1798), a discussion takes place between a pedagogue and her pupils, evoking the ancient geological connection to criticise the notion of France and England as ‘natural enemies’: ‘my information indeed says, that this island called Britain was peopled from Gaul . . . – so you see we can trace our origin no farther than to the people we despise and hate. There is a remote tradition, which tells that this island . . . was, by some violent concussion of the earth, severed from the Continent, and it must have been precisely from France’ (p. 263), quoted in L. Gurton-Wachter, ‘Keeping watch: wartime attention and the poetics of alarm around 1800’, unpublished PhD, University of Berkeley (2011), p. 66.

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Figure 1.2 Britannia reprimanding a naughty boy (3 May 1803).

conceptions of time. The land-bridge theory was inseparable from seventeenth-century religious beliefs: the fundamental oneness of the human species, dispersal from a common core and the finalism of land forms, all favoured communication between peoples. Once the existence of the isthmus was relegated to prehistory, this view of human evolution came

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into question. A disjunction of the history of humans from the history of Earth forms then became possible, hand in hand with the abandoning of the Bible as an explanatory guide to geomorphology. By 1750 the way was thus open for other explanations of the separation. In 1802 John Carr (1732–1807), who visited France during the Peace of Amiens, showed that the gap between England and France was only partly geographical; it was also a product of history: The fact seems at first singular. Two of the greatest nations under heaven, whose shores almost touch, and, if ancient tales be true, were once unsevered, call the natives of each other foreigners. Jealousy, competition, and consequent warfare, have, for ages, produced an artificial distance and separation, much wider and more impossible than nature ever intended, by the division which she has framed; hence, whilst the unassisted eye of the islander can, from his own shores, with ‘unwet feet’, behold the natural barrier of his continental neighbour, he knows but little more of his real character and habits, than of those beings who are more distantly removed from him by many degrees of the great circle.133

As a result of their reliance on Scripture, classical literature or fossils, almost all antiquarians and scholars shared the belief that France and England were linked in a more or less distant past. However, propaganda did not take this into account, as reflected in the use of the Channelseparation metaphor, which remained surprisingly stable over the years. Late eighteenth-century political discourse thus naturalised a division at a time when science was showing that such a division was anything but ‘natural’.134 The sea had not always separated two peoples, who came from the same stock; nor did it separate the two lands, because there was a geological continuity. Had the sea always separated the two states? A synchronic look at the ways that the Channel was demarcated on maps allows us to bring political chronology and views on maritime space closer still.

133

134

Sir J. Carr, The Stranger in France; or, a Tour from Devonshire to Paris, 2nd edn (London: J. Johnson, 1807), p. 360. In the French translation of this book, published in 1898 – the year of the ‘Fashoda Incident’ – Albert Babeau cut out the second paragraph: scientific ‘truth’ and political analysis did not always go hand in hand: A. Babeau, Les Anglais en France après la Paix d’Amiens: Impressions de voyage de Sir John Carr (Paris: Plon, 1898), p. 271. Conversely, highlighting the contiguity of France and England entitled a number of philosophers and writers to undermine the very notion of a ‘natural enmity’ between the two countries, including during the Revolutionary Wars: L. Gurton-Wachter, ‘“An enemy, I suppose, that nature has made”: Charlotte Smith and the natural enemy’, European Romantic Review, 20 (2010), pp. 197–205, and Gurton-Wachter, ‘Keeping watch’, pp. 57–76.

2

When the sea had no name

As the Earth is divided into countries, so the Ocean is divided into Seas.1 The particular names that one gives to these seas are by no means worthless geographical fancies; the toponymy here merely underlines the existence of realities that are as social as they are physical.2

How did that expanse of water between England and France come to have the names it has today? And what do these names tell us? Unlike the Atlantic, the Baltic, the Pacific or the Mediterranean, the names that were eventually established in the two languages (‘La Manche’/‘The English Channel’) stemmed from two unrelated etymologies. As Denis Retaillé has noted, topogenesis, or ‘history of a nomenclature of places leading to identifying the actors involved in the naming more than the places themselves’, reveals a constantly shifting ‘relationship of symbolic force’.3 Indeed, the changes in geographical and cartographical representations are bound up with the political dynamics at work in Western Europe, between the grip of states over their territory, on the one hand, and the new-found importance of the sea in international relations, on the other.4 The Channel became a space of confrontation marked by the two names. Between the early seventeenth and mid-eighteenth centuries, it gradually came to be defined as a border space between the entities of ‘France’ and ‘England’. When tracing the transformation of maritime space into a place and then a territory,5 the longue durée and a strictly comparative approach are in order. 1 2 3

4 5

A. Bruzen de la Martinière, Le Grand Dictionnaire Géographique, Historique et Critique, new edn, 9 vols. (Paris: Libraires Associés, 1735), vol. V: K–L, p. 288. C. Vallaux, Géographie sociale. La mer. Populations maritimes. Pêches. Commerce. Domination de la mer (Paris: Octave Doin, 1908), p. 40. D. Retaillé, ‘Topogenèse’, in J. Levy and M. Lussaut (eds.), Dictionnaire de la géographie (Paris: Belin, 2003), pp. 926–7. On the politics of naming places see R. Rose-Redwood, D. Alderman and M. Azaryahu, ‘Geographies of toponymic inscription: new directions in critical place-name studies’, Progress in Human Geography, 34 (2010), pp. 453–70. E. Mancke, ‘Early modern expansion and the politicization of oceanic space’, GR, 89 (1999), pp. 225–36. Here I am following Jan Penrose’s terminology: a space becomes a place when it is perceived as unique, whereas a territory is a place which is delimited, in J. Penrose,

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When the sea had no name

61

Geographical literature reveals no unanimity about the demarcation of the Channel on maps. When we step back from the map and focus on the depth of the sea, its geological structure, or its currents and tides, the configuration of the sea alters. If every map fragments physical reality,6 what parts of the surrounding lands are to be represented on a map of the Channel? Is the Strait of Dover part of the Channel or the North Sea? Does the geological Channel have the same limits as the aqueous Channel? Such problems of scale, units of measurement or perspective are not the sole concern of map-makers: the position of the observer in a given place at a given time affects the object described. As Bernard Lepetit puts it, ‘the soldier, the customs officer or the fisherman, for example, do not have the same relationship to the coast of Britain, and the difference in their points of view on the territory would allow it to be mapped on different scales’.7 Point of view is not just a metaphor here: in practice different actors do not necessarily use the same spatial location tools, and the map is only one instrument among others. We must therefore try to gauge the distance between the invention of a technique and its social uses. What is in a toponym? Whereas it had a single Latin name during the Antiquity and most of the Middle Ages, from the fifteenth century onwards the Channel slowly started to acquire different names in French and in English. By the middle of the eighteenth century, the two names were stabilised, a process which the first section of this chapter explains. The second section interrogates how geographers and cartographers linked the Channel to other physicals units, oceanic or continental; the choice depended on the period they considered: the present, the past or the future. In the third section, the Channel is considered as a space for scientific exploration in the eighteenth century. Knowledge about the sea was political. The charting of coasts or the seabed was sensitive information given their strategic importance. Hydrography, however, was not simply a means of waging war;8 it was tied in with another process developed during the same period: the international exchange of scientific knowledge. The Channel lay at the heart of this tension. Finally, we turn to the different ways in which the same sea space could be represented, perceived and experienced, with a focus on pilots and hydrographers.

6 7 8

‘Nations, states and homelands: territory and territoriality in nationalist thought’, N&N, 8 (2002), pp. 277–97. C. Jacob, The Sovereign Map: Theoretical Approaches in Cartography Throughout History, translation T. Conley (University of Chicago Press, 2006) (French edn: 1992), p. 106. B. Lepetit, ‘De l’échelle en histoire’, in Revel (dir.), Jeux d’échelles, p. 86. To paraphrase the title of an essay by Y. Lacoste, La Géographie, ça sert, d’abord, à faire la guerre (Paris: La Découverte, 1985) (1st edn: 1976).

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Maps and toponyms A map is not just a drawing; it is also a series of names, enabling us to look into linguistic developments. From the sixteenth century onwards cartography became state knowledge, a ‘science of princes’,9 the expansion of which was closely related to the construction of modern states. In France as in England the state gradually took control of the whole process of map-making, from production to publication. The map expressed a geopolitical point of view by manifesting the growing attention paid to political territoriality. James R. Akerman has shown that the cartographic representation of political territory in Europe underwent change as the notion of sovereignty shifted from a dynastic to a territorial conception. So, while many sixteenth-century maps did not depict the boundaries between states, the number that did grew significantly in the mid-seventeenth century. By the beginning of the eighteenth century all maps showed borders through the use of specific hand-colouring or engraved lines that were bolder than internal administrative boundaries.10 Maps of the sea, however, did not allow cartographers to dissociate boundaries of states and physical boundaries. In effect, maritime borders were not generally marked as borders but as multiple coastlines: the boundary of sovereignty did not appear as such. It was only at the end of our period that the idea of a linear state maritime boundary developed, with the notion of territorial waters. The corpus on which the following analysis is based consists of 401 maps.11 In the seventeenth century the geographer Augustin Lubin proposed an explanation of the names given to the sea: It derives its name from the various regions of the world, such as the Sea of the Setting Sun [sic] & the Sea of the Rising Sun, the North Sea & the South Sea; or because of the True or Apparent colour of its waters, such as the Black Sea, the White Sea, & the Red Sea, or by the country whose coasts it washes, as the 9

10 11

J.B. Harley, ‘Maps, knowledge, and power’, in P. Laxton (ed.), The New Nature of Maps: Essays in the History of Cartography (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001), p. 56. J.R. Akerman, ‘The structuring of political territory in early printed atlases’, IM, 47 (1995), p. 141. I used three criteria of selection. First criterion, the choice to favour longue durée over exhaustivity. Instead of looking at all the ‘Ptolemean’ maps of the sixteenth century, which used the same Latin place names, or those of the 1780s–1790s, decades by which terminology was stabilized, I opened the chronological compass as widely as possible: looking at the period from the middle of the fifteenth century to the beginning of the nineteenth allowed me to identify turning points. Second criterion, the decision to take into account multiple editions of the same map, since maps were copied, translated and updated. The Theatrum Orbis Terrarum of Ortelius was thus published in 41 editions in different European languages, between 1570 and 1612. Finally, in order to avoid overemphasising the importance of exceptions, I have limited the analysis to printed maps.

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Thyrrhene Sea & the Afric Sea, or by the name of some famous place that it touches, such as the Adriatic Sea, or by its figure like the Baltic Sea.12

This process of assigning a name to each sea was in fact spread out over several decades. Adapting Lubin’s proposals to our corpus, it is possible to establish a typology of names for the Channel as they (usually) appear on the map, in its title or cartouche: 1. The absence of a name: the map base is blank at the place of the Channel. 2. Generic naming, as in the phrase ‘mer océane’ or ‘mare oceanum’: the Channel is no longer regarded as an autonomous or original space, merely as part of ‘the great sea that surrounds the whole Earth’.13 3. Naming deriving from the country whose sea ‘washes its coasts’, to quote Lubin: that is, a partially territorial name: ‘mer de France’, ‘British sea’, ‘mare britannicum’. 4. Naming by position or geographical situation: in French, the term ‘canal’, like the term ‘channel’, designates a stretch of sea between two pieces of land. 5. Last, the Channel could be described by its ‘figure’, its visual form, being likened to the manche (sleeve) of a tunic. Certain expressions belong to several categories. Thus, the term ‘English Channel’ was both types 3 and 4, which explains why there were more place names than maps. Graph 2.1 shows that, on French maps, the naming of the Channel according to its figure, that is, the use of the term ‘Manche’, became dominant from the end of the seventeenth century onwards. It is possible to argue that the map’s place of publication is more significant than the national origin of the cartographer, for two reasons. The first reason is that patronage relations between map-makers and monarchies became more pronounced from the sixteenth century on. There are countless examples. Oronce Finé (1494–1555), the author of a large map of France, was François I’s military engineer during the Italian campaign of the 1520s. He was appointed royal lecturer in mathematics in Paris in 1531 and continued his activity as a cartographer, a sinecure extended by Henri II.14 On the English side, John Speed 12

13 14

R.P.A. Lubin, Mercure géographique ou le Guide du Curieux des Cartes Géographiques (Paris: Ch. Remy, 1678), p. 249. François de Dainville quotes this excerpt in Le langage des géographes: Termes, signes, couleurs des cartes anciennes 1500–1800 (Paris: A. & J. Picard, 1964), p. 99. Dictionnaires de Furetière, Trévoux, de l’Académie, quoted in Dainville, Langage, p. 100. D. Buisseret, ‘Monarchs, ministers, and maps in France before the accession of Louis XIV’, in D. Buisseret (ed.), Monarchs, Ministers, and Maps: The Emergence of

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64 50 45 40

Name

35

Figure

30

Situation

25

Country

20

Generic

15 10

0

1540 1550 1560 1570 1580 1590 1600 1610 1620 1630 1640 1650 1660 1670 1680 1690 1700 1710 1720 1730 1740 1750 1760 1770 1780 1790 1800 1810

5

Decade

Graph 2.1 Typology of place names in French maps depicting the Channel.

(1552–1629) was, like Christopher Saxton (c. 1543–c. 1610), rewarded for his county maps: he received land and appointments to official responsibilities.15 Moreover, most of the cartographers in the corpus, including foreign ones, can be considered state employees. Depending on the language of the edition, the Cosmographie Blaviane by Dutchman Joan Blaeu thus contained dedications to Louis XIV, the States General, Emperor Leopold i and Philippe iv of Spain.16 This close link between the production of maps and state power provides us with a first chronology of the intellectual construction of the Channel as a border space between France and England.

15

16

Cartography as a Tool of Government in Early Modern Europe (University of Chicago Press, 1992), p. 102; F. Lestringant and M. Pelletier, ‘Maps and descriptions of the world in sixteenth-century France’, in D. Woodward (ed.), The History of Cartography, 6 vols. (The University of Chicago Press, 1987–2015), vol. III: Cartography in the European Renaissance (University of Chicago Press: 2007), pp. 1463–79; M. Pelletier, ‘National and regional mapping in France to about 1650’, in ibid., pp. 1480–3. P. Barber, ‘England ii: monarchs, ministers, and maps, 1550–1625’, in Buisseret, Monarchs, pp. 82–3; S. Tyacke and J. Huddy, Christopher Saxton and Tudor MapMaking (London: The British Library, 1980), p. 25. M. Pastoureau, ‘Contrefaçon et plagiat des cartes de géographie et des atlas français de la fin du XVIe au début du XVIIIe siècle’, in F. Moureau (ed.), Les presses grises: La contrefaçon du livre (XVIe–XIXe siècles) (Paris: Aux amateurs de livres, 1988), p. 280.

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When the Channel had no name In the Middle Ages the Channel sometimes appeared as part of the vastness of the ocean, without being specifically marked out. More often than not, however, it was given names that corresponded to its proximity to the Roman provinces of Gaul or Britain: ‘Mare Britannicum’, ‘Mare Gallicum’, ‘the sea of the coast of Gaul’. In his Etymologies Isidore of Seville (v. 560–636) explained that different parts of the Ocean had different names. The Andalusian philosopher mentioned the ‘Oceanus Gallicus’, the ‘Oceanus Germanicus’ and the ‘Oceanus Scythicus’.17 While ways of delimiting the Oceanus Gallicus varied from one author to another, its terminology was relatively fixed and survived into the late Middle Ages. Even though authors never simply compiled ancient sources, this nomenclature remained essentially the same as in antiquity.18 A double logic of naming the Channel in relation to the surrounding ocean, or as a space linking or separating England and France, was used in both countries. This is illustrated by English ecclesiastical chronicles and histories of the Middle Ages. The Channel in this type of text appeared mainly as an element of location, enabling the British Isles to be situated in the world. In the sixth century AD Gildas, in his The Ruin of Britain wrote, ‘It [Britain] is surrounded by the ocean, which forms winding bays, and is strongly defended by this ample, and, if I may so call it, impassable barrier, save on the south side, where the narrow sea affords a passage to Belgic Gaul.’19 Two centuries later, the Venerable Bede (673?–735) also avoided individualising the Channel, placing the British Isles in the ‘Ocean’.20 The Channel was first described among English authors as a passageway to the Continent. This was still the case with Geoffrey of Monmouth (1100?–1155) in the twelfth century, who mentions in his Historia Regum Britanniæ ‘the straits to the south’, which ‘allow one to sail to Gaul’.21

17 18

19 20

21

The Etymologies of Isidore of Seville, ed. S.A. Barney, W.J. Lewis, J.A. Beach and O. Berghof (Cambridge University Press, 2006), XIII, 15, 2. P. Gautier-Dalché, ‘Tradition et renouvellement dans la représentation de l’espace géographique au IXe siècle’, in Géographie et culture: La représentation de l’espace du VIe au XIIe siècle (Paris and Aldershot: Ashgate, 1997), pp. 121–65. Gildas, The Works of Gildas, Surnamed the Wise, translation J.A. Giles (London: James Bohn, 1841), p. 7. ‘Britain, once called Albion, is an island of the ocean [Brittania Oceani insula], and lies to the north-west, being opposite Germany, Gaul, and Spain, which form the greater part of Europe, though at a considerable distance from them. . . . To the south lies Belgic Gaul’, from Bede’s Ecclesiastical History of the English People, edited by B. Colgrave and R.A.B. Mynors (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1969), pp. 14–15. ‘et absque meridianae plagae freto, quo ad Gallias nauigatur’: G. of Monmouth, The History of the Kings of Britain: An Edition and Translation of De gestis Britonum, edited by M.D. Reeve, translation N. Wright (Woodbridge: The Boydell Press, 2007), pp. 6–7 (with the

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Table 2.1 Maps depicting the Channel (1540–1599) Place of publication

Number of maps

Percentage

France England The Netherlands Italian principalities German principalities Other (Spain, Switzerland, Sweden and unknown) Total

9 4 8 18 11 3

17% 7.5% 15% 34% 21% 5.5%

53

100%

On the French side the perspective was reversed, and the sea went from being Gaulish to English for Raymond of Aguilers, the chronicler of the First Crusade, who differentiated ‘mare Anglicum’ and ‘mare Oceanum’.22 The Hundred Years War introduced no change of nomenclature. Written in 1370–1400, Froissart’s Chronicles named the Channel as an insubstantial threshold with the oft-used periphrasis ‘beyond the sea’.23 The translation of toponyms in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries from Latin into the vernacular set off the differentiation of the geographical vocabulary in the European languages. Map-making in the sixteenth century was still a European art, dominated by Italy, which explains the fairly widespread national dissemination of the fifty-three maps in our selection for this period (Table 2.1).24 English and French map-making was still comparatively undeveloped. The different editions of the Geography by Ptolemy, the second-century AD geographer rediscovered in the fifteenth century, enable us to trace back this process on a European scale. Indeed, following the first printed edition – that of Vicenza (without maps) edition of 1475 – and for two centuries after that, translations of this atlas proliferated.25 The first

22

23 24 25

exception of ‘Gallia’, which we chose to translate as ‘Gaul’ rather than ‘France’): Fiona Tolhurst analyses this passage as a naturalisation of the connections between Britain and France through commerce, aimed at legitimising the Norman Conquest: F. Tolhurst, Geoffrey of Monmouth and the Translation of Female Kinship (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), pp. 57–8. R. d’Aguilers, Historia francorum qui ceperunt Iherusalem (1101), quoted in C.W. David, Robert Curthose Duke of Normandy (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1920), p. 231. J. Froissart, Les chroniques de sire Jean Froissart (Paris: A. Desrey, 1835), vol. I, p. 70. For this table as well as the others, all types of maps, all scales and all editions, including several of the same map, have been considered. N. Broc, La géographie de la Renaissance 1420–1620 (Paris: CTHS, 1980), pp. 9–20; G.R. Crone, Maps and Their Makers: An Introduction to the History of Cartography, 5th edn (Folkestone: Dawson; Archon Books, 1978), pp. 34–41.

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67

editions with printed maps – the Bologna by Taddeo Crivelli (1477) and the Ulm edition by Nicolaus Germanus (1482) – echoed the ancient toponymy, calling the Channel ‘Oceanus Britannicus’.26 The first vernacular edition was that of the Florentine Francesco Berlinghieri (1482), who was content simply to translate the ancient terminology, terming the Channel ‘Britannico Oceano’.27 Until the third quarter of the sixteenth century the Channel frequently went unnamed: the map of Gaul in the first French edition of Ptolemy, by Michel Servet, reprinted in Vienne (Dauphiné) by Hugues de La Porte in 1541, left the Channel blank.28 Moreover, place names increasingly combined Latin and vernacular linguistic forms and varied according to the place of publication. The Basel cartographer, Sebastian Münster (1488–1552), accordingly made the Channel an English sea, or ‘Mare Anglicu’ [sic], in his 1540 edition (‘Anglia II Nova Tabula’).29 The generic place name in its various forms – ‘Mer Oceane’, ‘mare oceanum’ – appears in half the sixteenth-century French maps in our selection. This was true of the map of France by Oronce Finé (1525), also inspired by Ptolemy, which still used the expression ‘la grand mer oceane’, printed in both the Bay of Biscay and the Channel.30 On the map the Channel was not always regarded as an autonomous or unique space. However, another type of labelling emerged, based on ‘Oceanus Britannicus’, and taking its name from the country or region bordering on the sea. Sometimes the two place names coexisted on the same map: for example, in the map by Guillaume Postel, La vraye et entière description du royaume de France et ses confins (1570), ‘Britannicus Oceanus’ appeared to the east of the Cherbourg Peninsula and ‘La Grand Mer Occeane’ above Britain (Figure 2.1).31 Renaissance French maps, then, used two terminologies, ‘ancient’ and ‘modern’, not always consciously choosing between them.32 26 27 28 29

30

31 32

The map is reprinted in R.W. Shirley, Early Printed Maps of the British Isles 1477–1650, rev. [3rd] edn (East Grintstead: Antique Atlas Publications, 1991), vol. I, p. 3. F. Berlinghieri, Geographia. Tabula Tercia d’Europa (1482), BNF, Rés. Smith-Lesouëf 37 pl. 5. H. de La Porte, Tabula Nova Galliae (1541), BNFCP, Ge DD 2987 (369). S. Münster, Anglia II Nova Tabula (1540), in R.W. Shirley, Early Printed Maps of the British Isles 1477–1650, new edn (East Grintstead: Antique Atlas Publications, 1991), vol. I, p. 16. N. Broc, ‘Les cartes de France au XVIe siècle’, in Regards sur la géographie française de la Renaissance à nos jours, 2 vols. (Presses Universitaires de Perpignan, 1994), vol. I, pp. 42–53. The only surviving edition is that of 1553, which makes it the oldest map of France printed in France. G. Postel, La vraye et entière description du royaume de France et ses confins (1570), BNFCP, Rés. Ge D 7668. This coexistence of the Latin and the French is more generally a characteristic of the Renaissance: see M. Huchon, Histoire de la langue française (Paris: Le Livre de Poche,

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Figure 2.1 Guillaume Postel, La vraye et entière description du royaume de France et ses confins . . . (1570).

In our corpus the toponyms of the four sixteenth-century ‘English’ maps (maps published in England, that is) all derive from the Latin ‘Oceanus Britannicus’. On John Norden’s map of Sussex (1595) ‘Oceanus Britannicus’ made way for ‘British Ocean’,33 an expression which, in conjunction with ‘British Sea’, came to the fore in the first half of the seventeenth century (Figure 2.2). From that period on one detects a difference in the naming of the Channel in French, where indeterminacy ruled, and in English, where the vocabulary became fixed. The Channel disputed (1600 to mid-eighteenth century) In the last decades of the sixteenth century geographical terminology became more complex and toponyms accumulated. The first modern atlas is a case in point: the Theatrum Orbis Terrarum of 1570 was published by a Dutchman, Abraham Ortelius (1527–1598), and went through numerous editions and was translated into most European

33

2002), pp. 129–31. On the plurality of languages on maps, see also Jacob, Sovereign Map, pp. 211–12. J. Norden, ‘Sussex (1540)’, in E. Heawood, English County Maps in the Collections of the Royal Geographical Society (London: Royal Geographical Society, 1932).

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69

Figure 2.2 John Speed, ‘Gallia’, A Prospect of the Most Famous Parts of the World.

languages.34 On the one hand, in the Théâtre de l’Univers, a French edition published in Antwerp in 1587, then reprinted in 1598, the Channel was named in the entry ‘France’, as ‘La Mer de France & d’Angleterre’. On the other hand, Jean Jolivet’s map, which illustrated this passage, was in Latin: ‘Mare Britannicum’.35 Similarly, in the entry ‘Isles Britanniques’, the Channel was labelled ‘Oceanus Britannicus’, while the text spoke of ‘Mer Oceane’. The only English edition, The Theatre of the Whole World, was published in London in 1606. One anonymous map of Brittany and Normandy in the atlas dated 1594 is of special interest (Figure 2.3): 34

35

Broc, Géographie, pp. 178–82; C. Koeman, A. Ortelius, sa vie et son Theatrum Orbis Terrarum (Lausanne: Sequoia S.A., 1964), pp. 42–7, lists the different editions of the Theatrum: the first French edition dates from 1572, but no copy is known (ibid., p. 43). It is again reedited in French nine times between 1577 and 1609 (ibid., p. 45). A. Ortelius, Théatre de l’univers, contenant les cartes de tout le monde, avec une briève déclaration d’icelles (Imprimerie Plantinienne, 1598) (first published in Antwerp by Christopher Plantin in 1587), pp. 20–1. In this period, publishers would ‘buy in’ copper plates from an engraver or another printer/publisher for reuse. Thus, many toponyms in a (‘new’) text would not relate to those on a (‘bought-in’) older map/chart, and result in sometimes considerable disparity. I am grateful to Francis Herbert for this explanation.

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Figure 2.3 Anon., Map of Brittany and Normandy (1594).

When the sea had no name

71

Oceanus Britannicus. Vulgo Gallico Manche; Anglico vulgo Sleyse: Teutonico Kaniel. Quasi dicas Channel. Est enim Canalis instar, inter Galliam and Angliam.36

This definition combines different historical and social strata (old/ modern, learned/vulgar), and three national languages. The inscription retains this semantic richness when translated into English: Oceanus Britannicus. In common French Manche; in common English Sleyse [Sleeve?]; in German kanal. Which could be called Canal. Indeed it looks like a canal between Gaule and England.37

The map marks a major turning point in the history of the Channel: it was the first to apply the term ‘Manche’ to this sea space. It was also the first occurrence of the word, all sources considered. From the 1590s French and English geographical terminologies therefore tended to be more clearly differentiated. This second period saw the symbolic territorialisation of the Channel, marked by the emergence of two toponyms that have survived to the present day: ‘La Manche’ and ‘The English Channel’. The birth of ‘La Manche’ ‘La Manche’, with a geographical meaning, dates from the beginning of the seventeenth century. The word itself appeared towards 1150, from the Latin, manica, ‘deriving from manicus from manus, which refers to a long tunic sleeve covering the hand, a glove and also irons for the hands, handcuffs’.38 It was only at the beginning of the seventeenth century that this image came to be used to describe a stretch of sea and to express a metaphorical relationship, one of resemblance between the word and the place it referred to.39 This idea of adopting a bird’s-eye view probably stemmed from seeing contemporary maps of the Channel. The first to use the word in this sense was Cotgrave’s bilingual dictionary (1611): ‘a 36 37

38 39

A. Ortelius, The Theatre of the Whole World. London 1606 (Amsterdam: Theatrum Orbis Terrarum Ltd., 1968). This map is inspired from a Mercator’s map, Britanniae et Normandiae, in his 1585 atlas of France. But on the latter, the inscription reads: ‘Mare Britannicum vulgo het Caniel a Belgicis nautis dicitur’, in G. Mercatorem, Britannia et Normandia cum confinibus regionibus (1585): M.P.R. Van Den Broecke, Ortelius Atlas Maps: An Illustrated Guide (Westrenen: HES Publishers BV, 1996), p. 78. This Mercator map was reissued c.1635, with the same text (BNFCP, Ge D 15129). The term sleyce may be a deformation of sluice, which means a channel, drain or small stream (Oxford English Dictionary, 1989). A. Rey et al. (eds.), Dictionnaire historique de la langue française (Paris: Dictionnaires Le Robert, 1994), p. 1177. Sixteenth-century dictionaries, like R. Estienne’s Dictionnaire françois-latin (Paris: Robert Estienne, 1549), define a ‘manche’ strictly as ‘the sleeve of a clothing, Manica’ (p. 365). On this type of schematising of space, equating geographical forms and empirical objects, see Jacob, Sovereign Map, p. 350.

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sleeve-like narrowing of the sea between two lands; whence la manche d’Angleterre’.40 Geographical works, descriptions and travel narratives bear witness to the same development. If there was already an idea of the boundary in Charles Estienne’s La Guide des Chemins de France (1552), this geographer nevertheless did not individualise the Channel: ‘The kingdom of France is enclosed . . . on the one side by the ocean sea . . . which separates it from the isles of England, Ireland and Scotland . . . and on the other side . . . it is closed by the Mediterranean, which divides it from Africa.’41 Charles Bernard in his 1613 La Conjonction des mers uses only the word ‘Ocean’. The term ‘Manche’ appeared in 1617 in Jean Moquet’s travel narrative.42 In his Description de la France et de ses provinces (1623) Pierre Duval proposed a term that clearly demonstrated this was still an age of uncertainty for French vocabulary: ‘The British Sea, in common parlance la Manche, which separates it from England’.43 The term slowly came into its own over the second half of that century. Jean Chapelain (1595–1694) was the first to use the word in a French literary text.44 In La Pucelle, ou, la France délivrée (1656), an epic poem devoted to Joan of Arc, he describes how the king of England, Edward III, waged a series of attacks on Flanders, Bretagne and Normandy, besieging the kingdom of Philip VI of France: ‘But here is Edward’s easy revenge; the Frenchman who used to reign in the middle of La Manche, trapped as in a canal lock, . . . is forced to endure the rigour of his law.’45 Between 1670 and 1690 (Graph 2.1) the place name ‘Manche’, appearing on French maps in the 1640s, began to prevail over others. This phenomenon is explained, as we shall see, by the shift in the term’s political meaning. But this process was long-drawn-out, and it was only in the 1760s that it was complete: by then ‘Manche’ represented over threequarters of the toponyms used on French maps (fourteen out of

40 41

42

43 44 45

R. Cotgrave, ‘Manche’, in A Dictionarie of the French and English Tongues (London: A. Islip, 1611), n.p. C. Estienne, La Guide des Chemins de France, reveue et augmentée pour la troisiesme fois (1553), quoted in C. Liaroutzos, Le Pays et la mémoire: Pratiques et représentations de l’espace français chez Gillez Corrozet et Charles Estienne (Paris: Champion, 1998), p. 153. ‘Estans entrez dans la manche, nous apperceusmes un navire . . . . Le lendemain matin nous vismes l’Isle de Vic pensans que ce fut la terre d’Angleterre’: J. Mocquet, Voyages en Afrique, Asie, Indes orientales & occidentales. Faits par Jean Mocquet, garde du cabinet des singularitez du Roy, aux Tuileries (Paris: Jean de Heuqueville, 1617), p. 207. I would like to express my gratitude to Grégoire Holtz from drawing this text to my attention. P. Duval, Description de la France et de ses provinces (Paris: J. Dupuis, 1623), p. 43. According to the Frantext database: http://www.frantext.fr/. J. Chapelain, La Pucelle ou la France délivrée (Paris: A. Courbe, 1656), p. 295.

When the sea had no name

73

eighteen), while no more generic names are to be found after the 1750s.46 Over this ninety-year period geography remained first and foremost a science of the name, and map-makers still operated on the principle of accumulating information: when it came to toponymy, it was not a question of choosing between competing expressions but of mentioning them all. This is what makes for both the difficulty and the interest of a period when ‘the only possible form of link between the elements of this knowledge is addition’:47 rather than clear temporal demarcations, it was a question of gradations spread out over several decades. For a long time various terms to describe the same space coexisted, sometimes on a single map. The use of the coordinating conjunction ‘or’ confirmed that these years saw the development rather than the fixing of the vocabulary, as in the expression ‘La Manche, ou le Canal, autrement Mer Britannique’ (Figure 2.4a and 2.4b),48 or ‘The English Sea or Channel’(Figure 2.5).49 Between 1540 and 1640 no map falls into this category. Yet between 1640 and 1750, 54% (68 out of 126) offered what I would term alternatives. Language or geographical dictionaries confirm that the last quarter of the seventeenth century marked a turning point. The ‘country’ heading in Graph 2.1 groups together expressions such as ‘mare britannicum’, ‘mare gallicum’, ‘mare normandicum’, ‘ocean de bretaigne’ or ‘mer de France’. In fact, 87 maps out of 225 contained one or several elements of territorial naming. Just seven maps described the Channel as exclusively French by referring to national territory (‘La Manche de France’, ‘La Manche ou le Canal de France’)50 or to a French province (‘Mer Normanique’).51 These maps were all from before 1700, and four of them were published in the 1690s, when 46

47 48

49 50

51

See, for instance, the Plan de Dunkerque dressé en 1756, a military map of anonymous authorship, which designates the Channel with the expression ‘Mer Occeanne ou du Nord’ (BNFCP, Ge BB 567). Another contemporary example is J. de Beaurain (1696–1771), Carte topo-hidro-graphique des Isles d’Aurigny, de Burhou, et des Caquets (1757), BNFCP, Ge DD 2987 (1113) B: ‘Mer Océane’ and ‘Canal d’Angleterre’. M. Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archeology of the Human Sciences (London: Routledge, 2002) (French edn: 1966), p. 34. ‘La Manche, or the Channel, otherwise British Sea’: H. Jaillot, Le royaume de France divisé en toutes ses provinces, comprises sous douze gouvernements généraux . . . avec ses acquisitions dans l’Espagne, dans l’Italie, dans l’Allemagne et dans les Pays-Bas. Présenté à Monseigneur le Dauphin (1690), BNFCP, Ge DD 2987 (699) B. Robert Morden, A New Map of England Containing the Adjacent Parts of Scotland, Ireland, France, Flanders and Holland (1673), CUL, Map Department, Atlas.3.68.4 (plate 2). See, for instance, Baudrand, La carte des Royaumes d’Angleterre d’Escosse et d’Irlande dediée A Sa Majesté Britannique, et dressée suivant les Nouvelles Observations par le Sieur Abbé Baudrand, Avec privilège du Roy (1695), in Shirley, Early Printed Maps, vol. II, p. 51: ‘La Manche de France’; J.B. Nolin, La Manche ou le Canal ou sont les costes de Picardie, de Normandie, et de Bretagne en France, avec la partie méridionale du royaume d’Angleterre (1690), BNFCP, Ge AF Pf 4 (8): ‘La Manche ou le Canal de France’. J. Jolivet, La carte générale du pays de Normandie (1545), BNFCP, Ge D 8476.

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Figure 2.4a and 2.4b H. Jaillot, Le royaume de France (1690).

Anglo-French relations cooled and Louis XIV’s territorial claims were at their height. And, at the instigation of Colbert, maps would later become a veritable state enterprise. The establishment of the Paris Observatory (1666–1667), the appointment of the geographical engineers who drew up the maps of the first French nautical atlas (the Neptune français of 1693) as well as the kingdom’s great triangulation

When the sea had no name

75

Figure 2.5 Robert Morden, A New Map of England Containing the Adjacent Parts of Scotland, Ireland, France, Flanders and Holland (1673).

project stand as proof.52 Also, state control over the publication of maps was stepped up: the Conseil d’Etat’s (privy council) ordinance of 16 December 1704 made it mandatory to obtain the privilege for geographic maps.53 Six other French maps, all published before the end of the seventeenth century, used a dual system of place names (‘Oceanus Britannicus’/‘Gallicus Oceanus’, ‘Mer Britannique’/‘Mer de France’), effectively dividing sovereignty over the sea between France and England. These ‘official’ maps also represented state appropriation of sea space in graphic form. Nicolas Sanson’s map, L’Europe, drawn shortly after the Peace of Westphalia54 and republished several times, is an example of this: whereas ‘Mer 52 53 54

M. Pelletier, ‘Cartographie et pouvoir sous les règnes de Louis XIV et Louis XV’, BCFC, 141 (1994), p. 9. Pastoureau, ‘Contrefaçon et plagiat’, pp. 295–6. N. Sanson, L’Europe (c.1651), BNFCP, Ge D 12058.

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Figure 2.6 J.B. Nolin, Le royaume de France (1692), Bibliothèque Nationale de France (Paris), Cartes et Plans, Ge DD 2986 (386) B.

Britanique’ appears only above Scotland, the letters of ‘Mer de France’ are spread out across both the Channel and the Bay of Biscay in an act of ‘cartographical mimesis’, creating an effect of maximum symbolic appropriation and making the space named and the space occupied by the name coincide.55 Similarly, the map published in 1692 by Nolin (Figure 2.6) clearly favours one sovereignty over the other (in the lettering): whereas ‘La Manche ou le Canal de France’ is written in large characters, ‘costes d’Angleterre et mer britannique’ is much more discreet.56 This type of map ceased to appear after the seventeenth century. The last two decades of Louis XIV’s reign seem, then, to occupy a special place in the history of the construction of the maritime frontier. The use of a national adjective at a time of strong diplomatic tensions was obviously not insignificant. Yet a majority of the French maps in circulation at the time that identified territorial possession (68 out of 82, 55 56

Jacob, Sovereign Map, pp. 218–19. J.B. Nolin, Le royaume de France (1692), BNFCP, Ge DD 2986 (386) B.

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or 83%) feature the adjective ‘British’, which poses a problem. Was this recognition of British sovereignty over the Channel? This would be rather surprising. The Channel on French maps was rarely qualified only as British: twenty-seven maps fall into this category, twenty-four of which date from before 1715. Most French maps used the alternative phrase ‘La Manche ou Mer Britannique’. Furthermore, on French maps the qualifier ‘British’ was dropped in the 1770s. Lastly and most importantly, the meaning of ‘britannique’ was ambiguous in French: did it refer to ‘petite’ Bretagne, the French province of Brittany, or the island? Nicolas Aubin observed this ambiguity in 1702: The Sea has diverse names according to the diverse countries, or climates, where it extends. The great Sea is called the Oceane Sea, in which is the ebb and flow. From the Equator, on this side, it was named the North Sea, or Atlantic. . . . coming from the Sound toward the Strait of Dover, the Sea of Germany; on the coast of Bretagne & of England, the British Sea [La Mer Britannique].57

Around the same time, Thomas Corneille explained that the sea ‘has taken the name of British from the Isle of Great Britain’.58 This ambivalence of vocabulary was reflected in the variable spelling of the qualifying adjective on French maps, between ‘Bretanique’ and ‘bretanyque’.59 The idea of a common origin of the ancestors of the French and English was consistently asserted into the 1770s. In the last quarter of the eighteenth century the ethnic categories of ‘Briton’ and ‘Gaul’ were starting to be clarified and autonomised. In these years every qualifier deriving from ‘britannique’ was dropped on French maps. The early use of the national adjective in English To return to the categories of our typology, place names over the period 1600–1750 were distributed as follows on English maps (Table 2.2). According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the first geographical use of the English word ‘channel’ to refer to the sea comes in the second part of Shakespeare’s tragedy Henry VI (1593), which is staged at the end of the Hundred Years War. Banished from England for having 57 58 59

N. Aubin, ‘Mer’, in Dictionnaire de Marine contenant les termes de la navigation et de l’architecture navale (Amsterdam: Pierre Brunel, 1702), p. 560. T. Corneille, Dictionnaire universel (Paris: Jean-Baptiste Coignard, 1708), vol. II. Melchior Tavernier, on his Carte géographique des Postes qui traversent la France (1632) (BNFCP, Ge DD 960 (104)), writes ‘Mer Bretanique’, and Nicolas Sanson, on his Carte des rivières de la France curieusement recherchée (1641) (Ge CC 1244 (pl. XIX)), prefers ‘Mer Bretanyque’. The expression ‘la Manche ou Canal de Bretagne’ still appears in an anonymous memorandum on the herring fisheries published during the French Revolution, ‘Secondes notes sur l’introduction le prix et la qualité des harengs étrangers’, AN, Marine C560 [after 1791], vol. 788.

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Table 2.2 Place names on English maps 1600–1750 Type 1 (no name) Type 2 (generic) Type 3 (English, British, Britannicum, etc.) Type 4 (Channel) Type 5 (Narrow Sea) Total maps

0 0 41 37 2 50

ordered the murder of the duke of Gloucester, William de la Pole, 1st duke of Suffolk, is captured off the Kentish coast by a pirate ship, and subjected to a mock trial. He is accused of treachery and blamed for England’s loss of Anjou, Maine, Normandy and Picardy. As he is about to be beheaded by his captors, Suffolk emphasises the distance which separates him from the pirate captain: It is impossible that I should die By such a lowly vassal as thyself. Thy words move rage and not remorse in me: I go of Message from the Queene to France; I charge thee waft me safely crosse the Channell.60

The term ‘The British Sea or the Chanell’ was not used on a map until Robert Walton engraved it half a century later.61 We still find expressions of this alternative type until the late seventeenth century: ‘The British or Narrow Sea’62 or ‘British Sea or Chanell’,63 showing that the English toponym was not yet fixed. One explanation of the growing use of the ‘British’ adjective by map-makers in the seventeenth century might be political, reflecting the dynastic union of 1603 between the crowns of England and Scotland. Moreover, six English maps adopted what Christian Jacob has called a ‘topological’ toponomy:64 the name of the sea was relative to its position between the two countries, as in the expression ‘Channell between England and France’. These were hydrographic charts, such as Edmond Halley’s of 1701 or John Renshaw’s of 1745 (An Exact Trigonometrical Survey of the

60 61 62 63 64

Act 4, Scene 1. R. Walton, A Curious New and Plaine Mapp of England, Ireland, Scotland, and Wales (1654), in Shirley, Early Printed Maps, vol. II, p. 146. J. Overton, A New and Exact Map of Great Britannie (1667), in Shirley, Early Printed Maps, vol. II, p. 105. J. Adair, A New Mapp of the Kingdom of England. With the adjacent coasts of France & Flanders (1689), Shirley, Early Printed Maps, vol. II, p. 19. Jacob, Sovereign Map, p. 203.

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British Channel).65 We can surmise that cartographers were guided by a ‘neutral’ logic of location in their desire to be scientific. This type of name barely resurfaced after the mid-eighteenth century. Like lexicographers, cartographers made no clear-cut distinction between ‘British Channel’ and ‘English Channel’, which appeared towards the end of the seventeenth century. Manwayring’s Sea-Mans Dictionary (1670) mentions ‘the English Channel betwixt France and England’.66 The different entries in the Universal Historical, Geographical . . . Dictionary (1703) use different names for the Channel: on the one hand, British Sea is defined as ‘the Name of the Channel or Sea betwixt England and France; from its Form or Shape call’d La Manche, or the Sleeve’; Calais, on the other hand, is at the entrance to the ‘English Channel’, and Hampshire is bordered by ‘The Channel’. Does this age of toponymic abundance imply an absence of hierarchical organisation? Let us go back in time to the turn of the seventeenth century. In the first Latin edition of Camden’s Britannia (1586) the Channel appears in a description of the British Isles: This sea receives diverse names in keeping with the diversity of places: where it strikes Gaul to the south it is called the Brittanic Sea, to the East where it holds Germany, it is called the Germanic sea.67

In the 1607 edition, a whole new section is devoted to the ‘British Ocean’: This sea which generally is called mare britannicum, and oceanus caledonius, according to the diverse situation of places hath sundry and distinct names. Eastward, where it hath Germanie opposite unto it, they call it the German sea . . . But Southward where it inter-floweth France & Britain, it is properly called the british sea, & by the common mariners, The Chanel: by English sailers, the sleeve, and in the same sense, Le Manche in French, because it groweth narrow in maner of a sleeve. And this name of the british-sea, extended as farre as to Spaine, as writeth Pomponius Mela, being himselfe also a Spaniard, where he reporteth, that the Pyrene Mountaine runneth forth into the british ocean.68 65

66 67 68

E. Halley, A Large Chart of the Channell between England and France, Done from the Newest and Best Surveys with the flowing of the tides and setting of the current as they were observed by Cap. Edmund Halley. By His Majesties Command (1701), BL, Map Library, K.MAR.III (19); J. Renshaw, An Exact Trigonometrical Survey of the British Channel from the North Foreland to Scilly Islands and Cape Clear on the Southwest part of Ireland (1745), BL, Map Library, *Maps 1068 (11). H. Manwayring, The Sea-Mans Dictionary (London: Hurlock, 1670), p. 23. G. Camdeno, Britannia (London: Radulphum Newbery, 1586), p. 490. Translation from the Latin by James Clackson. ‘Hoc mare quod in universum britannicvm & oceanvs caledonivs nominatur varias pro locorum varietate fortitur appellationes. Ad Ortum quà Germaniam oppositam habet germanicvm vocatur . . .. Quà vero ad Austrum Galliam pulsat Britannicvm proprié dicitur, bodie nautis Belgis Canale, Anglis, The Sleeue, & eodem sensu Gallis Le

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This passage changes little over the seventeenth- and eighteenthcentury editions. If the translator suggested different criteria to explain place names depending on place or social group, he clearly indicated that one name was truer than the others: the British Sea. Little by little, the place names were fixed in both languages. The stabilisation of names (from the mid-eighteenth century) Eighteenth-century geography was still an adolescent ‘discipline’, whose terminology had not yet stabilised.69 However, from the 1750s, two clearly divergent developments took place on both sides of the Channel. The territorialisation of place names in both French and English began to illustrate the symbolic appropriation of sea space by the states. The names ‘La Manche’ and ‘English Channel’ slowly took hold. The dispute over the naming of the Channel still left its traces in the writings of the diplomat Ferdinand Cornot de Cussy (1795–1866) in 1856: ‘Even today England, in a vain assertion of national pride, always names the channel of La Manche “la mer Britannique [the British Sea]”.’70 Ever since its appearance the term ‘manche’ has been commonly used as a generic geographical concept, of which the Anglo-French sea is just one example. In 1687 Desroches’s Dictionnaire des termes de marine stated: ‘manche: A length of Sea between two lands, such as Manche Britanique, Manche de Bristhol, &c.’71 But, with no grammatical change, the capital letter and the definite article gave the common noun the status of a proper noun. According to Michel-Antoine Baudrand’s Dictionnaire géographique et historique (1705), ‘it is sometimes named la Manche de France & even la Manche du Sud, in order to distinguish it from the other stretches of the sea that are called Manches’.72 In 1768 Bruzen de la Martinière’s dictionary, while defining ‘the Channel proper’ as ‘that part of the sea that is pressed between England to the north, & France to the east & south’, goes

69

70 71 72

Manche, quia instar manica paulatim contrabitur. britannici autem Maris nomen ad Hispanias usque pertigisse author est Pomponius Mela & ipse Hispanus ubi prodit Pyreneum mountem in britannicvm procurrere oceanvm’, in Camdeno, Britannia (1607). The translation in my text comes from P. Holland’s first English translation, published in 1610, pp. 59–60. H. Blais and I. Laboulais (eds.), Géographies Plurielles: Les sciences géographiques au moment de l’émergence des sciences humaines (1750–1850) (Paris: L’Harmattan, 2006); C.W.J. Withers, Geography, Science and National Identity: Scotland since 1520 (Cambridge University Press, 2001). F. de Cussy, ‘De la mer’, in Phases et causes célèbres du droit maritime des nations, 2 vols. (Leipzig: F.A. Brockhaus, 1856), vol. I, tit. I, §2, p. 9. M. Desroches, Dictionnaire des termes de marine (Paris: Amable Auroy, 1687), p. 327. M. Baudrand, Dictionnaire géographique et historique, 2 vols. (Amsterdam: Marchands libraires, 1701), vol. I, p. 1076. Baudrand was also the author of a Carte des Royaumes d’Angleterre d’Escosse et d’Irlande (1695), which already adopted the same lexicon.

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on to apply the term to each of the globe’s narrow seas, speaking of ‘La Manche of Bristol’, ‘of Ceylon’, ‘of Denmark’, ‘of the East’, ‘of Finland’, ‘of Ireland’, ‘of Madagascar’, ‘of the North’ or ‘of St George’.73 By the end of the eighteenth century the use of the term would become rare in geographical dictionaries to describe other expanses of sea. But until the twentieth century, while highlighting the specific use of ‘La Manche’ with a definite article and a capital letter, language dictionaries also used the word as a geographical concept: ‘Manche, in terms geographical, is used of a channel, a narrow stretch of sea contained between two lands. La manche de Bristol.’74 In England too ‘channel’ remained a generic geographical concept. In Samuel Johnson’s Dictionary (1785), for example, we find this meaning, which has continued up to the present day: ‘Channel. n.f. [canal, Fr. canalis, lat.]. . . . 3. A strait or narrow sea, between two countries: as the British Channel, between Britain and France; St. George’s Channel, between Britain and Ireland’.75 English dictionaries also wavered up until the nineteenth century between ‘Channel’, ‘English Channel’ and ‘British Channel’.76 The French equivalent of ‘Channel’, ‘Canal’, appeared in the 1690s and was used as a synonym for ‘Manche’ throughout the eighteenth century.77 In 1743 one work composed for a general readership stated: ‘The names Manche & Canal may be given to all lengthy Straits. Nevertheless the name Manche is particular to the Sea that lies between France & England; & it also takes the name of Canal, which is common to it with several others.’78 In 1771 the Dictionnaire de Trévoux, again under the entry ‘Canal’, was categorical: ‘The stretch of sea that lies between France and England . . . is 73

74 75 76

77

78

A. Bruzen de la Martinière, Le Grand Dictionnaire Géographique, 6 vols. (Paris: Libraires Associés, 1768), vol. IV. The author, by and large, reused the definitions of Baudrand’s Dictionnaire géographique et historique (1705). Dictionnaire de l’Académie, 8th edn (1935). The ongoing 9th edition considers this use as ‘obsolete’. S. Johnson, Dictionary of the English Language (London: J.F. & C. Rivington, 1785), vol. II, n.p. According to our surveys in F. Watson, A New and Complete Geographical Dictionary (London: Printed for the authors, 1773); R. Brookes, General Gazetteer, 4th edn (London: J.F. and C. Rivington, 1778); G. Landmann, Universal Gazetteer (London: Longman, Orme & Co., 1840); J.A. Sharp, A New Gazetteer; or, Topographical Dictionary of the British Islands and Narrow Seas (London: Longman, 1852). The Channel was mentioned in the article ‘Canal’, in Aubin, Dictionnaire de Marine contenant les termes de la navigation et de l’architecture navale. In the 1736 and 1742 editions there was a specific article on ‘manche’, but it dealt with the geographical concept, not the particular space. M. Robert, Introduction à la géographie des srs Sanson, Géographes du Roi; revue, corrigée et augmentée par Mr. Robert, Géographe ordinaire du Roi (Paris: Durand, 1743), p. 108.

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plainly and simply called the Canal or the Manche.’ Let us skip a generation. Under the Empire the geographer François Robert proposed a series of questions intended to test the knowledge of college students: q. The sea that lies between England and France, what is it called? a. It is the Manche, also called the Canal.79

The term was also much prized in literary circles. Voltaire and the Abbé Prévost talked of the ‘canal d’Angleterre’, and Jean-Baptiste Robinet and Jean-Paul arat, of the ‘canal de la Manche’. As late as 1804 Bernardin de Saint-Pierre referred to the ‘channel that separates Gaul from the British Isles’.80 Diplomatic language also kept this name, as in the draft of a royal decree on privateering of 30 Vendémiaire Year 10(22 October 1801).81 As late as 1862, in the first Géographie Universelle, Théophile Lavallée spoke at length of ‘the stretch of sea known as the canal Britannique or la Manche.’82 Despite the persistence of alternative place names until the end of the period, they tail off sharply in the last third of the eighteenth century. On maps too linguistic uncertainty persisted into the 1760s, before ‘La Manche’ won the day once and for all: in the 1780s, 86% of French maps opted for this name to the exclusion of all other terms, and by the 1790s the figure reached 100%.83 A provisional chronology emerges from our exploration of names given to the sea. The moments of most intense territorialisation of sea space were not the same in England and France. In England it was in the early seventeenth century that the qualifying adjectives British or English took permanent hold, whereas the period during which French cartographers labelled the Channel as French was much shorter, starting in the midseventeenth century and lasting until the last third of the eighteenth. This

79 80

81 82 83

F. Robert, Géographie élémentaire à l’usage des collèges, avec des cartes, et un précis de la sphère, 9th edn (Paris: Genets, Year 9 [ca 1800/01]), p. 156. B. de Saint-Pierre, L’Arcadie. Livre premier: les Gaules, in Etudes de la nature, 5 vols. (Paris: Deterville, 1804), vol. IV, p. 340; J. Robinet, De la nature (Amsterdam: E. Van Harrevelt, 1761), p. 328; Abbé Prévost, Le Philosophe anglois ou Histoire de Monsieur Cleveland, fils naturel de Cromwell, new edn, 6 vols. (Utrecht: Etienne Neaulme, 1741), vol. IV, p. 199; J.-P. Marat, Les Pamphlets (1790–1792) (Paris: E. Fasquelle, 1911), p. 275. The expression used is ‘canal de la Manche’: AMAE, CPA 596, fo. 596. T. Lavallée, Géographie universelle de Malte-Brun, entièrement refondue et mise au courant de la science, 6 vols. (Paris: Furne et Cie, 1862–1865), vol. I, p. 341. One exception that proves the rule is the Carte d’Europe dressée pour l’instruction d’après les itinéraires et les observations astronomiques de l’Académie royale des Sciences, published in 1800 by Dezauche and based on an original by Guillaume Delisle and Philippe Buache: it mentions ‘La Manche ou le Canal’ (BNFCP, Ge D 15362).

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raises the question of the link between diplomatic relations and toponomy. We can now suggest some explanatory hypotheses. In a first phase, in the reign of Louis XIV, the battle of toponyms seems to reflect the maritime rivalry between the two states, marked by such expressions as ‘Mer de France’ on French maps or in French dictionaries. However, the elision of the possessive phrase ‘of France’ at the end of the seventeenth century and then of the ambivalent qualifier ‘britannique’ in the mid-eighteenth century seem paradoxical. It is precisely in this period that historians have traditionally located the beginnings of the expansion of national and patriotic discourse in France. We can assume then that we need to look less to the national and more to the territorial significance of the phrase. One attractive explanation is to apply to sea borders the classic model of the French kingdom’s territorial demarcation implemented at land borders. Unlike England then, France would have chosen to limit its ambitions to the coastal waters, renouncing its claim to any sovereignty over the Channel. The English term ‘channel’ always referred to sea space, including islands (Channel Islands) or naval squadrons (Channel Squadron), whereas in French the term ‘La Manche’ also came to refer to a local or a regional administrative district. This change came about during the French Revolution. A department took the name of Manche in 1790. The National Assembly’s department constitution committee, responsible for naming the eighty-three departments, first proposed giving this name to the department of Douai (Nord).84 It was eventually conferred on the Cherbourg Peninsula, but the reasons for this decision are not known. The expression was adopted again after the department’s creation to designate an ecclesiastical district. The Civil Constitution of the Clergy of 1790 had the effect of reorganising ecclesiastical divisions, and the province of Rouen was replaced by the ‘metropolis of the Coasts of La Manche’, which included, ‘in addition to the Norman dioceses, the dioceses of Oise and Somme’.85 The bishop of Rouen, Charrier de la Roche, was accordingly appointed métropolitain des côtes de la Manche on 20 March 1791, was

84

85

‘Discussion du décret général sur la division du royaume, 26 février 1790’, AP, 1st series (1789–1800) (Paris: Paul Dupont, 1880), XI, p. 710. The National Assembly debated for a long time the naming of departments (ibid., pp. 711–16). M. Ozouf-Marignier’s otherwise excellent book is not addressing this theme, La formation des départements: La représentation du territoire français à la fin du dix-huitième siècle (Paris: EHESS, 1989). É. Sevestre, L’acceptation de la Constitution Civile du Clergé en Normandie (Janvier-Mai 1791) (Paris: Alphonse Picard, 1922), p. 84. The said ‘metropolis’ was referred to in articles 2 and 3 of vol. I (‘Offices ecclésiastiques’) of the law on the civil constitution of the clergy.

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consecrated on 10 April and took up his seat on 17 April.86 What this amounts to, then, is a progressive regionalisation of La Manche. Why was it that the development of the maritime frontier produced different outcomes in France and in England? Once again, the question needs to be addressed by taking the long view. Parting land and sea The framing of maps In general, the act of framing, the ruling of a border around the area represented by the map, communicates a point of view. The meaning of a map changes according to the scale chosen by the cartographer, whether it is that of a province or a county, a state or a continent.87 For example, two maps entitled ‘La Manche’ in our sample did not show the same parts of France and England. However, one area did seem to exhibit a general consensus from the seventeenth century: to the south the latitude generally fluctuated between 46° (Île d’Oléron) and 48°20 (Pointe du Raz); to the north the limit was even more clear-cut, being almost always somewhere around 52° (Newport, Wales).88 On most English maps including the Channel, the western limit shown tended to be the Scilly Islands, sometimes Land’s End, or occasionally the Bay of Cork in Ireland. On French maps, the islands of Ushant (off Brittany) generally marked the western border. There was greater variation for the eastern frame. From Calais to Ostend, the range of the areas taken in by the Atlantic–Channel and especially the Channel–North Sea boundaries therefore fluctuated according to the structure of the map.89 Chronology does not explain the divergences in framing: in 1650 Frederik de Wit’s map adopted a very contemporary frame, with a latitude of 48°–52°, whereas the Scilly Islands and Gravelines stand at the western 86

87 88 89

M.H. Fisquet, La France pontificale (Galla Christiana) . . . Métropole de Rouen (Paris: E. Repos, 1866), p. 278. See C. de la Roche, Lettre pastorale de M. l’évêque de Rouen, au département de la Seine-Inférieure, et métropolitain des côtes de la Manche aux fidèles de son diocèse (Paris: Leclère, 1791). Our sample comprises every scale, regional (province, department, city), state or suprastate (Europe, the world, the North Atlantic), for a total of 402 maps. Our sample includes a total of seventy-two maps of the Channel, twenty-two of which are French, thirty-eight English and eight Dutch. However, military ingénieurs géographes agreed very early on the limits of the Channel, without changing their opinion. Thus Vauban placed ‘the two extremities of the Channel’ in Calais and Ouessant; see ‘Mémoire sur Cherbourg’ (15 July 1686), SHD 1M1085, fo. 1.

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and eastern edges of the map.90 In 1788, on the other hand, Thomas Kitchin symbolically excluded everything south of the Channel Islands (lat. 49°20 south) from his map of the ‘British Channel’.91 This is an exception: cartographers in general had difficulty arriving at precise limits. The uncertainty over the Channel’s eastern boundaries is glaring. The body of water on which Dunkirk and Calais are located varied according to each geographical dictionary. It was not always the Strait of Dover that was chosen as a dividing line ‘between the Channel . . . and the sea of Germany’ (another name for the North Sea).92 Bruzen de la Martinière’s 1768 dictionary placed the Channel ‘between a line, drawn from the western end of the province of Cornwall in England, as far as the isle of Ushant which lies to the west of Brittany, & another line from the port of Rie [Rye] in England to Ambleteuse, which is in France’.93 But was the Strait of Dover in the Channel or in the North Sea? In the absence of any agreement geographers attached the strait to either sea, with no other justification than a statement of the obvious. So in 1887, on the subject of the steamboats connecting French and English ports, Louis Vivien de Saint-Martin asserted categorically that ‘the shortest of these crossings and therefore the busiest of these sea lanes, the one from Dover to Calais, requiring but one hour and a quarter on a calm sea, is no longer strictly in the Channel’.94 Similarly, Pierre Joanne’s dictionary (1896) states that the ‘Strait of Dover is, strictly speaking, out of the Channel and rather in the North Sea’.95 The choice of boundary remained somewhat arbitrary. Despite the fluidity of western and eastern boundaries, maps of the Channel never called into question the coherence of the physical unit, modelled on the topography of bordering states. Under the influence of Philippe Buache (1700–1773), the mid-eighteenth century also witnessed the growth of a physical geography whose demarcations were based on ‘natural’ divisions.96 On his bathymetric chart of the Channel (1737), 90 91 92 93 94 95 96

F. de Wit, Canalis inter Angliae et Galliae littora. Pascaert van’t Canaal tusschen Engeland en Vranckryck, (1650), BL, Map Library, *Maps 1068 (1). T. Jefferys, The British Channel, with a part of the Atlantic Ocean, and of the coast of Ireland (1788), BL, Map Library, *Maps C.11.b.20. N. Sanson, Description de la France (Paris: Melchior Tavernier, 1639), n.p. Martinière, Grand Dictionnaire, vol. iv, p. 66. L. Vivien de Saint-Martin, Nouveau dictionnaire de Géographie Universelle (Paris: Hachette, 1887), 20 vols. (Paris: Hachette, 1879–1900), vol. III (1887), p. 601. ‘Manche’, in P. Joanne (ed.), Dictionnaire géographique et administratif de la France et de ses colonies, 7 vols. (Paris: Hachette, 1890–1905), vol. IV (1896), p. 2426. See D. Nordman and J. Revel, ‘La division de l’espace français’, in A. Burguière and J. Revel (eds.), Histoire de la France: L’espace français (Paris: Seuil, 2000) (1st edn: 1989), pp. 148–53. On Guettard, see N. Broc, La géographie des philosophes: Géographes et voyageurs français au XVIIIe siècle (Paris: Ophrys, 1975), pp. 205–6.

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discussed in the last chapter, Buache did not represent the sea; instead he showed the continuity of submarine mountain chains connecting Artois and Kent. As Numa Broc notes, ‘there is no sharper contrast between the old geography, which knew only historical boundaries or policies, and the new, which presented borders that were more stable because they were “natural”’.97 Emptied of water and endowed with steep slopes, the Channel vanished.98 Buache had his followers. On 19 February 1746 Jean-Étienne Guettard (1715–1786) gave a paper to the Académie des Sciences, proving the continuity of geological layers between France and England. His demonstration represented a critical milestone in the history of geology. It was illustrated by two maps by Philippe Buache99 (Figure 2.7). On these Guettard had featured three vertical and partly overlapping bands running approximately north-west–south-east across the Channel, which he identified as ‘metallic’, ‘marly’ and ‘sandy’, depending on the distribution of minerals in the soil. These schematic maps showing surface geology with deliberately blurred divisions between the strata made use of dozens of randomly distributed symbols were quickly outdated. Their main innovation from our perspective was rendering physical geography independent of political boundaries.100 Guettard sought to apply his discoveries about France to England, using an intuitive method, as he explains in the dissertation: One of the first ideas that came to me after all this work, was to assure myself that England resembled [France], in whole or in part . . .; I knew that Cornwall was famous for its tin mines, . . . this therefore made me think that, as Cornwall is aligned with Lower Normandy, there may very well be a uniformity between the

97 98

99

100

Broc, ibid., p. 203. In his Essai d’une nouvelle division politique, ou moyen d’établir d’une manière fixe et invariable les bornes des possessions entre les différentes puissances, Buache does not treat seas as natural divisions. Mountains must be the basis of the borders delimitating states, Bibliothèque de l’Institut, MS 2316, s.d. Carte minéralogique Sur la Nature du Terrein d’une portion de l’Europe. Dressée pour un Mémoire de Mr. Guettard, Par Philippe Buache (1746), pl. 31, in J. Guettard, ‘Mémoire et Carte minéralogique Sur la nature et la situation des terreins qui traversent la France et l’Angleterre’, in Mémoires de l’Académie Royale des Sciences, 1746 (1751), reissued in Suite des mémoires de mathématique, et de physique, tirés des registres de l’Académie Royale des Sciences, de l’année mdccxlvi (Amsterdam: J. Schreuder, 1755), vol. II, p. 584. See also Carte minéralogique, Où l’on voit la nature et la situation des terrains qui traversent la France et l’Angleterre. Dressée sur les Observations et pour un mémoire de Mr. Guettard de l’Acad. des Sciences. Par Philippe Buache de la même Académie (1746), pl. 32, in Guettard, ‘Mémoire et Carte’, p. 584. F. Ellenberger, ‘Recherches et réflexions sur la naissance de la cartographie géologique, en Europe et plus particulièrement en France’, Histoire et nature, 22–23 (1983), pp. 15–21.

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Figure 2.7 P. Buache, Carte minéralogique où l’on voit la Nature et la Situation des terreins qui traversent la France et l’Angleterre. Dressée sur les Observations et pour un Mémoire de Mr. Guettard de l’Académie des Sciences. Par Philippe Buache de la même Académie (1746). two provinces, and that this uniformity may even be found elsewhere between France and England.101

By representing France and England as belonging to the same geological structure, Guettard completely freed himself from the shackles of the logic that claimed that the Channel separated the two states: 101

Guettard, ‘Mémoire et Carte’, pp. 546–7.

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I therefore believed it was appropriate that I should speak of England and France in the same breath, and that the map should contain both kingdoms.102

While the Channel was often defined in relation to France and England, the sea was not necessarily situated in relation to the surrounding land. By the same logic of deconstruction, we may now ask ourselves whether geographers considered this sea as European or Atlantic. Atlantic corridor or continental sea? In the eighteenth century and for much of the nineteenth, geography was essentially descriptive. What was seen as natural units were classified and combined in large sets.103 Knowing which geographical, continental or oceanic grouping the Channel ought to belong depended on where its spatial coordinates were placed and also on the layer of time in which it was embedded. The Channel was the object of a tug of war between two systems of coordinates: Atlantic and European. Classification in one geographical group or another depended on several factors. The nature of AngloFrench relations did certainly play a part at times, as did the role given to water – as either repelling or attracting – in the history of civilisations. The key question was to decide whether Britain was the archetype of an island isolated from the world or its opposite, a beacon of transatlantic civilisation. The two systems of location coexisted in the eighteenth century. In that respect, the definition given in Charles Maty’s Dictionnaire géographique universel (1701) is quite modern: Bretagne, La Manche, or the Channel. Britannicum Mare, Manica. It is a great strait of the Atlantic Ocean. It stretches between the coasts of England to the North, and those of France to the South, from the islands of Ushant, as far as the Strait of Dover, which separates it from the sea of Germany.104

But while this ‘dual’ location appeared early on, it remained little used in the eighteenth and at the beginning of the nineteenth centuries, as a comparison of French geographical dictionaries shows. Only in eight out of twenty-two cases, seven of which date from before 1721, is reference made to the Atlantic. Despite Europe’s maritime expansion across the world in the eighteenth century, the Channel was defined in geographical works above all within Anglo-French horizons. Nineteenth-century changes in geography as a discipline modified the ways in which the 102 103 104

Ibid., pp. 547–50. D. Retaillé, Le monde du géographe (Paris: Presses de Sciences Po, 1997), p. 29. C. Maty, Dictionnaire géographique universel (Amsterdam and Utrecht: François Halma, 1701), p. 222.

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Channel was conceived, as is demonstrated by a comparison of the sections on physical geography in different editions of the Géographie Universelle, that comprehensive survey of the period’s geographical knowledge.105 The first edition, by Conrad Malte-Brun, published between 1810 and 1829, is still highly descriptive.106 Yet it no longer defined the Channel by the same criteria as the eighteenth century: it now appeared as a stretch of sea flowing into the North Sea, on one side, and ‘open to all the great movements of the Atlantic Ocean’,107 on the other. In Élisée Reclus’s Nouvelle Géographie Universelle, published in 1879, the sea was historicised by references to geology, which show the old continental anchoring of the Channel, or the North Sea or the Baltic.108 Reclus was following the actualist trend in geology, which postulated that the ancient causes of changes in the terrain continue to act in the present, when he proposed a prospective geography of the Channel: ‘The Atlantic of northern Europe is on the whole relatively shallow; even an upheaval of a hundred meters would make its eastern bays, the Baltic, the North Sea, St George’s Channel and La Manche vanish almost altogether.’109 The proliferation of soundings of the seabed during the seventeenth century had given rise to improved knowledge of the continental shelf, but it was not until the nineteenth century that the fourth dimension, that of depth, was emphasised in definitions of the Channel.110 In general works on geographical knowledge, increasingly sophisticated considerations on bathymetry are found together with passages which became standard after Reclus’s Géographie Universelle on the consequences of a potential lowering of the sea level.111 Paul Vidal de la Blache, in his États et nations de l’Europe (1889), 105

106

107

108 109 110 111

On the use of the Géographies Universelles as a source, see F. Deprest, ‘L’invention géographique de la Méditerranée: éléments de réflexion’, EG, 1 (2002), pp. 73–92; R. Ferras, Les Géographies Universelles et le monde de leur temps (Montpellier: GIP Reclus, 1989). N. Broc, ‘Quelques débats dans la géographie française avant Vidal de la Blache’, in P. Claval (ed.), Autour de Vidal de la Blache: La formation de l’école française de géographie (Paris: CNRS, 1993), p. 38. I have used the 5th edn, revised by J.J.N. Huot, Précis de la géographie universelle ou description de toutes les parties du monde sur un plan nouveau d’après les grandes divisions naturelles du globe, tome deuxième. Description de l’Europe (Paris: Au Bureau des Publications illustrées, 1845), p. 5. The same passage is reproduced in Lavallée’s new edition in 1862, p. 341. E. Reclus, Nouvelle Géographie Universelle: La Terre et les Hommes, 19 vols. (Paris: Hachette, 1876–1894), vol. IV: L’Europe du Nord-Ouest (1879), pp. 1–2. Ibid. A.H.W. Robinson, Marine Cartography in Britain: A History of the Sea Chart to 1855 (Oxford: Leicester University Press, 1962), pp. 28–31. For his lectures at the Ecole Normale in 1794–1795 Jean-Nicolas Buache de la Neuville used a relief map of the Channel, made by his uncle Philippe Buache, in order to show nautical contour lines and the consequences of a lowering of the sea levels; see lecture of 18 March 1795, in D. Nordman (ed.), École Normale de l’an III: Leçons d’Histoire, de

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highlighted the fact that, like the North Sea or the Irish Sea, the Channel was very shallow: ‘Between Dover and Calais . . ., there is nowhere a point where, to use a physical comparison, the towers of Notre Dame would not physically protrude above the surface of the waters.’112 The same metaphor was used by Halford Mackinder, one of the founding father of geopolitics, in 1902, with the cultural transfer de rigueur: ‘The Strait of Dover is so shallow, that were St. Paul’s Cathedral sunk in it, the dome would rise above the water even in its deepest part.’113 This kind of speculation is rather reminiscent of the previous century’s providentialism and enabled the expression of a kind of fantasy of the junction of England to the Continent, no longer past but future. This fantasy was all the more topical in those days because the plan to dig a tunnel under the Channel, launched in 1802, had been abandoned in 1882.114 In the third edition of the Géographie Universelle, directed by Vidal de la Blache, two volumes dealt with the Channel’s physical geography. For Albert Demangeon, who wrote the volume on England, it was a continental sea in terms of both its geological structure and its morphology. This was evinced by the deep similarities between the north of France and the south of England, similarly affected by the folds of the Hercynian Chain.115 What is more, ‘the Funnel of La Manche’116 or ‘narrow sea’117 was, like the North Sea, ‘a dependency of the continent’,118 due to its shallowness: ‘The shelf that bears the British archipelago belongs to the continent, including the thin film of sea water that covers it.’119 In Martonne’s volume on France, however, the emphasis was on the east–west flow of tides, particularly strong on this ‘film of coastal waters overflowing from the great Atlantic depths’.120 Though the expressions used were almost identical, in one case the Channel was continental, in the other, Atlantic.

112 113 114

115 116 120

Géographie, d’Économie politique. Édition annotée des cours de Volney, Buache de la Neuville, Mentelle et Vandermonde (Paris: Dunod, 1994), p. 234. P. Vidal-Lablache, États et nations de l’Europe: Autour de la France (Paris: Librairie Charles Delagrave, 1889), p. 248. H.J. Mackinder, Britain and the British Seas (London: William Heinemann, 1902), p. 25. The French engineer Albert-Mathieu Favier was the first to come up with the idea of a Channel tunnel, which he presented to Bonaparte in 1802. The literature on this topic is extensive: see, for instance, T. Whiteside, The Tunnel under the Channel (London: R. Hart-Davis, 1962); R. Garrett, Cross Channel (London: Hutchinson, 1972); J.-P. Navailles, Le Tunnel sous la Manche: Deux siècles pour sauter le pas (1802–1897) (Paris: Champ Vallon, 1987); D. Hunt, The Tunnel: The Story of the Channel Tunnel, 1802–1994 (Upton-upon-Severn: Images, 1994); G. Anderson and B. Roskow, The Channel Tunnel Story (London: E. & F. Spon, 1994). A. Demangeon, Géographie universelle, publiée sous la direction de P. Vidal de la Blache et L. Gallois. Tome premier. Iles Britanniques (Paris: Armand Colin, 1927), p. 3. 118 119 Ibid., p. 38. 117 Ibid., p. 39. Ibid., p. 18. Ibid. E. de Martonne, Géographie universelle, publiée sous la direction de P. Vidal de la Blache et L. Gallois. Tome VI. La France (Paris: Armand Colin, 1942), p. 259.

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In England Halford Mackinder also differentiated the geological and the liquid Channel, imagining the consequences of a rise or fall in sea level, to conclude that ‘the insular nature [of England] is an accident that is due to the present level of the sea relative to the earth’.121 Thus, at the beginning of the twentieth century these geographers clearly read the space as political: the interpretation of the geographical role given to the sea was partially determined by conceptions of Anglo-French relations. This is partly explained by the strong links between geography as a discipline and the institutions of power.122 Cartography has always been bound up with state authority: turning back to the eighteenth century, we need to establish how far political issues influenced the very construction of these tools for reading the world that are maps. Measuring the sea By the eighteenth century, the space of confrontation that was the Channel was becoming a ‘space-laboratory’ in which scientific knowledge made swift progress.123 The two dynamics were linked. Two attempts at a thematic cartography of the Channel serve to mark either end of this period. The first venture was conducted by Captain Edmond Halley and led to his tide map, published in 1702. The second was in the 1780s, which saw the launch of a major joint programme between the observatories of Greenwich and Paris. In both cases the question arises as to whether there was a conflict between international scientific research and the backdrop of rivalry between France and Britain. As Roy Porter writes, ‘the pursuit of knowledge was never very far isolated from national and commercial profit’.124 Indeed, while thematic cartography appeared to break free of classical political or natural units, it was itself the result of state investment. 121 122 123

124

Mackinder, Britain and the British Seas, p. 26. V. Berdoulay, La formation de l’école française de géographie (1870–1914) (Paris: CTHS, 1995) (1st edn: 1981). I borrow the expression from Roger Chartier, who used it (after the geographer Max Sorre) in a different sense: R. Chartier, ‘The Saint-Malo–Geneva line’, in P. Nora (ed.), Realms of Memory, vol. I: Conflicts and Divisions (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996), pp. 467–76. R. Porter, ‘The terraqueous globe’, in G.S. Rousseau and R. Porter (eds.), The Ferment of Knowledge: Studies in the Historiography of Eighteenth-Century Science (Cambridge University Press, 1980), p. 303. This question of the relations between science and politics in France and Britain has been discussed by historians for a long time. Compare the opposed views of G.R. de Beer, The Sciences Were Never at War (London: Thomas Nelson & Sons, 1960), and A.H. Dupree, ‘Nationalism and science, Sir Joseph Banks and the wars with France’, in D.H. Pinkney and T. Ropp (eds.), A Festschrift for Frederick B. Artz (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1964), pp. 37–51. See more recently E. Lipkowitz, ‘“The sciences are never at war?”: the republic of science in the era of the French Revolution, 1789–1815’, unpublished PhD thesis, Northwestern University Chicago (2009).

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Another consideration weighed on the work of scientists: the marine environment itself dictated its own agenda for anyone who wanted to domesticate it on a map. At the technical level, measuring the Channel, its contours, its width and its depth, charting its tides and embedding it in a chain of triangles were bold ventures at the time. The growing knowledge about the Channel at the end of the eighteenth century also had a symbolic meaning: joining London and Paris created a transnational space characterised by the harmonisation of scales and units of measurement.125 This dual dimension of knowledge on sea space – scientific progress and state security – was already present in Halley’s expedition in the English Channel in 1701, in which he surveyed the coasts and tides of the Channel. Interest in charting the seabed developed in England in the second half of the seventeenth century. Scientific figures such as Robert Hooke discussed the most suitable method for measuring distances and heights at sea.126 In addition to his interest in astronomy, which led to the discovery of the famous comet in 1682, Halley also produced a significant body of work in the field of nautical cartography. Appointed Royal Navy captain by special order of Charles II, he made several voyages in the Atlantic aboard the Paramore, expeditions subsidised by the Royal Society, which led to the publication of a chart representing magnetic variations on the ocean.127 On 11 June 1701 Captain Edmond Halley received instructions from the admiralty secretary to embark on a future mission in the Channel and the North Sea, this time to study the course of the tides and currents. It was first and foremost a scientific mission: ‘You are directed to . . . use your Utmost care and Diligence in observing the Course of the Tydes accordingly as well in the Midsea as on both Shores As also the Precise times of High and Low Water of the Sett and Strength of the Flood and Ebb.’128 The tense diplomatic background that was evident in the rumours of war over the Spanish succession in the summer 125 126 127

128

D. Turnbull, ‘Cartography and science in early modern Europe: mapping the construction of knowledge spaces’, IM, 48 (1996), pp. 5–24. A.H.W. Robinson, ‘Marine surveying in Britain during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries’, GJ, 123 (1957), pp. 449–56. N.J.W. Thrower, ‘Edmond Halley as a thematic geo-cartographer’, AAAG, 59 (1969), p. 661. On Halley’s maps, see J. Proudman, ‘Halley’s tidal chart’, GJ, 100 (1942), pp. 174–6; A.H. Cook, Edmond Halley: Charting the Heavens and the Seas (New York: Clarendon, 1998); M.S. Reidy, Tides of History: Ocean Science and Her Majesty’s Navy (University of Chicago Press, 2008); H. Rozwadowski, Fathoming the Ocean: The Discovery and Exploration of the Deep Sea (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005), pp. 35–41. ‘Instructions for observing the Course of the Tides &c in the English Channell, 12 June 1701’, in N.J.W. Thrower (ed.), The Three Voyages of Edmond Halley in the ‘Paramore’ 1698–1701, 2 vols. (London: The Hakluyt Society, 1982–1983), vol. I, p. 328.

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of 1701 also gave the expedition a strategic dimension. Knowledge of sea space was already the concern of the state: ‘And in case dureing your being employed on this Service, any other Matters may Occur unto you the observing and Publishing whereof may tend towards the Security of the Navigation of the Subjects of his Majtie or other Princes tradeing into the Channell you are to be very carefull in the takeing notice thereof.’129 While surveying the sea, Halley also took a careful look at the state of the fortifications of the French seaports.130 As a result of this voyage a chart was published in 1702, entitled A New and Correct Chart of the Channel between England and France with Considerable Improvements Not Extant in Any Draughts hitherto Publish’d. It would remain a benchmark in books about piloting until the end of the eighteenth century, and was reprinted in English in 1708, 1750, 1755 and 1776, and translated into French in 1760.131 According to his log Halley seems not to have encountered difficulties on the French side during his mission. Eight decades and three Anglo-French wars later, scientists from the two countries implemented a bilateral enterprise to conduct a comprehensive measurement of the Channel. The linking of the observatories of Greenwich and Paris in 1787 led to an unprecedented scientific collaboration between the two states.132 This event provides an opportunity to consider how the measurement of the space between France and England was harmonised. In France the triangulation process had long been under way at the national level. The Channel coastline in particular had been the focus of several scientific expeditions. The coordinates of Saint-Malo, Mont Saint-Michel, Caen, Calais and Dunkirk had been calculated by Jean Picard (1620–1682) and Philippe de La Hire (1640–1718) during their voyages of 1681–1682.133 These two members of the Académie des Sciences also estimated the width of the Strait of Dover.134 The coastline of Saint-Malo and later that between Saint-Valéry-en-Caux and Dunkirk 129 130 131

132

133 134

Ibid., p. 329. On this see Cook, Edmond Halley, pp. 236, 290. Reidy, Tides of History, pp. 37, 40. Ibid., pp. 63, 370. An augmented version was published in French by the Chevalier de Beaurain in 1760: G. Palsky, Des chiffres et des cartes: Naissance et développement de la cartographie quantitative au XIXe siècle (Paris: CTHS, 1996), pp. 42–3. J.W. Konvitz, Cartography in France 1660–1848: Science, Engineering, and Statecraft (University of Chicago Press, 1987), pp. 26–8; J.-P. Martin and A. McConnell, ‘Joining the observatories of Paris and Greenwich’, Notes & Records of the Royal Society, 62 (2008), pp. 355–72. Ibid., p. 6. S. Debarbat, ‘Coopération géodésique entre la France et l’Angleterre à la veille de la Révolution française: échanges techniques, scientifiques et instrumentaux’, in Actes du 114e Congrès National des sociétés savantes (Paris 3–9 avril 1989): Échanges d’influences scientifiques et techniques entre pays européens de 1780 à 1830 (Paris: CTHS, 1990), pp. 48–9.

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were included in a chain of triangles drawn by Cassini II between 1733 and 1737 as part of France’s first triangulation project.135 In 1760, thanks to the second triangulation project successfully led by Cassini III, all sheets of the Channel coastline between Dunkirk and Saint-Malo were published. On the English side, despite the foundation of the Greenwich Observatory in 1675, it was only after 1763 that a large triangulation project was launched, under the patronage of the Ordnance Survey. And it was only after the end of the War of American Independence and the easing of Anglo-French relations that a joint project between the observatories of Paris and London was launched. This event is a good illustration of the ambivalence of Anglo-French relations during the 1780s. On the one hand, political and military authorities were heavily involved in the enterprise;136 on the other, the scale of intellectual, scientific and economic exchanges was remarkable. The initiative for the project came from Cassini, who sent a ‘Paper on the Junction of Dover to London’ to the British Crown in October 1783, which was later passed on to the Royal Society.137 The director of the Paris Observatory stated the need to know ‘with exactitude the difference of longitude between the two most famous Observatories of Europe’, as ‘there is no agreement whatsoever on the longitude of Greenwich at eleven seconds, and on its latitude at fifteen seconds’.138 Cassini therefore suggested recalculating these coordinates using a geodetic rather than astronomical methodology. In May 1784 Joseph Banks, president of the Royal Society, advised Cassini that the project had received the backing of the British Crown.139 The symbolic significance of such an international operation was felt by scientists, as

135 136

137 138

139

M. Pelletier, Les cartes des Cassini: La science au service de l’État et des régions (Paris: CTHS, 2002), p. 84; Konvitz, Cartography in France, pp. 1–31. In France, Louis Auguste Le Tonnelier de Breteuil (1730–1807), Ministre de la Maison du Roi et de Paris, was Cassini’s intermediary with the French court in Versailles; in Britain, a military engineer, major general Roy, was in charge of the operations: S. Widmalm, ‘Accuracy, rhetoric, and technology: the Paris-Greenwich triangulation, 1784–88’, in T. Frängsmyr, J.L. Heilbron and R.E. Rider (eds.), The Quantifying Spirit in the Eighteenth Century (Berkeley CA: University of California Press, 1990), pp. 184, 193. Widmalm, ‘Accuracy, rhetoric, and technology’, p. 186. A copy of the memorandum is attached to a letter from J. Banks to Dorset dated 9 March 1787: TNA, FO27/21, fo. 105. C. de Thury, ‘Mémoire sur la jonction de Douvres à Londres’, in N. Maskelyne (ed.), ‘Concerning the latitude and longitude of the royal observatories of Greenwich; with remarks on a memorial of the late M. Cassini’ (read 22 February 1787), vol. LXXVII, 77 (1787), pp. 151–2. Banks to Cassini de Thury, 11 May 1784, BOP, D5–7, in S. Debarbat, Actes du 114e Congrès National des sociétés savantes (Paris 3–9 avril 1989): Échanges d’influences scientifiques et techniques entre pays européens de 1780 à 1830 (Paris: CTHS, 1990), p. 69.

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shown by Banks’s hesitation over the appropriate word to use in another letter to Cassini de Thury: ‘I imagine that an operation of such great difficulty across the Channel that separates our two countries with an accuracy sufficient to correct the astronomical observations cannot be executed without the reciprocal relief of two nations coasts on each of which signals will be established with Pyramides flags or fires that will be observed respectively.’140 Cassini III died a month later, and his son Jean-Dominique implemented the connection on the French side.141 In Britain the project was supported by William Roy (1726–1790), a lieutenant general in the British Army, already involved in the national triangulation that had begun twenty years earlier. Operations did not begin until autumn 1787. The first problem, as David Turnbull has shown, was intellectual: if the two coasts were to be joined in one homogenous space, the information gathered by either side had to be standardised. The conversion of the French toise into the English league, and of the distance between the meridians of Paris and Greenwich into degrees, itself depending on agreement over the shape of the Earth, were steps on the road to a ‘new international space’142 of knowledge. However, this knowledge could never ignore the local context in which it developed. The success of the venture also depended on the invention of new techniques and on specialised logistics. The trigonometric method involved drawing triangles from a series of coastal bases or stations on either side of the Channel. The angles were measured with instruments (Ramsden’s theodolite for the British and Borda’s circle for the French) from the bases, which were high points on the opposite coast, such as church steeples, watchtowers and clifftops. The first step was to determine the apexes of the triangles: Thinking that possibly from St. Peter’s church in the isle of Thanet the tower of Notre Dame at Calais may be seen, I have extended dotted triangles into that part of Kent; because, if the united heights should not be sufficient to raise the top of the tower above the curvature of the sea, which is the only thing to be doubted, we are always certain, that the signal of Blancnez may, by means of the Indian lights, be easily seen, since the whole range of chalk hills behind Calais are discovered with the naked eye from the isle of Thanet, when the weather is tolerably clear.143 140 141 143

Banks to Cassini de Thury, 4 June 1784, BOP, D5–7, n.p. The original letter is in French, and the strike-through is in the original too. 142 Debarbat, Actes, p. 51. Turnbull, ‘Cartography and science’, p. 19. W. Roy, ‘An Account of the Mode proposed to be followed in determining the relative Situation of the Royal Observatories of Greenwich and Paris’, in a memorandum presented to the Royal Society on 22 February 1787, Philosophical Transactions, 77 (1787), p. 193.

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Even if the distance was short, making out the opposite coast was not a necessarily unproblematic conclusion, and measurement proved difficult, as noted by the French scientists in their records of the operations: The vapours ceaselessly raised by the interposition of the sea between the two coasts, caused perpetual variation in our making out the objects. In the space of eighteen days there were but two where the coast of England was fairly constantly clear, and allowed me to perceive a mast on the tower of Dover that General Roy had had erected at the precise point of the station from which he had observed our first beacons.144

The French consequently adopted the English solution, namely the lighting of coastal beacons,145 but this needed perfect coordination with the other shore and relied on the harmonisation of the measurement of time, due to ‘the irregularity of the rates of the watches of the artillery-men attending at the different stations’.146 Eventually, the junction was realised (Figure 2.8). Between the beginning and the end of the eighteenth century, therefore, there is a shift from national projects to the first international scientific collaboration between France and Britain. While the exchanges of men and ideas began much earlier, the involvement of the state was quite new.147 So, far from being a separating border, the Channel became a space that connected. What was new was the will to break free of the natural obstacle of the sea and to encourage rival governments to cooperate. The geopolitical context was of course very different in 1702 and in 1787, on the eve of a war in one case and peace in the other. Yet an intellectual change in official representations of sea space seems to have taken place in this period, as we will see in the following section: nautical charts now affected the sailors’ experience.

144

145 146

147

Cassini, P.F.A. Méchain and A.M. Le Gendre, Exposé des opérations faites en France en 1787 pour la jonction des observatoires de Paris et de Greenwich (Paris: Imprimerie de l’Institution des sourds-muets, 1790), p. 11. Ibid., p. 2 seq. W. Roy, ‘An Account of the trigonometrical Operation, whereby the distance between the meridians of the Royal Observatories of Greenwich and Paris has been determined. By Major-General William Roy, F.R.S. and A.S., Royal Society of London’, PT, vol. LXXX (1790), pp. 169–70. P. Brioist, ‘The Royal Society and the Académie des Sciences in the first half of the eighteenth century’, in C. Charle, J. Vincent and J. Winter (eds.), Anglo-French Attitudes: Comparisons and Transfers between English and French Intellectuals since the Eighteenth Century (Manchester University Press, 2007), pp. 63–77.

Figure 2.8 Plan of the triangles whereby the distance between the royal observatories of Greenwich and Paris has been determined.

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Pilots and hydrographers: different ways of perceiving sea space In The Fractal Geometry of Nature, the mathematician Benoît Mandelbrot uses the example of the measurement of the British coastline to show the relativity of its length. If one takes into account all its twists and turns, down to the level of a pebble, it approaches infinity. He concludes, ‘In one manner or another, the concept of geographic length is not as inoffensive as it seems. It is not entirely “objective.” The observer invariably intervenes in its definition.’148 These remarks can be applied to the perception of sea space as a whole, but we still need to be able to reconstruct the point of view of the person Mandelbrot calls ‘the observer’. The hydrographic charts themselves sometimes allow us to trace the process of information-gathering. The Carte réduite des fonds, des qualités et profondeurs depuis 46 jusqu’à 52 degrés de latitude nord, ce qui comprend toute l’ouverture de la Manche de St. George de Bristol, Bretaigne (c. 1670) was the work of the pilot and hydrographer from Dieppe, Nicolas Le Cordier. Its very title stresses the practical experience of the cartographer and the transmission of knowledge: ‘Where the author has taken very great care to place the lands in their true situation and to take the opinion of the most famous pilots of the day for the view of the depths as well as placing those he has himself recognised on several voyages.’149 But the question remains unanswered as to the actual use made of these documents by sailors who, of course, had never waited for charts before they put to sea.150 Until the Renaissance navigators of the seas of Northern Europe had virtually ignored charts, relying instead on dead reckoning. However, when approaching the coast, it was vital to ascertain the depth and nature of the seabed in order to avoid running aground, for which purpose the plumb line had been systematically deployed since the Middle Ages.151 While the first French ‘scientific’ nautical atlas based on geodesic surveys and on the astronomic observation of latitude and longitude appeared in 1693 (the Neptune François), it was virtually ignored by the navigators. To take bearings at sea, they preferred to rely instead on a host of documents – other than charts – that did not necessarily adopt the plane

148 149 150 151

B. Mandelbrot, The Fractal Geometry of Nature (San Francisco, CA: W.H. Freeman and Company, 1977), p. 27. BNFCP, Ge Af Pf 193 (5663). J. Konvitz, ‘Changing concepts of the sea, 1550–1950’, Terrae Incognitae, 11 (1979), pp. 1–17. C.O. Frake, ‘Cognitive maps of time and tide among medieval seafarers’, Man, 20 (1985), pp. 254–70.

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Figure 2.9 Le Petit Flambeau de la Mer, ou le véritable guide des pilotes côtiers.

projection.152 The Petit Flambeau de la Mer, a nautical guide first published in 1683 and reprinted until the 1820s with no major changes, did not contain any nautical chart. Instead, the book contained meticulous textual descriptions of what could be seen of the coasts from the sea, such as distant steeples or hillocks, but also the contents of the seabed and the possibility of calling on local pilots, as well as the direction of tides. The Petit Flambeau de la Mer also included a sequence of coastal profiles, varying with distance and angle as the ship approached shore. No less than three pages and twelve sketches described and depicted Ushant in the 1690 edition153 (Figure 2.9). These coastal views were also often edited into the cartouches of charts (Figure 2.10). Profiles are ‘spatial analogies’, based on the idea of a direct correspondence between the visual representation and what was visible in 152 153

M. Deacon, Scientists and the Sea, 1650–1900: A Study in Marine Science (New York: Academic Press, 1971). R. Bougard, Le Petit Flambeau de la Mer, ou le véritable guide des pilotes côtiers (Havre de Grâce: Jacques Hubault, 1690), pp. 46–8.

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Figure 2.10 A chart of the chops of the Channel.

the world, from the sea.154 They are figurative depictions, in which the perspective is that of the participant – whereas navigation charts are more complex objects, what the cognitive anthropologist Edwin Hutchins calls ‘an analog computer’, in which the perspective is that of the spectator.155 The key to coastal navigation at the beginning of the nineteenth century remained the ability to spot landmarks like dunes, windmills, church steeples as well as lighthouses. In March 1812 pilots from Dunkirk complained that the church towers of Bergues had crumbled down, and asked that they should be rebuilt, because ‘without them it is impossible to reconnoitre the dangerous channels between banks . . . the two towers of Bergues are the two principal landmarks which pilots and navigators use in this area’.156 In 154

155 156

E. Hutchins, Cognition in the Wild (Cambridge, MA: MIT, 1995), p. 61. See also R. Bertrand, L’histoire à parts égales: Récits d’une rencontre Orient-Occident (XVIe–XVIIe siècles) (Paris: Seuil, 2011), p. 77. Hutchins, Cognition, pp. 61–2. T. Cunliffe (ed.), Pilotes. 2. Des goélettes européennes aux bateaux des pilotes côtiers (Rennes: Editions Ouest-France, 2002), p. 118.

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books of nautical instruction, the primary criterion for validating knowledge was direct observation by sailors, and it was announced on the title page of the first edition of the Petit Flambeau de la Mer: ‘All faithfully observed by R. Bougard, ship’s captain.’ Instead of asking why sailors did not use charts, we might also ask why they needed to use them at all: reading charts at sea posed a good many practical problems.157 So, who in Northern waters were using the charts? This varied with the type of shipping. As a result of being an epicontinental sea and an Atlantic corridor, the Channel was frequented both by coasters practising merchant shipping and by open water ships. While the former paid little attention to charts until the early nineteenth century, the latter turned increasingly to them as the eighteenth century wore on. This sociological variation was linked to a difference in hydrographic cultures, and to what Catherine Delano-Smith calls ‘map literacy’.158 The hydrographic skills required of sailors were not the same for pilots, fishing captains and coasters.159 In France, after the Ordonnance sur la Marine of 1740, practice very clearly took precedence over theory when it came to obtaining navigation licences for small coastal vessels. Whereas teaching and exam questions previously contained questions on the uses of charts, new programmes focused exclusively on practical problems, ‘on manoeuvre, coasts, ports and havens and channels of navigation’.160 Moreover, hydrography schools, where map-reading was taught, were not mandatory before the Maréchal de Castries’s Ordonnance sur la Marine of 1786.161 A number of captains of Channel rippiers (chasse-marées) or longboats (chaloupes) could not read or write, and therefore did not use charts.162 It was only with the Ordonnances of the Restoration in 1814–1815, which created navigation schools, that theoretical knowledge

157

158

159 160

161

The size of the charts printed in the nautical atlases goes some way to explaining navigators’ mistrust of hydrographic science. The first high-quality hydrographic charts, regularly updated, were those drawn by W.J. Blaeu in the seventeenth century and copied by the French and the English; they were ‘too big and too fragile to really be useful at sea’: Konvitz, ‘Changing concepts’, p. 3. See also O. Chapuis, À la mer comme au ciel: Beautemps-Beaupré & la naissance de l’hydrographie moderne (1700–1850) (Presses de l’Université de Paris-Sorbonne, 1999), pp. 143–4. A. Cabantous, Dix-mille marins face à l’Océan (Paris: Publisud, 1991), pp. 233–6; C. Delano Smith, ‘Maps and map literacy’, in D. Woodward, C. Delano Smith and D.K. Cordell (eds.), Plantejaments i Objectius d’una Història Universal de la Cartografia/ Approaches and Challenges in a Worldwide History of Cartography (Barcelona: Institut Cartogràfic de Catalunya, 2001), pp. 223–62. Chapuis, À la mer, pp. 43–86; Cabantous, Dix-mille marins, p. 233 sq. G. Le Bouëdec, ‘L’État et le cabotage en France et en Europe aux XVIIe–XVIIIe siècles’, in G. Le Bouëdec, and F. Chappé (eds.), Pouvoirs et littoraux du XVe au XXe siècle (Presses Universitaires de Rennes, 2000), pp. 384–5. Cabantous, Dix-mille marins, pp. 235–6. 162 Chapuis, À la mer, p. 150.

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came to be passed on to inshore shipping candidates. The captains of coasters were now required to be able to read charts.163 To what extent did this change in technical knowledge affect the way the Channel was viewed by these sailors? According to Olivier Chapuis, in moving from profile to chart, the navigators’ theoretical horizons expanded, which gave them a grasp of the whole of a space, not just ‘a region of origin or habit’.164 Whereas the plane representation of space required a process of written abstraction and training in geometry, the profile view, which was based on visual recognition and the fit of landscape and drawing, relied more on memory and the oral transmission of a familial knowledge.165 It is certainly the case that knowledge of a maritime space could be acquired not only by theoretical education or chart-reading but also by daily practice. The eye of the cartographer was not that of the coaster captain, whose experience of the sea also differed from that of the open ocean sailor. As with any image, there is a distance between concrete knowledge of sea space and its pictorial representation. This gap should not necessarily be explained by different levels of conceptualisation: formulating the problem in such terms would effectively delegitimise vernacular knowledge of maritime space, and thereby endorse a well-established scholarly and state tradition which opposed this empirical knowledge to more abstract and more ‘scientific’ forms of knowledge.166 The epistemological break between scientific charts, constructed by calculation, and the practical knowledge of navigators must not be overstated: the two were inextricably intertwined. Soundings and sandbanks were represented on hydrographic charts from the sixteenth century onwards.167 By the beginning of the nineteenth century this information had become highly accurate. On the Carte réduite de la mer du Nord, published in 1807, the description of the composition of the seabed was extremely detailed, specifying ‘sand and shells’, ‘clay and sand’, ‘rotten 163 166

167

165 Ibid., p. 651. 164 Ibid., p. 652. Ibid., pp. 150, 671. J.-M. Besse, ‘Introduction’ in J.-M. Besse, H. Blais and I. Surun (eds.), Naissances de la géographie moderne (1760–1860): Lieux, pratiques et formation des savoirs de l’espace en France (Paris: ENS éditions, 2010), pp. 1–7; J. Goody, The Domestication of the Savage Mind (Cambridge University Press, 1977); B. Latour, ‘Visualisation and cognition: drawing things together’, in H. Kuklick and E. Long (eds.), Knowledge and Society: Studies in the Sociology of Culture Past and Present (Greenwich: JAI Press, 1986), vol. VI, pp. 1–40; B. Latour, Science in Action: How to Follow Scientists and Engineers through Society (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1987); D. Woodward and G.M. Lewis, ‘Introduction’, in Woodward and G.M. Lewis (eds.), History of Cartography, vol. II, book 3: Cartography in the Traditional African, American, Arctic, Australian, and Pacific Societies (The University of Chicago Press, 1998), pp. 1–10. M. Destombes, ‘Les plus anciens sondages portés sur les cartes nautiques, aux XVIe et XVIIe siècles: Contribution à l’histoire de l’océanographie’, in Destombes (ed.), Contributions sélectionnées à l’histoire de la cartographie et des instruments scientifiques (Paris: Nizet, 1987), pp. 265–88.

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bottom’, ‘pebbles and pieces of shells’ and so on.168 It was necessary to rely on the navigators themselves to collect this type of information. When it came to landings, using the services of a pilot who was familiar with the waters he plied daily was often a necessity, even for seasoned seamen. Hydrographers were forced to rely on pilots to work out the layouts prior to drawing up their charts. In order to draw his famous tide map published in 1702, Edmond Halley used a Jersey pilot on the French coast.169 More than a century later, it was not a nautical chart which saved the life of Charles-François Beautemps-Beaupré. In 1817, the French hydrographer was charting, as part of his systematic survey of the French coasts, the granite reefs surrounding the Raz de Sein, the most direct but also the most dangerous maritime passage between the Atlantic Ocean and the Channel. After his longboat had been caught on an isolated rock while surveying the area, a local pilot from Portsall (Finistère) and a sailor from Ouessant rescued him from being shipwrecked.170 It was one thing to save the life of a cartographer in distress, and another to share with outsiders your detailed knowledge of the sea. Indeed, the notion of secrecy was deeply ingrained in the culture of pilots, just like it was central for states.171 Their technical knowledge was an economic capital and as such a jealously guarded asset. These seafarers got employment on the basis of their irreplaceable and detailed familiarity with the coasts, seabeds and currents, and could be reluctant to disclose their knowledge to their competitors or to cartographers.172 The same logic explains the lasting hostility of the French pilots to lighthouses.173 This reluctance to divulge information and determination to preserve trade secrecy was not unique to sailors: all across Europe, in the early modern period, skilled craftsmen did their best to hide their technical know-how from their competitors.174 Although knowledge about the sea 168

169 171

172 173 174

Carte réduite de la mer du Nord comprenant les côtes orientales des Iles britanniques et les côtes opposées du continent depuis le Pas de Calais jusqu’à Bergen . . .. Dressée par ordre de Sa Majesté l’Empereur (1807), BNFCP, Ge. CC. 1185. Thrower, Three Voyages, vol. I, pp. 51, 53. 170 Chapuis, À la mer, pp. 674–5. On intentional secrecy in maps and state attempts at controlling what information was (or was not) represented on them, see J.B. Harley, ‘Silences and secrecy: the hidden agenda of cartography in early modern Europe’, IM 40 (1988), pp. 57–76; A. Sandman, ‘Controlling knowledge: navigation, cartography, and secrecy in the early modern Spanish Atlantic’, in J. Delbourgo and N. Dew (eds.), Science and Empire in the Atlantic World (New York and London: Routledge, 2007), pp. 31–51. Chapuis, À la mer, p. 673; Sandman, ‘Controlling knowledge’, pp. 33–5. Chapuis, À la mer, p. 673. C.M. Belfanti, ‘Guilds, patents, and the circulation of technical knowledge: Northern Italy during the early modern age’, Technology and Culture, 45 (2004), pp. 569–89; K. Davids, ‘Craft secrecy in Europe in the early modern period: a comparative view’, Early Science and Medicine, 10 (2005), pp. 341–8; P.O. Long, Openness, Secrecy, Authorship:

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increasingly became a state monopoly in the eighteenth century, the sailors’ practical knowledge of the Channel, based on their everyday and sensory experience, retained its strategic and economic value well beyond our period. In the twenty-first century, navigation guides still warned sailors who enter the English Channel from the west to stay at a distance from the perilous isles of Ushant, Molène and Sein. According to a traditional Breton saying: He who sees Ushant sees his blood He who sees Molène sees his sorrow He who sees Sein sees his end.175

*** Whereas, until the sixteenth century, the body of water that the British now call ‘The English Channel’ and the French ‘La Manche’ did not have a proper name, a slow crystallisation of practices and knowledges took place over the following centuries. But there was, and there is, no objective maritime space called ‘English Channel’. Depending on the viewpoint, experience and moment, the Channel’s boundaries seemed capable of shifting ad infinitum. In order to capture the full complexity of this correlation of a physical space, its symbolic construction and its social appropriation, the historian should not constrain the sea within an established frame, but rather rethink the frame in terms of the issues raised. Fernand Braudel differentiated several Mediterraneans. The Western Mediterranean, which he termed the ‘Mediterranean Channel’,176 is a strait easily crossed north to south. Changing focus, in the ‘Greater Mediterranean’177 he included mountainous areas, the Sahara and the Atlantic Ocean. Correspondingly, there are two ‘Channels’. The first was defined in relation to continental and land masses: this was Victor Hugo’s ‘quasi-Mediterranean’, characterised by violent waves which carved rocks and cliffs.178 As the geographer Roger Brunet has put it, the Channel is from this point of view a mediterranean: ‘A quasi-enclosed sea, formed by a relatively continuous

175 176 177 178

Technical Arts and the Culture of Knowledge from Antiquity to the Renaissance (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001). For an example at the beginning of the nineteenth century, that of mining engineers and their attempt to steal the secrets of iron workers, see J. Cantelaube, La forge à la catalane dans les Pyrénées ariégeoises, une industrie à la montagne (XVIIe–XIXe siècles) (Toulouse: CNRS/Université de Toulouse-Le Mirail, 2005). ‘Qui voit Ouessant voit son sang/Qui voit Molène voit sa peine/Qui voit Sein voit sa fin’. F. Braudel, The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II, translation S. Reynolds (London: Collins, 1972), vol. I, pp. 117, 168. Ibid., p. 168. V. Hugo, Les Travailleurs de la mer. L’archipel de la Manche (Paris: Gallimard ‘Folio’, 1980) (1st edn: 1883), p. 33.

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seashore, surrounding a mass of water sufficiently large for the shoreline itself to be differentiated from the hinterlands, and for connections not to be immediate, but limited, so that navigation is easy and journeys of fairly short duration.’179 This is the Anglo-French sea, which most contemporary geographers take to run from Ushant to Calais on the French side, and from the Scilly Isles to North Foreland on the English side. The blurring of the demarcation between the Channel and the North Sea is rich in meaning and demands the inclusion of Flanders. There was also what Braudel might have termed a ‘larger Channel’, flowing into vaster maritime spaces, with the Atlantic Ocean, on one side, and the North and Baltic Seas, on the other. Viewed in terms of length, as a passageway, this channel has nothing specifically French or English about it. At the beginning of the twentieth century Camille Vallaux questioned this double nature of the Channel. For him, it was an oikoumene (the inhabited universe of the Ancients), both fishing zone and a ‘region of constant and uninterrupted passage between France and England’. But, for this geographer of currents and tides, the Channel was above all a ‘gateway from northwestern Europe to the Atlantic . . . an inroad from the whole of the Atlantic to continental Europe’.180 The task in hand in the following chapters is not to resolve this tension, but to understand its concrete meaning. The territorialisation of sea space by the two states, the joining of sea to land, was always limited by the fact that the Channel was never an Anglo-French monopoly; rather, it was always cruised by sailors from other European countries such as the United Provinces and the Habsburg Empire or by non-Europeans from America and Asia.

179 180

R. Brunet, ‘Modèles de méditerranées’, EG, 3 (1995), p. 200. Vallaux, Géographie sociale, pp. 8–9. See also the debate on the passage from the Mediterranean to Mediterraneans: Brunet, ‘Modèles de méditerranées’, pp. 209–25; D. Abulafia, ‘Mediterraneans’, in W.V. Harris (ed.), Rethinking the Mediterranean (Oxford University Press, 2005), pp. 64–93.

Part II

The border imposed

3

Defending the military frontier

While standard accounts of the eighteenth century point to a simple binary between British dominance at sea and French continental strength, most historians are aware that the contest was far more complicated. During the Napoleonic Wars the Channel certainly took centre stage in the geostrategic confrontation between France and Britain, but it is crucial to bear in mind that even after Trafalgar (1805) and the Continental Blockade (1806–), European waters, and particularly the Channel waters, remained disputed. Napoleon’s attempt to rebuild his navy after 1806 saw French shipbuilding increase to unprecedented heights. Aside from the numerous French naval sorties, French privateering efforts remained a constant menace, and French commerce-raiders took many prizes throughout the war just off the British coast, as they did in the eighteenth century.1 Conversely, Britain was militarily engaged on the Continent during the whole period of the ‘French Wars’. This chapter examines the English Channel as a military frontier for the period up to and including the Napoleonic Wars in order to test the validity of this classic opposition. In French and then in English, ‘frontier’ originally belonged to the vocabulary of warfare.2 By the beginning of the eighteenth century, the concept was commonly applied to the Channel in both French and English by diplomats, military theorists and pamphleteers. But does the similarity between the terms conceal different conceptions of the border in the two countries? To answer this question, the 1

2

On privateering, see J.S. Bromley, Corsairs and Navies, 1660–1760 (London: Hambledon Press, 1987); P. Crowhurst, The Defence of British Trade, 1689–1815 (Folkestone: Dawson & Sons, 1977); Id., The French War on Trade: Privateering, 1793–1815 (Hants: Aldershot, 1989); D.J. Starkey, British Privateering Enterprise in the Eighteenth Century (University of Exeter Press, 1990); P. Villiers, Les corsaires du littoral: Dunkerque, Calais, Boulogne, de Philippe II à Louis XIV (1568–1713) (Villeneuve-d’Ascq: Presses Universitaires du Septentrion, 2000). D. Nordman, Frontières de France: De l’espace au territoire XVIe–XIXe siècle (Paris: Gallimard, 1998), pp. 42–53. The English word comes from the old French frontier and means ‘the front line or foremost part of an army’ (OED).

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chronology of the ‘Second Hundred Years War’ has to be fine-tuned by examining the effects on the Channel of Anglo-French rivalry over the course of the long eighteenth century. This is not the place to rewrite the military history of the two states, which has long dominated the field of Anglo-French studies for this period – nor to rework classical comparisons between the two navies. The perspective adopted here focuses on the defensive meaning of the maritime border. Even though the struggle did take place on a global scale, studying coastal defences provides a way of putting this epicontinental sea back at the centre of the analysis, in order to address two central questions. First, the term ‘military frontier’ could be used to designate different spatial extents. The border zone fluctuated and, depending on the period, included a band of varying depth inland, though it did not take in the entire littoral fringe. This is precisely why it is necessary to take a broader view and ask which coastal segments and ports formed part of it. Second, what were the practical consequences for populations? Did states in the eighteenth century manage to translate the attachment to locality into attachment to the nation, and to anchor in their inhabitants a feeling of identification with the border region? Defining the maritime border French and English notions As early as the Middle Ages, the French term ‘frontière’ was used in a military sense to refer to a fortified place.3 The concept of maritime frontier appeared in the fourteenth century, as recounted by Jean Froissart: ‘Where can we better find our pleasure and profit, than entering this rich sea frontier of Bourbourg, Dunkirk and Cassel in the manor of Bergues?’4 The changes in the geopolitical context later led to the application of the term to other regions, firstly to the former possessions of the English Crown. Calais became English in the fourteenth century and remained so until 1558, while Normandy was English throughout the

3

4

Ibid., pp. 43–5; B. Guenée, ‘Les limites de la France’ (1972), reedited in B. Guenée, Politique et histoire au Moyen-Âge: Recueil d’articles sur l’histoire politique et l’historiographie médiévale (Paris: Publications de la Sorbonne, 1981), p. 84. Quoted in S. Curveiller, ‘Un défi audacieux: l’enjeu littoral’, in Curveiller et al. (eds.), Le Détroit: Zone de rencontres ou zone de conflits (Balinghem: Les Amis du Vieux Calais, 2001), p. 93.

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first half of the fifteenth century. Far from separating France and England, the Channel was still ‘a path within’5 for England. Throughout the eighteenth century, Calais and Dover remained the focal points of Anglo-French antagonism. The Pale of Calais had been English, as demonstrated by its other name, ‘Pays Reconquis’, which was still mentioned in certain French regional histories in the 1760s.6 The memory of this former English possession often recurs in eighteenth-century English dictionaries, which recalled with regret the events that led to the loss of the city. One dictionary of 1703 states that the port ‘was taken by Edw. III in 1348, and a Siege of 18 Months, and lost by Q. Mary in a Fortnight, in 1558, till when, for 220 Ys. before, England had the Key of France in her own Hands’.7 By the same logic, Jersey, Guernsey, Sark and Alderney ‘are all that are left to the English, fr. their once being possessed of the Crown of France, & for some hundreds of Years of almost the whole Coun. bordering on the Sea, fr. Flanders to the very Bor. of Spain’.8 The former occupation of Calais and Normandy set a legal precedent for British claims to sovereignty over the Channel and even to the French Crown.9 In France Calais acquired its status as a lieu de mémoire after the Seven Years War, with the success in France of the myth of the Burghers of Calais. In a famous episode of the Hundred Years War told by Jean Froissart, six burghers of the city besieged by the troops of Edward III in 1347 heroically surrendered to the English king, offering their life so that their compatriots would be spared. Froissart’s version, which was popularised in the sixteenth century, has been questioned by historians, who argued that this was merely a ritual of submission, in which the burghers’ lives were never at risk. The myth was widely disseminated in the eighteenth century, due to de Belloy’s

5

6 7

8 9

A. Demangeon, ‘La formation de l’Etat français’ (1940), quoted in D. Nordman, ‘Frontière et découverte (XVe–XVIe siècles)’, in R. Zorzi (ed.), L’Epopea delle scoperte (Florence: Leo S. Oschki, 1994), pp. 28–9. See for example R.P. Lefebvre, Histoire générale et particulière de la ville de Calais, et du Calaisis, ou Pays Reconquis, 2 vols. (Paris: Guillaume François Debure, 1766). Anon, ‘Calais’, in An Universal Historical, Geographical, Chronological and Poetical Dictionary (London: J. Hartley, 1703), vol. I, n.p.; see also F. Watson, ‘Calais’, in A New and Complete Geographical Dictionary Containing a Full and Accurate Description of the Several Parts of the Known World (London: G. Kearsly, 1773), n.p.; R. Brookes, ‘Calais’, in General Gazetteer, 4th edn (London: J.F. and C. Rivington, 1778), n.p. Anon, A New Geographical Dictionary (London: D. Midwinter, 1738), n.p. George III was the last British sovereign who was also ‘King of France’, a mention which disappeared from his titles in the Act of Union of 1801; likewise, the English coat of arms contains the royal French lily until that date: B. Fryde et al. (eds.), The Handbook of British Chronology (London: Royal Historical Society, 1986), p. 47.

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tragedy Le siège de Calais, first performed in 1765.10 In this play Edward III sings the praises of the exceptional location of the city he has just defeated: Whence it is that Cæsar, prevailing o’er the Morini [a Celtic tribe which controlled the area around Calais and Boulogne], Surprised the ocean ’neath the eagle of the Romans, And joined with the Gauls, by the law of war, These Britons separate from the rest of the Earth. It is in this same port that the king of the English Merged their empire to the French empire. There is no longer today any sea to divide them; Let us confuse forever the Seine and the Thames.11

The proximity of the French and English coasts, which allowed each of the two towns to control the opening and closing of the Channel, long made Dover the ‘key to the island’ and Calais ‘the frontier of France towards England’.12 However, in English the term ‘frontier’ was never used to designate a port. This semantic difference reveals opposing conceptions of the maritime frontier. France and Vauban’s legacy When the strategic rivalry between the two states deepened in the seventeenth century, the description of the Channel as a zone of military confrontation became a commonplace among French statesmen. Sébastien Le Prestre de Vauban (1633– 1707), the marshal of France and military engineer who designed and supervised the building of the fortification system of the French kingdom in the reign of Louis XIV, envisaged both land and coastal frontiers as part of his reshaping and rationalisation of the country’s external defences, which he called the pré carré (square meadow). As Daniel Nordman put it, Vauban’s frontier was ‘less a continuous line . . . than a knotted string where discontinuity and continuity were mixed’.13 The geographical 10

11

12

13

J.-M. Moeglin, Les bourgeois de Calais: Essai sur un mythe historique (Paris: Albin Michel, 2002), pp. 182–201; M. Biard, ‘Mythe et création théâtrale: Le Siège de Calais au siècle des Lumières’, in Les Bourgeois de Calais. Fortunes d’un mythe. Catalogue de l’exposition au Musée des beaux-arts et de la dentelle (Calais: Musée des beaux-arts et de la dentelle, 1995), pp. 11–21. P.L. Buirette de Belloy, Le siège de Calais: tragédie: représentée pour la première fois le 13 février 1765 (Paris: Ménard et Raymond, 1818), Act III, Scene I, p. 181. After Waterloo, the martyr town appears once again in French dictionaries, as in F. Robert, Dictionnaire géographique, d’après le recès du congrès de Vienne, le traité de Paris, du 20 novembre 1815, et autres actes publics les plus récens, 2 vols. (Paris: Eymery, 1818). ‘Dover, a seaport in Kent . . . It was formerly deemed the key of the island’: Brookes, General Gazetteer; T. Nugent, The Grand Tour, or a Journey through the Netherlands, Germany, Italy and France . . ., 3rd edn, 4 vols. (London: s.l., 1778), vol. I, p. 288. Nordman, Frontières, p. 250.

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situation of the ports gave them this border status. In 1681, Vauban embarked on an inspection voyage along the Channel, from the Boulonnais to the Cotentin Peninsula, and chose Cherbourg as the site for a military port equipped with a bastioned surrounding wall and a wet dock. The construction work began in 1686. In several memoranda Vauban explained his interest in building a large-scale port at this location. It was first and foremost the town’s situation at the frontier that caught his attention, a spatial configuration that went back to the Hundred Years War: ‘In view of the importance of its setting which has redoubled in esteem since the first domination of the French’, the town has been used by the French ‘as a frontier and maritime space because of England, of which [they] were not the masters’.14 More broadly, the whole of the Cotentin Peninsula was a frontier region, a ‘gateway in the heart of the kingdom’,15 the control of which would give assailants an invaluable advantage. According to Vauban, a fortified harbour was not just one link in a line of defence but also a rear base facilitating control over the sea: The space of the sea that lies from here to England forms a strait through which all the commerce of the North must pass unless it make the journey around Scotland, which is long and most perilous, indeed when one leaves the port of Cherbourg one is not six leagues out to sea before one discovers all that happens between England and our coasts.16

Vauban was not heeded, and in 1688 the building work was interrupted at the instigation of the marquis de Louvois (1641–1691), the secretary of state for war, who feared an Anglo-Dutch landing relying on the fortified city as its base.17 In the 1730s, while Anglo-French relations were worsening, the discussion was taken up again in identical terms. In several memoranda mimicking Vauban, Pierre de Caux, the engineer for fortifications at Cherbourg, recommended organising the city’s defence in order to block the militarisation of the Channel Islands.18 Vauban was always hovering in the background of plans drawn up during the War of the Austrian Succession to fortify ‘this ancient border and maritime town’.19 But it was not until 1777 that the building work in Cherbourg 14 15 17 18

19

[Vauban], ‘Mémoire sur Cherbourg’ (15 July 1686), SHD, Armée de Terre, 1M1085, fo. 6. Ibid., fos. 17–19. 16 Ibid., fos. 39–40. P. Rocolle, 2000 ans de fortification française, vol. II: Du 16e siècle au mur de l’Atlantique (Paris: Lavauzelle, 1989), p. 413. See his different memorandums in SHD, Armée de Terre, 1M1085. De Caux would become director of the fortifications of Normandy in 1754: E. Thin, Cherbourg: Bastion maritime du Cotentin: Histoire, témoignages et documents (Condé-sur-Noireau: C. Corlet, 1990), p. 108. Anon, ‘La Manche ou Canal 1741’, ADC, C1769, n.f.

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was ordered; it began in 1780 and was completed in 1783.20 Under the Empire, this military port became the equal of Brest or Toulon. The continuity of the language is remarkable: French conceptions of the maritime frontier had hardly changed in a century. Vauban was still being read and discussed on the eve of the Revolution, and memoranda several decades old were still being consulted by those responsible for the defence of the coastline on the declaration of war against Britain in 1793. In 1736 the lieutenant general of the king’s armies, Jean-Jacques Bazan, wrote a Parallèle des côtes de France et d’Angleterre, which proposed building a military port at La Hogue.21 This memorandum, which described the entire French coast as a frontier with England, was still relevant some sixty years later, when it was consulted by the Legislative Assembly’s representative on mission for the Côtes de Cherbourg, Gilbert Romme (1750–1795).22 It was also during the revolutionary period that the Channel was finally treated as a separate maritime frontier by the military archivists of the Fortifications Depot in Vincennes, who classed separately the memoranda on the ‘frontier of the Channel’ and those on ‘the frontier of the Ocean’, ‘the frontier of the Pyrenees’ and ‘the frontier of Italy or of the Alps’.23 The French Revolution was therefore an important stage in the theorisation of the Channel as a military frontier, systematising a demarcation of coastal borders that had been developing over a century and a half.

20 21

22

23

A.-M. Augoyat, Aperçu historique sur les fortifications, les ingénieurs et sur le corps du génie en France 3 vols. (Paris: C. Tanera) (2nd edn: 1860–1864), vol. III (1864), p. 636. It is probably Jean-Jacques Bazan, marquis de Flamanville (1715–1752), lieutenant general of the King’s armies, about whom not much is known. See A. Hamel, Flamanville, ses seigneurs, son château: Les Bazan du Cotentin (Coutances: A. Hamel, 1987), pp. 58–64. In the copy kept at the Service Historique de la Défense (SHD), Armée de Terre in Vincennes, the following inscription is pencilled in the margin: ‘Copié en août 1793 pour Rome député. Tiré du portefeuille Normandie 1686 à 1787 Défense des côtes’. The manuscript kept in the 1M series and communicated to Romme was anonymous and undated (SHD, Armée de Terre, 1M1095, n.f.). However, the copy in the Génie archives is dated and attributed to the marquis de Flamanville (SHD, Armée de Terre, Génie Art. 4, Sect. 2, §2, Carton 1 bis, n.f.). The archives of the Génie contain seven folders entitled ‘Frontières de la Manche, de Dunkerque à Avranches (1643–1854)’ (SHD, Armée de Terre, Génie, Article 4, ‘Frontières de France’). This classification was worked out between 1798 and 1802, while the archives as a whole were reorganized: J.-M. Goënaga, ‘Le Dépôt des fortifications 1791–1886: origine des archives du Génie’, unpublished Maîtrise, Université Paris IV Sorbonne (1982), pp. 222–3; J.-C. Devos and M.-A. Corvisier de Villèle (eds.), Guides des archives et de la bibliothèque [du service historique de l’armée de terre] (Vincennes: Service Historique de l’Armée de Terre, 2002), pp. 272, 275. On the administrative reforms of the army during this period, see H.G. Brown, War, Revolution, and the Bureaucratic State: Politics and Army Administration in France 1791–1799 (Oxford University Press, 1995).

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In practice and over the course of the century the fortification policy of the Channel’s littoral lacked coherence. If most of the French ports on the north coast of the Channel, such as Dunkirk, Gravelines or Calais, had already been fortified by the 1680s,24 thereafter they were barely maintained. This neglect was apparent after the War of the Spanish Succession, at the time of the Anglo-French alliance policy negotiated by cardinal Dubois and the earl of Stanhope. Fortifications were left to fall apart and were slowly worn down by the waves. The state of the fort at La Hogue in 1734, as described by an anonymous witness, is a good example of this decay: Its earthworks are crumbling, its platforms are rotten, and the stockade no longer here, so that it may be entered from all sides . . .; high up there is a battery whose platform is ruined, and it is even to be feared that were one to light a fire there the vault would crush the rest of the building owing to the poor state of repair . . .; only the barracks and the guardroom are in sound condition.25

The trend continued during the course of the War of the Austrian Succession, but the Seven Years War marked a real watershed. Indeed, the changing nature of eighteenth-century European warfare shifted the Anglo-French military frontier away from the west of the Channel to the Atlantic.26 On account of the easing of tensions in Franco-Dutch relations, the North Sea became less strategically important for France than it had been in the previous century. The changing scale of the conflicts also played its part in this process. The Seven Years War – a truly global war – inextricably tied the conflicts in Europe to colonial developments.27 In this new geopolitical order navies setting out from Europe sought to cut off the route of the trade convoys to America, Africa or India. The ports best placed for this were Brest, Lorient and Rochefort, and to a lesser extent the western Channel ports. On the English side the approach to the Channel, where it joined the Atlantic, also saw a concentration of effort, with the growth of Plymouth as a port.28 Nor should technical changes be 24

25

26

27 28

A. Cabantous, Dix-mille marins face à l’Océan (Paris: Publisud, 1991), p. 162. For other ports, see G. Toudouze, La défense des côtes de Dunkerque à Bayonne au XVIIe siècle (Paris: Chapelot, 1900). Anon, ‘État de la côte de Basse Normandie avec celui des réparations et des augmentations qu’il convient d’y faire pour sa défense et la sûreté du commerce’, 1 February 1734, SHD, Armée de Terre, Génie, Art. 4. Sect. 2 §2, Carton 1bis, n.f. Cabantous, Dix-mille marins, p. 167; D. Baugh, ‘Withdrawing from Europe: AngloFrench maritime geopolitics, 1750–1800’, International History Review, 20 (1998), pp. 1–32. D. Baugh, The Global Seven Years’ War, 1754–1763: Britain and France in a Great Power Contest (London: Routledge, 2011). M. Duffy, ‘Devon and the Naval Strategy of the French Wars 1689–1815’, in M. Duffy (ed.), The New Maritime History of Devon, 2 vols., vol. I. From Early Times to the Late Eighteenth Century (London: Conway, 1992), p. 182.

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overlooked: guerre d’escadre, the traditional battleship tactic by which large fleets fought in line facing each other, firing thousands of cannonballs at each other, virtually disappeared in the region due to the increase in the tonnage of warships, which made them more difficult to handle ‘in the neck of the Channel’,29 off Cape Barfleur or in the Strait of Dover. For all these reasons the space stretching from the Somme to maritime Flanders was neglected for most of the eighteenth century. In the second half of the century the coastal fringe stretching from Saint-Malo through to Cherbourg and on to Le Havre was the focus for the bulk of French defensive efforts and most English attacks. In terms of French coastal fortifications along the Channel there was no significant departure from the legacy of Vauban.30 From the Seven Years War onwards governments introduced local improvements to the protection of a coastline that was still primarily a defensive barrier. However, in the 1780s the expenditure incurred by the maintenance of fortresses began to provoke criticism.31 In the early days of the Revolution, as part of the debate over reforming the army, the corps of engineers was again at the centre of the discussion. Jean-Xavier Bureaux de Pusy (1750–1805) of the National Assembly’s military committee advocated fortresses, which would enable economies to be made in the maintenance of an army on the field. In addition to the traditional rivalry between the artillery and the engineers there emerged the rhetoric of natural boundaries with reference to England, which, ‘girded round by a natural barrier, was able to forgo the resources whose works have littered our borders. It has therefore confined itself to a small number of fortified towns, essential for the protection of the large establishments of its navy.’32 Wooden walls, aqueous border In the French view, defence of the territory depended first and foremost on land fortification. In Britain a zonal theory of the maritime border was dominant throughout our entire period of study. The sea itself was thought of as a natural frontier. In a famous passage in Richard II (1595) Shakespeare had already articulated what would remain the English doctrine for several centuries. In this speech, John of Gaunt, at the time of his death, reflects on the wretched state in which King Richard II, his nephew, is leaving the kingdom. 29 30 31 32

Duffy, Ibid., p. 182. On ‘guerre d’escadre’, see J.A. Lynn, The Wars of Louis XIV 1667– 1714 (London: Taylor and Francis, 1999), pp. 93–8. P. Rocolle talks of a century-long ‘stagnation’ in the history of French fortifications, between 1715 and 1815: ibid., pp. 435–48. Augoyat, Aperçu historique, vol. II, pp. 638–41. J.-X. Bureaux de Pusy, Considérations sur le corps royal du génie, présentées au comité militaire par un membre de ce comité (Paris: Imprimerie Nationale, 1790), pp. 3–4.

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Contrasting an idealised past with the tainted present, he resorts to the (geographically inaccurate) trope of England as an island, in a metaphor which interlaces the image of the island fortress defended by the sea and that of the moat protecting a house, to convey a sense of closure and isolation: This fortress built by Nature for herself Against infection and the hand of war, . . . This precious stone set in the silver sea, Which serves it in the office of a wall, Or as a moat defensive to a house Against the envy of less happier lands; . . . England, bound in with the triumphant sea, Whose rocky shore beats back the envious siege Of wat’ry Neptune, is now bound in with shame.33

The defence of the island against a foreign invasion also relied on the Royal Navy’s so-called ‘wooden walls’, an idea which developed in England in the first half of the seventeenth century and became a central tenet of English warfare and foreign policy after the ‘Glorious’ Revolution of 1688–1689.34 In 1690, for example, addressing a pamphlet to Parliament that called for a ban on Dutch fishing off the English coast, Joseph Gander explained that England’s salvation rested on its navy: ‘And how can it be supposed, that we shall be able to defend ourselves against any invasion or incursion, that a foreign enemy may make, unless we preserve the foundation of those floating castles that must secure the island?’35 This type of rhetoric resurfaced again and again in eighteenth-century political debate, and was mirrored in Britain’s foreign policy under the first two Hanoverian monarchs,36 which revolved around the command 33

34 35 36

W. Shakespeare, Richard II (1595), Act II, Scene I. See K. Chedgzoy, ‘This pleasant and sceptered Isle: insular fantasies of national identity’ in Anne Dowriche’s The French Historie and William Shakespeare’s Richard II’, in Philip Schwyzer and Simon Mealor (eds.), Archipelagic Identities: Literature and Identity in the Early Modern Atlantic Archipelago (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2004), pp. 25–42; S. Grandage, ‘Imagining England: contemporary encodings of “this sceptred isle”’, in W. Maley and M. Tudeau-Clayton (eds.), This England, That Shakespeare: New Angles on Englishness and the Bard (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2010), pp. 127–46; G. Holderness, ‘“What ish my nation?”: Shakespeare and national identities’, Textual Practice, 5 (1991), pp. 74–93; W. Maley, ‘“This sceptred isle”: Shakespeare and the British problem’, in J.J. Joughin (ed.), Shakespeare and National Culture (Manchester University Press, 1997), pp. 83–108. D.A. Baugh, ‘Great Britain’s “blue-water” policy, 1689–1815’, IHR, 10 (1988), pp. 33–58. J. Gander, A Vindication of a National-Fishery (London: F. Coggan, 1690), p. 47. R. Harding, ‘British maritime strategy and Hanover 1714–1763’, in B. Simms and T. Riotte (eds.), The Hanoverian Dimension in British History, 1714–1837 (Cambridge University Press, 2010), pp. 252–74.

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of the English Channel and the North Sea.37 The ‘blue-water’ or maritime strategy was regularly discussed in Britain, especially since the menace of a French invasion never ebbed away, and became real on at least seven occasions during the period 1689–1815 (1692, 1708, 1744–1745, 1759, 1779, 1795–1798, 1803–1805).38 Another school of thought, which advocated interventionism on the Continent, was very vocal too.39 The debate was stormy in 1745, a year of genuine strategic crisis in Britain. The previous year, a French fleet had entered the Channel but failed to invade due to bad weather, even as Louis XV’s armies were piling up victories in Flanders. In 1745, the Jacobites rebelled and linked up with France. This raised the question of what support, if any, Britain should give to its European allies.40 A pamphlet war pitted proponents of naval power against the supporters of an amphibious strategy, combining the navy and a mercenary army on the Continent. In the first camp is found the anonymous author of The Present Ruinous Land-War (1745), who criticised the alliance with the Hanoverians as unnatural: As we are Islanders, and indisputably the greatest Maritime Power, and the greatest Trading Nation, in the known World, our natural and principal Strength must necessarily lye in our Naval Armaments; from whence it consequently follows, that . . . we ought to confine all our Efforts to the Sea, which, in reality, may almost as properly be call’d our Element, on such Occasions, as it may that of the Fish.41

In contrast, the similarly anonymous author of The Criterion of the Reason and Necessity of the Present War (1745) was a supporter of a ‘Barrier on the Continent’ and he mocked the short-sightedness of those who ‘constitute [the Channel] our natural Boundary’.42 37 38 39

40 41

42

Baugh, ‘Great Britain’s “blue-water” policy’, p. 40. P. Coquelle, ‘Les projets de descente en Angleterre’, RHD, 15 (1901), pp. 591–624. N.A.M. Rodger, ‘The continental commitment in the eighteenth century’, in L. Freedman, P. Hayes and R. O’Neile (eds.), War, Strategy and International Politics: Essays in Honour of Sir Michael Howard (Oxford University Press, 1992), pp. 39–55; B. Simms, Three Victories and a Defeat: The Rise and Fall of the First British Empire, 1714–1783 (London: Basic Books, 2008). The debates over these strategies could cut across party affiliations; the Whigs as proponents of continental interventionism and the Tories as the sole advocates of the maritime strategy has been revised: J. Black, Debating Foreign Policy in Eighteenth-Century Britain (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2011), pp. 93, 218–19; G. Holmes, British Politics in the Age of Anne (London: The Hambledon Press, 1987), pp. 64–81. M. Peters, ‘Early Hanoverian consciousness: empire or Europe?’, EHR, 122 (2007), pp. 632–68; Black, Debating, pp. 134–6. The Present Ruinous Land-War, Proved to be a H- – -r War, by Facts as Well as Arguments (London: M. Cooper, 1745), p. 10. On Britain and Hanover, see J. Black, The Continental Commitment: Britain, Hanover and Interventionism, 1714–1793 (London: Routledge, 2005); Thompson, Britain, Hanover. Anon, The Criterion of the Reason and Necessity of the Present War (London: M.Cooper, 1745), pp. 42–3.

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It seems therefore clear that the ‘blue-water’ stance never extended to all positions on the British political chessboard.43 The case for a landbased defence of the British Isles was made throughout the period. Thus, even though the Seven Years War is (rightly) seen as a triumph for ‘bluewater’ strategy, as Britain became increasingly involved in extraEuropean conflicts, the idea of establishing a defence on the English coast was implemented during the same period, with the raising of a permanent militia.44 In 1755, the economist and clergyman Josiah Tucker (1713–1799) undertook to prove that allies on the Continent constituted the most efficient and most economical defence of the British Isles. He thus challenged the patriot-country rhetoric about Britain’s naval power, ‘the Mistress of the Sea, the Queen of the Ocean’, writing that ‘the Continent is at our very Doors’ and that ‘the Sea is in many Places wide, and in all Places an unstable Element.’45 In the following years, numerous pamphlets were written arguing the case that the Royal Navy would never be sufficient to defend the country against the French threat.46 Such an extreme view, however, was becoming a rarity by the end of the Seven Years War, and the idea that the sea was the island’s first line of defence survived until long after the eighteenth century.47 In practice, by 1759 the supremacy of the Royal Navy was well established. Nevertheless, control of the Channel relied heavily on naval bases, first and foremost Portsmouth and Plymouth, which witnessed rapid expansion from the last decade of the seventeenth century. These ports were home to the fleets that enforced the blockade of French ports during 43 44

45

46

47

R. Pares, ‘American versus continental warfare 1739–1763’, EHR, 51 (1936), pp. 429–65. Baugh, ‘Great Britain’s “blue-water” policy’. This was also due to an international turnaround in British military strategies, by which the defence of Britain mainly relied on British resources from 1759 onwards. This was linked to the diplomatic revolution of the mid-eighteenth century: the defence of Hanover was no longer a British strategic priority after 1760: Black, Debating, p. 151. J. Tucker, The Important Question Concerning Invasions, A Sea-War, Raising the Militia, and Paying Subsidies for Foreign Troops (London: R.Griffiths, 1755), pp. 5, 11, 13. Overall, Tucker advocated the merits of peace and trade over war: J. Robertson, The Scottish Enlightenment and the Militia Issue (Edinburgh: Donald, 1985), p. 67; K. Ghorbal, ‘Josiah Tucker: biographie intellectuelle d’un économiste du dix-huitième siècle’, unpublished PhD thesis, Université Paris 8 (2013), pp. 253, 524–6. See for instance T. Whiston and J. Christian (eds.), A Political Discourse upon the Different Kinds of Militia, Whether National, Mercenary, or Auxiliary (London: John Whiston and Benj. White, 1757), pp. 12–13. On the growing fear of France in the middle of the century, see B. Harris, Politics and the Nation: Britain in the Mid-Eighteenth Century (Oxford University Press, 2002), pp. 5–6, 33–4, 240–7.

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each conflict.48 In addition, from the seventeenth century onwards the Channel Islands started to bristle with fortifications.49 Britain’s superiority on the seas was sternly tested by the War of American Independence.50 In 1779 the threat of a Franco-Spanish raid on Portsmouth and the Isle of Wight was heightened by the involvement of the bulk of the Royal Navy in America. The incompetence of the allied commanders in coordinating the attack, plus the dysentery epidemic that decimated the French squadron, put paid to the plan. But in Britain the repercussions of this abortive invasion were enormous.51 For the first time since 1744 British mastery of the Channel was in jeopardy. The British fleet, facing a European coalition, had been torn between its engagements overseas and the defence of the kingdom. The event was a turning point in the state’s management of the military border. The Channel Islands, which were also the object of attempted landings by the French in 1779 and 1781, were consequently fortified with towers. Round towers were designed to withstand a siege while awaiting reinforcements, could accommodate small garrisons and were equipped with short-range batteries. In Guernsey twenty-three towers were built before 1787, and fifteen in Jersey, the last of them in 1794.52 However, it was more difficult to persuade Parliament to accept the extension of this large-scale fortification to the south coast of England. The debate over the fortification of the dockyards of Plymouth and Portsmouth in 1785–1786 is revealing. With the backing of William Pitt, the master-general of the Ordnance, the duke of Richmond, was the main advocate of land defences, which he saw as an essential support to the navy and the best means of avoiding a repetition of the errors of the previous war. A bill was tabled to that effect and debated from March 1785 onwards.53 Besides their hostility to Richmond, the opponents of his plan argued that the measure was unconstitutional: it would augment 48

49 50

51 52

53

M. Duffy, ‘The Establishment of the Western Squadron as the linchpin of British Naval Strategy’, in Duffy (ed.), Parameters of British Naval Power, 1650–1850 (University of Exeter Press, 1992), pp. 60–81; R. Morriss (ed.), The Channel Fleet and the Blockade of Brest, 1793–1801 (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2001). The cartouche of the Carte topo-hidro-graphique de l’Isle de Jersey (Paris: Chevalier de Beaurain, 1757) describes precisely the different forts on the island. J.R. Jones, ‘Limitations of British sea power in the French wars 1689–1815’, in J. Black and P. Woodfine (eds.), The British Navy and the Use of Naval Power in the Eighteenth Century (Leicester University Press, 1988), pp. 33–49; N.A.M. Rodger, Command of the Ocean: A Naval History of Britain, 1649–1815 (London: Allen Lane, 2004), pp. 335–57. A.T. Patterson, The Other Armada: The Franco-Spanish Attempt to Invade Britain in 1779 (Manchester University Press, 1960). E.J. Grimseley, The Historical Development of the Martello Towers in the Channel Islands (Guernsey: Sarnian Publications, 1988), pp. 13, 17, 47; S. Sutcliffe, Martello Towers (Newton Abbott: David & Charles, 1972). HCJ, 27 February 1786, vol. XLI (1786), p. 263.

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the standing army and neglect ‘the wooden walls of England’,54 strain the treasury and increase the risk of a successful invasion. It was a shrewd political tactic to set the debate within the traditional Whig discourse that linked the tyranny of the executive, military power and arbitrary taxes.55 Whether opposing or defending the scheme, speakers heavily relied on the classic patriotic trope of the navy as a bulwark of English liberties, which encapsulated the national character, and on the superior honour and glory of pursuing an offensive rather than a mere defensive strategy.56 The critics’ arguments eventually carried the day in Parliament and the bill was rejected for a second time in May 1786.57 As is well known, the navy remained the pivot of the British defence strategy during the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars: first, through the operation of the North Sea and the Channel squadrons,58 and second, by threatening the French coast and blockading French ports, as in previous conflicts. But this naval strategy was also combined with an unprecedented defensive effort on land. It was Napoleon’s plan to invade in 1803–1805 that precipitated the last stage in the fortification of the 54

55 56

57

58

Mr. Bastard, representing the country gentlemen, in New Annual Register: British and Foreign History, January 1786 (London, 1787), p. 75. Richard Walwyn, MP for Herefordshire, concurred on 27 February 1786, PH, vol. XXV, col. 1116: ‘He should think it his duty to oppose the system, as directly militating against the ancient mode of insular defence, as prejudicial to the increase of our navy, and as dangerous to the constitution.’ For a typical example of this language, see William Sheridan’s speech: New Annual Register, pp. 77–83. Mr. James Luttrell, 14 March 1785: PH, vol. XXV, col. 378–9; Mr. Courtenay, 14 March 1785, ibid., p. 383; Pitt, 14 March 1785, ibid., col. 390; 27 February 1786, ibid., col. 1096–1113; Colonel Barré, ibid., col. 1123; James Luttrell, ibid., col. 1129; J. Hawkins Browne, ibid., col. 1129. In his speech of 27 February 1786, former surveyor general of the Ordnance John Courtenay thus quoted some verses of Thomas Tickell’s 1712 poem, On the Prospect of Peace: ‘In vain the nations have conspir’d her fall./ Her trench the sea, and fleets her floating wall’ (col. 1135). On this poem specifically, and maritime and imperialist propaganda more generally, see L. Brown, Fables of Modernity: Literature and Culture in the English Eighteenth Century (Cornell University Press, 2001), chap. 2. New Annual Register, p. 68; S. Widmalm, ‘Accuracy, rhetoric, and technology: the ParisGreenwich triangulation, 1784–88’, in T. Frängsmyr, J.L. Heilbron and R.E. Rider (eds.), The Quantifying Spirit in the Eighteenth Century (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990), pp. 202–3; A.L. Olson, The Radical Duke: Career and Correspondence of Charles Lennox, Third Duke of Richmond (Oxford University Press, 1961), pp. 81–6. Despite their names, the North Sea squadron was based in the Thames, patrolled the English Channel and kept watch of the movements of the Dutch fleet, while the Channel squadron was based in Plymouth and primarily scoured the Atlantic Ocean: R. Glover, Britain at Bay: Defence Against Napoleon, 1803–1814 (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1973), p. 57. Although it is usually said that Trafalgar put an end to the French threat on the seas, Glover convincingly argues that a ‘renaissance of French seapower’ took place after 1805 (ibid., p. 19). See also Glover, ‘The French fleet, 1807–1814: Britain’s problem; and Madison’s opportunity’, JMH, 39 (1967), pp. 233–52.

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south coast of England. Between 1805 and 1808 seventy-three Martello Towers were erected along the coast from Brighton to Folkestone, making a total of 168 in the British Isles during the Napoleonic Wars: these round towers are continued evidence of British maritime insecurities.59 In the eighteenth century, apparently contrasting military theories of the frontier emerged in France and in England. Viewed from France, the coasts of the Channel were the first frontier, while the first (but not the only) line of English defences was the sea. But every frontier is relational, its organisation being a function of the relations between neighbouring states.60 Beyond the canonical but somewhat forced opposition between France as a continental and Britain as a maritime power, defensive strategies in the Channel overlapped and intertwined. In the second half of the eighteenth century protection of the coasts increased on both sides of the Channel, more particularly towards the west. State administrators and geographers were not alone in using the language of the frontier: so did the populations which lived in these regions, for different purposes. Of the advantage of living on the border: the Normandy–Brittany Gulf A border is a structuring delimitation. As the geographer Julian V. Minghi puts it, ‘the boundary creates its own distinctive region, making an element of division also the vehicle for regional definition. This paradox is at the core of the concept of the borderland.’61 In wartime certain cities or regions constituted the first line of defence, and their location on an international border was exploited by resident populations to obtain benefits from the central state. On the Cotentin Peninsula, Coutances and Saint-Lô battled with each other during the Revolution to be the departmental capital of Cotentin. The two towns sent countless petitions and requests to the National Assembly, pointing out their respective strengths.62 On 17 December 1789 the deputies of Coutances published a tract entitled Observations sur le chef-lieu du département de Cotentin. More densely populated, located 59

60 61

62

Grimseley, Martello Towers, pp. 13–15; Glover, Britain at Bay, pp. 103–24; R. Knight, Britain Against Napoleon: The Organization of Victory, 1793–1815 (London: Allen Lane, 2013), pp. 276–9, 282–3. C. Raffestin, Pour une géographie du pouvoir (Paris: Librairies Techniques, 1980), p. 141. J.V. Minghi, ‘From conflict to harmony in border landscapes’, in J.V. Minghi and D. Rumley (eds.), The Geography of Border Landscapes (London/New York: Routledge, 1991), p. 15. For an analysis of these phenomena of inter-urban competition, see T.W. Margadant, Urban Rivalries in the French Revolution (Princeton University Press, 1992).

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at the geometrical centre of the department and, unlike Saint-Lô, already possessing a court of justice, Coutances occupied, above all, a key strategic position: When France is at war with England, the coasts of the Avranchin and the Cherbourg Peninsula, close by the islands of Jersey and Guernsey, are exposed to continual insults by the enemy. Of all the towns in the department, Coutances is the one that can send the necessary orders fastest to all points threatened by invasion, and its location must seem the most advantageous for the placing of an administrative Assembly that shall be the immediate agent of the executive power.63

The departmental capital was first fixed as Coutances in 1790, but its transfer to Saint-Lô in 1795 revived the conflict between the two towns. While the Chouan revolt saw a royalist and peasant uprising tear apart western France from 1794 onwards, the advocates of the Coutances cause thus pointed to the supposed danger of communications between the enemy and Saint-Lô.64 By contrast and somehow paradoxically, they highlighted the advantages of their town’s ‘topographical position’, ‘in the vicinity of the coasts, an important position in a war with the power which owns the islands of Jersey and Guernsey’.65 The recurrence of the argument concerning location in relation to the military frontier, underscored by the language of national interest, clearly shows that reference to the English threat was an effective means of obtaining state supplies and bettering regional competitors. In the Channel Islands, the same rhetoric was used. Ever since coming under English protection in 1204, the Channel Islands’ strategic importance had never been questioned. The clergyman Peter Heylin (1600– 1662), who visited them in the mid-seventeenth century, dwelt on the quality of their natural defences: In aftertimes as any war grew hot between the English and the French, these Islands were principally aimed at by the enemy . . ., but with ill successe. And certainly, it could not be but an eyesore to the French, to have these Isles within their sight, and not within their power; to see them at the least in possession of their ancient enemy the English.66 63 64

65

66

Quoted in A. Lebaindre, La formation du département de la Manche (Caen: Imprimerie Adeline, 1911), p. 109. J.J. Costin, Économie de trois millions pour la République, et Précis des motifs de sagesse et justice qui s’opposent à la translation de l’Administration Centrale de la Manche à Saint Lô (26 October 1795), [[Paris]: Imprimerie de Fantelin, s.d.], pp. 4–5. Les administrateurs municipaux de la Commune de Coutances, Département de la Manche, Au Corps Législatif, 28 December 1795 (Coutances: Printed by J. N. Agnès, 1797), pp. 1–2. P. Heylin, Survey of the Estate of France, and of Some of the Adjoining Islands. The Sixth Book (London: E. Cotes, 1656), p. 293.

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Also, positioned on the great trade route linking the Atlantic and Northern Europe, the Channel Islands privateers were able to interrupt exchanges between the French coast and the hinterland. French strategists described the Channel as a road junction along which the points of access had to be controlled. However, vessels from the Atlantic had no option but to sail between ‘the great land of England, where the ports of Portsmouth and Portland stand, and the islands of Gersay, Grenesay, Aurigny, &c.’, as the Cherbourg engineer De Caux wrote in 1734.67 As tension between the French and the English rose from 1680 onwards, the proximity of the French coast became the Islanders’ major asset in obtaining benefits from the English Crown: just as on the Cotentin Peninsula, the rhetoric of the frontier was used to defend the tax privileges of the Channel Islands.68 Hence Philip Falle, a Channel Islands envoy for William III, stated in 1694: ‘We are a Frontiere [sic] and a Garrison, under which Notion we ought chiefly to be considered now.’69 He followed this with a lengthy demonstration addressed to the king and queen, orchestrating the usual themes of Orange propaganda – the sovereignty of the seas, the overweening aspirations of Louis XIV to universal monarchy and the old antagonism between the two states – and calling for protection of the Channel Islands. While swearing loyalty to his sovereigns, Falle also implied that they could not do without the Channel Islands, more than ever the linchpin of control over the maritime border: ‘The known Endeavours of the French, for some years, to increase their Naval Power, and their late bold entring the Channel, and disputing with Your Majesties the Empire of the Sea, is a pregnant proof how greatly it would prejudice the Safety and Honour of Your Crown, should they become Masters of This and the adjoyning Islands.’70 A century later, during the Revolutionary Wars, the French threat stimulated the republication of Falle’s book.71 If geographical location and geopolitics really did make this zone a frontier, the inhabitants had their own specific objectives in underlining this fact. Living on a military frontier might appear to be advantageous, but in practice it was often regarded as a burden by coastal populations. 67

68 69 70 71

De Caux, ‘État de la côte de Basse Normandie, avec celui des réparations et des augmentations qu’il convient d’y faire pour sa défense et la sûreté du commerce’, 1 February 1734, SHD, Armée de Terre, 1M1085, fos. 22–4. See Chapter 7. P. Falle, An Account of the Isle of Jersey, The Greatest of Those Islands That Are Now the Only Remainder of the English Dominions in France (London: John Newton, 1694), preface, n.p. Ibid., pp. 45–7. Caesarea: Or an Account of Jersey, the Greatest of the Islands Round the Coast of England or the Ancient Duchy of Normandy. Began by Philip Falle, M.A. Continued by Philip Morant, M.A. (London: Eglin and Pepys, 1797), p. 25.

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The social depth of the military frontier: garde-côtes and militia In 1764 the parish of Agon on the Cotentin Peninsula numbered 1,031 inhabitants. The effects of the Seven Years War made themselves felt in a gender imbalance: Agon counted only 149 men as against 262 women at this date.72 Two decades later the parish’s cahiers de doléances described the social cost of the recurring conflicts: This parish is entirely composed of the most useful part of the kingdom, all the inhabitants being sailors, and subject to being employed in His Majesty’s royal navy; . . . it has suffered the loss of more than 400 men in the last three wars, killed and dying in the service of the state and in the prisons of the enemy.73

The entire family unit was affected by the absence or disappearance of husbands. On top of the physical damage inflicted by the enemy – bombardments of ports, capture of fishing boats, raids in the countryside – seafarers were also subjected to state requisitioning.74 The garde-côte and the classes (the system created under Louis XIV by which the French Marine Royale was manned) were held in contempt by coastal populations, on which they weighed specifically.75 Much the same can be said about the south coast of England, where impressment mainly fell on seafaring people. In both countries inhabitants living near the frontiers were thus caught in a crossfire. On the one hand, they owed military service to the state; on the other, they were also the first to be captured or bombed by the enemy. To define these men as ‘border dwellers’ or frontaliers, to use the French word, is not straightforward. Indeed, this term only appeared in French in the 1730s with reference to mountainous regions,76 and was never used by contemporaries to denote the people of the littoral zone. In English the term ‘borderer’ appeared at the end of the fifteenth century, referring to those living on the outskirts of a county or a district, but not specifically coastal populations.77 This semantic difference might also indicate a difference 72

73

74

75 76

‘Dénombrement des habitants des deux sexes de l’élection de Coutances en 1764’, ADC, C181, quoted in E. Bridrey, Cahiers de doléances du bailliage de Cotentin (Coutances et secondaires) pour les États généraux de 1789 (Paris: Imprimerie Nationale, 1912), vol. III, p. 104. ‘Cahier de doléances, plaintes et remontrances, que présentent à Sa Majesté les paroissiens et possédants fonds de la paroisse d’Agon, en tant que du tiers état’ (8 March 1787), in ibid., pp. 108–9. Cabantous, Dix-mille marins, pp. 161–206. Although this work has no equivalent on England, regional studies make the same kind of analysis: see for instance Duffy (ed.), New Maritime History of Devon. Agon, like many other parishes at the end of the Ancien Régime, requested to be exempted from this in its cahiers: ibid., art. 8, p. 109. Nordman, Frontières, p. 334. 77 OED (1991), art. ‘borderer’.

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in the social conception of the coastal border. In what follows, I will argue that whereas in France, the littoral of the Channel was defined, from a military viewpoint, as a space inherently different from the rest of the country, this was not the case in England. This will be shown by comparing the ways in which those regions were required to contribute to defence against invasion in the two countries. The existence of a common identity, felt or claimed by the people who inhabited the regions bordering the Channel, remains to be demonstrated. In France there was certainly a border-dweller identity: one that was prescribed and imposed by the state.78 It was as inhabitants of a certain fringe of the territory, regarded as part of the military frontier, that some subjects of the kings of France owed a special duty to their state, that of serving in the garde-côte. In 1774, in a memorandum on this institution, the duc d’Aiguillon (1721–1788), himself a soldier and minister of French Affaires Etrangères, wrote that ‘the inhabitants of the sea coasts owe . . . a service to the state. Therefore, in all times, the service expected of them for the defence of this part of the kingdom was regarded as most essential.’79 There was no strict equivalent of the French ‘garde-côte’ in England. The Coastguard Service, created in 1822, brought under the same head different institutions which hitherto had been combatting smuggling independently.80 In the eighteenth century, the board of customs countered smuggling by employing riding officers, who ranged up and down the shore on horseback, while armed Revenue sloops, which came under the admiralty, patrolled some distance into the sea. In 1809, the Preventive Water Guard was established: it was responsible to the treasury, and its cruisers checked smuggling in coastal waters.81 By contrast, in France the ‘garde-côte’ usually referred to land defence troops. Here, for example, is the definition in Lescallier’s bilingual lexicon 78

79

80 81

On this dual process of assignation and appropriation which is at work in social categorisation, see G. Noiriel, ‘Représentation nationale et catégories sociales: l’exemple des réfugiés politiques’, Genèses, 26 (1997), pp. 25–54. ‘Instruction et notice historique sur les garde-côtes, données par M. le duc d’Aiguillon à M. le Maréchal Duc de Richelieu’, 16 March 1774, in C. Hippeau, Le gouvernement de Normandie aux XVIIe et au XVIIIe siècles, 9 vols. (Caen: Imprimerie Goussiaume de Laporte, 1863–1869), vol. I, p. 141. This volume almost entirely deals with the ‘gardecôte’. W. Webb, Coastguard: An Official History of HM Coastguard (London: H.M.S.O., 1976), pp. 12–30. P. Muskett, ‘English smuggling in the eighteenth century’, unpublished PhD thesis, Open University (1997), pp. 287–330; Webb, Coastguard, pp. 14–17. Because neither riding officers nor Revenue sloops were sufficient, the army helped the revenue service with this coastal duty: P. Muskett, ‘Military operations against smugglers in Kent and Sussex, 1698–1750’, JSAHR, 52 (1974), pp. 89–110; J.A. Houlding, Fit for Service: The Training of the British Army, 1715–1795 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1981), pp. 75–82.

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garde-cotes . . . or soldats garde-coˆ tes. A military guard employed to defend the coast in time of war. vaisseau garde-coˆte. A guarda-costa, or a vessel of war employed to cruize along the coasts of a country, to protect it from the enemy, and also to seize the vessels which carry on an illicit trade.82

This difference, once again, reflects the contrasting ways in which the maritime border was defined in the two countries. If we are looking for an English institution closely comparable to the garde-côte, a good candidate is the militia.83 Both were made up of civilians, and their ranks strictly conformed to social hierarchies: it was an accepted practice for wealthy and privileged subjects whose name had been drawn at the ballot to serve in these corps to find a substitute. And both were subject to simultaneous pressures due to the international context, which explains why the main reforms in both countries took place at the same time, were often modelled on each other and changed as theatres of operation shifted and threats of invasion came and went. But there were substantial differences as well. The most obvious one was the territorial basis of these two institutions. In France residence in the border zone was the central qualification for service in defence of the coasts. In England, the militia was never strictly territorialised nor specific to coastal regions: militiamen were recruited in their parishes of origin but hardly ever served in their own county.84 Despite these important differences, the arguments raised against the militia and the garde-côte also bore some striking similarities. One controversy revolved around the central issue of entrusting the defence of the nation to civilians, especially from the lower classes. The social composition of these corps sparked passionate discussions about the social distribution of what Adam Ferguson called the ‘military spirit’.85 Could non-propertied men really be trusted with the defence of the nation, since they had no interest in its survival? Would not daily necessities, such as working the fields, come before confronting a foreign enemy when in times of crisis? Was political virtue a monopoly of the landed elites, or could a spirit of patriotism grow among more popular groups? Was it fair

82 83 84

85

C. Lescallier, Vocabulaire des termes de marine anglais-français et français-anglais, 3 vols. (Paris: Firmin Didot, Year 6 –1797), vol. I, p. 106. There also existed a militia in France; but the garde-côte was specific to coastal regions and was conceived as the equivalent, on the littoral, of the militia on land. J.R. Western, The Militia in the Eighteenth Century: The Story of a Political Issue (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1965); E.H. Gould, ‘To strengthen the king’s hands: dynastic legitimacy, militia reform and ideas of national unity in England 1745–1760’, HJ, 34 (1991), pp. 329–48. Robertson, Scottish Enlightenment, pp. 87–91.

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to put the burden of the defence of the territory only on the shoulders of those civilians who lived by the sea? While the English militia has been the subject of numerous studies, by political, social, intellectual or cultural historians, the garde-côte is less well known and has remained the quasi-monopoly of military historians: the bulk of the analysis that follows therefore focuses on the latter while employing a comparative approach. Three sets of questions will be addressed. First, how did these forces of defence work? Were they effective, and did they elicit opposition from the local populations? The issue at stake here is the relationship between the central state and the peripheries. Second, the garde-côte and the militia played a central part in the political debate about the link between the sense of belonging to the locality and the building of a broader sense of citizenship. In the event of invasion, could the state count on a population’s supposedly natural and unquestioned attachment to its parish? Would participation in the defence of the country as a whole stimulate among local populations a sense of patriotism comparable to that hitherto vested in their own parishes? Third is the question of the frontier. We might infer from the territorial differences in the recruitment and mobilisation of the garde-côte and the militia a confirmation of our earlier conclusions about the differing nature of the maritime border in France, where it was regionalised and its defence partly devolved onto its own inhabitants, and in England, where it was nationalised and defended by all English male subjects. Yet, does this neat opposition hold when one looks at the French Revolution, which aimed at treating every French citizen equally and applied the principle of territorial equity everywhere? The first half of the eighteenth century England The origins of the English militia date at least to the eleventh century.86 Created anew at the Restoration of the monarchy, in 1660, it had the double function in the first half of the eighteenth century of defending the country against invasion and of carrying out domestic repression against political opponents, religious minorities or rebels.87 Despite being mobilised in the southern counties at every threat of foreign invasion, during the second Anglo-Dutch War and the Nine Years War, 86 87

J. Beeler, ‘The composition of Anglo-Norman armies’, Speculum, 40 (1965), pp. 398–414. Western, English Militia, pp. 57–8.

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its military role was more symbolic than real, and the institution lapsed during the first half of the eighteenth century.88 Tellingly, it was not even called out in Kent in December 1745, when a French landing was expected.89 In England, the militia was at this time primarily understood in the intellectual context of ‘civic tradition’: it was typically defined as the symbol of a healthy political community, one in which citizens took part in the defence of their own country, by contrast to the standing army favoured by the Stuarts, which was always suspected of paving the way to tyranny.90 This explains why it was presented by its advocates as an army of citizens: although controlled by the lord lieutenants, the recruitment of militiamen was local, at the level of the parish, and every county was supposed to contribute to the national defence. France Coastal surveillance already existed as early as the reign of François I (1515–1547), when it was known as the guet de la mer, or ‘sea watch’. This service owed by the inhabitants of certain coastal parishes dated back to the Middle Ages. It consisted of monitoring the movements of the enemy fleets by ringing bells to assemble the population in the event of an alert. Both in terms of territory and institutions, the watch was rather feebly defined in the regulations and edicts that followed one another in the sixteenth century.91 Colbert’s Great Marine Ordinance of 1681, which transformed the ‘sea watch into garde-côte militias’,92 was vague about its scope: it was to concern ‘not merely the inhabitants of the parishes neighbouring the sea . . ., but also the inhabitants of other parishes, albeit remote’.93 By the end of the seventeenth century the number of garde-côtes and their tasks were still modest, as shown in 1694 in the directives of the comte de Pontchartrain, secretary of state for the Marine, to the marquis de Beuvron, governor of Rouen and lieutenant general of Normandy: Let there be a man stand on each of the bell-towers that are on the sea coast from where a watch can be kept, and let there be in each of these villages three men who 88 89 91 92

93

Ibid., pp. 43–4, 53, 73; Gould, ‘To strengthen the king’s hands’, pp. 329–34; Robertson, Scottish Enlightenment, pp. 63–7. Western, English Militia, p. 73. 90 Robertson, Scottish Enlightenment, pp. 10–11. C. Durand, Les milices garde-côtes de Bretagne de 1716 à 1792 (Rennes: Imprimerie TypoLithographique H. Riou-Reuzé, 1927), p. 3. A. Corvisier, ‘La défense des côtes de Normandie contre les descentes anglaises pendant la guerre de Sept Ans’ (1976), reedited in Corvisier, Les hommes, la guerre et la mort (Paris: Economica, 1985), p. 263. Ordonnance de la Marine du mois d’août 1681. Commentée et conférée sur les anciennes ordonnances, le droit romain, et les nouveaux règlements (Paris: Charles Osmont, 1714), vol. VI, pp. 405–6.

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shall not stand guard, but shall be ordered to go upon the first signal to show themselves in the ports with their rifles, in order to discourage privateers from setting foot on land and burn houses or make off with cattle.94

In the eighteenth century, the military tasks and general structure of the garde-côte were gradually modified. First of all, its zone of recruitment was standardised, at least in theory. In 1701, with the declaration of war on the United Provinces and England imminent, the coastguard now targeted ‘the inhabitants of the maritime parishes which are at a distance of two leagues [approximately five to six miles] from the edge of the sea’.95 But this limit was far from being uniformly applied. In Brittany, for example, custom took precedence over royal regulations, and local authorities were entirely free to incorporate parishes a great distance from the seashore into the garde-côte by interpreting the ‘edge of the sea’ as the space covered by the tide.96 Thus, in the pays of the rivers Rance and Arguenon, which had the highest tides in Europe, the parishes of Tremorel and Le Loscouët were eleven and twelve leagues from the coastline, respectively: yet they still had to send men to the coast in the event of an alarm. Conversely, parishes located within the two leagues zone were not subject to this service.97 These territorial inequalities within the border zone fostered the discontent of those populations who had to bear the brunt of the defence, while their neighbours were exempt. This situation worsened when, during the War of the Spanish Succession, the military training of the coastguard militia was stepped up, with obligatory monthly or bimonthly reviews. An elite subdivision of the coastguard was also created, the compagnies détachées, or ‘detached companies’, which were better armed and trained weekly.98 These obligations were a very heavy burden on the populations, who were forced to attend inspections under penalty of imprisonment or hefty fines:99 The King having been informed, Monsieur, that the captain generals of the gardecôte under the pretext of holding reviews every Sunday, summoned the peasants from very far away, made them waste their time, exhausted them with constant garrisoning, [requesting them to be equipped with] trimmed hats, uniform dress, cockades, and other such things, so that there was not a peasant whose costs did not come to more than 40# . . . and there were parishes where it had cost almost as much as for the tallage.100 94

1 December 1694, in Hippeau, Gouvernement de Normandie, vol. I, p. 6. ‘Règlement concernant le service des milices garde côtes de par le Roy’, 19 December 1701, ADS, 248B3, fo. 90. 96 97 Durand, Milices garde-côtes, p. 12. Ibid., pp. 17–19. 98 Ibid., p. 13. 99 See for instance the penalties against the inhabitants of the Norman capitaineries générales garde-côtes who were absent at the reviews: AN, Marine B3156, 1708, fos. 350–1. 100 Letter to M. Desmarest, 27 November 1714, AN, Marine B3226, fo. 98. 95

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In addition to the garde-côte, coastal parishes were subject to the milice de terre, or ‘land militia’, a far more wearisome and highly unpopular service: recruited for three years, miliciens were liable to be sent to the kingdom’s land borders.101 The system lasted until 1716, when an ordinance divided the entire French coast into capitaineries garde-côtes, or ‘captaincies’, and imposed across the board a recruitment zone of two leagues from the coast.102 Gradually the maritime frontier was regularised. The same law exempted coastguard parishes from the land militia, enforcing a spatial dichotomy between the coastal parishes subject to the border effect and the hinterland. However, the map of the garde-côte parishes was not cast in stone and there was still uncertainty and discontent in the border zone. Indeed, some parishes were assigned to the land militia when strategic imperatives changed, with the prevalence of land-based wars.103 This led to a phenomenon of inter-parish mobility, since the coastguard was now becoming more attractive than the land militia: inhabitants from the interior started migrating to the coast. Faced with such undesired movements, the French state tried to settle them in their parishes, and the order of 25 October 1735 forced them ‘to come and draw lots for the land militia, with their old parish . . ., under penalty of being prosecuted and punished as fugitives’.104 This restriction to the freedom of movement was a direct consequence of the military service owed to the state by border dwellers. Because of the long Anglo-French peace lasting between 1713 and 1744, neither the militia nor the coastguard was mobilised in the first half of the century. But when the international situation became strained again, these institutions once again took centre stage. Mid-eighteenth-century reforms The Seven Years War, which saw a dramatic reversal in geostrategy and diplomacy, put the sea at the centre of the Anglo-French military confrontation, raising a similar question in both countries. What was the best way to defend oneself against a foreign invasion while successfully waging war overseas, in the colonies? The balance between the army, the navy and the specific contribution of civilians to the defence of the country was debated very widely by administrators, soldiers and politicians. Between 101 103

104

102 Durand, Milices garde-côtes, p. 14. Corvisier, ‘La défense’, p. 263. This was, for example, the case in Brittany, where the 1726 regulations integrated maritime parishes to the land militia, while the 1732 regulations did the opposite: Durand, Milices garde-côtes, pp. 20–1. Anon, Ordonnance concernant les garçons des paroisses des provinces maritimes sujettes à la milice qui se sont retirez dans les paroisses gardes-costes desdites provinces (Paris: Imprimerie Royale, 1735), quoted in ibid., p. 28.

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1757 and 1762, the characters of the militia and of the garde-côte were fundamentally altered. Although these reforms were not explicitly linked to each other, they were responses to the same intellectual context in so far as the corps in question faced similar challenges. England For the first time since 1690, Britain faced a real threat of French invasion in 1744, followed in 1745 by a Jacobite rebellion, which exposed the limitations of the defence system and renewed interest in reforming the militia.105 From then on, the question of military efficiency of the corps, as well as its social, moral or constitutional raison d’être and nature, came to the fore: the reform of the militia was debated for over a decade, until a bill was successfully carried in Parliament in 1757. The militia was seen by its advocates as a counterweight to the growth of an army stationed in England and as an alternative to the traditional reliance on foreign, notably Hanoverian, mercenaries.106 The militia would also help to reconcile the interests of the people and the Crown, and to consolidate good citizenship and monarchical patriotism. It would also provide an answer to a perceived crisis in moral values, by counterbalancing the gentry’s effeminacy and recent desertion of their military ethos.107 By retaining its local character and strictly following social hierarchies, the reformed corps would prevent subversion of the state.108 Thus, Colonel Martin, the author of a Plan for Establishing . . . a National Militia (1745), proposed that the militia of a county should never ‘march out of its limits, except to the aid of some neighbour county’.109 The danger of popular subversion would be kept at arm’s length by reserving the ranks of officers for men of property. The ‘common people’ would serve in the infantry of the ‘subordinate militia’, which would form independent companies ‘within the limits of their respective parishes’.110 The duke of Dorset, the former deputy lieutenant of Sussex, used the same arguments, seeing the local rootedness of the county militia as non-negotiable: ‘Neither the general Militia, nor the County Regiments, or any part of them, so as to make a Body of armed 105 106 107

108

109

110

Western, English Militia, chap. 5. Robertson, Scottish Enlightenment, pp. 81–2. Gould, ‘To strengthen the king’s hands’, pp. 344–6; Western, English Militia, pp. 104– 7; Robertson, Scottish Enlightenment, p. 81; M. McCormack, ‘The new militia: war, politics and gender in 1750s Britain’, Gender and History, 19 (2007), pp. 483–500. W. T[hornton], The Counterpoise, Being Thoughts on a Militia and a Standing Army, 2nd edn (London: John Swan, 1753), pp. 41, 45; Charles Sackville, duke of Dorset, A Treatise Concerning the Militia, 2nd edn (London: J. Millan, 1753), p. 14. [Colonel Martin], A Plan for Establishing and Disciplining a National Militia in Great Britain, Ireland, and in All the British Dominions of America (London: A. Millar, 1745), p. 5. Ibid., p. 7, p. 19.

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Men, to march out of their respective Counties upon any pretext, or by any command whatsoever; upon pain of being declared enemies to their Countyr, and guilty of high treason.’111 The opponents of these projects used a classical discourse, revolving around the threat to the subjects’ liberties and public disorder caused by an armed populace.112 Thus, Adam Ferguson doubted that the lower classes would ever develop a sense of patriotism, unlike freeholders.113 Others remarked ironically upon the military qualities of civilians, be they men of property or plebeians: ‘John in the Rear will be firing his Piece into the Back-side of his Friend Tom in the Front; or, which would be still worse, blow out the Brains of his noble Captain.’114 The friends of the militia prevailed and in 1757–1758 a ‘new militia’ was formed in England; it would remain active until the French Revolution.115 The new English militia could be mobilised at the king’s discretion at the slightest threat of invasion. Unlike under the old system, the labouring classes made up the bulk of militiamen.116 The popularity of the law was far from obvious, and fraud, desertion and mutiny were routine throughout the eighteenth century.117 Knowing where the loyalties of militiamen would lie – to their counties or to the nation as a whole – continued to preoccupy contemporaries. For unlike the French coastguard, the militia also had the function of maintaining public order on English territory: it was feared with some justice that, when asked to pacify riots at home, these men, like constables, would be reluctant to fire on their friends and neighbours.118 Hence the double character of the militia. On the one hand, the institution’s territorial dimension was certainly its most original feature compared to the army. Recruitment was carried out by civilian officers at parish level, and mobilisation undertaken at county level;119 on the other hand, the militia’s main function was to defend the country, not simply individual counties: this explains why militia units were, as a rule, mobilised

111 112 113

114 115 117 118 119

Sackville, A Treatise Concerning the Militia, pp. 40–1. Gould, ‘To strengthen the king’s hands’, pp. 344–6. A. Ferguson, Reflections Previous to the Establishment of a Militia (London: R. and J. Dodsley, 1756). See Robertson, Scottish Enlightenment, pp. 89–91. Ferguson developed an even more pessimistic view on this matter in his An Essay on the History of Civil Society (1767): Robertson, Scottish Enlightenment, pp. 202–7. A Word in Time to Both Houses of Parliament . . . By a Member of Neither House (London: R. Griffiths, 1757), p. 11. Western, English Militia, pp. 127–61. 116 Ibid., p. 256. Ibid., pp. 249–50, 283–4, 290–302. T. Hayter, The Army and the Crowd in Mid-Georgian England (London: Macmillan, 1978). Western, English Militia, p. 258.

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outside their counties of origin.120 In order to build a nationwide force, it was important for the government, at least in wartime, to break down local ties between militiamen and their neighbours from their counties of origin.121 Thus, even though the two kinds of affiliations, the local and the national, were not necessarily incompatible,122 there could sometimes be a tension between the two. One problem, which the friends of the bill had predicted, regarded territorial and social equity. It was vital for everyone to contribute to the war effort ‘and not have some repose in sloth and idleness, whilst others are diligent and watchful; let the burthen as well as advantage fall equal’.123 The remit of the plan had to be ‘universal’.124 But local variations remained important in practice. At the national level the counties of the south-east were the first to implement the parliamentary acts, in early 1759, due to the acute fear of a French invasion.125 But the militia was never mobilised during the Seven Years War in the Isle of Wight, Sussex or East Kent: local political disputes and passive resistance to recruitment played just as important a part as fear of the enemy.126 After the Peace of Paris (1763), many plans to make the militia permanent were drafted, and several acts were passed, but one problem was never solved: several counties continuously defaulted on their duty to raise militiamen.127 The British government unsuccessfully tried for more than a decade to correct this territorial inequality, arguing that the militia was a national defence force. Their location on the maritime frontier was clearly not enough to motivate the local elites to call up the militia, and Sussex remained in default until 1778.128 It is also questionable how much popular enthusiasm there was for the militia, even in coastal counties: there were four episodes of rioting against recruitment into the militia in Kent between 1757 and 1759.129 Overall, despite the resistance of a minority of counties, what was striking about the English system was the drive towards uniformity on the national level; border regions were not given any special treatment, the whole country being made responsible for the defence of the coast. This was a major difference with France, where coastal populations bore the brunt of coastal defence.130 120 121 122 123

124 127

S. Conway, ‘The mobilization of manpower for Britain’s mid-eighteenth century wars’, HR, 77 (2004), p. 400. Western, English Militia, pp. 261, 402. S. Conway, War, State and Society in Mid-Eighteenth-Century Britain and Ireland (Oxford University Press, 2006), pp. 195–6. Observations on the new militia bill now under the consideration of Parliament, wherein the material alterations are pointed out, published by the friends of the bill (London: s.l., [1757]), p. 23. Ibid., p. 25. 125 Western, English Militia, pp. 124, 154 sq. 126 Ibid., pp. 190–2. 130 Ibid., ch. 8. 128 Ibid., pp. 196–9. 129 Ibid., p. 291. Ibid., pp. 190–4.

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France In France, during the same period, a fierce debate pitted those who wanted a professionalisation of the garde-côte, whose numbers were to be rank-and-file soldiers, against those who wanted to maintain the civilian character of the body. In the course of this controversy, two conceptions of the patriotism of the border dwellers were merged. Many administrators of the navy favoured the militarisation of the garde-côte. The Admiral de France, the duke of Penthièvre, thus suggested transforming the ‘timid peasants, who are prone to surprise, and to fleeing at the first sight of organised troops’, into ‘disciplined soldiers [who] will be untouched by the natural surprise of country people that have never seen anything’.131 At the instigation of the marshal of BelleIsle, the commander general of the ocean coasts, reforms were adopted to that effect in each maritime province at the beginning of the Seven Years War.132 The garde-côtes were stationed for several days a month and practised troop movements and arms drill. Eventually, in 1759, this institution came under the umbrella of the Ministry of War.133 These reforms were not universally welcomed, as in Brittany, where the garde-côte was funded by the provincial states and was the subject of several orders between 1756 and 1759. In 1757 the lawyer Guy-Charles Le Chapelier (1711–1789), a deputy of the procureur généraux syndics of the Estates of Brittany, defended the old system, under which economic independence based on property guaranteed patriotism and attachment to the territory: As things were, over centuries, and entirely unproblematically, all citizens were born soldiers and defenders of the coasts where they lived . . . : zeal, activity, courage were maintained solely by the spirit of property and the desire for preservation that it inspired. . . . It is in feelings . . . that real safety lies and not in leaving the inhabitants of the coasts to rely on ten thousand vagabonds who more smugglers than militiamen will soon no longer have an interest in owning and preserving.134

Besides using the traditional language of hostility to the army, Le Chapelier drew an anthropological link between territorial identity and 131 132 133

134

Anon, ‘Mémoire sur les garde-côtes’ (c.1750), ADC, C2452, item 68. On these reforms, see Durand, Milices garde-côtes, p. 50 sq. By the ordinance of 24 February 1759: H.-T. Adams, ‘Les enjeux de pouvoir entre la marine et l’armée pour la défense du littoral’, in Le Bouëdec and F. Chappé (eds.), Pouvoirs et littoraux du XVe au XXe siècle (Rennes: Presses Universitaires de Rennes, 2000), p. 303. ADIV, C3670, quoted in Durand, Milices garde-côtes, p. 92. On this individual, who was the father of Isaac René Le Chapelier, see T. Hamon, ‘Aux origines de la suppression des corporations par la Révolution française: les conceptions de Guy-Charles Le Chapelier (père) sur la réforme des communautés de métier bretonnes, à travers un mémoire inédit de 1782’, RHDFE, 4 (1996), pp. 525–66.

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property, which was embodied in the garde-côte militia. This was part of the same ‘civic tradition’ which has been analysed by John Robertson for the Scottish militia, an intellectual discourse which was also alive and well in eighteenth-century France.135 In the French context, defending a militia of citizens was also a way of asserting the autonomy of the provincial states in the face of the monarchy. And that was precisely how it was understood by a faithful servant of the French monarchy, Védier, war commissioner for Brittany and subdelegate of the intendant.136 In tune with the shift in political discourse which saw the defence of absolutism beginning to be couched in the language of patriotism, Védier accused Le Chapelier of concealing disobedience behind the plea of local identity: In the former state of things, every citizen had to be a soldier, but none was; in the new state, there will be citizen-soldiers who will defend their homeland without neglecting their ordinary duties. . . . It is very strange that states should treat those of their compatriots who are devoted to the service of the homeland (pays natal) as vagabonds and smugglers and that criticisms of the indecent [sic] should be sanctioned in a memorandum submitted by a province to its master.137

The debate on the reform of the garde-côte also raged in Normandy, between the duke of Harcourt, the lieutenant general of Normandy, who in 1761 drafted a bill for the reorganisation of the Norman garde-côte, and Fontette, intendant of the généralité of Caen.138 Their heated exchange is a perfect illustration of the two points of view that clashed over the military frontier. First, for Harcourt, basing his reasoning on learned arithmetical calculations, the border had to be standardised on a geographical basis, such that all inhabitants of the parishes living within a certain distance from the coast were treated in the same way. The quest 135

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Robertson, Scottish Enlightenment; J.G.A. Pocock, The Machiavellian Moment: Florentine Political Thought and the Atlantic Republic Tradition (Princeton University Press, 1975). On the French tradition of republicanism, see M. Linton, Politics of Virtue in Enlightenment France (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2001). The intendants were high-ranking servants of the central monarchy, appointed by the king and sent into the provinces; they exercised an array of political, financial and judicial powers. Subdelegates were their direct subordinates. Quoted in Durand, Milices garde-côtes, p. 93. On the mid-eighteenth century as a turning point in the language of patriotism, see David Bell, The Cult of the Nation in France: Inventing Nationalism, 1680–1800 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001). ‘Examen du projet de nouvelle division des capitaineries et de nouvelle formation des compagnies détachées de garde-côtes, proposé par M. le duc d’Harcourt, par M. de Fontette, Intendant de la Généralité de Caen’ (1761) in Hippeau, Gouvernement de Normandie, vol. I, pp. 124–41. See A. Corvisier, ‘Les hommes qui défendaient l’estuaire de la Seine pendant la guerre de Sept Ans’, CLD, 21 (1972), pp. 31–46; E. Lemonchois, ‘Capitaineries et gardes-côtes du Cotentin et de l’Avranchin 1716–1778, 1e partie: Infanterie’, RDM, 16 (1974), pp. 87–142; T. Chardon, ‘Du guet de mer aux milices garde-côtes: la défense du littoral en Normandie à l’époque de la guerre de Sept Ans (1756–1763)’, Annales de Normandie, 56 (2006), pp. 355–80.

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for the ideal ratio between population and territory exercised eighteenth-century political economists.139 In Fontette’s view the make-up of the garde-côte had to correspond to a real threat of an enemy landing and not ‘the beauty of speculation’.140 The second bone of contention was the balance between the interests of local communities and those of the state. Calling himself the ‘born guardian of all communities that make up his department’, the intendant tended to be the first representative of local communities and only secondarily an agent of the central power.141 Accordingly, his rhetoric harped on the burden of the garde-côte on populations. Recruiting 60-year-olds, as Harcourt proposed, was nonsense: ‘Rather, is it not fairer to let this stooped old man enjoy a leisurely rest which he has well earned through his own toil?’142 Similarly, mobilising married men was counterproductive from a demographic viewpoint.143 Finally, as in Britain, the question of the sociology of the garde-côte was divisive, but for economic reasons. Harcourt thus wanted to extend this service to all leaseholders [fermiers], ‘its being very fair’, he said, ‘that he who is most interested in the defence of the coast, should contribute to it in person’. On the other hand, according to intendant Fontette, landowners already contributed to the country’s defence through their taxes, and such a measure would be ruinously expensive for the province’s agriculture and trade.144 The risk of seeing these well-off peasants flee their fields to avoid the garde-côte was a real one, and Fontette’s fears were soon confirmed: emigration, mutinies and desertions were on the increase.145 In this struggle between war and finance it was the former that won the day in Normandy. Harcourt’s project became law in 1762. The new system weighed far more heavily on coastal populations than that of 1716, as the ocean became the main theatre of the conflict in the Seven 139 140 141

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J.-C. Perrot, ‘Les économistes, les philosophes et la population’, in Une histoire intellectuelle de l’économie politique (XVIIe–XVIIIe siècles) (Paris: EHESS, 1992), pp. 143–92. Hippeau, Gouvernement de Normandie, vol. I, p. 128. ‘Examen du projet’ in ibid., p. 130. On the intendant as an intermediary between localities and central state, see F.-X. Emmanuelli, Un mythe de l’absolutisme bourbonien: L’intendance, du milieu du XVIIe siècle à la fin du XVIIIe siècle: France, Espagne, Amérique (Études historiques) (Paris: Honoré Champion, 1981). 143 Hippeau, Gouvernement de Normandie, vol. I, p. 128. Ibid., p. 134. Ibid., p. 135. On the question of food provisioning, so important in the administrative functions of the intendants, see J. Miller, Mastering the Market: The State and the Grain Trade in Northern France, 1700–1860 (Cambridge University Press, 1999). Hippeau, Gouvernement de Normandie, vol. I, p. 136. According to Mr de Martené, inspector of the gardes-côtes of Moyenne-Normandie, only fifteen or sixteen men out of eighty went to the reviews of the Dives company, in the capitainerie of Ouistreham: letter to duc d’Harcourt, 14 November 1759, in ibid., p. 32.

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Years War. The direction of inter-parish migration flows was thus reversed, and the inhabitants of the maritime parishes headed for the interior to avoid the garde-côte and naval recruitment in the classes system.146 Notwithstanding the reforms, the reconfigured garde-côte experienced drastic setbacks during the Seven Years War. There was the tragicomic episode of the British landing at Cherbourg in August 1758, when, panicking at the noise made by the horses of the French troops, the garde-côte fired on them.147 Criticism grew in the 1770s, and Fontette’s arguments of ten years earlier were restated even more forcefully. Thus, in an essay of 1774, the duc d’Aiguillon, secretary of state for war and Affaires Etrangères, wrote that ‘a garde-côte cannot be both soldier and cultivator’.148 Because he was more attached to his land than the nation, the military tasks allotted to the peasant had to be modest: If he willingly serves the cannon, it is because this service does not remove him either from his field, or his family, and he is interested in what precisely is done when the enemy wishes to make a landing and debark in his canton. If he seeks to threaten this enemy, it is because he wishes to keep his property which is threatened; but he will flee shamelessly and lay down his arms, if he be too far removed from his parish.149

The reforms undertaken in France during the Seven Years War originated in fact in a basic misapprehension that, were they given the means to do so, the inhabitants of the coasts would vigorously defend their parishes and, by extension, the territory of the state. By the 1770s the argument of the elites had become more pessimistic. It was time for yet another rethink of this institution. In England, by contrast, after the spirited discussion of 1757–1758, the militia had won over its main opponents. From then on no doubts were expressed about its pertinence. Beyond the intellectual differences between the French and English debates, due to the nature of the countries’ respective political regimes, thought was given on both sides of the Channel to ways of harnessing local patriotism in the defence of the state.

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Durand, Milices garde-côtes, p. 29. André Corvisier has shown this phenomenon in four parishes situated bordering the Marais-Vernier, in Upper Normandy: see Corvisier, ‘La défense’, p. 277. Duc d’Harcourt to Maréchal de Belle-Isle (12 August 1758), in Hippeau, Gouvernement de Normandie, vol. I, pp. 215–18. The battle of Saint-Cast is another example: Y. Lagadec, S. Perréon and D. Hopkin, La bataille de Saint-Cast (Bretagne, 11 septembre 1758): Entre histoire et mémoire (Presses Universitaires de Rennes, 2009). 149 Hippeau, Gouvernement de Normandie, p. 141. Ibid., p. 147.

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The impossibility of national defence? The War of American Independence In the War of American Independence the usual priorities of Britain and France were reversed. For the first time in the eighteenth century, Britain found itself isolated against an international coalition and faced invasion; the defence of the homeland was less of a priority in France. England The conflict in America had important consequences for the defence of the British Isles, especially after France entered the conflict, in 1778. British society experienced an unprecedented militarisation during this war.150 Rather than doubling the number of men recruited in the militia, a plan that was contemplated for a while but which led to vehement opposition in Parliament, the British government decided to generalise voluntary service and then make use of ‘fencibles’, who would later become a key element in English defence during the French Revolution.151 In both cases the military hierarchy was reluctant to arm untrained civilians, who were seen as ineffective.152 At any rate, in 1779, in response to the threat of a combined Franco-Spanish invasion, volunteer regiments were formed in Cornwall, Devon and Sussex, often without official sanction.153 The big question raised by this phenomenon in the context of the war with the British colonies in North America is whether it signified a developing sense of identification with the nation or the entrenchment of local patriotism. According to Stephen Conway, the volunteers, predominantly middle class, were ‘the negation of a national force’ serving primarily ‘to defend their own communities from attack’, as well as to assert their local prestige.154 With respect to the militia, the translation of local allegiance into genuine patriotism was not straightforward. True, in terms of public perceptions, it was seen by many, without a sense of contradiction, as the embodiment of the pride in the county as well as a key component in the national defence.155 A growing sense of nationhood certainly followed from the frequent intermixing between the regiments of different counties, which socialised in the camps created in the south and east of 150 151

152 155

S. Conway, The British Isles and the War of American Independence (Oxford University Press, 2000), p. 119. These regiments of regular troops had already been levied in Scotland during the Seven Years War and were subsequently created in the Cinque Ports and on the Isle of Man during the War of American Independence: Conway, British Isles, p. 19; Patterson, Other Armada, pp. 113–20. 154 Conway, British Isles, p. 21. 153 Ibid., pp. 22–3. Ibid., pp. 103, 170. Ibid., pp. 120–8.

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England during the war.156 But in some counties bordering the Channel, patriotic enthusiasm could not be taken for granted, at least if we use the militia as a measuring stick. As in the previous conflict, in 1778, recruitment in the militia sparked resistance riots, notably in Sussex, where it was raised for the first time.157 The powerful Sussex grandee, the duke of Richmond, thus undertook to show that the militia could not be a national force: By changing the militia of the respective counties, and marching those raised in one part of the kingdom into another, that regard for their natale solum, that family attachment and connection which would make a militiaman fight with the utmost ardour in defence of a particular place, was wholly destroyed, and a general indifference begot in the minds of the whole body.158

But he then explained that this only applied to coastal counties, which merited special treatment because of their vulnerability to attack. By the same token, the militias of inland counties, such as Rutlandshire, should be marched near the sea when necessary.159 Even though Richmond’s arguments were not upheld, the example of Sussex shows that centralisation and nationalisation of the state in the eighteenth century were only partially achieved. In the localities, reluctance to serve outside one’s own county, on the part of the gentry as well as their less privileged neighbours, persisted;160 this shows that the county remained a meaningful ‘political, cultural and social unit’ for its inhabitants well into the nineteenth century.161 These strong local allegiances appear to differentiate the militia from the garde-côte, whose main asset was considered, at least originally, to be the local patriotism of border populations, who would rush to the defence of their parishes against a foreign enemy. France On the French side the shift in the geopolitical context (the war was mainly extra-European) led to a drastic reduction in the number of garde-côtes: the ordinance of 13 December 1778 brought numbers down from 46,000 to 23,000 men. Their military functions now consisted mainly of guarding the coast against attacks by enemy privateers. But the issue of territorial equity resurfaced. In fact, the military pressure on coastal parishes became more pronounced because garde-côtes were now liable to be conscripted for 156 157 158 160 161

Ibid., pp. 190–4. Western, English Militia, pp. 298–9. On these desertions see Conway, ibid., p. 27. 159 Duke of Richmond (25 June 1779), in PH, vol. XX, p. 981. Ibid. Western, English Militia, pp. 259–61. D. Eastwood, Government and Community in the English Provinces, 1700–1870 (London: Macmillan, 1997), p. 107.

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the Marine.162 As a result there was a steady flow of migrants from the coasts inland. Soldiers themselves were aware of this problem. In 1780 the chevalier du Tertre, an army major and chief war commissioner, raised the problem of the unequal contribution of town and country to the defence of the maritime border. He pointed out that Honfleur, Le Havre, Dieppe and Pont-Audemer in the generality of Rouen were exempted from supplying gunners and from drawing lots for deckhands: ‘Would it not be fair that the towns and cities . . . should themselves contribute to their safety? It is the countryside that provides for them.’163 The human cost of the war also stands out from the figures he provided. Out of 11,975 potential candidates for the garde-côte, less than a quarter, just 2,826, were deemed fit for service. The others were ‘crippled or broken’ (3,998, 33%), ‘too short or too old’ (1,017, 8%) or else ‘absent’164 (131, or 0.1%). In the final analysis, on the eve of the French Revolution, despite many reforms, the garde-côte remained a hated institution that was a general burden on the daily lives of the inhabitants of coastal parishes. This situation was considerably worse in the countryside than in the towns. In both countries the War of American Independence therefore exposed contradictions in the defence of the frontier-zone by its own inhabitants. With the Revolutionary Wars the ‘defence of the nation’ became an omnipresent watchword in both France and Britain, raising the question of its impact on the attitudes of the border populations themselves. The local dissolves into the national? The French Revolution The volunteer phenomenon, which was prominent on both sides of the Channel during the Revolutionary Wars, was celebrated in the propaganda of the time as a demonstration of the patriotic enthusiasm and military fervour, which were spreading in France and Britain during this period. Unlike the armies of the Ancien Régime, volunteering was intrinsically linked to citizenship and was celebrated as the symbol of true patriotism. This compelling narrative has been taken up in the 1990s by a number of historians, who have seen in the nation in arms the genesis of 162

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Ordonnance du Roi, pour augmenter de onze mille cinq cent hommes le nombre des matelots classés, dans les provinces de Flandre, Picardie, Normandie, Bretagne, Poitou, 3 January 1779, ADC, C4152, art. 1, n.p. Hippeau, Gouvernement de Normandie, vol. I, pp. 113–14. ADSM, C642 (numbers cited in ibid., p. 134). The English militia suffered from the same problems at the time: Western, English Militia, p. 275.

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modern nationalism.165 However, the motives behind the act of volunteering remain elusive. Hatred of the enemy was only one of many potential reasons for joining these corps. From the perspective of the state, recourse to civilians to contribute to the national defence did not have the same significance in France and in Britain, while the question of the blending of local and national patriotism was not framed in the same way. England Much has been written about the significance of the volunteer movement, which was born in March 1794. The raising of volunteer corps was based on existing loyalist organisations and was promoted by the British government.166 It was a huge success: more than 300,000 men enlisted in 1794, and by 1804 there were over 400,000 volunteers in Britain. However, the political interpretation of this phenomenon continues to divide historians. According to Linda Colley, mass enlistment in the volunteer corps played a key part in the consolidation of British national consciousness. This ‘popular nationalism’, she argues, was spontaneous and testified to the commitment of the majority of the British population to the monarchical regime and its hostility to the French Revolution.167 Moreover, if the motives for enlisting were primarily local, which explains the over-representation of some areas (southern and western coasts, urbanised and industrial regions), the movement became truly national, and local identities were not a hindrance but rather a stimulus to the building of the nation.168 Other historians have nuanced or challenged the idea that volunteering was an irrefutable sign of nationalism, blending loyalism and the wish to defend the kingdom from the outside threat.169 While the urban and middle-class character of these movements is widely acknowledged, the extent and meaning of the popular support has

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167 168 169

See the chapters by Krüger and Levsen, Hippler, James and Leiserowitz in C. Krüger and S. Levsen (eds.), War Volunteering in Modern Times: From the French Revolution to the Second World War (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2011). It was also aimed at strengthening the landowners’ grip over communities, which had been jeopardised by the success of revolutionary ideas in Britain: J.R. Western, ‘The volunteer movement as an anti-revolutionary force 1793–1801’, EHR, 71 (1956), pp. 603–14. L. Colley, Britons: Forging the Nation 1707–1837 (London: Vintage, 1996) (1st edn: 1992), pp. 297–337. The expression is used at p. 337. Ibid., pp. 308–23. J.E. Cookson, ‘The English volunteer movement of the French wars 1793–1815: some contexts’, HJ, 32 (1989), pp. 867–91; J.E. Cookson, The British Armed Nation 1793– 1815 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997), pp. 209–45; A. Gee, The British Volunteer Movement 1794–1814 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2003).

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been debated.170 The alleged translation of local loyalties into nationalism has also been discussed. John Cookson thus argued that what he calls ‘national defence patriotism’ emerged only episodically, with the threat of invasion in 1798, 1801 and 1803–1805.171 However, he agrees with Colley that at those times, the government harnessed volunteers of all classes to the monarchy.172 At the same time, he doubts that the movement can really be treated as contributing to nation-building, due to the essential local particularism at its core and the permanent need for the state to negotiate the commitment of its populations.173 Likewise, Austin Gee argues that despite the picture of national unity projected by the apologists of the volunteers, their loyalties remained ‘local, rather than national’, and ‘many refused to act outside their locality’.174 Attachment to the locality was conspicuous in the frequent refusal of these corps to serve beyond the boundaries of their county of residence.175 It is not easy to find conclusive evidence regarding the motivations of the volunteers. A number of hypotheses have been floated: desire for social promotion, peer pressure, patriotic enthusiasm, economic interest, the thrill of taking part in a war and the ‘natural desire to protect one’s own hearth and nation’.176 Besides these explanations, all plausible but very difficult to substantiate, there is widespread agreement among historians that fear of invasion is the prime explanation behind volunteering in the regions bordering the Channel. This explains why, on a national scale, the coastal counties of the south and south-east of England volunteered earlier and on a larger scale than others.177 Thus, in 1803 the socalled Levy en Masse Act (42 Geo. III C 96) raised volunteers for the militia.178 Using lists which recorded the willingness of men to serve or not, Colley convincingly emphasises the ‘peculiarities of place’179 and contends that the picture is one of diversity, citing the example of the 170

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Roger Wells emphasised class divisions within the volunteers, in the context of the repression of domestic disorder and food riots: R. Wells, ‘The revolt of the SouthWest 1800–1: a study in English popular protest’, SoH, 6 (1977), pp. 713–44. Cookson, Armed Nation, pp. 210–11. Ibid., pp. 214, 229, 233; Colley, Britons, p. 331. 174 Cookson, Armed Nation, pp. 236–7. Gee, Volunteer Movement, p. 190. D. Eastwood, ‘Patriotism and the English state in the 1790s’, in M. Philp (ed.), The French Revolution and British Popular Politics (Cambridge University Press, 1991), pp. 158–9; Cookson, Armed Nation, pp. 209–45. Colley, Britons, p. 320. Ibid., pp. 308, 317–23; Cookson, Armed Nation, p. 227. The provisions and implementation of the Levy en Masse Act are described in J.W. Fortescue, The County Lieutnancies and the Army, 1803–1814 (London: Macmillan, 1909), pp. 60–4 and passim. Colley, Britons, pp. 308–9.

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parish of East Grinstead (East Sussex), in which, out of 556 men aged 17–55 eligible to volunteer, only 206 (37%) came forward or were already enrolled in the voluntary infantry or cavalry.180 If we use the same sources, and look more closely at the case of Sussex, it confirms that even within one single county, figures considerably varied. In the neighbouring parishes of Mayfield, Rotherfield and Horsted Keynes, the numbers were respectively of 40%, 68% and 86%.181 In the coastal parishes closest to the sea, only 41% of men on average were willing to serve, and in some of them the proportions fell well below that, as in the smallest and most rural parishes, like Blatchington (25%, 8/32), Eastdean (20%, 10/50), West Dean (0%, 0/28) and Willingdon (35%, 29/83).182 Clearly, many men did not see volunteering as the best response to the danger of invasion, even among those who lived closest to the enemy. Some historians have argued that volunteering was in fact a rational choice to avoid being drafted into the militia or the regular forces.183 The Sea Fencibles, a kind of ‘marine militia’184 which was very similar to the French garde-côte, was established in 1798 around the coast of England, in order to defend the country against an invasion. In his study of this corps, Nicholas Rogers takes the view that the professed patriotism of those who volunteered, in 1798 and in 1803, was chiefly opportunistic: ‘joining the Sea Fencibles, then, was not a high form of patriotic endeavour. For a significant number, it was a perfect scam!’185 Unlike Colley, Rogers sees a friction between the locality and the nation which was not resolved in this period and insists on the limits to the reach of the state.186 Despite all its propaganda, Pitt’s government was under no illusion regarding the motives of the volunteers. Pitt himself always remained ambivalent towards popular patriotism.187 Many politicians doubted that these citizen soldiers would prove their worth in case of an invasion. 180 181 182 183

184 186 187

Ibid., pp. 306–7. Mayfield, Horsed Keynes and Rotherfield, Sussex Militia List: Pevensey Rape 1803 Northern Division (Eastbourne, PBN Publications, 1988). Ibid. The same variation can be observed further away from the sea: Denton 70% (7/10 willing to serve), Alfriston 37% (49/131), Litlington 58% (14/24). The Army of Reserve Act of 1803 exempted volunteers from the ballot. This point was notably made by C. Emsley, British Society and the French Wars 1793–1815 (London: Macmillan, 1979), p. 102; Gee, Volunteer Movement, pp. 151–2; N. Rogers, ‘The Sea Fencibles, loyalism, and the reach of the state’, in M. Philp (ed.), Resisting Napoleon: The British Response to the Threat of Invasion, 1797–1815 (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2006), p. 52. Rogers, ibid., p. 44. 185 Ibid., p. 51. Ibid., pp. 53–5. James Davey sees the Fencibles in the same light: In Nelson’s Wake: The Navy and the Napoleonic Wars (London: Yale University Press, 2015), chap. 7. M. Philp, ‘Vulgar conservatism’, EHR, 110 (1995), pp. 42–65; K. Gilmartin, ‘In the theatre of counterrevolution: loyalist association and conservative opinion in the 1790s’, JBS, 41 (2002), pp. 291–328; Eastwood, ‘Patriotism’; L. Colley, ‘The reach of the state, the appeal of the nation: mass arming and political culture in the Napoleonic wars’, in

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This is why the swearing of an oath to the king required from the volunteers in 1803 is so ambiguous. Arguably, it was demanded because the government felt the need to convince the volunteers that they were fighting for a bigger cause than their parishes.188 Seen in this light, it is easier to understand why the local ties of these associations were gradually broken down: from 1803 on, volunteers could be sent to fight outside their counties of residence, and they were required, just like the militia, to train a number of days away from home.189 In general, while relying on local networks to raise manpower, after 1803 the government centralised the defence of the kingdom.190 France In France, the Revolution brought out into the open the ambiguous role of the garde-côte: once the privileges of the Ancien Régime were roundly condemned, the unfair burdens suffered by the border populations could not go unchallenged. In 1789 the cahiers of the coastal parishes called for the abolition of the garde-côte. The cahiers of the bailliage of Saint-Sauveur-Le-Vicomte on the Cotentin Peninsula thus read: The matelotage or sea milita, to which the parishes registered as coastal [sic] are subjected, puts fear and distress into the inhabitants of these parishes; it drags good landlords and good farmers from cultivation of the land; they prefer to lower themselves and reduce themselves to the lowly and humiliating status of priest’s or gentleman’s servants than be subject to it.191

There were similar criticisms in the cahiers of the third estate of the bailliage of the Cherbourg Peninsula, Saint-Lô, Carentan, Bayeux and even in the cahier of the commune of Granville, which accused the gardecôte of being ‘destructive of agriculture, and the certain cause of the depopulation of the lands bordering the sea’.192 Other cahiers called for the extension of the recruitment area of coastguards and seamen to

188 189

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L. Stone (ed.), An Imperial State at War: Britain from 1689–1815 (London: Routledge, 1993), pp. 179–81. J. Faulkner, ‘The role of national defence in British political debate, 1794–1812’, unpublished PhD thesis, Cambridge (2006), p. 183. Gee, Volunteer Movement, p. 196. The centralisation of these organisations increased, as was exemplified in the Volunteer Consolidation Act of March 1804 and the Local Militia Act of 1808: Faulkner, ‘Role of national defence’, p. 70. In the 1798 and 1801 militia acts, regiments were not stationed in their counties of origin, but ‘a fair way away’: Western, English Militia, p. 375. Faulkner, ‘Role of national defence’, pp. 20–7, 73–7. On this question, see Knight, Britain Against Napoleon. Bridrey, Cahiers de doléances, p. 215. Hippeau, Gouvernement de Normandie, vol. viii, p. 21, p. 29, p. 82, p. 101, p. 161.

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parishes further from the sea.193 In response to these complaints the Constituent Assembly’s naval committee introduced reforms.194 As a first step the garde-côte was dissolved by the decree of 9 September 1792 and its functions passed to the national guards,195 with the idea that the defence of the military border was the preserve not only of its inhabitants but of all French citizens. This was a clean break with the Ancien Régime: for the first time the defence of France’s maritime borders was based, in part at least, on volunteering.196 The declaration of war on Britain on 1 February 1793 necessitated the garde-côte to be created anew, while the French army, in general, was undergoing fundamental changes. On 24 February 1793, the National Convention provided for a national levy of about 300,000 men, and on 23 August, a levée en masse was decreed. With respect to the gardecôte, the decree of 3 June 1793 created sedentary gunners, then later in the 1790s the Directory combined the principles of the Ancien Régime with those of the Revolution and created companies of volunteer garde-côte gunners and battalions of garde-côte grenadiers.197 The garde-côte finally seemed to have found its place in the defence of the territory. All that now remained was to convince the inhabitants of its benefits. As in the case of Britain, there is a risk of taking too literally the rhetoric of propaganda on the unwavering patriotism that followed mass mobilisation. In practice the laws were difficult to enforce at the local level, as can be seen in Seine-Inférieure in Normandy. Just as under the Ancien Régime, coastal communities demanded equal treatment. The request below, sent by the municipal administration of the canton of SaintLeonard to the newly appointed prefect, illustrates this perfectly: Our constituents once provided this service in conjunction with the inhabitants of the communes of Gereville, Maniquerville, Auberville. . . . The latter have been freed from it in the present war all the more unfairly, for several of those communes are closer by the sea than some of those of this canton. . . . Each tour of duty takes [the citizens of this canton] away from their work for two consecutive days.198

193 194 195 196

197

198

‘Cahier . . . de l’assemblée du tiers-état de la paroisse de Saint-Vaast, bailliage de PontL’Evêque’ (29 March 1789), in Hippeau, Gouvernement de Normandie, vol. v, p. 361. N. Hampson, ‘The “Comité de Marine” of the Constituent Assemblée’, HJ, 2 (1959), pp. 130–48. Explain. Depending on the departments, volunteers or ballots were used: R. Dupuy, ‘Gardes nationales’, in A. Soboul, Dictionnaire historique de la Révolution française (Paris: PUF, 1989), pp. 489–92. Law of 10 September 1799, quoted in Adams, ‘Les enjeux de pouvoir’, p. 313. These companies were suppressed by the law of 8 October 1800: letter to the sub-prefect of Yvetot, 22 July 1800, ADSM, 1M200, n.f. 17 April 1800, ADSM, 1M200, n.f.

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The problems had not changed since the Ancien Régime: the challenging of the privileges of neighbouring communes, the reference to the objectivity of geographical location and the competition between the work of the peasant and the soldier still prevailed. The duty of defending the coasts, moreover, was only grudgingly accepted by the populations. To justify their refusal to answer the summons of the national guard, the inhabitants of the arrondissement of Saint-Valéry-en-Caux argued in May 1800 that it was often perceived as an urban institution that inadequately defended the interests of the countryside.199 Just as before the Revolution, the effective defence of the maritime frontier depended on the active collaboration of its inhabitants. Despite yet another reorganisation following the renewal of war against Britain in 1803,200 the gardecôte, which was put to the test when it saw real action in the Continental Blockade, remained an unpopular institution, whose military efficiency was never completely proven.201 As shown by the analysis of the militia and the garde-côte, the complexity of the border populations’ beliefs and loyalties continues to divide historians. The question remains open as to the respective contributions of attachment to one’s local area and to the nation. While not always opposed, these were not always in harmony either. Neither voluntary enlistment nor desertion can be systematically interpreted in political terms as proof of hostility or loyalty to the regime of the day, nor as indicative of attitude to the enemy. Throughout the eighteenth century attempts by governments to assimilate the defence of local territory to the state met with resistance from the populations. By equating state and nation, the French Revolution created the conditions for a fusion of local and national patriotisms. Similarly, Pitt’s government appropriated the language of patriotism in order to consolidate the regime.202 Yet in both countries there was sometimes a jarring dissonance between the language 199

200

201 202

Sub-prefect of the arrondissement of Yvetot to the prefect of the department of SeineInférieure, 9 May 1800, ADSM, 1M200, n.f. On the impopularity of the national guard in the countryside, see R. Dupuy, La Garde Nationale et les débuts de la révolution en Ille-etVilaine (1789–Mars 1793) (Paris: Klincksieck, 1972). ‘Arrêté contenant organisation des compagnies de canonniers garde-côtes’ (28 May 1803), in J.B. Duvergier, Collection complète des lois, décrets, ordonnances, réglements, avis du Conseil-d’Etat. Suivie d’une table analytique, 158 vols., 2nd edn (Paris: A. Guyot et Scribe, 1824–1949), vol. XIV (1803–1804), pp. 146–9. F.J. Delauney, Napoléon et la défense des côtes (Paris: Librairie militaire Berger Levrault et Cie, 1890). H.T. Dickinson, ‘Popular conservatism and militant loyalism 1789–1815’, in Dickinson (ed.), Britain and the French Revolution 1789–1815 (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1989), pp. 103–25. However, J. Dinwiddy and M. Philp have argued that the government failed to confiscate this language: J. Dinwiddy, ‘Interpretations of anti-Jacobinism’, in Philp (ed.), The French Revolution, pp. 38–49; Philp, ‘Vulgar conservatism’.

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of the nation and attitudes on the ground. Quite obviously, this tension was not peculiar to the border; similar behaviours could be found in inland regions as well. It is, maybe, more surprising in the case of the Channel shores, which were frequently threatened by enemy incursions. Thus, the question to devolve, or not to devolve, a role to border populations in the defence of the country was not viewed in the same way in France and England. There were three main reasons for this. First, the intellectual debate about the English militia in the eighteenth century was framed in the aftermath of the Civil War, an event that had no parallel in France. Second, the militia also had the function of guaranteeing domestic order, which was never a prerogative of the garde-côte. Finally, state territory was historically constructed differently: until the French Revolution, England was more centralised than France, and attempts to unify the whole structure were more successful than in France, even during the ‘French Wars’.

*** Governments made the Channel a military border, but with different rationales in France and in Britain. In France, maritime peripheries were erected as barriers against the enemy. Policies of harbour fortification and numerous reforms to the coastguard bear witness to governments’ uncertainty over the best defensive strategy. Three major turning points can be identified, nonetheless. First, it was under Louis XIV, on Colbert and Vauban’s initiative, that the foundations of the maritime border à la française were laid. Primacy was given to a few heavily fortified ports and the defence of the coasts by their own inhabitants. The term ‘frontier’ referred essentially to these fortified ports, whereas the zones where the garde-côte was to be recruited were poorly defined. Second, the Seven Years War militarised the French Channel coastline. Third, in 1759 the coastal fortifications, previously under the joint tutelage of the war and navy ministries, came under the exclusive control of the war department. That same year, the garde-côte also came under the control of the war minister. These changes marked a long-term shift in France’s relationship with the maritime boundary. The French border was defined by the French coast. The ties of the Channel populations to their parishes became more and more binding in the eighteenth century, in line with the logic of regionalisation of the border. By making every French citizen a defender of their fatherland, the French Revolution seemed to define a new era. But defensive strategies were not updated and Vauban’s memoranda continued to be used. Likewise, no sooner was the garde-côte done away with, that it was resurrected under a different name, once again burdening the coastal populations with the defence of the nation.

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In Britain too the Seven Years War witnessed the first real challenge to the dogma of a defence of the islands that relied solely on naval power. In practice, it was not until the wars against Napoleon that the south coast began to be heavily fortified. Ultimately, the idea of the frontier, where the sea itself serves as a bulwark, explains the differing articulation of coastal and naval defences. Since the maritime border was bounded by the opposite seashore, defence of the territory began on the French coast and the central role devolved on the navy. The roots of this divergence are to be found in opposing concepts of the law of the sea, as we will see in the next chapter.

4

Who owns the Channel? The overlap of legal rights

It is not easy to determine to what distance a nation may extend its rights over the sea by which it is surrounded. . . . At present the whole space of the sea within cannon shot of the coast is considered as making a part of the territory.1

This was how the jurist and diplomat from Neuchâtel Emerich de Vattel (1714–1767) stated the central problem of the sovereignty of states over the seas. The way this question was formulated in the eighteenth century added little to previous periods in theory. The distinction between sovereignty or jurisdiction over the sea (imperium) and its ownership (dominium), inherited from Roman law, remained of paramount importance in the eighteenth century.2 In practice, this could lead to a number of problems, such as the extent of the sovereign’s property rights over the foreshore and the ownership of the sea’s resources. Furthermore, a new idea developed in the seventeenth century, that of a limited territorial claim to the sea over the ‘mare proximum’.3 This was the notion of territorial waters. However, it was only at the end of the following century that international agreements formalised this principle between France and Britain with respect to the Channel. Why this time lag between the development of theoretical principles and their implementation? Two opposed ways of conceiving the right of states over the sea existed in France and Britain during this period. This, in addition to the peculiar status of the Channel and the specific context of Anglo-French relations, made any agreement impossible. The situation complicated – this time at the level of practice – the way the conflicts 1

2 3

Emer de Vattel, The Law of Nations, or, Principles of the Law of Nature, Applied to the Conduct and Affairs of Nations and Sovereigns (French edn: 1758), Vol. I, Book I, chap. XXIII: ‘Of the Sea’, edited from the 1797 edn with an Introduction by Béla Kapossy and Richard Whitmore (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 2008), pp. 254–5. D. Armitage, The Ideological Origins of the British Empire (Cambridge University Press, 2000), pp. 27–32. As it was later termed by the German jurist and diplomat Georg Friedrich Martens: G.F. de Martens, Précis du droit des gens modernes de l’Europe (Gottingue: Dieterich, 1801) (1st edn: 1789), §40, p. 71.

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between the sailors of the two countries were interpreted, be they captains in the Royale, privateers or coast-guards. The absence of an international convention bestowed particular importance on the statements of seafarers, who expressed their own view of the maritime sovereignty of states. Anglo-French disputes, whether theoretical or practical, always crystallised over the name and boundaries of the Channel. Particular attention must therefore be paid to the precise times and places that these two ways of thinking of the territory came into conflict. The theoretical background: Grotius versus Selden The theoretical division of the oceans had been causing rifts between the major European powers since the famous 1494 Treaty of Tordesillas, which divided the world between Spain and Portugal along a north–south line 370 leagues west of Cape Verde. This text sparked a rash of writings that set a precedent for debates on the law of the sea for two centuries. One of the themes of the controversy concerned the right of men to divide up the Earth – God’s gift to men – into individual properties. In the seventeenth century, which was marked by a host of European conflicts, competition between states was couched in the language of the law.4 The Anglo-French rivalry over the Channel was for a long time fuelled by a polemic formulated at the beginning of that century: namely, the debate over the sovereignty of the seas, the two extremes of which were represented by the Dutchman Hugo Grotius (1583–1645) and the Englishman John Selden (1584–1654). This controversy has been analysed at great length by historians, jurists and political scientists. Grotius and Selden were not the only thinkers to have addressed these issues – nor were they the first to do so.5 However, their influence was enduring and unparalleled and the free sea-closed/sea debate remained foundational until the end of our period. Grotius’s Mare liberum, published anonymously in Leiden in 1609, was a key text. Hired by the Dutch East India Company, the jurist

4

5

H. Duchardt, ‘La guerre et le droit des gens dans l’Europe du XVIe au XVIIIe siècle’, in P. Contamine, Guerre et concurrence entre les États européens du XIVe au XVIIIe siècle (Paris: PUF, 1998), pp. 339–64. On these long-term legal debates, see T.W. Fulton, The Sovereignty of the Sea (Edinburgh and London: William Blackwood & Sons, 1911), pp. 338–77; C. Schmitt, The Nomos of the Earth in the International Law of the Jus Publicum Europeaum (New York: Telos Press, 2003) (1st edn: 1950), pp. 172–84; R. Tuck, ‘Grotius and Selden’, in J.H. Burns (ed.), The Cambridge History of Political Thought 1450–1700 (Cambridge University Press, 1991), pp. 499–529; M. B. Vieira, ‘Mare liberum vs. Mare clausum: Grotius, Freitas, and Selden’s debate on dominion over the seas’, Journal of the History of Ideas, 64 (2003), 361–77.

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wanted to demonstrate the correctness of Dutch views over Portuguese claims to exclusive trade in the Indian seas, asking ‘whether the huge and vast sea [can] be the possession of one kingdom’.6 According to Grotius, it was impossible to consider the sea as private property. First and foremost, all property implied occupation. Citing a formula of Cicero that constantly recurred in these debates, Grotius compared water to the air we breathe, ‘because it cannot be possessed and also because it oweth a common use to men’.7 And, unlike some parts of the seashore, which may be occupied at some point, the sea did not lend itself to appropriation. Ultimately Grotius called into question the very legitimacy of boundaries drawn on maps: ‘Which if it be allowed, and such a dimension be sufficient for possession, the geometricians should long since have taken away the earth from us and the astronomers heaven.’8 The Dutch jurist also established an important distinction between rivers and oceans. When their shores belonged to the same people, rivers or inland seas might fall under the control of a single people’s jurisdiction or sovereignty, on the express condition that occupation had been continuous since time immemorial. However, the whole ocean, ‘which antiquity calleth unmeasurable and infinite, the parent of things bordering upon heaven’, could not be owned. At once both a channel and a sea, was the Channel a river or was it part of the ocean? This was a regular matter of disputes in later times. Grotius finally added, ‘If any in so great a sea should take empire and jurisdiction wholly to himself from the common use, yet nevertheless he should be accounted an ambitious seeker of excessive dominion.’9 Even though it was directed against the enterprises of the Portuguese in India and the Spanish in the Atlantic, this sentiment was not welcomed in England. With the Act of Union of 1603, England imported new conceptions of maritime law from Scotland. These broke with the idea of a free sea, dominant until then on the other side of the Channel.10 Barely a few months after the publication of Grotius’s dissertation, a proclamation from the privy council on 6 May 1609 prohibited foreigners from fishing along the British coast, unless equipped with permits. This law was aimed at Dutch herring fishermen, who were arriving in their hundreds on the north and eastern coasts of Albion. It is from this time, according to Thomas Fulton, ‘that one may date the beginning of the English 6

7 10

H. Grotius, The Free Sea, translation R. Hakluyt (1609), ed. D. Armitage (Indianapolis, IN: Liberty Fund, 2004), p. 5. See W.E. Butler, ‘Grotius and the law of the sea’, in H. Bull, B. Kingsbury and A. Roberts (eds.), Hugo Grotius and International Relations (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990), pp. 209–20. 8 9 Grotius, Free Sea, p. 25. Ibid., p. 34. Ibid., pp. 29, 32, 33. Armitage, Ideological Origins, pp. 107–8.

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pretension to the sovereignty of the sea’.11 If the idea had already been present among the Plantagenets in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, it had few practical consequences before the seventeenth century.12 British hostility towards the Dutch herring fishers only grew under the reign of James I’s successor. To counter Grotius’s Mare liberum, the touchstone of the Dutch argument, Charles I recruited the services of John Selden. Begun in 1617, Selden’s Mare clausum only appeared in 1635.13 The English jurist’s entire argument was based on the idea that the sea could be appropriated. The fluidity of water was no obstacle: the owner of a house owns its air. Moreover, while water is ever changing, the seabed remains stable. It is the occupation of a thing that implies that it is bounded, and neither the distinction between rivers and seas nor the physical nature of water was a valid argument. In fact, there were a number of natural boundaries between the sea and the Earth – high rocks, reefs or islands – ‘from whence as well direct Lines, as crooked windings and turnings, and angles, may bee made use of, for the bounding of a Territorie in the Sea’.14 Historically, there were many peoples, such as the Hebrews, Carthaginians, Greeks or Tuscans, who had owned adjacent seas. Yet the French had never been in this situation. This passage is important because, for the first time, France was brought into the debate over the freedom of the sea: But som modern Lawyers among the French do vainly affirm that their King is Lord not onely of a part of sea neighboring upon the Territorie of Bretaign, but of the whole Sea that is adjoyning to any part of France, and so of the British or English sea also . . . But as to what concerns the bodie of the Sea which lie’s Northward or Westward of the French, or that flow’s between France and the Islands of great Britain . . . they neither produce any Testimonies of Antiquitie.15

According to Selden, historically the French and English conceptions of the law of the sea differed. Whereas the shore in France never fell within royal jurisdiction, the entire sea formed part of English territory, which historically extended on both sides of the Channel: ‘The soveraigntie of this Sea which flow’s between them and us, became absolutely appropriate to the Kings of England.’16 The names the ancients gave this sea 11 12

13 15 16

Fulton, Sovereignty of the Sea, p. 10. Ibid., pp. 30–3. John Dee was the first to theorise ‘the maritime conception of the British Empire’, delimited by the oceans, in the 1570s, but this position remained very original for its time: Armitage, Ideological Origins, pp. 105–7. J. Selden, Mare Clausum, seu De Dominio Maris (London, 1635). 14 Ibid., p. 137. Ibid., pp. 113–14. Ibid., p. 115. The notion that the foreshore belonged to the royal domain existed in both countries since the sixteenth century: see Chapter 5 infra.

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also proved the legitimacy of the English claims. Thus Pomponius Mela (first century AD) wrote about the ‘British Sea’,17 which he described as stretching as far as the north coast of Spain. More recently the commissions of English admirals still involved jurisdiction not just over England, but Aquitaine, Normandy and Picardy as well.18 These provinces, even though lost by England, formed the outer limit of the admiral’s power, which extended across the sea to the coastline opposite. Selden finally argued that the English Crown’s dominion over the Channel Islands proved the indivisibility of this sovereignty over the surrounding sea.19 These controversies were destined to have a long history. In 1803, the year hostilities were resumed after the brief Peace of Amiens, the Hellenist academician Jean-François Champagne (1751–1813) published La Mer libre, la Mer fermée. The work’s full title shows the relevance of the Grotius versus Selden debate at the time.20 Through the mixture of past and present, and its layered structure, which alternated long quotations by authors and comments on them by Champagne, the book brought the polemic up to date, thus enabling a critique of the aggressiveness of ‘England’ on the sea. Discussing a passage from Selden – ‘On the South, flow’s that which is particularly noted by Ptolomie to bee the British Sea’21 – Champagne remarked in a footnote: ‘For some time now the English no longer give the name of Manche to the sea that separates France from England: all their new charts give this part of the Ocean the name of British Sea.’22 Champagne’s approximation is highly revealing, since the British

17

18 19

20

21

J. Selden, On the Dominion, or, Ownership of the Sea . . . Written at First in Latin, and Entituled, Mare Clausum, seu, De Dominio Maris, . . . Translated into English by Marchamont Nedham (London: William Du-Gard, 1652), pp. 184–5. In fact, Mela wrote about ‘the Britannic Ocean’ (Britannicus oceanus) and about the ‘Britannic Sea’ (Britannicum mare): F.E. Romer, Pomponius Mela’s Description of the World (Ann Arbor: The University. of Michigan Press, 1998), 1.15, 2.85, 3.48 (pp. 38, 92, 115). Selden, On the Dominion, pp. 312–20. Ibid., p. 342. This idea was still framed in the same terms in the following century: ‘comme les Anglais possèdent les isles de Grenesey & de Jersey du côté de la France, ils prétendent que toute la Manche est de leur domaine. Quelques-uns l’expriment en latin par Oceanus britannicus’, in A. Bruzen de la Martinière, Le grand dictionnaire géographique, historique et critique, 2 vols., new edn (Paris: Libraires Associés, 1735), vol. IV, p. 66. J.-F. Champagne, La Mer libre, la Mer fermée, ou Exposition et Analyse du Traité de Grotius, intitulé La Mer Libre, et de la réplique de Selden, ayant pour titre, La Mer fermée, dans laquelle l’auteur s’efforce d’établir le droit légitime de l’Angleterre à la domination exclusive des Mers (Paris: Moutardier, 1803). 22 Book II, chap. I, pp. 184–5. Ibid., p. 56.

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never called the Channel ‘La Manche’; at the time the expression ‘British Channel’ was prevalent on British maps. Another theory developed among European jurists in the seventeenth century, according to which state sovereignty extended over a fringe of the sea adjacent to the coastline. In the second half of the eighteenth century jurists designated the distance of a cannon shot from the shore as the range of territorial waters.23 If this principle was aired from the beginning of the seventeenth century, the Dutchman Cornelius Van Bynkershoek (1673–1743), in his De dominio maris dissertatio (1703), was the first to formulate the doctrine that would eventually prevail.24 The league or three nautical miles – that is, the supposed range of a cannon shot from the shore – was recognised in international law as the limit of territorial waters at the end of the century.25 This definition established itself over other principles of demarcation, such as the thalweg, or the distance visible to the naked eye from the sea or from the Earth.26 However, in the Channel, many disputes involving French and English ships did not so much focus on distance from the coasts as the particular location of the incident, i.e. in which stretch of water, ‘the Channel’, ‘the British Sea’ or the ‘Atlantic Ocean’, they were supposed to have taken place. It mattered which toponym was chosen. Maritime ceremonials: saluting the flag Requiring foreign ships to salute the flag was a constant of English naval policy from the beginning of the seventeenth century onwards, before fading out over the next century.27 The ‘British seas’ were the touchstone of the English argument: in that space, the definition of which fluctuated, England demanded absolute respect for her flag. The whole debate, then, among French, British, Dutch, or Spanish diplomats and jurists focused on the actual space covered by this term. This was more serious than a 23 25

26

27

Fulton, Sovereignty of the Sea, pp. 537–75. 24 Ibid., pp. 555–6. In the 1786 Anglo-French treaty of navigation, the jurisdiction of the states with regard to prizes extends ‘as far as a canon shot’ [‘jusqu’à la portée du canon’]: J. De Clercq, Recueil des traités de la France (1713–1802) (Paris: A. Durand et Pedone-Lauriel, 1880), vol. I, pp. 163–4. This process began in the Scandinavian countries: H.S.K. Kent, ‘The historical origins of the three-mile limit’, AJIL, 48 (1954), pp. 537–53. The thalweg is ‘the line in the bottom of a valley in which the slopes of the two sides meet, and which forms a natural watercourse; also the line following the deepest part of the bed or channel of a river or lake’: Oxford English Dictionary, 2nd edn, vol. XVII (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989), p. 860. W.G. Perrin, ‘The salute in the narrow seas and the Vienna conference of 1815’, in W.G. Perrin (ed.), The Naval Miscellany. Vol. III, Navy Records Society, 63 (1928), pp. 289–329.

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mere matter of diplomatic precedence: this issue could become a casus belli. In the seventeenth century the salute was a pretext for two wars between England and the United Provinces. Thus in 1652, when lieutenant admiral Van Tromp refused to strike his flag on meeting the fleet of admiral Blake in the Strait of Dover, England opened hostilities and started the First Anglo-Dutch War.28 During the negotiation of the Treaty of Westminster of 1654, which put an end to that war, an article on the salute was the subject of heated discussions. The English first asked to be saluted ‘at sea’, a sketchy term objected to by the Dutch ambassadors, who suggested the expression ‘narrow seas, which are called the British seas’. It was eventually the English who prevailed in the final treaty, imposing the term ‘British Seas’. The woolliness of the formula allowed England to maintain its claim to the sovereignty of the seas.29 The expression was retained in subsequent treaties: Whitehall (14 September 1662), which put an end to the First AngloDutch war, and Breda (31 July 1667), which terminated the Second Anglo-Dutch War.30 Applying these principles at sea was a complex matter, and quarrels between English and Dutch ships multiplied. In May 1654, for example, having come across a Dutch warship that refused to salute it between The Lizard and Ushant, an English captain asked the admiralty for instructions: ‘I want to know how far is intended by the British Seas, and how far our power reaches.’31 Indeterminate boundaries were once again the pretext that allowed England to start the Third Anglo-Dutch War in 1672. Yet again, battle was joined when a royal yacht demanded to be saluted by the entire Dutch fleet, six leagues off the Zeeland coast. This war had new implications for the conventional boundaries of the Channel. Article 4 of the 1674 Treaty of Westminster contained some novelties: All and singular the ships and vessels belonging to the said United Provinces . . . which shall meet with any ships or vessels belonging to . . . the King of GrandeBretagne . . ., in any of the seas from the Cape called Finisterre, to the middle point of the land called van Staten, in Norway . . ., shall strike their flag and lower their topsail, in the same manner and with the like testimony of respect.32

The space involved was extensive, comprising all the seas along the French and Dutch coasts, and from Galicia to Norway. But, for the first time, the expression ‘British Seas’ no longer appeared; instead, the treaty 28 29 32

D. Loades, England’s Maritime Empire: Seapower, Commerce and Policy, 1490–1690 (London: Longman, 2000), pp. 171–2; Fulton, Sovereignty of the Sea, pp. 397–405. 30 31 Fulton, ibid., pp. 420–1, 434–5. Ibid., pp. 455, 465. Quoted in ibid., p. 437. Quoted in ibid., p. 508–9.

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contained a precise demarcation. As noted by the English diplomat Sir Philip Medows (1626–1718), who wrote a memorandum on the matter in 1692, this article had important consequences for relations with France: ‘France is possessed of . . . the whole opposite banck of the Channel, & if the Dutch who pretend no share to themselves in the dominion of the Channel do not acknowledge any in the Crown of England, much less with France do it, who has pretentions of her own.’33 From the middle of the seventeenth century, the French monarchy refused to recognise pre-eminence, symbolic or otherwise, where British ships at sea were concerned, still less so on the Channel. In fact, in the sixteenth century royal ordinances were already declaring that all foreign ships must salute French ships,34 but the monarchy, busy at the time with the Wars of Religion, lacked the means to enforce such a requirement. A famous incident occurring in 1603 illustrates the point. On the occasion of James I’s coronation, Henri IV sent the marquis de Rosny to England. On leaving Calais for Dover the French vessel was soon escorted by two British frigates that had come to meet it. Invoking the sovereignty of the British seas, they succeeded in their demand that the craft carrying the future duc de Sully lower its flag before continuing on its course.35 But times changed, and as soon as the French navy openly asserted its power, the time for such ‘insolence’ was past, as cardinal de Richelieu wrote in his Testament politique.36 Several incidents in the 1630s brought French and English merchant ships and naval fleets into confrontation. The orders issued to English admirals were inflexible where the salute was concerned: it was required throughout the Channel. But the French systematically refused to give way. In 1635, anxious to avoid conflict, Richelieu offered Charles I absolute reciprocity, which the English king declined.37 Another solution envisaged by the minister-cardinal was a salute depending on where the fleets met: One might agree that French Vessels meeting English Vessels on the Coasts of England, should salute first, & lower the Flag; and when that English Vessels 33

34 35

36 37

P. Medows, ‘A Treatise of the flag’, BL, Add MS34353, fo. 10. I am grateful to Stéphane Jettot for drawing my attention to this text. See also P. Medows, Observations Concerning the Dominion and Sovereignty of the Seas: Being an Abstract of the Marine Affairs of England (London: Samuel Lowndes, 1689), chap. III (‘What the salutation at sea by the flag and topsail signifies, and whether it has any relation to the dominion of it’). See for instance the 1555 ordinance by Henri II, followed by Henri III’s 1584 ordinance, in Selden, Mare Clausum, p. 399. This anecdote was narrated by F. de Cussy, Phases et causes célèbres du droit maritime des nations, vol. II (Leipzig: F.A. Brockhaus, 1856), pp. 293–4. On the same story, see also J.J. Jusserand, Recueil des Instructions données aux ambassadeurs, vol. XXIV: Angleterre. 1648–1665 (Paris: E. de Boccard, 1929), pp. 301–5. Richelieu A. J. Du Plessis, Testament politique (Amsterdam: H. Desbordes, 1691), pp. 118–19. Fulton, Sovereignty of the Sea, pp. 271–2, 276–9.

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should encounter French Vessels on the Coasts of France, they should render them the same Honours, on condition that, when the English & French Fleets should meet off the Coasts of the two Kingdoms, each should be on their Way without any Ceremony.38

This abortive plan puts one in mind of French maps published in the latter half of the seventeenth century, which divided the Channel visually into several areas of sovereignty. But political demarcation of the sea lay in the future. Keen to maintain French diplomatic precedence, Louis XIV claimed the same pre-eminence at sea as on land and in 1662 demanded the salute for all vessels.39 If the issue was not resolved in theory, the two states reached a minimal accord: according to Pierre Clément (the editor of Colbert’s correspondence in the nineteenth century), the two fleets were instructed ‘not to make demands of the others with respect to saluting the flag’.40 With the Nine Years War (1688–1697) the question came to the fore again. Louis XIV enacted an ordinance on the salute to the maritime flag (15 April 1689) which required foreign ships to salute first ‘on whatever seas or coasts on which the encounter should take place’.41 In his declaration of war on France in May 1689 William referred to the ‘violation of our Sovereignty of the narrow Seas’ by the French, who have not recognised ‘the right of the Flag’.42 Saluting the flag, however, lost its importance in international relations from the end of the seventeenth century. On the British side, the demarcation of the seas, long left to the discretion of sailors, became fixed. And so, according to the 1746 laws of admiralty, it was an admiral’s duty to demand a salute ‘within her Majesty’s Seas, (which for your better guidance herein, you are to take Notice, that they extend to Cape Finisterre)’.43 This same division became a permanent feature in legal treatises and naval histories. French naval officers received orders not to pick fights with the English over the issue. Champigny, rear admiral of the navy at Le Havre and Dunkirk, estimated in 1714 ‘that it is not appropriate to give any concern thereon to the English, who have claims, albeit fanciful and ill-founded, to have all 38 39 40 41 42 43

Richelieu, Testament politique, p. 120. C. de la Roncière, Histoire de la marine française, vol. V: La guerre de trente ans. Colbert (Paris: Plon, 1920), p. 388. P. Clément, Lettres, instructions et mémoires de Colbert (Paris: Imprimerie impériale, 1864), vol. III, Part II, Appendix, p. 726. De Cussy, Phases et causes célèbres, vol. II, pp. 295–7. Quoted in Fulton, Sovereignty of the Sea, p. 518. ‘Abstract of the Regulations establish’d by his Royal Highness the Prince of Denmark, since his accession to the Office of Lord High Admiral’, in The Laws, Ordinances, and Institutions of the Admiralty of Great Britain, Civil and Military (London: A. Millar, 1746), vol. II, p. 303; the Regulations and Instructions Relating to His Majesty’s Service at Sea of 1734, 1766 and 1790 mentioned again the same limits: Fulton, Sovereignty of the Sea, p. 520.

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nations salute them in the Channel of La Manche and even as far as the Cape Finisterre, this could provoke arguments’.44 In practice Anglo-French conflicts arising over the salute became rarer in the eighteenth century.45 According to my findings, the last of them took place in 1787, when a frigate from Morlaix, finding itself six miles from the Isle of Portland (Dorset), was obliged ‘to strike its sails in salute of the British flag’.46 The British claim to the sovereignty of the seas was tacitly dropped when in 1805, for the first time, the order to enforce the salute to the British flag at sea was removed from the book of Naval Instructions. Instead, new principles were adopted: the salute on the high seas was not to be demanded anymore, and absolute reciprocity was to prevail in the ports and on the coasts of any country.47 But officially the position of the British government remained unchanged. During the negotiations at the Congress of Vienna, in 1815, British negotiators avoided to formally renounce this principle, by fear of endangering the traditional claim to the sovereignty at sea.48 Sir Roger Curtis (1746–1816), admiral and former commander-in-chief at Portsmouth, deplored this decision: I have ever considered our claim to the Sovereignty of what we call the British Seas as a vain, empty and pernicious pretension, never generally admitted, and as it appears has been sometimes very discreditably abandoned. It placed officers in situations of perplexity and peril. . . . The Article in our old Instructions relative to enforcing the taking of the flag and lowering the topsails was I know considered as a mischievous and ridiculous order by many now deceased officers of sound understanding and great distinction, but as it flattened the pride and prejudices of Englishmen, the Government had never resolution enough to annul it.49

According to the admiralty librarian William Gordon Perrin (1874– 1931), who was writing in 1928, ‘no formal repudiation was ever made’.50 Officially at least, the Channel remained British. 44 45

46 47 48 49 50

Letter of 5 September 1714, AN, Marine B3218, fo. 23v. In 1815, John Wilson Croker, first secretary of the admiralty, could only list two cases involving French ships in the eighteenth century: in 1727 a French man of war passing in the Sound of Plymouth was forced to lower her topsail and to salute with guns; in 1769 another French frigate anchoring in the Downs was fired at for refusing to strike her topsail in respect to the British flag. In both cases the French government remonstrated officially: J.W. Croker, ‘Memorandum on the subject of the Sovereignty of the Sea and of Salutes at Sea’, 18 Janvier 1815, in Perrin, ‘The salute’, pp. 307–9. Maréchal de Castries to comte de Montmorin, 11 August 1787, TNA, FO27/22, fo. 319. The same case was also evoked in TNA, FO27/23, fos. 169–71v. ‘Extracts from the Naval Instructions 1806’, in Perrin, ‘The salute’, pp. 325–6. These instructions were drafted in 1805 and promulgated in 1806. [J.W. Croker] to [Lord Bathurst], 7 February 1815, in ibid., pp. 322–5. Sir Roger Curtis to J.W. Croker, 20 May 1815, in ibid., p. 327. Curtis had been consulted in 1805 on the omission of the article about the salute in the new Naval Instructions. Ibid., p. 291.

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The uneasy sharing of the seas: the case of prizes of war In order to be legalised, the plunder of enemy ships and cargoes needed to follow certain rules and procedures. Enemy property seized at sea in wartime by privateers, usually called ‘prizes of war’ or simply ‘prizes’, fell within the remit of naval prize law.51 If the legality of these captures was contested, prize courts would settle disputes over seized property. In order to facilitate the work of the courts, at the end of every conflict and ‘in view of the distance at which maritime wars are waged’,52 more general negotiations were held between the warring parties to adjudicate the legality of the seizures of ships made at sea after the formal cessation of hostilities. Because the news of the conclusion of a peace in Europe would take some time to reach the captains of ships in faraway seas and oceans, it Table 4.1 Prizes in Anglo-French treaties Treaty of Breda (1667) All such ships, merchandise, and other movables, as may chance to fall into either party’s hands after the conclusion and publication of the present instrument, within the space of twelve days, in the British Channel and the North Sea (Article 7 of the treaty between Great Britain and the United Provinces).53 All ships, merchandise & other movables that may after the signing and publication of this treaty be seized by either party shall remain the property of those from whom they are seized for the space of twelve days on the near and neighbouring seas (Article 17 of the treaty between Great Britain and France).54 Treaty of Ryswick Within the space of twelve days in the British and North Seas, as (1697) far as the cape St. Vincent (Article 10 of the treaty between Great Britain and France).55 Treaty of Utrecht The captures made, either in the British and North seas (Article (1713) 17 of the treaty between Great Britain and France).56

51 52 53

54 55 56

D.A. Petrie, The Prize Game: Lawful Looting on the High Seas in the Days of Fighting Sail (Annapolis, MD: Naval Institute Press, 1999). G.F. de Martens, Cours diplomatique ou Tableau des relations extérieures des puissances de l’Europe, 3 vols. (Berlin: Auguste Mylius, 1801), vol. III, p. 62. Treaty of Peace and Alliance between Great Britain and the United Provinces of the Netherlands, Signed at Breda, 31 July 1667, in C. Parry (ed.), The Consolidated Treaty Series, vol. X (1667–1668) (Dobbs Ferry, NY: Oceana Publications, 1969), p. 252. Treaty of Peace between France and Great Britain, Signed at Breda, 31 July 1667, in ibid., pp. 223–4. Our translation from the French. Treaty of Peace between France and Great Britain, signed at Ryswick, 20 September 1697, in ibid., vol. XXI (1695–1697), p. 448. Treaty of Peace and Friendship between France and Great Britain, Signed at Utrecht, 11 April 1713, in ibid., vol. XXVII (1710–1713), p. 488. Our translation from the French (‘les Mers Britannique et Septentrionale’).

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Table 4.1 (cont.) Treaty of Aix-laChapelle (1748)

Treaty of Amiens (1802)

All vessels, both war and merchant, that have been seized since the expiry of the agreed terms for the cessation of hostilities at sea, shall be similarly surrendered in good faith (Article 4 of the Treaty between Great Britain, France and the United Provinces).57 The vessels and effects taken in the Channel and Northern Seas, after a space of twelve days from the exchange of ratifications (Article 16 of the treaty between Great Britain, France, Spain and the Batavian Republic).58

was necessary to agree on where and when to draw the boundary between legal and illegal seizures. The question of the nomination and demarcation of maritime space once again comes to the fore. Yet, the purpose of these diplomatic discussions was not, as in the case of the salute, solely monarchical prestige or military power but also commercial interests: a shipowner would be allowed compensation or not, depending on which side of the spatial and temporal delimitation his ship had been taken. A comparison of articles on prizes of war in treaties between France, Britain and the United Provinces between the mid-seventeenth and late eighteenth centuries helps to fine-tune the chronology we have established regarding the salute of the flag (Table 4.1). In the Treaty of Breda, signed on 31 July 1667 between England, France, the United Provinces and Denmark-Norway, the terminology used to refer to the Channel varied according to the versions of the text. For the negotiators from the United Provinces the important thing was to separate the ‘North Sea’, where the bulk of their herring fishing took place, from the ‘British Sea’.59 However, in a preliminary meeting at the house of d’Estrades, a former French ambassador to London, French diplomats refused to call the Channel the ‘British Sea’.60 They were also successful in imposing their views on the English in the final text. The final version of the treaty, printed in Paris, specified what was referred to by the expression ‘nearby and neighbouring seas’ as that ’which is comprised of the Sea Channel between England and Ireland, & of the North & 57

58 59 60

General and Definitive Treaty of Peace between France, Great Britain and the United Provinces of the Netherlands, Signed at Aix-la-Chapelle, 18 October 1748, in ibid., vol. XXXVIII (1748–1750), p. 306. Our translation from the French (‘cessation des hostilités sur mer, seront pareillement rendus de bonne foi’). Treaty of Peace signed at Amiens on 27 March 1802, HCJ, vol. LVII (1801–1802), col. 879. Fulton, Sovereignty of the Sea, pp. 465–6. According to Jusserand, who unfortunately did not cite any source: ‘Introduction’, in Recueil des Instructions, p. 6. This anecdote is not in AMAE, CPA88 (1666–1667), nor in MDA31 (November 1665–March 1668).

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The border imposed

Baltic Seas’.61 While the Dutch and the French did not have the same goal, they did focus on the same subject, that is, the naming of maritime space. The Treaties of Ryswick (1697) and Utrecht (1713) enshrined the English view, which did not prevent French publicists throughout the eighteenth century referring to the legal precedent set at Breda, while conscientiously passing over the subsequent treaties. During the Seven Years War Emer de Vattel, a subject of the king of Prussia by birth, and pensioned by the elector of Saxony, a state which was a close ally of France, challenged Britain’s ambition to dominate the whole of the Channel. He cited to that end Louis XIV’s intransigence at Breda, where the French king ‘would not even suffer the Channel to be called the English Channel, or the British Sea’.62 The same anecdote was invoked by French jurists during the War of American Independence, and then during the Wars of the Revolution and the Empire, in order to defend the principle of the freedom of the seas.63 The absence of an agreement was the source of numerous disputes over the legality of the prizes of war. The limits of the ‘British Seas’ were not selfevident, even for the British authorities. The admiralty and Trinity House, the institution in charge of lighthouses, did not see eye to eye.64 Moreover, the broad demarcation of British seas inevitably brought shipowners of various states into these quarrels. In 1719–1720 the capture of three English vessels by Iberian privateers between Cape Finisterre and the Channel at latitude 47°N was deemed legal by the Spanish. Indeed, while the English shipowners claimed that the British seas extended to Finisterre, the Spanish privateers declared for their part that ‘the British seas extend no further than the Channel’.65 This incident shows that on the longitudinal boundaries of the Channel, there were implications for other powers of this delimitation of maritime space: Spain in the west and the United Provinces in the east. The demarcation of the seas moreover varied with the actors, the stakes and the times. After a lull, in the years 1720–1730, the diplomatic 61 62

63

64 65

AMAE, CPA89, fos. 122v, 145, 149v. E. de Vattel, The Law of Nations (1797), reedited by B. Kapossy and R. Whatmore, in K. Haakonssen (ed.), Natural Law and Enlightenment Classics Series (Indianapolis, IN: Liberty Fund, 2008), vol. I, par. 289, p. 254. See also E. Jouannet, Emer de Vattel et l’émergence doctrinale du droit international classique (Paris: A. Prédrone, 1998), pp. 13–14. In the name of the freedom of commerce and of navigation at sea, Robinet, during the War of American Independence, copied this passage word by word: J.-B. Robinet, ‘Mer’, in Dictionnaire universel des sciences morale, économique, politique et diplomatique, 30 vols. (London: Les libraires associés, 1777–1783), vol. XXIV, p. 487. The same thing happened in 1818, this time with regard to the Continental Blockade: M. Gilibert de Merlhiac, De la liberté des mers et du commerce (Paris: Rémont, 1818) (reedited Leiden: IDC, 1985), p. 47. Matthew Prior [to Dartmouth], Paris, 30 June 1713, TNA, SP78/157, fo. 183. Col. William Stanhope to Craggs, 30 September 1720, TNA, SP78/169, fo. 21.

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wrangling over the naming of the Channel was renewed in the mid-eighteenth century. As Daniel Nordman has shown, these decades marked a turning point in French notions of territory, as the new concept of a ‘rational’ and linear border gradually edged out the older, juridical view of the border as a territory constituted by interconnected and overlapping rights, jurisdictions and titles.66 On the occasion of the negotiation of the Treaty of Aix-la-Chapelle the chevalier Duval de Bonneval, the king’s geographer, drew up peace proposals, the central idea of which was the ‘extension of delimitation to all borders’.67 This new line of thought was not confined to land borders, as shown by the issue of prizes of war at sea. With the hostilities suspended, invariably a host of shipowners would send petitions to the diplomats to complain about the illegitimacy of one seizure or another.68 France, Britain and the United Provinces agreed to a resolution in terms of previous practices and convened an ad hoc committee ‘to order reciprocal restitution, or the indemnity of prizes of war’.69 This was why, unlike previous treaties, the Treaty of Aix-la-Chapelle of 18 October 1748 left open the settlement of the problem, and the article on naval prizes was extremely brief. Subsequently, an Anglo-French commission was set up to negotiate in detail the contentious clauses of the treaty. Besides prizes, this involved the disputed boundaries in North America, the ownership of the Caribbean islands which had changed hands during the war and the settling of accounts regarding prisoners of war. The discussions of the committee, which met at Saint-Malo from 1749, ‘have wholly turned upon the limits of the space wherein, according to the 16th article of the Preliminaries, hostilities ought to have ceased at sea’, as the British envoys noted.70 Let us leave aside here the position of the Dutch, who were exclusively concerned with the North Sea. To illustrate his government’s demands, the French plenipotentiary Guillot provided a map, on which he had marked the area of cessation of hostilities with two vertical red strokes. British diplomats were forced to improvise, in the absence of clear guidelines, and, because ‘opinions thereon, received from the offices of [the duke of Bedford, secretary of state for the southern department], differ with one another’.71 They 66 67 68 69 70 71

D. Nordman, Frontières de France: De l’espace au territoire XVIe–XIXe siècle (Paris: Gallimard, 1998), pp. 303–7, 517–27. Nordman, Frontières, p. 305. See for example the petitions attached in the letter by J. Potter to the French commissary in Saint-Malo, 27 February 1749, TNA, SP78/234, fo. 4. A common declaration was signed on 8 July 1748: royal commission to Guillot, general Marine commissary in Saint-Malo, 9 November 1748, TNA, SP78/234, fo. 17. C. Allix and G. Hinde, English envoys to Saint-Malo, to duke of Bedford, secretary of state for the southern department, 6 April 1749, TNA, SP78/234, fo. 26. Ibid., fo. 27.

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accordingly proposed a limit, a dotted line on the map, based on instructions from Trinity House and the admiralty.72 They required any vessel seized within this area surrounding the British Isles, or at a distance of ten leagues, to be included in the area of cessation of hostilities. Therefore, depending on the location through which the imaginary line passed, the respective number of lawful and unlawful seizures varied greatly. The English negotiators expressed it in coded passages at the end of their report (retranscribed here in small caps): [These limits] include as far as is come to our knowledge all the prizes made by the french which claim the benefit of being taken within the limits of the 12 days . . . Mr Guillot seemed indifferent as to the Western part of the boundary but very tenacious of the Northern, which we conceive may be owing to the many Dutch & several English prizes that have been taken off the Coast of Norway since the expiration of the twelve days.73

From November 1749 onwards, the issue of the boundaries of the Channel came to the fore.74 French ministers agreed that one of the aims of the meeting should be to conclude a ‘Convention to designate the limits comprised under the name of the Channel and the North Seas’.75 This clashed with the British view. Indeed, from the outset there was a tension between two ways of viewing the Channel: as a symbolic space and as a material space. On the British side, the meeting’s only purpose seemed to be to solve concrete problems – the spoils of war – but the French ambition was quite different. The marquis of Puysieulx, secretary of state for foreign affairs, thus advised Antoine Rouillé, his counterpart in the Marine, to examine the ‘Treaty of Breda of 1667, in order to set the maritime boundaries’.76 This reference was, of course, not accidental. French diplomats consciously followed the tradition of Louis XIV, and Rouillé asked the British to use ‘the term of French Seas which has never been used’.77 Nor was the French position free of contradictions. A few days later Rouillé commented on the difficulty of setting the boundaries of the Channel. Unlike designations that ‘offer specific and familiar points that are not open to any diversity of opinions on one side or the other’, such as Cape St. Vincent, 72 74

75 76

73 Ibid., fo. 26. Ibid., fo. 27. A more official commission was held in Paris from 1750 until 1755, with new commissioners on both sides, William Shirley and William Mildmay, on the one hand, and the marquis de la Galissonière and the marquis Etienne de Silhouette, on the other. For a detailed account of these negotiations, see E. Robbie, The Forgotten Commissioner: Sir William Mildmay and the Anglo-French Commission of 1750–1755 (East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 2003). Marquis de Puyzieulx to M. Rouillé, 18 December 1749, AMAE, Fonds des Limites, vols. I–II, n.p. 77 Ibid. Rouillé, 19 December 1749, ibid.

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the boundaries [of the Channel] have not perhaps been thus far well enough established. It is certain however that the Lizard is the last land that we lose sight of when leaving the Channel, and that all navigators regard themselves as being outside the Channel when they have rounded this Cape.78

However, the overriding focus on the vocabulary, open to multiple interpretations, was an obstacle to the discussion. Thus, Rouillé asserted that the object of the convention must be ‘to set the boundaries of the Channel and the North Seas: a settlement that will at once serve for the limits of the French seas and the British seas’.79 The British position then hardened, with the assertion that the Channel ‘has been reputed to extend to Cape Finisterre, and often as far as [Cape] St. Vincent, and that is the opinion of the Seamen of most Nations in Europe’.80 The invocation of customary practices of the sailors served, in both cases, to legitimise diplomatic stances. The debate stagnated throughout 1750.81 Eventually, the French negotiators proposed in April 1751 to resume the discussion and discuss ‘limits of the Sea relative to prizes, . . . in a way quite independent of the matter of the dominion and sovereignty over the respective Seas’.82 The British agreed, while specifying that ‘sovereignty of the British flag extends as far as Cape Finisterre, but that with respect to prizes, the boundaries of the British Channel are the South Foreland & Calais to the Easward, & from the Westermost part of Ireland to the Westermost part of Ushant to the Westward’.83 These exchanges reveal the difficulty of thinking about the economic stakes independently of issues of sovereignty. Moreover, no sooner was one obstacle removed than it reappeared in another form. It was first and foremost the way the English divided up the Channel that stirred up the opposition of their French counterparts. Where the limits of sovereignty were concerned, Rouillé refused ‘to accept the extent that England gives

78

79 80 81

82 83

Rouillé to Bedford, ‘Mémoire d’Observations sur le projet d’Instructions pour les Commissaires Anglois relatif aux Prises faites sur Mer depuis la Guerre’, sent on 24 December 1749, BL, Add. MS32819, fo. 243 [underlined in the source]. Ibid., fo. 244. April 1750, W.C.L. Mildmay Papers, 5: 20–6, quoted in Robbie, The Forgotten Commissioner, p. 65. Letters of La Galissionière and Silhouette to marquis of Puyzieulx (28 September 1750), AMAE, Fonds Limites, vols. I–II, n.p. Another reason for the slow start to the negotiations was the continued absence from Paris of one of the British negotiators, William Shirley, which meant that the first meeting only took place on 31 August 1750: Robbie, Forgotten Commissioner, pp. 55–9. Anon. to anon., [1st] April 1751, ibid., n.p. Bedford to Shirley and Mildway, 23 May 1751, TNA SP78/239, fo. 69v–70.

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The border imposed

the Channel along our coasts’.84 The boundaries defined for prizes did not satisfy the French negotiators either: ‘Never have the Seas of Ireland been supposed to form part of the Channel, the extrememost point of which has always been regarded as set at the Isle of Ushant on the one hand and the Lizard on the other.’85 Once again there was deadlock.86 After three and a half years of fruitless discussions, the last act of this prolonged dispute was finally played out, thanks to the sudden inspiration of the British commissioners in December 1752: To put an end to this dispute, we took notice that there was no necessity of our coming to any decision of the question concerning the limits of the seas, unless it should appear that prizes were taken in such parts of the disputed limits as would render it impossible to determine the legality or illegality of the capture without previously settling their limits.87

The French were accordingly requested ‘to look over their lists of prizes after the war, to find if any were taken in such parts as would bring the point into dispute’.88 Miraculously, ‘after examining it, they admitted that there were no others apart from those that were seized towards the middle of the channel, which makes it pointless to set limits’.89 To their surprise, the British diplomats discovered that their own list included ‘but one [single prize], and that only of one hundred and sixty pounds value’!90 The most extraordinary thing about this situation is that the original subject of the meeting, namely the issue of prizes, had been completely overlooked for two years in favour of symbolic quarrels about the Channel’s boundaries. Does the fact that the existence of two irreconcilable views was endorsed mean that the negotiation of 1749– 1752 was a total waste of time? On the surface neither position had changed since the seventeenth century. But, if the arguments used by the negotiators were nothing new, the very fact that boundaries were up for discussion heralded a highly significant change. The French demand seemed to conform to the new logic outlined in the mid-eighteenth century to demarcate land borders, a pragmatic logic, aiming to simplify boundaries through the signing of treaties between European states.91 84

85

86 87 88

‘Mémoire particulier de M. Rouillé pour le Mis de Puyzieulx contenant des observations sur la réponse du 13 juin dernier, et projet d’observations etc.’, 13 July 1751, AMAE, Fonds Limites, vols. I–II, n.p. La Galissonière and Silhouette, ‘Observations sur la réponse de Mrs. les Commissaires anglais datée du 13 June 1751, et remise aux Commissaires du Roi le 28 du même mois’, 5 August 1751, TNA, SP78/239, fo. 90v. As stressed in the French reports on the discussions: ‘still the same explanation about the pretended British Seas’, 23 August 1751, AMAE, Fonds Limites, vols. I–II, n.p. Allix and Hinde to Lord Holdernesse, secretary of state for the southern department (he replaced Bedford in June 1751), 6 December 1752, TNA, SP78/239, fo. 221. 89 Ibid. Ibid., fo. 221–v. 90 Ibid., fo. 221–v. 91 Nordman, Frontières, p. 307.

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Likewise, the principle of the states’ limited territorialisation at sea was prevailing by the middle of the century. Just as conflicts over the flag were increasingly rarely interpreted in terms of sovereignty over the whole Channel, the idea of a demarcation of the Channel’s conventional western and eastern boundaries emerged after the War of the Austrian Succession. At the beginning of the nineteenth century the Treaty of Amiens included an article on prizes. The English version of the treaty for the first time used the phrase ‘The Channel’ without a qualifying adjective. The Napoleonic Empire appears to be a turning point in conceptions about the sovereignty of the sea. The extent of the customs radius In the economic confrontation between France and Britain during the eighteenth century, the Revolution and the Empire marked the high point of a century of protectionism and customs barriers, briefly interrupted by the treaty of commerce of 1786. The customs regime of maritime borders was complex. Within a strip of land that varied in its extent, states progressively claimed a right to surveillance over the movement of people and goods. In the first stretch of the sea, the states, applying their respective financial regulations, demarcated a further area to prevent smuggled goods entering or exiting. This customs radius was a space of constant confrontation with states and foreign actors, and its extent posed problems at sea. The customs boundary then became an external boundary of the authority of the state. However, jurists did not agree over the limit of state sovereignty. Valin, a jurist and prosecutor of the king at the amirauté in La Rochelle, wrongly believed that peace and trade treaties had set this distance at two leagues of the coast; . . . on the far side . . . shipping must be absolutely free, and as such, exempt from any inspections by the commanders of coastguard vessels, and . . . on this side one is suspected of illegal trading, whereby one is subject to inspections and even the confiscation of the merchandise and the vessel . . . As far as a distance of two leagues . . . the sea, then, is the domain of the sovereign of the nearer coast.92

Valin was expressing an idea prevalent in eighteenth-century France and Britain: commercial shipping was free at sea. But how free? Neither the 1713 Treaty of Utrecht nor the 1786 Eden Treaty specified customs

92

R.-J. Valin, Nouveau commentaire sur l’ordonnance de la marine, du mois d’août 1681 (La Rochelle: Jérôme Légier, 1760), vol. III, p. 639.

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The border imposed

boundaries. In the absence of agreed boundaries between France and England, this area of confrontation was constantly shifting (Table 4.2). In France it was not until the Revolution that this limit at sea was extended; the British customs radius, however, grew continuously throughout the eighteenth century.93 So-called ‘hovering laws’ specified where seizures or inspections of any vessels suspected of smuggling were allowed. These laws did not apply to ships caught in storms or to fishing boats.94 In the period 1699–1819 twenty-three such Acts were passed at Westminster.95 The question arises whether these changes to the customs Table 4.2 Variations in customs boundaries in English law Act

Title

Jurisdiction

1718 (5 Geo I, c. 11)

An Act against clandestine running of uncustomed goods

– port limits – up to fifty barrels – hovering on the English – all prohibited coast merchandise or subject to duty – up to fifty barrels – at anchor – brandy – hovering two leagues (11,112 m) off the English coast

1719 (6 Geo I, c. 21)

An Act for preventing frauds and abuses in the publick revenues of excise, customs 1736 (9 An Act for indemnifying Geo II, persons who have been c. 35) guilty of offences against the laws made for securing the revenues of customs 1779 (19 An Act for the more Geo III, effectually preventing c. 69) the pernicious practices of smuggling 1784 (24 An Act for the more Geo. effectual prevention III, 2nd of smuggling session, c. 47)

93

94 95

– ships unloading merchandise within four leagues (22,224 m) of the English coast

Capacity

– up to 100 barrels – all prohibited foreign merchandise subject to payment of duties

– up to 200 barrels – within two leagues – liqueurs and spirits in of the English coast – or if the boats were ships coming from or discovered to be there leaving from abroad – boats of any size – within four leagues – wines, liqueurs, of the English coast – or if the boats were spirits, coffee or any discovered to be there prohibited merchandise

W.E. Masterson, ‘National jurisdiction in the marginal seas over foreign smuggling vessels’, Transactions of the Grotius Society, 13 (1927), pp. 53–77; W.E. Masterson, Jurisdiction in Marginal Seas with Special Reference to Smuggling (New York: The Macmillan Company, 1929). Masterson, ‘National jurisdiction’, p. 65. In table 9, only the laws that modified the limit are mentioned. They remained in vigour simultaneously, before a law of 1825 (6 Geo. IV, C105) suppressed them all.

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Table 4.2 (cont.) Act

Title

1794 (34 Geo. III, C50)

An Act for . . . making more effectual an Act [24 Geo III, C47]

22 June 1802, (42 Geo. III, C82)

1805 (45 Geo. III, C121)

Jurisdiction

– within four leagues of the English coast – if it is discovered that the boats were inside a straight line, running: From the Lizard, in the County of Cornwall to the Prall, in the County of Devon; From the Prall to the Bill of Portland, in the county of Dorset An Act to alter, amend and – within eight leagues render more effectual an (44,448 m) of the act English coast – except for the segment [24 Geo III, C47] ‘between the north foreland on the coast of Kent and Beachy Head on the coast of Sussex’, maintained at four leagues An Act for the more – two leagues from the effectual prevention of Channel Islands – if boats were smuggling discovered to have been ‘in the British or the Irish Channels, or elsewhere in the middle of the sea at 100 leagues from the coast of Great Britain or Ireland’

Capacity – boat of any capacity – brandy, snuff or prohibited merchandise

– all vessels carrying prohibited merchandise

– all boats coming from overseas, having on board foreign brandy or tea, tobacco in certain quantities

frontier – at first technical adaptations to concrete problems – also expressed a way of thinking about the territory. Another issue is how could the notion of the customs line be applied at sea, where space was broken up by the indentations of capes and bays? When incidents between customs and smugglers did occur, it was less the actual location of the incident than the interpretation of legal rules by the different actors that determined the outcome of the conflict. Studying these

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micro-events enables us to see how conceptions of maritime territory affected practices; but also how practices in turn influenced the definition of rules. The absence of boundaries (up to 1710) In this first period British customs laws never specified precisely the extent of the radius at sea. Some used expressions such as ‘being at sea’, or ‘within the limits of a port’, but these boundaries varied depending on the place and type of merchandise.96 The boundaries of the ports of Faversham and Rochester in the Thames estuary in Kent, for example, stretched as far as the low-water mark (roughly three nautical miles), but those of Chichester in Sussex reached ‘The point at which a horn, blown at the harbour mouth, could just be heard.’97 For the British government, customs boundaries that were too specific would undermine the sacrosanct principle of the sovereignty of British seas, which would explain the imprecision of the radius.98 For other governments these laws were fiscal in nature, not political.99 Without precise boundaries customs incidents took on a particular form. In 1713 the French ambassador to London, the duc d’Aumont, complained to Lord Bolingbroke, the secretary of state for foreign affairs, about the treatment meted out to vessels from Calais suspected of fraud along the English coast. The problem was as follows: boats loaded with illicit goods had been apprehended by British customs. Were they trying to be involved in smuggling or were they there by chance or bad luck? The duc d’Aumont left nothing to chance. The French ambassador’s description of incidents in his version of the incident (Table 4.3) always stated that the vessel had ‘been forced by contrary winds’ to take shelter in an English haven or port. Vessels forced by the elements to put in at a port did indeed enjoy an exemption from smuggling laws. Seizing them would result in ‘destroying the law of nations, as they would tend to forbid the vessels of both nations the refuge they must reciprocally find in each other’s ports during peacetime’.100 In the case of the Saint-Pierre the French ambassador was happy to concede that his captain had sold 96 97 98 99

100

Masterson, ‘National jurisdiction’, pp. 56–7. J.H. Andrews, ‘Geographical aspects of the maritime trade of Kent and Sussex, 1650– 1750’, unpublished PhD thesis, University of London (1954), p. 22. Masterson, Jurisdiction in Marginal Seas, pp. 3-4. P.C. Jessup, The Law of Territorial Waters and Maritime Jurisdiction (New York: G.A. Jennings, 1927), p. 10. Jessup notes that French laws always differentiated between customs jurisdiction and territorial sovereignty: ibid., p. 18. Memorandum of the duc d’Aumont, 21 July 1713, TNA, T1/164, fo. 47.

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Table 4.3 French smugglers seized by British customs in 1713

Date

Ship’s name

Goods confiscated

Port of origin

30 July 7 July

Saint-Pierre La Mouche

53 kegs of brandy 172 kegs of brandy

Calais Calais

14 July

La 181 kegs of brandy Trompeuse 18 L’Hirondelle 51 kegs of brandy, September 1 barrel of wine, and £21 5s 6p sterling. 29 August Saint-Jean4 woollen Baptiste mattresses 29 July L’Effrontée 80 kegs of brandy, 8 kegs of red and white wine

Point of prize

Calais

Hastings, Sussex Brislington Key, Yorkshire Margate, Kent

Calais

Hanson Island

Saint-Malo Padstow, Cornwall Calais [Cape of Rye in Sussex]

brandy, but ‘offshore’, or ‘two leagues from Hastings on the English coast’, which could not technically constitute a fraud.101 Why specify where the incident occurred, when the distance to the coast was no criterion for prize in the eyes of the law at the time? On the English side the limit between fraud and legality lay in the contact between land and sea, and not offshore, as Aumont knew well: Fraud may only be supposed fraud in its consummation and it is only consummated when the merchandise be deposited on land, without any declaration previously being made by the selling merchant. . . . As long as the merchandise is still aboard a vessel . . ., it cannot be regarded as smuggled goods, since it has not yet been smuggled in.102

Defining fraud was always a matter for negotiation and interpretation, as it involved relating a given situation to a legal text. Customs officers would try to prove that the merchandise had been taken ‘ashore’. Such a problem arose in the North Sea in 1716, when Sunderland customs boats confiscated the cargo of two sloops from Calais laden with brandy, at anchor near the port of Hartlepool in County Durham. There was no doubt that these boats intended to commit fraud, but that was not the

101 102

‘Extrait d’un mémoire du Duc d’Aumont’, attached in a letter from Dartmouth to the lord treasurer, sent 31 July 1713, TNA, T1/164, fo. 38. 21 July 1713, TNA, T1/164, fos. 47–8.

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problem, as ‘there being no law to hinder vessels selling or delivering any sort of goods at sea, out of the limits of a port’.103 Setting the limits (1710–1760) Once customs boundaries in the Channel started to be mapped out, a new phase began. From the 1710s onwards a series of French and British laws specified the extent of the customs radius at sea. A second line of customs was added at sea, parallel to the one drawn within the state’s territory on land. It is not certain, however, whether these laws still reflected a conception of state sovereignty; it is possible to argue that, from the point of view of the state, political and fiscal issues remained distinct at sea. In the aftermath of the War of the Spanish Succession the two monarchies were financially exhausted. Increasing indirect taxation was a favourite means of improving public finances, while smuggling rose sharply.104 The precise demarcation of the customs radius in the Act of 1719 (Table 4.2) thus aimed to regain the upper hand over the smugglers, who, ‘to elude the intent of that law, do lie at anchor, or hover on the coasts as near to the said limits as may be’.105 This legislative inflation solved nothing, as the brandy-makers of Bristol bitterly remarked: ‘The nearness of France, and the openness of our coast, make running easie so that the kingdom is filled with French brandys and the force of the Act evaded by foreign vessels.’106 The Leducq Collection in the Bordeaux Musée de la Douane [Customs Museum] contains several transcripts of complaints by ‘smogleurs’ captains from Calais (Table 4.4), apprehended by British customs boats and dispossessed of their wares.107 Even if these disputes occurred in the North Sea, the way the legal boundary was defined (or not) could be extrapolated to the Channel because the laws affected the entire English coastline and the same ships often operated on both coasts. In 1729, for example, seven captains from Calais gave a statement to the amirauté of the same port. Laden with brandy, they had been boarded near the English coast. Five of them specified the distance from the said coast: in every case it was more than two leagues. 103 104

105 106 107

Letter of a legal councillor for the customs, quoted in a letter from the lords commissioners of the customs, London, 26 June 1716, TNA, T1/202, fo. 131. J. Brewer, The Sinews of Power: War, Money and the English State, 1688–1783 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1990) (1st edn: 1988), pp. 88–134, 211–17. An Act for preventing frauds and abuses in the publick revenues of excise, customs, stampduties, post-office, and house-money (6 Geo. I, C21, §31). Petition sent to the lords commissaries of the treasury, 2 March 1719, TNA, T1/227, fo. 91. On ‘smogleurs’, see infra Chapter 8.

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Table 4.4 French smugglers seized by British customs in 1729 Date of statement

Boat’s name

Place of incident

Folio no.

9 August

L’Heureuse

Fo. 61

14 September 14 September 15 September 31 October

La Fidèle

‘5 leagues offshore from said Flambourg [Flamborough in Yorkshire]’ ‘level with Flambourg, 4 leagues offshore’

Fo. 74 v

Saint-Jean Baptiste La Subtile

8 November

L’Aimable

‘2 leagues offshore from the Pointe de Baston’ [sic] ‘9 leagues offshore ENE and WSW of Croumer [Cromer, Norfolk]’ ‘being level with Crourmer [sic] 4 leagues’ ‘it was forced to hover and come level with Flambourg, where it was approached by a coast-guard of the English customs’ ‘being level with Hull Bay’

Saint-Jean

17 Quatre Fils November Aymon

Fo. 3 v

Fo. 74 v Fo. 83 v Fo. 85 v

Fo. 86 v

Such precise location at sea before the invention of accurate methods of calculation is difficult to believe. Again, it was less the place where the incident actually occurred that was important for the smugglers than the place where it ought to have taken place in order to enjoy the support of their government. Two leagues corresponded to the limits of the jurisdiction of British customs established by the Act of 1719. It is clear here that, once their interests were directly engaged, seafarers developed a perfect command of the language of the law. Is that to say that these seamen of lowly social extraction were familiar with the exact content of the legislation? In fact, the transcripts were taken down by amirauté clerks, who recorded the statements and no doubt acted as intermediaries in familiarising the complainants with the legislation. Moreover, the variation of the boundaries as recorded in the minutes shows that we are not dealing here with a standard form. The expressions used also display a knowledge of legal rhetoric: the captain of the Saint-Jean, which was boarded, he said, two leagues from the English coast, ‘does protest all losses, costs, damages and interests and appeals against whomsoever it shall be for the removal of said launch and its cargo,

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made on open sea, without any fraud’.108 Another smuggler, François Pollet, the bearer of a passport for Berg in Norway, was boarded by an English coast-guard, who took him to Yarmouth and confiscated his cargo of brandy along with his boat. The captain’s complaint was permeated with a Grotian rhetoric, deploring practices ‘against the droit des gens, the sea being free for all nations that are not at war’.109 Smugglers were not the only ones to take liberties with the law. The twentieth-century lawyer W.E. Masterson notes that at the beginning of the eighteenth century, in the accounts of prizes of vessels at sea, ‘[v]ery seldom . . . is the exact place of seizure noted’110 in the correspondence between the board of customs and the customs collectors. An Act of 1698 (10 & 11 Will. III, C10) remained in force, authorising the seizing of ‘all ships engaged in exporting wool to foreign parts, without defining any distance within which seizures might be made’.111 In practice legal boundaries were always subject to interpretation, and the British customs administration itself encouraged its captains to overstep them should the need arise. In 1739, against a backdrop of escalating tensions with Spain and France, the lord justice general, the earl of Ilay (1682–1761), justified the state’s right to apprehend foreign vessels at sea: The liberty which every nation enjoys, of searching, on suspicion of unlawful trade, the ships of foreigners that approach near to their coast without any necessity, is a liberty that is not only established by the law of nations, but is generally regulated by the particular laws or customs of each respective society.112

The expression ‘near to their coast’ used by the magistrate was deliberately vague because the prerogative of the fiscal administration was only defined by the criterion of suspicion, not by a territorial boundary. This argument put the internal definition of the economic frontier, with references to British customs and laws, above the external definition, namely, conventions with neighbouring countries. These British laws were not to be followed blindly or they would penalise the Treasury, as the earl of Ilay again explained, interpreting the 1698 Act above-mentioned that set ten boats the task of cruising the Irish and English coasts to stop wool being exported to France: 108 109 110 112

14 September 1729, Musée de la Douane (Bordeaux), Fonds Leducq, D 29, LED322. XIIIB114, fo. 74v. 17 November 1729, ibid., fo. 86v. Masterson, Jurisdiction in Marginal Seas, p. 24. 111 Ibid. Speech at the house of lords, 22 February 1739, PH, vol. X, col. 1232, quoted in Masterson, Jurisdiction in Marginal Seas, p. 29.

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If any of the men of war, or armed sloops thus employed, should see a French ship hovering, or lying at anchor within a few leagues of our shore, and boats passing and repassing between her and the land, are we to suppose that they are only to visit such ship, according to the rules prescribed by treaty, and to give entire credit to her passports, or sea-letters?113

This expressed a purely internal definition of the territorial sea, for which, according to the jurist Paul de Lapradelle, there are ‘as many limits as there are corresponding needs’.114 That is also why ‘such limits derive an international value from their customary nature alone’.115 As France and Britain in the eighteenth century never discussed the extent of their territory at sea, we can understand the earl of Illay’s recommendation to withhold respect for the letter of the law, which would be detrimental to British interests. While British customs limits continued to stretch with the development of smuggling, in France they remained stable. The laws on tobacco and salt smuggling drawn up under the Regency (1715–1723) also stipulated that ‘small foreign craft and others that should be found on the sea on the Coasts one or two leagues offshore [be] arrested by the employees of the pataches of the collector of the Fermes Générales [French customs] to be checked and searched’.116 The same limit was retained in laws that followed throughout the Ancien Régime.117 How to explain such astonishing continuity compared to England? In the absence of works on the subject, we are reduced to conjecture. The difference in legal status of the Ferme Générale, a semiprivate institution, and of Customs, a state institution, is not a good enough explanation. The Ferme was indeed selectively entrusted with extra-fiscal, and in particular military, missions. However, the techniques for combating fraud differed in the two countries. The Ferme Générale favoured land-based filtering, its task being complicated by customs barriers internal to the state’s territory. In Britain, customs could focus their efforts ‘on the coast and inshore waters’.118 Until the 1760s customs boundaries at sea would remain internal fiscal boundaries, in the absence of a convention between France and Britain, and because incidents between customs and smugglers were not 113 116

117

118

114 Ibid. De Lapradelle, La frontière, pp. 213–14. 115 Ibid., p. 214. Memorandum of fermiers généraux to Choiseul, copy, TNA, SP78/272, 1767, fo. 130. A patache was a vessel, usually a former warship, reconverted for surveillance of coasts: H.B. Culver, The Book of Old Ships: From Egyptian Galleys to Clippers Ships (Mineola, NY: Dover Publications Inc., 1993, reprint of 1924 edn), pp. 155–6. Council judgments of 17 November 1716, 23 December 1718, 9 March 1719, renewed by article 8 of the royal declaration of 17 October 1720, and supplemented by a judgment of 22 October 1752. Brewer, Sinews, p. 128.

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interpreted in terms of sovereignty. But when the customs radii of the neighbouring states began to overlap, as they did from the 1760s, new problems arose. ‘Violations of territory’ (1760–1793) We have seen how the notion of territorial waters developed among European jurists from the middle of the eighteenth century. The parallel dropping of the adjective ‘national’ in French names for the Channel seems to mark the waiving of any sovereignty over the sea. In Britain that principle was not abandoned. To what extent were diplomats’ interpretations of customs incidents affected by this general development? Again, it is essential to begin with concrete problems. From the 1750s the war on smuggling became a major preoccupation of British governments, obsessed as they were with the national debt.119 The smugglers’ boats often protected themselves from the British Revenue by taking refuge within French jurisdiction, which, however, did not always stop the British customs cutters in their tracks. Despite the lively diplomatic exchanges that resulted from these incidents, a consensus emerged regarding the littoral state’s sovereignty over its adjacent waters: the term ‘territory’, denoting a state appropriation, became increasingly frequent in discussions between the French and English in the 1760s. But what exactly was meant by this term? In 1766 a French vessel suspected of smuggling was pursued by a corvette of the British customs, forcing it to run aground near Calais. The French ambassador to Britain Guerchy then complained of ‘violations on the territory of France’.120 These customs officers were reprimanded by their superiors, who enjoined them ‘henceforth to keep themselves, with the greatest attention, within the limits of their commission, and to respect, at all times, the territory of a neighbouring and friendly crown’.121 Conveying this news to Durand (minister plenipotentiary in London in Guerchy’s absence), Lord Shelburne, secretary of state, underlined the goodwill of the British in terms it would be difficult to find a century earlier: ‘I am confident that this example will satisfy you, Sir, of His Majesty’s resolution to enforce completely the territorial rights of France.’122 If Peter Sahlins is right to point out that it is really in the age of nationalism, from the nineteenth century on, that so-called ‘violations 119 120 121 122

Brewer, Sinews, p. 124. Letter to the duke of Richmond, secretary of state for foreign affairs, 5 June 1766, TNA, SP78/270, fo. 96. 10 October 1766, attached in Shelburne to Durand, 11 October, TNA, SP78/271, fo. 54. 11 October 1766, TNA, SP78/271, fo. 52.

Who owns the Channel? The overlap of legal rights

177

of territory’ became casus belli, one has to understand the meaning of this language in our context.123 Thus, one ambiguity in this exchange was not resolved: at what exact point did the English corvette violate French territorial sovereignty? The language used by the English diplomats on the same case was not much more specific: ‘Having received a Complaint from the French Ambassador, of an Infraction of Territorial Jurisdiction, imputed to Captain MacBride of His Majesty’s Ship the Cruiser, by having seized an English Vessel on the Coast of France.’124 Where did ‘the coast’ begin? Territorial violation had been clearly defined at the time by jurists such as Vattel: We cannot then, without doing an injury to a state, enter its territories with force and arms in pursuit of a criminal, and take him from thence. This would at once be a violation of the safety of the state, and a trespass on the rights of empire or supreme authority vested in the sovereign. This is what is called a violation of territory;125

According to the same author, the shore, seaports and harbours were all part of the state’s territory. This was also true of any anchorages, bays and straits, with one exception: ‘But I speak of bays and straits of small extent, and not of those great tracts of sea to which these names are sometimes given.’126 On a legal level the problem of how far state sovereignty in the English Channel reached was therefore not always clear-cut. However, the two countries’ diplomats used the term ‘territory’ increasingly often to describe the area close to shore. After the War of American Independence incidents in this area became more frequent: the two phenomena seem to be linked, suggesting that the territorialisation of border areas was also the result of interactions with other countries. In Britain in the aftermath of the War of American Independence, a rethinking of the whole navigation system was conducted. The restoration of the finances of the state became a priority for the government of William Pitt the Younger (1759–1806), first lord of the treasury and chancellor of the exchequer from December 1783, who significantly increased customs duties. At the same time the scale of smuggling changed, becoming a ‘big business’ that mobilised more significant capital, and more numerous and better armed ships.127 Following the recommendations of a parliamentary inquiry committee, the area of customs jurisdiction was further expanded, with the new act passed in 1784 123 124 125 127

P. Sahlins, Boundaries: The Making of France and Spain in the Pyrenees (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989), p. 102. Conway to the lords of the treasury, 10 August 1765, TNA, SP44/328, fos. 132–3. 126 Vattel, The Law of Nations, vol. I, par. 93, p. 169. Ibid., ‘De la Mer’, p. 255. Brewer, Sinews, p. 213.

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adopting the distance of four leagues for all boats.128 This Act was part of a package of measures – a sharp decrease in duties on tea, for example – designed to deal a death blow to smuggling.129 The captains of the British customs boats were therefore encouraged to pursue smugglers at sea, and incidents off the French coast proliferated. Indeed, municipal authorities in Boulogne were highly sensitive to what they perceived as English abuses of authority. The key protagonists in this story were the so-called smogleurs, English smugglers well established in the French port, who were supplied by trading houses in the town and who offloaded their wares on the English coast.130 In the French and English archives, an abundant administrative correspondence documents the assaults of the English coast-guards on English smugglers sheltering in the port of Boulogne. On 21 April 1785, for example, captain John Sole left the port of Boulogne with a cargo of brandy before being intercepted by a Revenue cutter from Rye in Sussex, who gave pursuit as far as the French port and forced him to run aground. The intervention of several sailors from Boulogne, who retaliated to the shots fired by the customs boat with musket and canon, drove them away. In his complaint to the amirauté of Boulogne, the smogleur insisted on the illegality of the behaviour of the customs boat, which was ‘contrary to the law of nations and to the safety of trade’.131 The report of the clash was then sent to the French foreign minister, who described the incident as ‘violations of territory’ by the English cutter, the incident having occurred in a French harbour.132 The same expression was used by Barthélemy, the French chargé d’affaires to London, who condemned ‘the enterprises of the English coastguard craft, which without any regard for French territory, permit themselves the liberty of pursuing both French and English craft, even into the harbours, on the coasts and even take their temerity as far as disembarking and perpetrating assaults’.133 It is clear here that territorial sovereignty and the customs radius were two independent boundaries for the French government, who was not complaining of encroachment by British customs on French jurisdiction 128 129 130 131 132 133

Third parliamentary report, 23 March 1784, in Parliamentary Papers, from 1731 to 1800, vol. XI, p. 282, quoted in Masterson, Jurisdiction in Marginal Seas, p. 55. H.C. Mui and L.H. Mui, ‘William Pitt and the enforcement of the Commutation Act, 1784–1788’, EHR, 76 (1961), pp. 447–65. See Chapter 7 infra. ‘Extrait des registres de l’amirauté de Boulogne’, 22 April 1785, AMAE, CPA553, fo. 43. Vergennes to Barthélemy, 22 May 1785 (ibid., fo. 157); Vergennes to maréchal de Ségur, secretary of state for war, 13 June 1785 (ibid., fo. 265). Letter to Carmarthen, secretary of state for foreign affairs, 30 May 1785, TNA, T1/620, fo. 196.

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Table 4.5 Incidents between English smugglers and customs on the French coast in 1785 Date

Place of incident

15 February 1785

‘A coast-guard . . . has seized in sight of Le Portel a caiche laden with 420 half-anchors of brandy and genever, 61 bags of tea & 1 of coffee, although she pointed out that she was on the coast of France, and bound for Fécamp.’ ‘Another boat was redeemed while delivering a hundred half anchors to a coast-guard in harbour.’ ‘Captain Lamb, of Rye, was seen pursuing an English ship, going ashore opposite Cucq in Picardy near Etaples.’ ‘The aforesaid captain was seen firing from his launch two rifle shots on an English ship, run aground at Le Portel a half a league from Boulogne.’ ‘He made signals to his launch which was running alongside the land to cut it off from two boats regaining the port.’ ‘Another boat [. . .] destined for Alderney was taken some 15 leagues off the coast of England by the cutter The Cockatrice, very close to Normandy.’

10 April 1785 21 April 1785 22 April 1785 22 April 1785 1785

(the width of the French customs radius at the time was two leagues, or over ten kilometres). The reason for the complaint was that British Revenue cutters were entering French territory, more specifically French harbours or ports: the British government itself recognised French sovereignty over this space, and the commissioners of the Treasury spoke of ‘unacceptable assault and violence’.134 Boulogne traders who invested in cross-Channel smuggling understood this well, and they listed the incidents which had happened on the coast of France.135 As at the beginning of the eighteenth century the language of traders was wont to slip into the official discourse of the French government in order to attract support (Table 4.5). This strategy was successful, and a decision was taken to send the corvette normally stationed at Cherbourg to cruise up and down the coasts of Boulogne.136 134

135

136

Translated from the French: 11 June 1785, translation attached to a letter from Carmarthen to Barthélemy, ibid., fo. 232. Order was given to the customs ships not to expose themselves to the French criticisms: board of customs to collector of customs in Dover, 16 June 1785, TNA, CUST 54/148, fo. 102. The French translation is in Carmarthen to Barthélemy, 11 June 1785, AMAE, CPA553, fo. 232. ‘Extrait d’un mémoire adressé à Monsieur le Maréchal de Castries par les négociants de Boulogne’, n.d., TNA, T1/620, fo.194. This memorandum can probably be dated 12 May 1785, according to a letter from Castries to ‘M. les Présidents et Administrateurs du Comité du Boulonnais’, 21 May 1785, AN, Marine B2429, fo. 66. Castries to ‘M. les Présidents et Administrateurs du Comité du Boulonnais’, AN, Marine B2429, fo. 66.

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This period saw the emergence of a sharing out of the Channel between the two states. This was not laid down as a principle, but customs incidents made clear what was happening. On the English coasts the question of ‘territorial sovereignty’ was never raised by the British government – probably because such cases mainly involved English smugglers, with whose actions the French government did not wish to meddle. On the French coast the incidents involved British customs captains – Crown employees – who had gone beyond their prerogatives in exceeding their customs radius and, above all, in running aground on the French coast. The French conception of a territory running along the shoreline and out into coastal waters was now perfectly compatible with British claims of sovereignty over the Channel. Customs incidents paradoxically reveal a tacit agreement between the two states over the extent of their respective territories at sea. On the English side this could only be limited by the opposite coast; on the French side it was cut back to the harbours of ports and epicontinental waters a very short distance from the shore. Setting the customs border (1793–1815) After the French Revolution, smuggling, on an unprecedented scale, became a weapon in the war between the two states, and customs disputes became part of a broader geopolitical rivalry. During this period, the whole of the Channel was included in the Anglo-French struggle, as shown in the overlapping of customs boundaries. After the outbreak of war in February 1793 changes to the fiscal borders of the two states were directly linked to developments in Anglo-French relations. In France the traditional theme of the ‘famine plot’ instigated abroad gathered momentum in the spring of 1793, fed by the first military defeats on the northern border and the beginning of the Vendée insurrection in March 1793, and increasing sans-culotte pressure in Paris from May 1793 onwards.137 The Law of the Maximum of 11 September 1793 accordingly prohibited all storage of flour and grain less than six miles from land and sea borders.138 At sea too the state of war led to a doubling of the jurisdiction of customs by the decree of 4 Germinal Year 2 (24 March 1794). Any ship under one hundred tons and less than four miles (twelve nautical miles) off the coast of France with prohibited goods was liable to confiscation.139 137

138 139

The notion of ‘famine plot’ is borrowed from S.L. Kaplan, The Famine Plot Persuasion in Eighteenth-Century France (Philadelphia, PA: The American Philosophical Society, 1982). Reproduced in LDRF, vol. I, p. 436. S. Lebeau, Recueil des lois relatives à la marine et aux colonies, 9 vols. (Paris: Imprimerie de la République, 1787–1800), vol. IV, p. 382.

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In 1794 a law passed in Westminster stated for the first time the special status of the Channel: the English coast was divided up into areas enclosed by lines drawn from headland to headland, reminiscent of the Scottish King’s Chambers of the seventeenth century.140 From then on national jurisdictions overlapped: the customs border was no longer external but internal, and entailed constant confrontation with the neighbouring state. In consequence of all-out war and the raising of the fight against English smuggling to the rank of a national priority after the Directory, any spatial limit on the actions of customs was removed not only within the state’s territory but also at sea. The two processes were concurrent. Thus the ‘law on ships laden with English merchandise’ of 18 January 1798 declared as a lawful prize ‘any craft found at sea, wholly or partially laden with merchandise from England or from its possessions’.141 At the same time on land a decree of 27 February 1798 from the Directory (1795–1799) extended customs boundaries to include the entire territory of the state, enabling the administration to ‘carry out the search and prize of any English merchandise reported to it, irrespective of the place of its storage’.142 Economic and political objectives went hand in hand. A substantial change was under way, namely, the territorialisation of the whole of the Channel by the two states. In Britain in June 1802 an Act again doubled the customs boundaries to eight leagues, or over forty-four kilometres. As this demarcation was wider than the Strait of Dover, an exception was made for this part of the Channel, where the jurisdiction of customs was kept to four leagues. In the end the British customs’ grip extended to the French coast: for the first time the argument of the sovereignty of the seas did not clash with the extent of customs boundaries. In Britain, the act of parliament passed on 12 July 1805 eliminated any geographical limit on the customs radius for the first time since the beginning of the eighteenth century: prize was legitimate if a smuggling boat was found anywhere ‘in the British Channel’. The entire Channel was becoming a political and economic border. Starting in 1806, the Continental Blockade was the culmination of this evolution. Had things come full circle? Are we back to the situation at the end of the seventeenth century? Unlike the 1690s the Royal Navy now had the means to put the theory of the sovereignty of the seas into practice. Conversely, Napoleon, by systematically protesting against this same theory, validated it by opting for the Continental Blockade. Step by step 140 142

141 See Chapter 6 infra. LDRF, vol. II, p. 382. ‘Arrêté du Directoire exécutif qui ordonne de continuer la recherche des marchandises anglaises dans l’intérieur’, 27 February 1798, ibid., p. 399.

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France built a defensive wall against British imports across Europe. The Channel then was nothing more than a bone of contention among others in the broader rivalry between the two states, which also included the North Sea, the Baltic and the Mediterranean. For Coquebert de Montbret, then director of the bureau of statistics of the Ministère de l’Intérieur, the economic confrontation came to be couched in new terms once France started to conquer large chunks of territory in Europe: should this whole area be unified into one common economic space or should traditional internal political borders between the states be kept?143 In an 1806 project Coquebert suggested unifying customs on the external borders of all the subject countries of the imperial family, modelled on the 1791 unification of French customs barriers. According to him, The pushing back of customs to the furthermost borders of the French Confederation would be the means . . . to prevent our neighbours, whose customs [duties] cannot equal our own, bringing into our country under the cloak of friendship and close alliance any merchandise from rival or enemy countries.144

The aim was thus to guard against the common English enemy because, Coquebert added, it was ‘easier to insure ourselves against absolutely and truly foreign peoples than against those we are obliged to consider in all other relations as brothers’.145 The Napoleonic Empire, it is well-known, operated on radically different lines, the ties between France and the peoples of Europe being not ones of fraternity but of domination.146 But this idea that economic borders, political borders and borders between peoples could coincide was new, and the fiscal barrier became a true political and national barrier.

*** Unlike in other maritime spaces that were subject in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries to conventional demarcations between the states, in the Channel the areas of competence of states were always being reassessed in reaction to national and international events. In spite of the absence of treaties, tacit agreements between France and Britain emerged with shifting chronologies depending on the issues. From the mid-eighteenth century, conflicts over the boundaries of the 143 144 145 146

I. Laboulais-Lesage, Lectures et pratiques de l’espace: L’itinéraire de Coquebert de Montbret, savant et grand commis d’État (1755–1831) (Paris: Honoré Champion, 1999), p. 376. Coquebert-Montbret, ‘Rapport sur les douanes’, AN, F12643, VIII-5, pp. 15–16. Ibid., p. 16. S. Woolf, Napoleon’s Integration of Europe (London: Routledge, 1991); S. Marzagalli, Les boulevards de la fraude: Le négoce maritime et le Blocus continental 1806–1813. Bordeaux, Hambourg, Livourne (Lille: Presses Universitaires du Septentrion, 1999), pp. 170–6.

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areas of respective sovereignty over the Channel were in practice fairly easily resolved. In the east and west of the Channel, French and British conceptions were inimical to a diplomatic agreement, and it was decided to limit discussion to concrete problems, as was demonstrated by the issue of the flag or prizes. Yet along the coasts the British customs radius partially overlapped with the French radius from the 1760s, and then, under the Empire, covered the entire Channel. By the time this change was complete the Channel had become a true economic and political border, but one that did not have the same extension in France and England. According to Lapradelle, ‘if the border zone is attractive to strong states, who view boundaries as obstacles to their expansion, demarcation is by the same token for weak states an elementary measure of territorial guarantee’.147 In the last quarter of the eighteenth century the way incidents on the French coast were interpreted shows that the territorial boundary on that side of the Channel had aligned with the French shore. In England the sea was not a neutral zone, but part of Crown territory, a fiscal, economic and political border, bounded by the French shoreline. Chronologically, therefore, we are faced with a complete change between the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries: disagreement between the two states no longer concerned the Channel’s boundaries with other maritime spaces, such as the Atlantic or the North Sea, but revolved around definitions of where land met the sea.

147

De Lapradelle, La Frontière, p. 61.

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The fight for natural resources

From the point of view of states the boundaries of the Channel provoked bitter theoretical and practical argument. But for fishermen the Channel was above all a provider of resources. From this angle the fixing of boundaries remained a matter of struggle and negotiation which involved more than one set of actors. This question is crucial in the case of an activity such as fishing: were fish, wherever they were found, the common property of all humankind? Or did the territorial logic also apply to this roaming manna of the seas? When the problem is expressed this way, another question arises: namely, how specific is this debate to the maritime border? Were comparable struggles not also to be faced in the hinterland, about the right to access a river and its products? The question must therefore be asked as to how far the international border, defined both by the interest of states in a vital geostrategic zone and by the interaction of actors of various origins, altered the configuration of disputes. The first issue is to bring together two major legal developments of longue durée on the sea which are usually treated separately. First, the Channel became a terrain of political, military and legal confrontation between France and Britain. At the same time, states claimed a legal monopoly over their seashores. To what extent did these two processes meet? The distinction between the seashore and the sea is problematic, for in practice the boundaries between these zones and within each one fluctuated. I will argue that competition at sea and the territorialisation of the seashore were two sides of the same coin. The second issue is to understand how this legal territorialisation was experienced on the ground. How far could local populations influence state policies? How did they couch their claims? Once again, the key question was about delineation. 184

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Winning the shore: the case of seaweed In theory, in both France and England the assertion of royal power relied on the principle of ‘absolute domaniality of the kingdom’s seashores’.1 This excluded private property, as Valin, prosecutor royal at the admiralty in La Rochelle, noted in 1760: The domain of the sea serving as limits to the coasts of a state – a domain which, according to the first principles of law, belongs to the community – in essence falls to the sovereign who embodies in his person all the rights and the interests of the community by reason of the public power that resides in him alone. On these grounds, the domain of the sea therefore belongs to him in name and as head of the nation, to the exclusion of all the individual lords who are but members of the nation. Now, if the domain of the sea belongs to him, the shoreline of the sea belongs to him also.2

Included in the domain by an ordinance of 1544, the seashore was rendered inalienable by the Ordinance of Moulins of 1566. In the ordinance of Marine of 1681, which set the law of the sea for the next century, the ‘seashore’ was akin to what today we would call the ‘foreshore’, namely, the space alternately covered and uncovered by the tide.3 By this principle of domaniality it was forbidden to build parks or fisheries on the seashore, to divert water from navigable rivers for one’s own use or to take the bounty of a shipwreck from the seashore. The principle of the domaniality of the seashore also existed in England and was asserted by the Crown at the same time as in France, in the midsixteenth century. Thus, under the reign of Philip and Mary (1554– 1558) commissions of inquiry were appointed to verify property rights over the seashore.4 Under Elizabeth (1558–1603) the principle of prima facie title was defined. It claimed for the Crown in the widest sense, not only the foreshore as between high and low water marks, but every piece of land which had at any time been subject to the flux and re-flux of the sea; and these lands, together with the foreshore, were,

1 2 3

4

A. Cabantous, Les côtes barbares: Pilleurs d’épaves et sociétés littorales en France (1680–1830) (Paris: Fayard, 1993), p. 126. Valin, quoted in ibid., p. 125. Ordonnance de la Marine du mois d’août 1681. Commentée et conférée sur les anciennes ordonnances, le droit romain, et les nouveaux règlements (Paris: Charles Osmont, 1714), vol. IV, pp. 410–11. See M.-A. Vandroy, ‘La loi et le rivage d’après l’ordonnance de 1681 et le commentaire de Valin’, in G. Le Bouëdec and F. Chappé (eds.), Représentations et images du littoral (Rennes: PUR, 1998), pp. 57–65. S.A. Moore, The History of the Foreshore and the Law Relating Thereto. With a Hitherto Unpublished Treatise by Lord Hale ‘De Jure Maris’, and Hall’s Essay on the Rights of the Crown in the Sea-Shore (London: Stevens & Haynes, 1888), p. 170.

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from the commencement of the reign of Elizabeth downwards, persistently claimed by the Crown throughout the whole kingdom.5

Simplifying the layering of rights which were exercised over the seashore over centuries turned out to be an arduous task. Several factors made this impossible in France and Britain before the nineteenth century. First, the state came up against an ‘internal’ barrier: competition among the structures of administration, each of which held some legitimacy, was a check on the assertion of royal power over the peripheries. A second series of obstacles was the reluctance of local actors – landlords, peasants, fishermen, parish communities and even agents of the state – to see their prerogatives eroded. Two conceptions of the seashore clashed in these disputes. The seashore was, to use a French word, a territoire, in other words, a space controlled by the power of the state; but it was also a terroir, or area of land delimited by the customary practices of the local populations. This is illustrated by the case of seaweed. The analogy between fisheries and agriculture was a commonplace in the eighteenth century. In a report from 1787, the generality of Rouen in Normandy expressed it in the following terms: Fishing is, if we are permitted the expression, the cultivation of the sea, as agriculture is that of the land; it perfectly bears comparison with the latter. One may compare the shipowner with the landowner, the shipowner or fishing boat master with the farmer, the sailors on the boat with the farmer’s hands.6

The list of expressions carrying the same sense is very long indeed: the ‘fruits of the sea’ to describe fish or the navy as a ‘breeding-ground’ for sailors. The similarities went well beyond mere rhetoric: the references to natural law, the use of the natural resources, the social organisation of practices and state regulations were also comparable, mutatis mutandis. Certain activities, such as harvesting kelp, resembled agriculture in practice but were organised in legal terms by the specific laws governing the seashore. Called goémon in Brittany, and vraicq in Normandy and the Channel Islands, wrack is a kind of seaweed that can be collected along the shore or picked from rocks.7 In France and in territories under English 5 6

7

Ibid., p. 171. ‘Procès-verbaux et rapports des assemblées provinciales dans les généralités de Rouen, de Caen et d’Alençon’, report from the generality of Rouen (1787), in C. Hippeau, Le gouvernement de Normandie aux XVIIe et au XVIIIe siècles. D’après la correspondance des Marquis de Beuvron et des Ducs d’Harcourt, Lieutenants Généraux et Gouverneurs de la Province, 9 vols. (Caen: Imprimerie Goussiaume de Laporte, 1863–1869), vol. V, p. 272. P. Jacquin, Le goémonier (Paris: Berger-Levrault, 1980), p. 11. See also M.-J. Desouches, ‘La récolte du goémon et l’Ordonnance de la Marine’, ABPO, 79 (1972), pp. 349–72; L. Chauris, ‘Coupeurs de goémon contre tailleurs de pierre: cas de luttes pour la possession de l’estran en Bretagne au XIXe siècle’, ABPO, 100 (1993), pp. 121–7.

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sovereignty seaweed had been used as fertiliser or fodder for hundreds of years,8 before the discovery was made at the end of the seventeenth century that it could also be used to produce soda ash, an essential component in the manufacture of glass and soap. The variety of the economic uses of this plant meant that several groups, farmers, fishermen or manufacturers competed to appropriate it. The case of seaweed illustrates how competition over access to and ownership of the produce of the sea on the seashores of the Channel interwove local, national and international issues. It was first and foremost a legal question. As Jeanette M. Neeson has pointed out in her work on the seashore as a ‘commons’, a tension can be identified between the law of treaties and courts of justice and customary law, which is sometimes written down but is based primarily on the perpetuation of practice and ritual.9 In reference to Guernsey, Neeson strikingly emphasises the prevalence of collective rituals of solidarity in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. On this island, she argues, besides the written law of treaties and courts of justice, the local practical uses of the foreshore were re-enacting customary rules and contributed to limiting conflicts for the appropriation of the foreshore.10 Indeed, though many groups (farmers, cottagers, fishermen and so on) competed with each other for use of this resource, the harvesting of wrack was structured by notions of community and reciprocity. Thus, the poor’s right to have full access to the seashore was retained, although increasingly limited. In essence, the foreshore on Guernsey remained a shared space, a ‘coastal common’ that resisted enclosure, and a space on which conflicts were limited. Those local practices of economic self-regulation were endorsed by the British monarchy.11 Thirty-one miles from Guernsey, on mainland France, wrack was also a treasure coveted by a variety of actors. At the legal level the right to collect seaweed in Normandy, assimilated to the droit de bris (wreckage right), was at first a feudal privilege. Article 194 of the Custom of Normandy (1583) stated that ‘any feudal Lord has the 8

9

10 11

On the variety of uses of wrack, see J.M. Neeson, ‘Coastal commons: custom and the use of seaweed in the British isles, c. 1700–1900’, in S. Cavaciocchi (ed.), Ricchezza del Mare, Ricchezza dal Mare (Prato: Istituto Datini, 2006), pp. 345–52. Neeson, ‘Coastal commons’; J.M. Neeson, ‘“Gathering the humid harvest of the deep”: the mid-summer cut vraic harvest in nineteenth-century Guernsey’, La Société Guernesiaise: Report and Transactions 2009, 26 (2010), pp. 521–38. Neeson borrows the categories of analysis of E.P. Thompson, Customs in Common (London: Merlin Press, 1991), ch. 2. Neeson, ‘“Gathering the humid harvest”’. J.M. Neeson, ‘Commons’ sense: the failure and success of British commons’, paper given at the ‘Property and Commons’ seminar (University Paris 13, 25 April 2013): www.mshparisnord.fr/ANR-PROPICE/25-26_avril/neeson_british-commons.pdf.

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right to seaweed, because of his fiefdom, as far as it stretches on the shore of the sea’.12 But the royal ordinance of 1681 on the Marine came to restrict seigneurial privileges by distinguishing several kinds of seaweed. First of all, the right to collect seaweed was not assimilable to the droit de bris, which allowed the appropriation of material cast up on the seashore by the sea, for instance, following a shipwreck: The right of seaweed does not extend to things found on the waves, or fished at sea, and brought to the seashores and strands, though situated in the area of fiefdoms and seigniories that have a right to seaweed, still less does it extend to fish . . . that may have been led and hunted there by the skill, industry and toil of the fishermen.13

A distinction was therefore made between fish and seaweed. The latter was subject to appropriation only when it came into contact with the land. Thus, articles devoted to wracks cut from rocks conveyed a theory of coastal territory.14 Indeed, access to this resource depended on the parish of residence, and harvesting it was reserved for parishes bordering the sea: ‘Art. I. The inhabitants of the parishes, located on the coasts of the sea, shall assemble . . . to set the days on which the cutting of the grass called wrack or vraic is to begin and end . . ., which grows at sea in the place of their territory.’ Only when it was dragged in by the waves and spread across the seashore was the seaweed available to all: ‘The inhabitants of the other parishes which do not lie immediately beside the sea, may come and take of it, namely that which the sea when rising drags with it, and pushes onto land by the incoming tide upon the strands.’15 However, this was only a right of use, not a right of property, according to the theory of the common sea which was extended to the seashore: ‘Art. IV. In common law the sea, and all that is in it, is common to all men . . .; Thus no one man may claim any property in the rocks, all the less so in those where vraic grows . . ., all the less so in this sea grass which grows on these rocks.’16 But when it was 12

13 14 15 16

‘Coutumes du Pays de Normandie’ (1583), in C. Bourdot de Richebourg, Nouveau Coutumier général ou corps des coutumes générales et particulières de France, 4 vols. (Paris: Claude Robustel, 1724), vol. IV, p. 69. Ordonnance de la Marine, vol. IX, pp. 443–4. Neeson, ‘“Gathering the humid harvest”’, p. 522. ‘De la coupe du varech, ou vraicq, sar ou goüesmon’, in Ordonnance de la Marine, vol. X, pp. 447–8. Ordonnance de la Marine, ibid., pp. 449–50. The language of natural law was used by David Hoüard (1725–1802) to defend the Ordonnance de 1681 against customs (coutume): ‘Cette décision a pour objet l’avantage général des récoltes. Il eut été contre toutes les lois de l’humanité de priver tout un pays, pour faire le bien-être d’un seul, d’une plante que la mer prend soin de cultiver, et qu’elle procure à tous également’: D. Hoüard, Dictionnaire analytique, historique, étymologique, critique et interprétatif de la Coutume de Normandie (Rouen: Le Boucher jeune, 1780–1783), p. 432.

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harvested, like crops in a field, this plant was well and truly the entitlement of the inhabitants and not of forains (outsiders to the parish).17 The territory of reference for all coastal economic activities was the parish. The concept here was very close to that of terroir, with which it shared an etymology. In fact this semantic ambiguity lasted throughout the eighteenth century, as in Féraud’s Dictionnaire critique de la langue française, published in 1788, which classed the two terms under the same entry: ‘Territoire, s.m. Terroir, s.m. Terroir is said of the land inasmuch as it produces fruits; and territoire, when it concerns jurisdiction.’18 In practice, the ordinance of 1681 was difficult to implement. The guerre des algues (war of the weeds), according to Philippe Jacquin’s expression, raged throughout the eighteenth century between landlords who refused to renounce their ancient right and coastal populations; kelp burners, who used the ash to produce soda; farmers, who made fertiliser from it; and fishermen, who saw that seaweed was a source of protein.19 As the overexploitation of seaweed was blamed for the scarcity of fish along the Normandy and Brittany coasts, the monarchy therefore attempted, in 1731, to limit the times of harvest by ‘reconciling the conservation of the fish brood . . . with the need that the people might have for these grasses’.20 For the admiralty of Cherbourg, the ordinance divided the seaweed between those who wished to use it ‘for fertilizing their lands’ and those who wished to use it ‘to make soda ash’.21 Several articles divided the right to harvest between coastal parishes over a limited thirty-day period chosen by the community somewhere between February and March. Only the inhabitants of the parishes mentioned in the law had the right to harvest the seaweed growing ‘on the coasts of their territory’.22 The ban on landlords appropriating the rocks or the coasts where seaweed grew, already formulated in 1681, was reiterated, which suggests that this measure had not been implemented.23 Similarly, the wrack that drifted along the shore was free ‘to all persons . . ., at all times and in all places’, while the harvesting of seaweed growing ‘on deserted islands and rocks in mid-ocean’ was likewise permitted to all 17 18 19

20

21 22

Ordonnance de la Marine, vol. X, p. 449. J.-F. Féraud, Dictionnaire critique de la langue française, 3 vols. (Marseille: Jean Mossy père et fils, 1788), vol. III, n.p. P. Jacquin, ‘La guerre des algues: contestations et affrontements pour le partage de l’estran dans la France de l’Ouest (XVIIIe–XIXe siècles)’, in Le Bouëdec and Chappé (eds.), Représentations et images, pp. 617–22; Jacquin, Goémonier, p. 24 sq. Déclaration du Roy, Au sujet des Herbes de Mer, connues sous les noms de Varech ou Vraicq, Sar ou Goüesmon, sur les Costes des Provinces de Flandre, pays conquis & reconquis, Boulonnois, Picardie & Normandie (Versailles, 30 May 1731), p. 2, BNF, F–23624(48). Ibid., vol. I. The former could choose thirty days between March and April; the latter were free to do the same between 15 July and the end of September. Ibid., p. 7. 23 Ibid.

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comers.24 The legal status of the sea and that of the seashore therefore remained distinct. It should also be noted that this royal legislation only confirmed the traditional customary management of the resource by the inhabitants of the coastlines.25 Land pressure exerted in some of these parishes for access to the same resource accounted for the intensity of local conflicts that lasted well into the nineteenth century. Norman cahiers de doléances often expressed the unhappiness of non-coastal communities with the privilege of harvesting. These claims were expressed in the language of natural law, as in the cahier of Saint-Sauveur-le-Vicomte: The sea is common to everyone; and so everyone has the right to take what it delivers up in order to fertilize their land. Yet the parishes immediately bordering the sea claim to have the exclusive right to take seaweed from it or to harvest it three days before the other more remote parishes; the Third Estate calls for this claim, which is the cause of brawls and trials, to be outlawed as sovereignly unjust.26

Because of the plurality of actors involved in seaweed harvesting, there are several ways of interpreting the struggles that took shape around it along the Normandy coast. The first relates to the scientific controversy about the danger of the fumes produced by the burning of soda ash. This provoked tension between the monarchy and the Normandy parliament.27 Turning to experts sent by the Académie des Sciences – a new practice at the time – the monarchy, by a royal declaration in 1772, put an end to the restriction on seaweed harvesting that favoured coastal parishes, and had thus far guided the use of this resource. By delegitimising the local uses of the seashore, this law opened up the harvesting of kelp to free competition, at least for a time.28 To what extent was this type of conflict specific to the coastal regions of the Channel, or comparable to other coastlines, such as the Atlantic coast of Brittany or the seashores of Scotland? In this case specific intervention of foreign actors in these conflicts brought to bear an additional element. In fact, a purely local or regional analysis of the conflicts among the 24 25 26

27 28

Ibid. J.-B. Fressoz, L’apocalypse joyeuse: Une histoire du risque technologique (Paris: Seuil, 2012), pp. 135–6. Bridrey, Cahiers de doléances, vol. III, p. 216. One finds the same request in the cahier of Saint-Malo-de-la-Lande, in the arrondissement of Coutances: M. Lantier, Doléances pour la Manche – 1789: Les cahiers de doléances du bailliage de Cotentin (Saint-Lô: CDDP de la Manche, 1989), pp. 86–7. For a similar example in the departments of northern Brittany, see Jacquin, Goémonier, pp. 31–2. Fressoz, Apocalypse, pp. 133–40; G. Denis, ‘Une controverse sur la soude’, in J. Theys, La terre outragée, les experts sont formels (Paris: Autrement, 1992). Fressoz, Apocalypse, pp. 139–40.

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various Norman interest groups would risk overlooking important agents in this competition, namely, the British. In this economic struggle, where access to this natural resource was the main thing at stake, highlighting one’s local affiliations was a way to legitimise the justice of one’s claims against competitors near and far. In Normandy a circumstantial alliance was thus forged between English soda ash producers and Norman glassworkers, who tried to play on the dissensions between the latter and French soda ash producers in order to bring down entry duties on this product. In 1732 a request was submitted to the Conseil d’État by the Normans, calling for the removal of a duty of three per cent, established in 1718, on seaweed ash from England.29 The debate can be followed in the correspondence between the Conseil d’État and the intendants of Rouen and Caen, who were asked to report on the matter. An inquiry was diligently conducted in the province of Normandy in order to find out how much seaweed ash was being produced by the parishes in different généralités and whether it was advisable to lower the entry duty or not. Garville, the intendant of Rouen, and his counterpart in Caen, Vastan, consulted each other about adopting a common position. Whereas Garville took advice from the city’s master glassmakers, who were defenders of English soda ash imports, Vastan listened to the ‘merchant traders of Cherbourg and others conversant with this matter’, who produced the – seaweed ash.30 The intendants’ conclusions coincided: the parishes of Lower Normandy produced enough soda ash for the whole of the province and even, if need be, for the entire kingdom. If the master glassworkers denied this, it was out of ‘special interest’, because they preferred English soda ash, ‘which they believe to be purer and better’.31 A dissertation, undated and anonymous but very probably drafted jointly by the two intendants, was sent to the Conseil d’Etat asking for the duty to be maintained or increased. Its preamble refers to collusion between French manufacturers and their counterparts on the other side of the Channel: ‘The English, always highly mindful of increasing their trade by diminishing that of their neighbours, have hitherto made several attempts, either on their own initiative or through their factors, and perhaps having a secret understanding with the glassmakers, to deprive us of that [the trade of] of the seaweed ash which is used in the making of glass.’32

29 30 31 32

Arrêt du Conseil d’État qui fixe les droits d’entrée sur les cendres de varech venant d’Angleterre (Paris: Imprimerie Royale, 1718). Vastan to Garville, Caen, 27 April 1732, ADSM, C177, n.f. Garville to Reveille, Conseiller d’État, 30 April 1732, ADSM, C177, n.f. ‘Mémoire’, ADSM, C177, n.d., n.f.

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Economic patriotism was a classic rhetorical weapon, the use of which was hardly surprising in the early 1730s, when diplomatic tensions between the two states had resurfaced after a long lull. The selfishness of manufacturers was also a commonplace, found in many other contexts.33 Using the language of patriotism was a way to mask the economic tensions which pitted coastal communities against each other: ‘It would be inhuman to deprive the peoples of the said coasts of the sole assistance that providence has granted nature to give them in spite of the harshness of the element that produces it, in order to favour the English, who rigorously make us pay extravagant duties on the goods we carry to them.’34 The tax was therefore maintained, and eventually all importation of foreign seaweed was banned – by a ruling [arrêt] of 30 September 1743. It was only subsequently restored for a brief period.35 During the French Revolution the executive of the Seine-Inférieure department used identical terms to denounce the behaviour of English glassmakers, who ‘have at all times worked to remove from France this branch of commerce’.36 While this reference to unfair competition from England certainly was based on real facts, it also served a domestic purpose. The use of this rhetoric was not peculiar to the seashore of the Channel, but its spatial dimension was: competition with the English was also a problem of ‘land’ ownership. Territorial sea or common sea: the impossible demarcation of fishing zones Fishing disputes broke out throughout the eighteenth century as French fishermen scoured the English coasts, and vice versa. The problem posed by these incidents was not the compatibility of various local rights with monarchical legislation, but potential conflicts between national legal systems. How did the relationship between municipal rights and the law of nations develop over the course of the eighteenth century? How did the concept of territorial waters emerge in local legal practices? And lastly, 33

34 35

36

See on British manufacturers from the 1780s onwards: D.C. Coleman, ‘Adam Smith, businessmen, and the mercantile system in England’, HEI, 9 (1988), pp. 161–70; J. Raven, Judging New Weath: Popular Publishing and Responses to Commerce in England 1750–1800 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992), pp. 4–5, p. 7. ‘Mémoire’, ADSM, C177, n.d., n.f. Arrêt du Conseil d’État du Roi, Qui révoque l’arrêt du Conseil du 30 août 1718 et . . . fait défenses à tous négociants et autres de faire venir de l’étranger dans le royaume, du salicor ou cendres de varech (30 September 1743), BNF : F–23660(315). Petition to ‘Messieurs les Administrateurs composants le Directeur de Département de la Seine-Inférieure’ [sic], ADSM, L332, fo. 68, n.d.

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how did these practices influence legal norms devised by the states? The question could indeed be asked whether the geopolitical significance of fisheries fundamentally altered the nature of the disputes between the economic actors, or whether these reproduce the same logics found in struggles over the seashore. The latter hypothesis would confirm that the sea was undergoing state territorialisation. We must then ask ourselves where and when these different kinds of incidents occurred, according to the accounts of the various protagonists involved. The location of the dispute was not trivial, since it determined the kind of support granted by the state to its subjects as with smuggling, setting a legal boundary was always the outcome of a power struggle between various actors. According to one anonymous eighteenth-century author, what he called ‘sedentary’ fish,37 like shellfish or river fish, were prone to overexploitation and had to be given the administration’s undivided attention. However, the author remarked, it was not appropriate to take measures to safeguard what he called ‘travelling fish’ [poissons de passage], such as herring or mackerel, since there was an inexhaustible supply of them, and, above all, they were politically important: Because they are widespread in the vast expanse of the seas, no particular authority may act thereon, and because they are of as much interest to the other nations as to our own. Yet their significance is considerable for trade and policy. All the maritime nations of Europe regard the fruit of this fishing as one of the most advantageous products of their industry, and the men employed therein as the base and foundation of their strength and power.38

Anglo-French fishing disputes must therefore be interpreted in relation to these two issues, at the junction of economics and politics. French fishermen on English coasts There are innumerable documents that recount fishing incidents; I have chosen to focus only on cases reaching the central administrations of states, so as to see how the different categories of actors tried to influence state policy and whether their claims affected the attitudes of governments. Additionally, my survey focuses on the first half of the century – 97 of 135 cases (71%) are pre-1750 – when the framework and rules of these disputes were defined. These represent a total of 135 disputes involving French and/or English fishermen drawn from three main areas: diplomatic archives (SP78 Series, National Archives, Kew) and admiralty 37 38

‘Extrait des idées, sur les opérations du comité établi pour les pêches’, n.d., AN, Marine C560, fos. 648–50. Ibid., fo. 650.

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archives on the English side, and the Marine archives (Marine B2 and B3 Series of the Archives Nationales) on the French side. Of them, seventysix took place in wartime and fifty-nine in peacetime, involving a total of 321 boats. This sample is plainly much smaller than the total number of disputes involving the fishermen of the two states in the eighteenth century. The form of the accounts varies, from fishermen’s petitions to naval officers’ reports and ambassadors’ complaints. The category of ‘disputes’, here taken broadly, includes prizes by privateers, thefts of nets or catches and ill treatment by customs. During wartime most incidents concerned cases of prizes made of fishing boats by privateers. Whether the witnesses were French or English, the distance from the coast was mentioned in less than a third of these incidents (twenty-two out of seventy-six) and was almost always specified numerically (with just three exceptions). The accounts generally went as follows: ‘on the coast of Woäldan [Wissant] two miles from this town [Gravelines]’, ‘on the coast of Rye’, or ‘on the Lower Normandy coast’.39 The writers of these complaints, whether they were Admiralty judges, ambassadors or ship’s captains, were probably familiar with the law of prizes. If we follow this interpretation, the fuzziness of the terminology used would be explained by the fact that in both states letters of marque and reprisal generally authorised privateers to seize enemy boats anywhere at sea. In France, in spite of the modifications to the law of prizes at the time of the Revolution, the same principle was upheld throughout the eighteenth century.40 British laws contained the same clauses, privateers being authorised to attack enemy ships ‘on all seas, bays, ports or rivers’.41 The problem was different in peacetime, when most incidents pitted French and English fishermen against each other, and the seafaring populations ran the risk of getting in the way of state diplomacy. The frequency of the disputes followed the tides of Anglo-French diplomatic relations. If we look at the period covered by the Anglo-French ‘alliance’ initiated by Fleury and Stanhope between the years 1713 and 1739, numbers are trivial: a total of just eight incidents. From the moment 39

40

41

M. de Chateauneuf to M. du Guay, 8 April 1708, AN, Marine B3154, fo. 192; Pigault to Anon., 9 April 1708, An, Marine B3154, fo. 195v; Maurepas to Van Hoey, 28 April 1746, Tna, SP78/230, fo. 488. P. Villiers, Les corsaires du littoral: Dunkerque, Calais, Boulogne, de Philippe II à Louis XIV (1568–1713) (Presses Universitaires du Septentrion: Villeneuve-d’Ascq, 2000); F. Le Guellaff, Armement en course et droit des prises maritimes, 1792–1856 (Presses Universitaires de Nancy, 1999). K. Von Martens, Essai concernant les armateurs, les prises et sur tout les reprises: d’après les loix, et les usages des puissances maritimes de l’Europe (Gottingen: J.C. Dieterich, 1795), pp. 64–5.

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relations between the two states became strained, at the beginning of the 1730s, the number of incidents grew, with thirty-two clashes listed between 1734 and 1743. If this difference in hard numbers should not be overestimated, these questions clearly took on increasing importance in a period of international tensions. Just before the War of the Austrian Succession Hervé, commissaire des classes (the official in charge of recruiting seamen for the French navy) in Dieppe, analysed the factors which sparked these disputes as follows: Our Dieppe fishermen exercising the freedom they have always had in the practice of their fishing, when they are at sea, seek the deeps where the fish are more abundant, and spread their nets there; these deeps are almost always found off the coasts of England and Ireland . . .; the English and Irish fishermen and shoredwellers are upset to see ours making catches that are sometimes extremely abundant so close to their coasts and thereby removing from their sight a fish that they regard as a commodity that they believe belongs to them [sic].42

The economic and political issues involved in these disputes were thus closely linked. The incidents can be explained by competition for access to the same resource in a limited space: by analogy with landownership, we might speak of a ‘seaownership’ problem. As Hervé noted, except in exceptional circumstances, states always defended their fishermen. And it is true that fish were more abundant along the English coasts than on the French side of the Channel. The migration of mackerel and herring shoals began in the summer in the North Sea before skirting the coasts of the Dover Strait and Normandy in the autumn, and reaching Lower Normandy in the winter.43 Hundreds of boats from Calais, Boulogne or Dunkirk would thus appear on the south and east coasts of England, where the bulk of disputes occurred for most of the eighteenth century: forty-seven incidents out of fifty-nine (80%) in our sample took place on the English side of the Channel.44 In the years 1730–1735, when the disputes were most numerous, there were no herring off the coast of Normandy, but abundant supplies off the English and Dutch coastlines, as the mayors and aldermen of Dieppe explained in April 1744 to the comte de Maurepas, secretary of state for the Marine: ‘There is virtually no fish to be found before the mid-Channel or the coast of England, the coast of France produces none, and this has always been the case.’45 This uneven 42 43 44 45

Letter to Maurepas, 16 July 1739, AN, Marine B3390, fo. 375–v. Baron Pichon, De la pêche côtière dans la Manche, spécialement de la pêche du hareng: Par le Baron Pichon, Conseiller d’Etat (Paris: Dentu, 1831), p. 8. Seven disputes took place on the French side, as well as four in the high sea or in zones not specified in the sources. AN, Marine B3428, fo. 301.

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distribution of fishing resources thus added to the diplomatic tensions just mentioned. Furthermore, national regulations could be laden with consequences at the international level. One of the reasons for the English fishermen’s discontent was the French use of ‘dredges’, large dragnets that scraped the seabed, captured small fish and ultimately depleted fish stocks. After the royal ordinance of 1726 the use of such equipment was banned on the French coasts, but nothing prevented the French, who were not subject to English regulations, from using them on the south coast of England. Conversely, at the end of the eighteenth century the same criticism was levelled by the French at English oyster fishermen going to the Bay of Cancale and dredging the seabed with nets that were banned in France.46 The same logic underlay the conflict on the foreshore and at sea between fishermen belonging to different states: some wanted to claim a monopoly on a natural resource, while others demanded free access. Customs and boundaries Once fishing disputes moved up diplomatic channels all the way to London or Paris, the right of French fishermen to sail so close to the English coasts was raised. Accounts of incidents, from both sides, indicate often with great precision the location of the French boat. In forty-seven cases involving French fishing boats on the English coast the place of the incident is stated in 80% of cases (thirty-eight out of forty-seven), with the numerical distance provided for one case in three (fifteen out of forty-seven). This difference from wartime has to be explained. The distance from the coast also varied according to whether the speaker was French or English. French fishermen or diplomats (twentyfive accounts) had two options. In half the cases they remained vague as to the distance from the land, using expressions such as ‘drifting along the coast of England’, or ‘level with Hÿde [Hythe in Kent]’.47 In the other twelve cases a distance in miles or leagues was mentioned (Table 5.1), which was almost always more than one league (three miles) from the English coast. Conversely, English fishing captains and customs coastguards (thirteen accounts) located incidents within an English jurisdiction or used 46 47

See Chapter 6 infra. ‘Déclaration des maîtres pêcheurs du port de Boulogne qui ont été pillés et causé perte par les gardes-côtes, pêcheurs, et chaloupes anglaises le long de la côte d’Angleterre’: declaration of François Bihé, attacked during the night of 28 to 29 July 1734, enclosed in Disque’s letter, Boulogne, 5 July 1737, AN, Marine B3380, fo. 35v; declaration of Nicolas Bourgain, attacked in July 1736, AN, Marine B3380, fo. 36.

Table 5.1 Locations of fishing incidents according to the French Date of No. incident

Fishing vessel’s port of origin

1

8 May 1718

St Valéry en Caux

2

8 May 1718

St Valéry en Caux

3

18 July 1727

Dieppe

4

29 May 1737 Dieppe (Le Polet)

5

29 May 1737 Dieppe (Le Polet)

‘2 leagues from the coast of England’

Jean Baptiste Sovestre

6

7 May 1737

‘3 miles from the coast of England’

Nicolas Duquesne

7

‘half a league off Folkestone’

Jacques Charles

8

17 August 1737 25 May 1739 Dieppe

Laurent Haugais

9

26 May 1739 Dieppe

‘approximately one ground league of the coast of England opposite the port of Dover’ ‘close by the Isle of Wight a rifle-shot from land’

Dieppe (Le Polet) Boulogne

Location of dispute

Captain’s name

Type of dispute

Source

‘lying perpendicular to the port of Bristanton [Brighton] being at more than one league at sea’ ‘the crossing of the port of Choran [Shoreham-by-Sea] at more than one league at sea’ ‘a short league from Asting [Hastings] on the English coast’ ‘2 leagues from the coast of England’

Stalin

Theft of catch + acts of violence

AN, Marine B3249

Billart

Theft of catch + acts of violence

B3249

Unknown

Fishing disputes with Hastings fishermen Theft of catch by two Hastings customs boats Theft of catch by two Hastings customs boats Theft of catch by coastguards Nets stolen by Folkestone fisherman Theft of catch and nets

B3313, 364

Fired upon and rope stolen

B3390, v°372

Jean Teste

Thomas Grange Jnr.

B3380, 206; SP78/ 215, 74, 213. B3380, 206; SP78/ 215, 74, 213. B3380, 206; SP78/ 215, 74, 213 B3380, p. 37 B3390, fo. 371 v

Table 5.1 (cont.) Date of No. incident

Fishing vessel’s port of origin

10

[26] May 1739

11

12

Location of dispute

Captain’s name

Type of dispute

Source

Dieppe

‘within ten leagues of the coast of Ireland’

Arrested by Kinsale customs

TNA, SP78/220

5 September 1766

Calais

’2 miles off the port of Dover’

Unknown, ship owner Nicolas Vasse François Beaugrand

SP78/271, p. 29

9 June 1767

Boulogne

‘two leagues at sea or thereabouts from the coast of England between Finche and Brinquat’

Attack by Dover customs, fish and nets theft and ill-treatment Attack by Dover customs

Jean Pierre Huret

SP78/273, pp. 5, 7

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expressions which denoted state sovereignty, such as ‘off the coast of England’. When a precise distance appeared, it was always within the one marine league boundary (Table 5.2). How to explain this numerical consistency when there was no AngloFrench treaty demarcating fishing zones in the Channel? The speakers may all have been referring to the theoretical boundary which began to be enforced in the eighteenth century: that of territorial waters. On both sides of the Channel, one nautical league from the coast seems to have been considered the space over which the state exercised its sovereignty. On the one hand, the coastguards of the British customs were not entitled to apprehend fishermen unless they were suspected of smuggling within a certain area: this is how they justified their actions. On the other hand, French fishermen claimed to be fishing more than one mile from the English coasts, hence in a neutral area. We therefore see the same pattern as in customs disputes: all the actors made their versions of events coincide with the limit that would enlist state support. The way these incidents were reported in diplomatic correspondence shows that this assimilation of fishing and customs boundaries or territorial waters remained problematic for states. Diplomats in Britain were prisoners of the principle of sovereignty of the seas, which limited the range of arguments at their disposal. In the 1730s, for example, incidents multiplied close to the English coast, involving mackerel fishing boats, from Cornwall to Sussex. The town corporation of Hastings gave the following explanation to the duke of Newcastle, secretary of state for the southern department: There . . . almost daily are, upwards of thirty large fishing vessels, belonging to Dieppe and Polet, in the Bay of Hastings, very near the town, which shoot their nets in the stream of our fishing vessels near the shore, almost every night, and that, as they are much stronger than our vessels, the fishermen of Hastings are obliged to be patient under their loss; and that, as this practice increases, it will tend to the ruin of our fishery there.48

Waldegrave, Britain’s ambassador in France, was given instructions to protest against such behaviour: ‘the French fishing vessels may be enjoined to fish at a greater distance from the English coast, and give no disturbance, or obstruction to our fishermen’.49 This haziness over distances was no accident. Britain’s official stance indeed barely varied over the century and remained faithful to Selden’s thinking about the English sovereignty over the Channel. The same principles were asserted in the 48 49

The duke of Newcastle reported this speech in a letter to Waldegrave, 9 August 1737, TNA, SP78/215, fos. 213–14. Ibid., fo. 214.

Table 5.2 Locations of fishing incidents according to the English No. Date

Fishing vessel’s port of origin

1

30 June 1737 Dieppe

2

1739

Dieppe

3

8 June 1766

Boulogne

4

September 1802

Boulogne

Location of dispute

Author of report

Type of dispute

Source

‘within half a mile of the shore’, ‘two miles east of Hastings’ ‘even in the harbours, coves, and beaches less than half a league and often a quarter of a land league’ between Dungerness and Dover, ‘a mile or thereabout from the English shore’ ‘within a hundred yards of Dungeness Beach towards which she was standing and not pursuing his voyage to Dover’

Mayor and corporation of Fish and nets theft Hastings in Sussex Earl of Waldegrave, Abusive fishing British ambassador in Paris

TNA, SP78/215, fo. 213 v SP78/220, fo. 194

Seven mariners of the Seized by customs boat belonging to HMS Mecklenburg cutter Dover customs Seized by customs, accused of smuggling

SP37/22, fos. 42, 47

CUST54/15, p. 167

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orders given to Royal Navy commanders and to customs vessels, who were ‘in a friendly manner, to make known to such foreigners, that it is expected by His Majesty that they do keep at a proper distance’.50 An exact boundary would no doubt have made it possible to limit these skirmishes, but the British diplomats never proposed such a convention. We must therefore assume, as it was for customs boundaries, that the British government’s reticence over setting fishing boundaries is explained by the persistence of the legal fiction of the Channel as an English sea.51 The tension between the fishermen’s interests and the theoretical sovereignty over the Channel was resolved in favour of the latter. The directives given to the ambassador in Paris in 1771 made this clear: When you have any conversation with the Duc d’Aiguillon [minister of foreign affairs] on the subject of the French fishing boats . . . you are to insinuate, without making use of the King’s name, that the giving new orders to fish at a distance from our coasts may be a means of preventing many little altercations which may daily arise.52

The British diplomatic position was thus consistent with legal theory. For advocates of the dogma of the sovereignty of the seas, the narrow sea was included in the public domain. Sir Matthew Hale (1609–1676), then lord chief justice, expressed it in the 1670s as follows: ‘The narrow sea, adjoining to the coast of England, is part of the wast and demesnes and dominions of the king of England, whether it lie within the body of any county or not.’53 According to this logic, just like the water which flows from rivers into seas, the law of nations was merely an extension of common law. This school of thought still survived among British diplomats and jurists at the beginning of the nineteenth century.54 The best way to protect English fishing would consist in placing a legal cap on the number of French fishermen authorised to frequent the coasts of Albion, as English fishermen were vainly accustomed to demand. A 50 51

52 53

54

Copy of an order given by the lords commissioners of the admiralty to lieutenant Durell, commanding HMS Laurel cutter, 14 June 1764, TNA, SP78/261, fo. 296. The link was clearly established by J. Gander, A Vindication of a National-Fishery [. . .]. To Which Is Added, the Sovereignty of the British Seas (London, 1690), p. 94: ‘His Majesty by right of his sovereignty hath supream commands, and jurisdiction over the passage of His Seas, and fishing therein beyond all contradiction.’ Suffolk to Blanquière, 27 September 1771, TNA, SP78/283, fo. 118. A Treatise de Jure Maris et Brachiorum Ejusdem. By Lord Chief-Justice Hale [n.d.], reprinted in Moore, History of the Foreshore, p. 376. This book was published after 1670, since Hale became lord chief justice from 1671 until his death in 1676. See for example R.G. Hall, Essay on the rights of the Crown and the Privileges of the Subject in the Sea-Shores of the Realm, 3rd edn (1875) (1st edn: 1830), in Moore, History of the Foreshore, pp. 668–9.

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petition sent to the General Brotherhood of the Cinque Ports in 1726 thus regretted: ‘The Lord Warden used to limit the number of French boats fishing on the coast, but now there are no limits set by the Lord Warden.’55 The same accusation was repeated in 1750 and 1771.56 The point of reference was implicitly the beginning of the seventeenth century, when this magistrate could issue fishing permits ‘to a limited number of French fishermen chiefly of Dieppe and Treport, for the ostensible purpose of supplying the king of France’s table with fresh fish, and especially soles . . . The liberty of fishing was granted for a definite area or bank, called the Zowe or Sowe, off Rye and well out in the Channel.’57 This kind of measure vanished from the moment France officially rejected the English claim to sovereignty of the seas. It was certainly in reference to fishing permits that, in 1745, as war was raging, the marquis de Livry, Louis XV’s maître d’hôtel (chief butler), asked the Dutch ambassador in London to act as an intermediary with the British court and obtain for him twelve British passports ‘in order to supply fish from Dieppe which His Majesty eats in preference to any other’.58 The expedient chosen shows that times had changed: the navy minister, the comte de Maurepas, wrote to Livry that ‘he did not believe it was appropriate for this Court to send a formal request to the Court of Great Britain to the above-mentioned effect’.59 Since the negotiation of a boundary convention, which would have been another way of preventing these disputes, was undesirable for the British monarchy, there could be no clearer evidence of the clash of interest of state and fishermen. This contradiction did not exist in France, where there was an objective agreement between the monarchy and fishermen. Since the disputes occurred on the English coast, the state had no more reason than the fishermen to negotiate a boundary convention for fishing. To justify fishing off the English seashores, the French diplomats therefore conveyed the gist of the maritime communities’ arguments by resorting to another language, that of custom and tradition. In answer to the British complaints the comte de Maurepas accordingly assured their ambassador ‘that the strictest orders were always given to their [the French] people, not to go anywhere, or do anything, but what was warranted by ancient 55

56 57 58 59

‘General Brotherhood or Guestling held at New Romney on 26 July 1726’, in F. Hull (ed.), A Calendar of the White and Black Books of the Cinque Ports 1432–1955 (London: Her Majesty’s Stationery Office, 1966), p. 554. Ibid., pp. 558–9, 563. T.W. Fulton, The Sovereignty of the Sea (Edinburgh and London: William Blackwood & Sons, 1911), p. 65. ‘Mémoire de la pourvoirie du roi’, Dieppe, 2 February 1745, TNA, SP78/230, fo. 144–v. Ibid., 15 February 1745, fo. 140.

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practice and custom’.60 According to the fishermen questioned in 1739 by Hervé, the Dieppe commissioner, custom was age-old: ‘The most ancient themselves say that they have, from time immemorial, been free to practise this fishing and that of fresh fish throughout the Channel and equally on the coasts of England and Ireland or on those of France as close to land as they wished.’61 We have already come across this rhetoric in connection with the jurisdictional disputes over the seashore. But all traditions can be moulded to will,62 and the English countered that the French custom of fishing off the English coast was only recent, as in this petition of March 1739 by fishermen from Looe in Cornwall: That there has of late been a great scarcity of fish to the loss of the poor petitioners, which they have reason to think is occasioned by French fishing vessels by the Cornish coast – that the said French fishing vessels, about twenty in number, and about thirty and forty tons, supposed to belong to Dieppe, have for three years last past, during the winter months, made it their business to fish with nets in the sandy grounds in the Bay, between Stark-Point and Dudman Point, frequently within half a league from the shore.63

Apart from the use of the traditional rhetoric of overexploitation already encountered with regard to the seashore, Hervé’s investigation reveals the frequent ignorance of administrators of the laws governing fishing on the open sea. Thus, it is from the fishermen themselves that the state learnt about customs. More surprisingly, when these populations referred to the existence of a fishing treaty between France and Britain, they were taken very seriously by diplomats. Yet no such convention had ever been concluded for the Channel in the eighteenth century. In search of a fishing treaty In May 1739 a Dieppe fisherman complained about being seized by the customs of Kinsale in Ireland; he claimed ‘that he had been fishing less than ten miles off coast and that that was forbidden’.64 The French minister for foreign affairs Amelot de Chaillou then conveyed the 60 61 62 63

64

Waldegrave to Newcastle, 2 July 1738, TNA, SP78/218, fo. 249–v. Letter to Maurepas, 16 July 1739, AN, B3390, fo. 374. See E. Hobsbawn and T. Ranger (eds.), The Invention of Tradition (Cambridge University Press, 1992). ‘The petition of the fish-curers, fishermen, and labourers in the fishery, whose names are hereunto subscribed, within the Burroughs of East-Looe and West-Looe, and the fishingCreek of Polperro, in the County of Cornwall, in behalf of themselves and several others. Recd 29 March 1739’, sent to the duke of Newcastle, TNA, SP36/47, fo. 171. Memorandum included in Amelot to Waldegrave, 26 May 1739, TNA, SP78/220, fo. 192.

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complaint to his British counterparts. Without once questioning the fisherman’s word, Amelot ‘required satisfaction for this infringement of treaties, which authorized, he claimed, fishing everywhere on our mutual coasts’.65 The British ambassador in France subsequently reported the ensuing conversation: ‘I could hardly imagine our people would take any of their ships for fishing at ten leagues distance from our shore, neither did I know of any treaty that allowed them freedom to fish where they pleased upon our coast. He could not specify the article nor the treaty, by which this supposed usage was established.’66 Real or affected, the uncertainty about the existence of a treaty prevailed at all levels of French administration, from diplomats to officers of the classes administration in the ports. Evoking the Kinsale affair to defend the Dieppe fishermen, Hervé wondered whether Anglo-French treaties demarcated fishing areas. To find out, he did not speak to the secretary of state for the Marine, nor to his counterpart in Affaires Etrangères – but directly to the main protagonists: I have enquired on this occasion of the fishing captains and tradesmen of this town whether the Peace Treaties that have been made between France and England regulated distances and set fishing limits for the two nations . . ., but neither could give me any confirmation about this matter, the captains told me only that if they had known that there were clearly-marked distances, they would not have risked losing their nets and their ropes.67

This comment is crucial. The absence of boundaries was the trump card of the French fishermen, who wanted to fish wherever it suited them. They also talked things over with Hervé, who carried out fresh enquiries at Maurepas’s behest in July: I have also consulted all these gentlemen and several merchants in this town about the distances it would be advisable to set. The majority assure me that no distance can be set for the fishing they practise without losing their trade, and that Dieppe’s trade would collapse entirely if the fishermen were to have the freedom they have enjoyed until now removed.68

The absence of written law provided room for manoeuvre in the exploitation of a natural resource: at sea as well as on the seashore, the notion of commons loomed large, as in the case of the seaweed. How then can we explain that French fishermen often specified the place where the interception took place? The explanation must, no doubt, lie in their greater concern for the maximisation of their legal advantage than for 65 67 68

66 Ibid., fo. 192. Ibid., fo. 190–v. Letter to Maurepas, 21 June 1739, AN, Marine B3390, fo. 372v. Same to same, 16 July 1739, AN, Marine B3390, fos. 375–6.

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the strict coherence of their legal arguments. Whatever the case may be, the assertion of the French fishermen consolidated the official French position, as illustrated by the cardinal de Fleury’s sleight of hand as reported by Waldegrave in 1739: [Fleury] said he would be very willing to . . . come into any proper regulation for that purpose, but he had always looked upon it that usage and practice had given to the subjects of both nations a kind of mutual right to fish anywhere upon each other [sic] coasts, and cited our peoples fishing constantly without any molestation for oysters in the Bay of Boulogne, since a bank of oysters was discovered there.69

In other words, a treaty was not necessary because international customary law70 made it possible to fish anywhere in the Channel. When did these ideas begin to change? In 1760 the jurist Valin was very vague when he wrote that, according to trade and peace treaties, ‘up to the distance of two miles, . . . the sea is the domain of the sovereign of the neighbouring coast . . . But that does not prevent the domain of the sea, as regards jurisdiction and fishing, extending beyond it’.71 This blurring of fishing limits was particularly significant in the case of the Channel: their extent was never the object of consensus among seventeenth- and eighteenthcentury jurists, and no diplomatic agreement on the matter was signed before the nineteenth century. Until the end of the sixteenth century the freedom to fish was assured in many treaties between France and England without any limits being set. The first author to develop the idea of a definition of fishing zones was John Dee (1527–1609), in the 1570s.72 James I applied the principle in an ordinance of 1604 by instituting the so-called ‘King’s Chambers’ along the Scottish coast, drawing straight lines that ran from one rocky outcrop to another to prohibit foreign vessels from fishing in these areas without Crown permission. However, this decision was unilateral and was not recognised by other European states. Almost a century later, in 1689, the English diplomat and MP Philip Medows (bapt. 1626–1718), in a work influenced by John Selden, also asserted the need not to confuse the open sea and the royal domain:

69 70

71 72

Letter to Newcastle, 18 July 1739, TNA, SP78/221, vol. 3. I am aware that this term is anachronistic. See D. Armitage, ‘Parliament and international law’, in J. Hoppit (ed.), Parliaments, Nations and Identities in Britain and Ireland, 1660–1850 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2003), pp. 169–86. R.-J. Valin, Nouveau commentaire sur l’ordonnance de la marine, du mois d’août 1681 (La Rochelle: Jérôme Légier, 1760), vol. II, p. 639. John Dee published in 1577 his General and Rare Memorials Pertayning to the Perfect Arte of Navigation. See Fulton, Sovereignty of the Sea, p. 101.

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Why may not the Dutch, as formerly they have done, dredge for oysters upon the coasts in streams and waters appertaining to particular manors, by grants from the crown? Why may they not fish within the mouth of the Thames? Or within our creeks, havens, and rivers, as far as salt water flows? Or to the first bridge, if they will please to stop there? Is it reasonable, that there should be no distinction, as to fishing, betwixt Native and Alien?73

Since any demarcation on the sea was arbitrary, concluded Medows, ‘the surest way is to prescribe the limits of fishing betwixt neighbouring nations by contract, and not by the less certain measure of territory’.74 From the end of the seventeenth century onwards France and England concluded agreements over fisheries in a number of regions of the world. This was notably the case of Newfoundland in North America.75 In the Channel, however, it was only in 1839 that a convention ‘for the demarcation of fisheries on the two countries’ respective coasts’76 was concluded. A distance of three miles, which was the limit of territorial waters, was adopted as an exclusive fishing zone on either shore of the Channel.77 This treaty was the first to make the boundaries of sovereignty and economic activities coincide. But the shape of the littoral and the specific status of the Channel Islands complicated the regulation of fishing in this region. In actual fact, the convention caused a tremendous number of difficulties and was rarely respected by fishermen.78 The difficulty of harmonising municipal and international jurisdictions on fishing rights explains why it took so long to reach an agreement. In 1833 a House of Commons committee investigated the state of fisheries in ‘the British Channel’, between Yarmouth and Land’s End. In particular, it attributed the declining state of English fisheries in these areas to overfishing, due to the ‘interference of the French fishermen’.79 Among the committee’s recommendations was the need to force foreign fishermen to respect exclusive fishing limits: ‘Foreign Fishermen should be 73 74 75 76

77 78 79

P. Medows, Observations Concerning the Dominion and Sovereignty of the Seas: Being an Abstract of the Marine Affairs of England (London: Samuel Lowndes, 1689), pp. 43–4. Ibid., p. 44. See O.T. Murphy, ‘The Comte de Vergennes, the Newfoundland fisheries, and the peace negotiation of 1783: a reconsideration’, CHR, 46 (1965), pp. 32–46. ‘Convention conclue à Paris, le 2 août 1839, entre la France et la Grande Bretagne, pour la délimitation des Pêcheries sur les côtes respectives des deux pays’, in J. de Clercq, Recueil des traités de la France (1713–1802), 23 vols. (Paris: A. Durand et Pedone-Lauriel, 1880–1917), vol. IV (1831–1842), pp. 497–500. The treaty was subsequently supplemented by a ‘Règlement général sur les pêcheries entre les côtes de France et d’Angleterre’ on 24 May 1843, which listed exceptions to the necessity to respect limits: de Clercq, Recueil des traités, vol. V (1843–1849), pp. 65–78. ‘Convention’, in de Clercq, Recueil des traités, vol. IV, p. 500. Fulton, Sovereignty of the Sea, pp. 612–20. Report from the Select Committee on British Channel Fisheries; with Minutes of Evidence, and Appendix (18 August 1833), House of Commons Parliamentary Papers.

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prevented at all seasons of the year from Fishing within one league, or such other distance of the English Coast, as by the law or usage of nations is considered to belong exclusively to this country.’80 But in the absence of an international convention on fishing limits this was just wishful thinking. The committee also suggested these French fishermen should conform to English municipal laws on the preservation of brood stock and refrain from using trawling nets in the English shallow waters, a practice which was prohibited on the French coasts within three leagues of the shore for the same reason.81 However, these laws were not standardised and the distance to the coast within which fishing was authorised varied according to the type of fish, net and time of year. The lack of harmonisation of ‘national’ legal boundaries and the application of national laws to foreigners were therefore major curbs to international agreement.82

*** During the eighteenth century the legal territorialisation of the English Channel sharpened. However, this process remained incomplete because the sea could not become state territory. According to Daniel Nordman, three criteria effectively define a territory. First, a territory is ‘intellectually perceived as the precise object of an appropriation, of a domination, in whatever form or on whatever scale’.83 The theory of the sovereignty of the seas, which survived throughout the eighteenth century, made the Channel an English and then a British territory. If on the French side only a narrow band at sea was claimed as forming part of the state’s territory, English pretentions to dominium were disputed. Second, ‘unlike sheer space, a territory bears a name’.84 This was not true of the Channel either, the multiplicity of names revealing the permanence of geopolitical tensions. Third, ‘a territory has limits, visible or invisible’.85 Once again we see the fluidity of French and English frontiers at sea, which intersect without ever being aligned. Instead of a single territory, it makes more sense to think of multiple territories coexisting in the same space, depending on the type of boundary. In every case defining and setting frontiers triggered conflicts, involving both governments and peoples. At the beginning of the nineteenth century certain limits in the border zone tended to become fixed, both at 80 82

83 84

Ibid., p. 5. 81 Ibid., p. 4. R. Morieux, ‘Anglo-French fishing disputes and maritime boundaries in the North Atlantic 1700–1850’, in P. Mancall and C. Shammas (eds.), Overseas Commerce and the Governing of Maritime Space in the Early Modern Era (Los Angeles, CA: Huntingdon Library Press, 2015), pp. 41–75. D. Nordman, ‘Territoire’, in L. Bély (ed.), Dictionnaire de l’Ancien Régime (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 2002) (1st edn: 1996), p. 1204. 85 Ibid. Ibid.

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the national level (with the marking out of the seashore) and at the international level (with the signing of the first fishing treaties). But this process of territorialisation unfolded differently on the seashore, where states managed to monopolise the law, and at sea, where French and British notions of the law of the sea continued to clash. There was no authority that could resolve international maritime disputes. These developments did not necessarily come about against the will of the people, who were often consulted and actively contributed, through their practices, to the drawing up of legal norms by the states.86 The similarity of the arguments used in the disputes over appropriation on the seashore and at sea is striking. Put schematically, there were three ways of requesting the support of the state, namely by invoking the language of natural law, which revolved around the issue of the common sea, or the language of politics with its anti-foreign discourse, or the language of economics, which underlined the depletion of resources. Finally Anglo-French fishing disputes reveal a sharp contrast between the two sides of the Channel: whereas in France the state wanted to demarcate the maritime zones while the fishermen objected, it was the reverse in England. At sea as on land a tension lingered between two ways of considering the same space: as terroir or as territory. Even when local economic actors decided to exploit the boundaries set by states, these were still the ones that set the rules of the game. Always disputed in practice, the ideology of the border gradually imposed itself on the populations. It remains to be seen whether drawing lines in the sea had the same impact on all economic activities. After looking at the abstract space of charts and dictionaries, and the political and legal space negotiated during the disputes between states and their subjects, we can now turn our attention to space as it was experienced: geography as a ‘spontaneous activity’.87

86

87

Instead of opposing norms to practices, it is possible to choose a different explanatory model, which emphasises the juridical competences of actors, who are not simply responding to pre-existing and exterior norms: see S. Cerutti, ‘Normes et pratiques, ou de la légitimité de leur opposition’, in B. Lepetit (ed.), Les formes de l’expérience: Une autre histoire sociale (Paris: Albin Michel, 1995), pp. 127–45; Id., ‘Processus et expérience: Individus, groupes et identités à Turin au XVIIe siècle’, in J. Revel (dir.), Jeux d’échelles: La micro-analyse à l’experience (Paris: Editions de l’EHESS, 1996), pp. 161–85. D. Retaillé, Le monde du géographe (Paris: Presses de Sciences Po, 1997), p. 55.

Part III

Transgressing the border

6

The fisherman ‘Friend of all nations’?

The impact of war on the activity of maritime populations was in most ways disastrous. Victims of the depredations of privateers or navies, forcibly recruited into the classes or impressed, fishermen constituted a significant proportion of prisoners of war on both sides.1 Losses were considerable, and some ports, repeatedly drawn into these conflicts, even went as far as to abandon fishing in the eighteenth century.2 Still, it is important to avoid reproducing the discourse used by fishermen about themselves: they were not always passive victims. The previous chapters showed how in peacetime they manipulated the juridical limits defined by the states. But in wartime, did they retain room for manoeuvre? Did they manage to continue their activity, or did they have to adopt another, just like privateers who also smuggled? What were the political repercussions of naval war on coastal populations? Contacts between the fishermen of northern France and southern England, which were very frequent in peacetime, were not totally severed by war, and were far from always being unfriendly. Indeed, during all the Anglo-French conflicts of the eighteenth century the fishing communities tried to pursue their activities by initiating truces with their counterparts. Even if these truces rarely lasted more than a few months, their very existence allows one to qualify the idea that war affects all communities in the same way: it was always feasible and conceivable, in spite of the violence of conflicts and the scale of the propaganda, to remain neutral. Moreover, these agreements did in fact survive from one conflict to another and were generally negotiated on the initiative of local people. Their most unusual characteristic was that they were directly negotiated between municipalities or interest groups from both sides of the Channel, 1 2

A. Cabantous, Dix-mille marins face à l’Océan (Paris: Publisud, 1991), pp. 161–206. Such was the case of Saint-Valéry-sur-Somme: Cabantous, Dix-mille marins, p. 101. In Dieppe, according to a petition by the aldermen and inhabitants of the town, for the 80 to 90 boats that fished herring and salted mackerel in April 1744, there were no more than 40 to 50 four years later. The town had lost ‘3,000 sailors, most of them having died in the warships, in privateering and in the prisons of England’: AN, Marine C560, fos. 454–454v.

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and thus short-circuited official diplomacy. The workings of this parallel diplomacy, through the activation of informal networks consolidated in peacetime, allow us to see how, on the ground, local populations could reach governmental authorities and affect official decision-making processes. This cross-Channel dialogue between local actors whose economic interests did not always coincide with the states’ geostrategic choices also provides a way of reinterpreting fishing disputes, which multiplied in peacetime. First, fishing truces demonstrate the ways in which ordinary people in France and England intervened in international politics, which was not only the business of diplomats but also that of non-institutional players. This cross-Channel cooperation illustrates how these matters were handled within two different governmental systems, at various institutional levels. However, just as these international economic alliances were not constrained by state boundaries, conflicts of interests could also cut across national ties, setting fishermen of the same country against each other. In other words, internal differences in the borderland were sometimes as great as differences across the border. The confrontation between discourses about fishermen and fishermen’s own practices therefore enables us to question how far the model proposed by Peter Sahlins for the Pyrenees can be extended to the Channel. Sahlins showed that local conflicts over agricultural or pastoral issues between French and Spanish inhabitants of the Cerdanya increasingly came to be interpreted in national terms, which contributed to fixing the modern idea of the nation in the minds of local actors.3 But the problem can be turned around: if the relations between French and English fishermen were rarely expressed in terms of national rivalry, doesn’t this call into question the existence of an international frontier? Fishing truces The first conventions to guarantee the right of fishermen of both sides of the Channel to carry on their trade unharassed by men-of-war and privateers date back to the end of the Middle Ages. In 1403, Henry IV of England and Charles VI of France signed the first treaty of this kind, for fresh herring 3

P. Sahlins, Boundaries: The Making of France and Spain in the Pyrenees (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989), pp. 155–64. Feelings of national belonging were very slow to take root: see, in particular, E. Weber, Peasants into Frenchmen: The Modernization of Rural France 1870–1914 (Stanford University Press, 1977). Local horizons were still prevalent at the end of the nineteenth century, and were mobilised in the construction of the French nation: see, for example, J.-F. Chanet, L’école républicaine et les petites patries (Paris: Aubier, 1996).

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fished in the Channel.4 Other treaties adopted during the Hundred Years War granted the freedom to fish off British coasts.5 In France an edict of February 1543 still mentioned the status of exemption enjoyed by fishermen in wartime, in the context of ‘fishing truces’ granted to ‘enemies and their subjects’ who were offered safe-conducts.6 According to most history books, these treaties were no longer negotiated from the eighteenth century onwards due to the growing hostility between France and England. The idea that entire groups were somehow exempted from the rivalry between the two states does not fit well with the common assumption that the century faced the second Hundred Years War. Thus, historian A.R. Mitchell considers that from the end of the seventeenth century, ‘despite requests from fishing ports in England and on the continent, no official truces were ever negotiated, though simple bilateral truces such as those between Dover and Calais during the 1690s were not unknown. With increasing English belligerence this system seems to have finally died out during the later seventeenth century’.7 The erasure of these fishing truces from collective memory had already begun in the eighteenth century, as is evident from the writings of the jurist Valin in 1760: These ‘fishing treaties’, even for the daily catch of fresh fish, have hardly been observed anymore since the end of the last century; and that on account of the disloyalty of our enemies who, taking advantage of the good faith with which France has always honoured these treaties, would habitually capture our fishermen while theirs fished in total safety. The injustice of such conduct finally obliged Louis XIV to abandon these treaties that were always disadvantageous to the French.8 4

5 6

7

8

This law is reproduced in full in N. de la Morinière, Histoire générale des pêches anciennes et modernes dans les mers et les fleuves des deux continents, 2 vols. (Paris: Imprimerie Royale, 1815), vol. I, pp. 404–6. See also the safe-conduct granted to French fishermen in 1460 by the king of England, reproduced in M. Mollat, ‘La pêche à Dieppe au XVe siècle’, in Etudes d’histoire maritime (1938–1975) (Turin: Bottega d’Erasmo, 1977), pp. 38–9. On this issue, see M. Kowaleski, ‘The commercialization of the sea fisheries in medieval England and Wales’, IJMH, 15 (2003), pp. 195–6. T.W. Fulton, The Sovereignty of the Sea (Edinburgh and London: William Blackwood & Sons, 1911), pp. 72–5. ‘Édit sur l’amirauté, la juridiction de l’amiral, le guet de la mer, la course maritime, la manière de traiter les prisonniers, etc.’ (1543), art. 49–50, in Isambert, Jourdan and Decrusy (eds.), Recueil général des anciennes lois françaises, depuis l’an 420 jusqu’à la Révolution de 1789, 29 vols. (Paris: Plon, 1821–1833), vol. XII, p. 867. A new edict, of March 1584, applied the same principles anew: ‘Édit sur la juridiction de l’amiral, le droit de prises, la pêche du hareng, l’entretien des navires, etc.’, art. 79, in ibid., vol. XIV, p. 582. ‘The European fisheries in early modern history’, in E.E. Rich and C.H. Wilson (eds.), The Cambridge Economic History of Europe, 1st edn, 8 vols. (Cambridge University Press, 1966–1989), vol. V (1987), p. 182. R.-J. Valin, Nouveau commentaire sur l’ordonnance de la marine, du mois d’août 1681 (La Rochelle: Jérôme Légier, 1760), vol. II, p. 640. Florence Le Guellaff takes at face value

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The main problem posed by such assertions is to ascertain the accuracy of the jurists’ opinions. By using sources other than law compendia and by adopting a comparative approach, this chronology can be completely revised. As has been noted, such truces were regularly being negotiated, even at the height of the eighteenth century. But they have never been subjected to an indepth study, no doubt because they were often broken9 and because they did not always end up as formal agreements. No one has attempted to compare and contrast the English and French sources on the subject, which are, however, extremely rich. A big gap certainly separated the spirit of the laws and their application, but it is important to show precisely why this was so. The first conventions: the War of the Spanish Succession In the eighteenth century, the first convention guaranteeing the freedom to catch ‘fresh fish’ was concluded between France and the United Provinces in September 1707.10 What was meant by fresh fish at this period were oysters, turbot, sole and ray, but sometimes also herring and mackerel. Limiting the agreement to these sorts of fish served first and foremost as a safeguard against those fishermen who would otherwise have lingered too long offshore: unlike salted fish, fresh fish goes off very quickly. By restricting the length of time fishermen spent at sea, the risk of their spying on the coasts was accordingly minimised. There was also an economic explanation for the agreement: the Dutch herring fishermen tried systematically to take advantage of these treaties in North America or Greenland, thereby provoking the hostility of French and English shipowners.11 The first ‘ordinance of the king for freedom of fishing in relation to the French and English crowns [sic]’ was finally concluded on 28 June 1708. On the French side it was formulated thus: Having approved the convention agreed with the English establishing the freedom to fish along the coasts of France from Dunkirk to Bayonne, his Majesty has

9

10 11

Valin’s opinion on the issue: ‘If France applied this generous principle, the same doesn’t hold true for England whose privateers would capture the French fishermen. . . . Faced with this lack of reciprocity, Louis XIV suspended the fishing truces’: F. Le Guellaff, Armement en course et droit des prises maritimes, 1792–1856 (Presses Universitaires de Nancy, 1999), pp. 749–50. É. Dardel, La pêche harenguière en France: Étude d’histoire économique et sociale (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1941), pp. 136–7; A. Cabantous, ‘Le hareng et son monde: structures de la pêche harenguière de Boulogne à Blanckenberghe (vers 1650– vers 1830)’, in A. Lottin et al. (eds.), Les Hommes et la Mer dans l’Europe du Nord-Ouest de l’Antiquité à nos jours (Villeneuve d’Ascq: Revue du Nord, 1986), pp. 47–72. Bernières, French representative in Flanders, to Pontchartrain, secretary of state for the Marine, 12 September 1707, AN, Marine B3164, fo. 166. Louis XIV’s royal orders, 17 August 1675 and 11 September 1675: AN, Marine B3428, fos. 303, 304.

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expressly prohibited the commanding captains of his vessels, the shipowners and all captains and master mariners from raiding English ships that are fishing for herring, mackerel, oysters and other sorts of fresh fish from the Orkneys to the extremities of England, including the islands of Jersey and Guernsey.12

To be effective, such an agreement had to be extended to all the maritime powers in the region, such as the Flemish ports of Ostend and Nieuport, which were dens for privateers. Ostend, under Habsburg sovereignty following the allied victory at Ramillies in May 1706, soon signed a convention on 12 November 1708.13 However, Nieuport remained under the sovereignty of Philip V of Spain, and some privateers of that port refused to be governed by Anglo-French agreements: I captain commander of the frigate Hannibal of Nieuport, certify to all captains of this coast and others . . ., that I do not recognize nor have I received any order to recognize the agreement made between the two states [France and England] with regard to fishermen, assuming that there is one.14

As this example shows, the success of diplomatic agreements relied in the first place on the collaboration of local populations. Far from passively abiding by decisions taken at the highest level of state, intermediary institutions played a key role in maintaining relations between France and England throughout the eighteenth century. In the majority of cases the treaties started life as informal agreements negotiated directly between French and English ports. Thus, from February 1704 a rumour that the English wanted a fishing truce circulated at Dieppe. In order to find out more the town’s commissary of the navy took the initiative of sending a fishing boat to England, whose captain was commissioned to deliver a letter to the mayor of Rye or Hastings. In the latter port James Capelain, master of the Dieppe boat, and one of his crew members, who spoke English, met the mayor and aldermen of the Sussex port to find out whether the rumour was well founded.15 This circuit of communication 12

13

14 15

AMAE, CPA226, fos. 67–67v. A similar decision had been made on the English side by Josiah Burchett, secretary of the admiralty: ‘Translation [into French] of a declaration by the chief admiral of Great Britain on behalf of fisheries’, n.d., AMAE, CPA226, fo. 68v. This agreement can be dated to May, since it was announced at Dunkirk at the end of that month: Du Guay to Pontchartrain, 26 May 1708, fo. 289. Ostend capitulated in July 1706: J.N. Pasquini, Histoire de la ville d’Ostende et du port (Bruxelles: Hauman, 1843), pp. 193–204. A printed version of this document is kept in the Service historique de la Défense (Vincennes): ‘Liberté de la pêche dans toute l’étendue du Canal. Donné à Ostende le 12 novembre 1708’, Archives de la Marine, MS0073, 5, fos. 161–3. A manuscript version is in AN, Marine B3155, fo. 440v. The admiralty of Flanders signed in the name of Ostend. ‘Fait à bord de lad. frégate L’Hannibal en mer le 28 juin 1708. Signé Grinée’, 28 June 1708, AN, Marine B3155, fo. 59. Mayor and aldermen of Hastings to the duke of Nottingham, 2 March 1704, TNA, SP34/ 3, fo. 178. In this example as in latter ones, communication – both oral and

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was an unusual one: to obtain the necessary information the French fisherman did not go to the French government, but to an English town council. The treaty that was finally concluded in 1708 developed out of negotiations conducted between the ports of Folkestone and Boulogne. It was ‘then extended to all the coasts of the two realms’, as noted by Mutinot, mayor of Boulogne, in 1744.16 Suspended and then reinstated in 1710, again as a consequence of negotiation carried out directly by representatives of Boulogne and Folkestone, the treaty of 1709 was rarely adhered to. The lack of any precise definition of the category of fisherman left the door open to all manner of malpractices. The French government thus complained of ‘an infinite number of abuses and lootings’17 carried out by Channel Islands privateers and ships of the British navy against French fishermen. For their part the French privateers followed the convention to the letter in order to justify their attacks, arguing that the treaty protected neither the boats transporting provisions or fishing gear nor those who bought fish from fishermen to sell in the market.18 Other privateers complained that English fishermen carried passengers, making them legitimate prizes.19 The comte de Pontchartrain, secretary of state for Affaires Etrangères, complained, for example, about the behaviour of Jersey and Guernsey privateers, who ‘take all the fishermen’s rowing boats that they can find, keep them for several days, loot them and then use them for raids on the merchant ships, which they capture while pretending to be fishermen’20 in order to ‘mask their irregular practices [malversations] with the pretext of the freedom of fishing’.21 Complaining about France’s lack of respect for the convention, the English admiralty – not Louis XIV, despite Valin’s statement – broke off the agreement in July 1710. In a reprisal French privateers were again authorised to swoop on English fishing boats.22 However, the 1708 treaty was not formally revoked, ‘because such a step would mark a total break’ and there was still hope to return to the status quo.23 In July royal officers

16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23

written – generally took place in English. Language never seemed to function as a complicating factor. Mutinot to Maurepas, 10 April 1744, AN, Marine B3428, fo. 270. Pontchartrain to the archbishop of Rouen, 13 August 1710, AN, Marine B2222, fo. 413. Copy of the petition presented to the admiralty of Calais, 6 July 1708, AN, Marine B3155, fo. 557v. Pontchartrain to Dartmouth, secretary of state for the southern department, 30 July 1710, AN, Marine B2222, fos. 231–3. Pontchartrain to the archbishop of Rouen, 13 August 1710, AN, Marine B2222, fo. 233. Pontchartrain to Dartmouth, 27 August 1710, ibid., fo. 729. Circular to intendants, class commissioners and admiralty officers, 30 July 1710, AN, ibid., fos. 203–4. Anon. to comte de Toulouse, 30 July 1710, ibid., fos. 250–1.

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in Boulogne allowed a fisherman from this port to go to ‘Floston’ (Folkestone) in order to resume the dialogue.24 As before, an English mayor was thus put in charge of explaining his government’s policy. Once again local communities of fishermen were playing the role of mediators: ‘two of the main merchant fishermen in Boulogne and Dieppe’25 passed on the French proposals in England. The convention was back in force in September 171026 until the end of the war. Its results were contrasting. These truces only affected fishermen and did not specify sanctions for offenders, which is certainly why the agreement was regularly violated. Many privateers took advantage of the protection granted to fishermen and sailed on board fishing boats in order to plunder the coasts with impunity.27 Mr. Grelasche, a fishing master from Saint-Valéry-sur-Somme, thus fitted out a small fishing boat as a privateer, provoking an angry response from the lieutenant general of the coasts of Picardy: He is a drunk whose only endeavour is to indifferently plunder boats and fishermen, neutrals, friends, allied or enemies alike, and who has just let himself be captured twice in a row by the English . . . Seeing that the freedom to fish had been reinstated, I thought better of allowing the said Grelasche to set sail.28

Fishermen from the Channel Islands circumvented neutrality in order to smuggle with inhabitants of French Normandy, while smugglers borrowed fishing boats for the same purpose.29 Thus, a ‘so-called fishing vessel from Alderney’ shipped ‘woollen stockings and camisoles’ to the Cotentin coast.30 Although fishermen regularly complained of being attacked by enemy privateers, their relations were not always hostile, as this circular sent to the French navy commissioners on 22 July 1711 shows: ‘The King has been informed that Jersey and Guernsey privateers have secret dealings with the coasts of Brittany and even with fishing boat

24 25 26

27 28 29

30

Pontchartrain to Dartmouth (who succeeded Sunderland), 6 August 1710, ibid., fo. 297. Ibid., fo. 298. Same to same, 4 September 1710, ibid., fos. 786–8 et TNA, SP78/155, fo. 53 sq. This convention was not restored until 26 September, after a circular of 10 September 1710, AN, Marine B2222, fos. 788–9. Pontchartrain to Dartmouth, 27 August 1710, AN, Marine B2222, fo. 729. Letter from De la Haye d’Anglemont, lieutenant general of the coast of Picardie, 14 September 1710, AN, Marine B3178, fos. 470–1. The same practices can be observed between French and Dutch ports: letter of the admiralty of Dunkirk to the King’s prosecutor, 11 May 1712, AN, Marine B2230, fo. 287; complaints from the officer of the admiralty of Zeeland, 22 June 1712, ibid., fo. 551. Pontchartrain to the officers of the admiralty of Portbail, 26 August 1711, AN, Marine B2228, fo. 307. The same event is mentioned in TNA, SP78/155, fo. 186.

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masters, and that they are supplied with provisions and refreshments, which they need to continue privateering.’31 The game of appearances was never-ending, for the fishermen themselves often used the neutrality accorded them by the two countries in order to practise smuggling.32 Furthermore, governments were hardpushed to punish these abuses, which presupposed a deeper level of communication between them. Attempts to force seafaring people into distinct socio-economic categories were hampered by the range of different activities that maritime communities engaged in.33 This is why the comte de Pontchartrain suggested in October 1710 punishing masters who ‘privateer as corsairs under the guise of fishermen.’34 Two months later, the proposal of the secretary of state for the Marine testifies to the governments’ difficulty of understanding the occupational pluralism of seafarers: ‘it would be necessary to explain to fishermen that they won’t be allowed to carry any passengers, nor to ship goods, since the Convention was concluded with the sole aim of facilitating the catching of fresh fish’.35 Despite its very minimal success, the convention of 1708 remained a constant point of reference during subsequent conflicts. A state delegation of authority: the War of the Austrian Succession and the Seven Years War The practice of direct negotiation between ports on both sides of the Channel lived on in peacetime. Disputes between English and French fishermen multiplied in the 1730s, when the tensions between their states revived after more than a decade of cordial relations. They were always settled in the same way. Thus, in May 1739 a Dieppe fisherman, whose nets had been stolen by an Englishman one nautical league off Dover, went to the English port ‘to register his complaints with Mr Maynet the English trader, who understands French, who he says is the mayor of that town’.36 It was only afterwards that he spoke to the French king’s officer 31 32 33

34 35

36

Circular to the commissioners of the navy, Fontainebleau, 22 July 1711, AN, Marine B2228, fo. 104. Such was the case, for example, between the Channel Islands and the Continent: royal circular to the commissaries of the navy, 22 July 1711, AN, Marine B2228, fo. 104. See, for example, C. Cérino, A. Geistdoerfer, G. Le Bouëdec and F. Ploux (eds.), Entre terre et mer: Sociétés littorales et pluriactivités (XVe–XXe siècle) (Presses universitaires de Rennes, 2004). Pontchartrain to Dartmouth, 24 October 1710, TNA, SP78/155, fo. 60. Same to same, 17 December 1710, ibid., fo. 76. Occupations changed with seasons and needs, and the distinction between sailor and peasant is not always valid. Besides Cabantous’ work already cited, see C. Cérino et al. (eds.), Entre terre et mer. Report from Hervé, classes commissary in Dieppe, to Maurepas, 21 June 1739, AN, Marine B3390, fo. 372. On ‘Maynet’ [Minet], see chap. 8.

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in Dieppe. In these situations French fishermen still referred to the 1708 conventions.37 From the beginning of Anglo-French hostilities in 1744 fishermen were taken prisoner by both sides. Attempts were then made by the French to reinstate what was referred to as the 1708 ‘fishing treaty’. To this end the mayors and aldermen of various French ports, such as Calais, Dieppe and Dunkirk, sent innumerable petitions to the comte de Maurepas, the secretary of state for the Marine.38 He decided to delegate negotiation to the communities involved in fishing, claiming ignorance on the subject himself: ‘I have already asked for clarifications on that matter in several ports where merchants made me similar representations. I would be obliged if you could give me all the intelligence you have on the matter, and I will gladly agree to the merchants of Dunkirk writing to England as a result.’39 The Dunkirk chamber of commerce was tasked with negotiating with the magistrates of Ostend, while, as during the previous war, Mutinot, mayor of Boulogne, entered into talks with his English counterparts.40 The discussions quickly foundered, the French protagonists not having sufficient legitimacy as far as the English were concerned, according to Mutinot: ‘They finished by telling me that [the freedom to catch fresh fish] will not stand and that no-one will give credence to [the plea] as coming from a community and that the Court of France must signal their approval of it.’41 It is difficult to interpret the English request to open official discussions instead of following the existing practice of negotiation. Sure enough, the refusal to conclude the truce was relayed to the mayor, Mutinot, and not to the French government. In fact, the English decision was motivated by an enquiry carried out by the government in the fishing ports of England with the aim of getting a ‘feeling for the towns where fishing takes place . . . There is very little likelihood that freedom will be achieved, the responses of the towns consulted not being at all favourable: the public papers so common in this country cry treason

37 38

39 40

41

Report from Hervé, 16 July 1739, ibid., fos. 374–v. Petition from the aldermen and inhabitants of Dieppe to Maurepas, 19 April 1744, AN, Marine B3/428, fos. 300–1; from their counterparts in Calais to the same, 7 May 1744, AN, Marine B3/428, fos. 283–283; from the comte d’Aunay, the town’s commanding officer, to the same, 29 July 1745, 14 August 1745, AN, Marine B3/440, fo. 324, fo. 330. Maurepas to the officers of the admiralty of Dieppe, 22 April 1744, AN, Marine B2 322, fo. 47. Anon. to the chamber of commerce of Dunkirk, 22 May 1744, ibid., fo. 148v; Maurepas to Mutinot, 15 April 1744: ibid., fo. 116. Mutinot had sent his request to Maurepas on 10 April 1744: AN, Marine B3 428, fo. 270. Mutinot to Maurepas, 23 May 1744, ibid., fo. 274.

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against the supplicants of this proposition’.42 The role accorded to public opinion and interest groups was therefore crucial in England’s rejection of the agreement. Both Newcastle, secretary of state for the southern department, and Lord Carteret, his northern counterpart, consulted interested parties. According to Michel Bégon, the Marine intendant in Dunkirk who wrote a report on these past negotiations in 1760, when a precise draft treaty was handed to him, ‘My lord Carteret instructed that it be communicated to the Commerce [sic] who dragged their feet and in the end made totally contrary representations’.43 What is exposed here is an essential difference in methods of negotiation and, fundamentally, in the role played by international trade in political debate in France and England in the eighteenth century. In France, the representation of interest groups was channelled through the state. Consultation on economic opinion, conducted via bodies such as the council of commerce and chambers of commerce, was at the discretion of the government. Furthermore, the debate was not a public one but was restricted to these institutions.44 In 1744–1745, petitions from the Channel ports were sent directly to the government. In England, trade policy, far from being confined to the sphere of parliament, was of interest to the public and was debated in the papers and pamphlets, and aired in caricatures.45 During the War of the Austrian Succession, opponents of Carteret’s ministry unleashed a veritable press campaign in England against British foreign policy. Xenophobic propaganda was at first directed against the Hanoverians and then, after the attempted French invasion in February–March 1744, against France.46 42

43 44

45

46

Same to same, 22 June 1744, ibid., fo. 276. It has not been possible to identify the ‘public papers’ referred to by Mutinot. A reading of the Gentleman’s Magazine and the London Magazine for the year 1744 did not throw up any mention of these negotiations. [Bégon], ‘Report on the neutrality of fishing fresh fish along the full length of the coastline’, 25 September 1760, TNA, ADM 97/107, fo. 39v. These institutions were founded in the early eighteenth century and survived up until the French Revolution. The council of commerce, created in 1700 at the instigation of Louis XIV, rapidly became ‘the government’s library of information on all commercial affairs’: T.J. Schaeper, The French Council of Commerce 1700–1715: A Study of Mercantilism after Colbert (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1983), p. 35. It was notably composed of trade representatives and only had a consultative role. The chambers of commerce were for the most part created by a decree of 30 August 1701 in towns represented on the council of commerce, such as Rouen, Saint-Malo or Lille. Made up of merchants, they represented local interests but also acted in an advisory capacity for the government. P. Gauci, The Politics of Trade: The Overseas Merchant in State and Society, 1660–1720 (Oxford University Press, 2001), pp. 234–70; L. Colley, Britons: Forging the Nation 1707– 1837 (London: Vintage, 1996) (1st edn: 1992), pp. 55–100. B. Harris, A Patriot Press: National Politics and the London Press in the 1740s (Oxford University Press, 1993), pp. 163–6. On this period of uncertainty about power and the fear of invasion, see K. Wilson, The Sense of the People: Politics, Culture and Imperialism in England, 1715–1785 (Cambridge University Press, 1995), pp. 165–78.

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In this climate, further heightened by the landing in Scotland in 1745 of the Young Pretender Charles Edward Stuart, it is all the more understandable why the government was not at all in favour of signing a fishing treaty. And in fact, despite repeated attempts by the French, the two sides could not reach an accord. It was not until the end of the war in May 1748 that the order was given in London to stop attacking French fishermen.47 Likewise, when the convention between France and the United Provinces was at last concluded in 1747, the economic slump of the Channel and the North Sea ports was too serious to be remedied.48 During the Seven Years War, the same pattern was repeated.49 In 1757 Moras, secretary of state for the Marine50 ordered Michel Bégon, Marine intendant in Dunkirk, to enter negotiations with the English commissaries in charge of the exchange of prisoners of war. Once again this request met with the refusal of the lords of the admiralty, who pointed to the incessant infractions of the French privateers to justify their decision.51 In August 1760 Moras’ successor at the Marine acknowledged the failure of the talks, in a disillusioned tone: At the beginning of this war and during the previous one several propositions were made to the government of England in order to establish the reciprocal freedom of fresh fishing on the coasts. . . . Whatever inconvenience and prejudice this absence of a treaty will cause to the inhabitants of the maritime coasts, it does not lie with the ministry to remedy them; it would be compromising ourselves to risk new endeavours after the repeated experience we have had of lack of willingness on the part of the English to assent to it.52

In this first period, stretching from the War of the Spanish Succession to the Seven Years War, the influence of initiatives by local communities on decisions made centrally should not be exaggerated. It might even be 47 48 49

50 51

52

Le Prévost-Tournion, head clerk to the recruits in Boulogne, to Maurepas, 20 May 1748, AN, Marine B3463, fo. 297v. Cabantous, ‘Le hareng’, p. 51. [Bégon], ‘Report on the neutrality of fishing fresh fish along the full length of the coastline’, 25 September 1760, TNA, ADM97/107, fos. 37–8; Berryer (secretary of state for the Marine from 1758 to 1761) to the duc d’Harcourt (lieutenant-general of Normandy), 30 August 1760, in C. Hippeau, Le gouvernement de Normandie aux XVIIe et au XVIIIe siècles. D’après la correspondance des Marquis de Beuvron et des Ducs d’Harcourt, Lieutenants Généraux et Gouverneurs de la Province, 9 vols. (Caen: Imprimerie Goussiaume de Laporte, 1863–1869), vol. IX, pp. 186–7. Secretary of state for the Marine, 10 February 1757–27 May 1758, Moras succeeded to Machault d’Arnouville. Bégon, ‘Mémoire concernant la neutralité’, 25 September 1760, TNA, ADM 97/107, fos. 37–8. Michel Bégon was the last representative of a dynasty of servants of the state going back to the sixteenth century. See Y. Bézard, Fonctionnaires maritimes et coloniaux sous Louis XIV: Les Bégon (Paris: Albin Michel, 1932), p. 326. Berryer (secretary of state for the Marine from 1758 to 1761) to the duc d’Harcourt, Versailles, 30 August 1760 in Hippeau, Gouvernement de Normandie, vol. IX, pp. 186–7.

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supposed that their interventions only had a chance of success if they corresponded in all respects to options chosen by their governments. In short, it would be no more accurate to overemphasise the role of the state than to exaggerate the significance of the impulse from below. On the other hand, starting with the War of American Independence, negotiating methods changed, and in turn affected the equilibrium between governments and local people. From the coasts to the capital cities: the War of American Independence Following France’s entry into the American conflict, from 1778 onwards, direct negotiation between port communities was systematised. Extragovernmental negotiators were sent into enemy country in wartime to hold informal talks there. In the Channel, hostilities commenced in June 1778 and the capture of fishermen escalated rapidly. In November the owners of a Dunkirk privateer, La Thérèse, decided to release the captain of a Harwich fishing boat whom they had taken hostage. This conduct was praised by Sartine, secretary of state for the Marine, who expressed satisfaction at the marked respect for a ‘useful trade at all times, the stability of which it was in the interest of both nations to preserve during wartime’.53 This show of goodwill bore fruit in England: the owners of the Harwich fishing boat then suggested to their French counterparts that they negotiate a fishing treaty. From that moment on there was prolific correspondence in English between the English and French ports, which lasted several years. The English proposal instantly set the pattern for all subsequent dealings; there was a rise in lobbying on both sides of the Channel by fishermen’s representatives. Elias Loveday, the owner of the Harwich boat, thus wrote to his French colleagues: ‘My hostage arrived here Friday 20 inst., and as Mr Robinson, secretary to Lord North and member of parliament for this town, was here, I introduced them to each other and Lord North gave him ample assurances of your extreme goodness to him.’54 The appeal to the patronage of John Robinson, member of parliament for Harwich between 1774 and 1802, was well advised. At the time, this key figure in English parliamentary life was at the peak of his influence. 53

54

Copy of Sartine to Mrs Lhermite and Michelon, owners of La Thérèse, 24 November 1778, ADN, C4609, item 3. These different letters make up a folder of some hundred pages at the ADN C4609, which are not folioed, but stamped on the top-right corner. Other documents on the same affair are scattered throughout ADN C4624/1 and C4610bis. ‘Translation [into French] of the English letter from Mr Elias Loveday of Harwich to the aforementioned shipowners’, 25 November 1778, ADN, C4609, in a letter from the Officers of the Dunkirk chamber of commerce to Sartine (copy), 4 December 1778, stamp 3.

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Secretary of the treasury since 1770, and a close ally of the all-powerful Lord North – who was at once prime minister, first lord of the treasury and leader of the House of Commons – he was charged with organising governmental supporters at the time of the general election of 1774.55 In the eighteenth century members of parliament were important middlemen, making the demands of urban communities known at central government level, while interest groups were represented officially in Westminster.56 Lobbying took place by means of petitions but also through direct talks with the MP. The Harwich shipowners asked their Dunkirk counterparts to adopt a similar tactic, appealing to ‘your admiralty and your navy’ to ‘obtain orders from your government to release other hostages taken by some fishing boats’, 57 with the aim of getting the British government to adopt the same measure. In their attempts to influence international politics, French and English shipowners adopted a very unusual method – co-ordinating their actions and presenting a united front in simultaneously pressuring both governments. The Dunkirk chamber of commerce enthusiastically relayed the English proposal.58 This kind of negotiation – at the local level and without the intervention of governments – was not, however, undertaken without the latter’s knowledge. It was Sartine who assigned a measure of royal authority to local institutions, recommending that the shipowners of Dieppe – France’s main fishing port along with Dunkirk – ‘consult with English fishermen in order to co-ordinate their efforts’. The minister also recommended that the Dieppe chamber of commerce go to the Dunkirk chamber of commerce in order to ‘confer with her on the instructions to be given to those persons that you will both send to the scene and whom you will task with acting in your name’.59 55

56

57 58 59

S. Lee (ed.), Dictionary of National Biography (London: Smith, Elder, 1897), vol. XLIX, pp. 26–8; H.C.F. Matthew and B. Harrison (eds.), Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford University Press, 2004), pp. 66–368; Sir L. Namier and J. Brooke, The History of Parliament: The House of Commons 1754–1790, 3 vols. (London: Secker & Warburg, 1985), vol. III, pp. 364–6. J. Brewer, The Sinews of Power: War, Money and the English State, 1688–1783 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1990) (1st edn: 1988), pp. 231–49; J. Innes, ‘The local acts of a national parliament: parliament’s role in sanctioning local action in eighteenthcentury Britain’, Parliamentary History, 17 (1998), pp. 23–47. ‘Translation [into French] of the English letter from Mr Elias Loveday of Harwich to the aforementioned shipowners’, 25 November 1778, ADN, C4609, stamp 3. Letter from the officers of the Dunkirk Chamber of Commerce to Sartine (copy), 4 December 1778, stamp 3. Sartine to the Dieppe chamber of commerce, ADN, C4624/1, 13 February 1779, n.f. The initial proposal did indeed come from the town councils, and not from the governments, as can be seen from a rough draft of this anonymous report addressed to the king in 1778, in which ‘the towns of Dieppe and Dunkirk themselves are offering to take the necessary steps to succeed in this’, ADN, C4624/1, n.d., n.f.

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ENGLISH CHANNEL

Fishing boats owners

FRANCE Fishing boats owners

Local institutions (municipalities)

Local institutions (municipalities + chambers of commerce)

Harwich

Dunkirk + Dieppe

Minet &

Lowestoft

Fector

Yarmouth, Barking, Harling, Rye, Greenwich, Gravesend

MPs Robinson Townshend Bamber Gascoigne

Calais, Boulogne

Intendants Calonne

Public Public opinion

opinion press,

?

lampoons

Government

Government

Lord North

Secretary of State Navy

Admiralty

Prize Court

Secretary of State Northern Dpt

Informal actors

State institutions

English delegation French delegation

Chart 6.1 Cross-Channel negotiation during the War of American Independence.

The pattern of negotiation was identical in France and in England, as shown by Chart 6.1. I have broken this negotiation down into four stages: a request from the local population was made by the shipowners, who then took it up with the institutions in their own town. The latter relayed

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this local request to the intermediary institutions that performed the role of go-between: members of parliament in England and intendants in France. Finally, the information reached central government. It should be noted that despite the failure of negotiations conducted during previous conflicts, the same local institutional participants resurfaced in both countries, thus showing the strength of links maintained between the two shores despite the recurrence of wars. The Dunkirk Chamber of Commerce simultaneously made contact with the corporation of Harwich and with Lemoyne, the mayor of Dieppe. In turn, the latter wrote a report recommending to ‘grant this nation the freedom of fishing, on condition of reciprocity, and to allow the city of Dieppe to solicit the same from the English ministry’.60 A specialist in fishing matters, Lemoyne had before the war built up contacts at the Marine ministry and with the controller-general of finances, writing several reports requesting ‘the lowering of local taxes on fish brought into Paris’.61 During the Revolution he would continue to defend his town’s interests.62 The procedure he came up with – to go and meet the English in person – inaugurated a parallel diplomacy. His request was granted. Accompanied by Lemoyne, the negotiator Gamba, representing the Dunkirk chamber of commerce, embarked for England in early April 1779, ‘to handle these matters by private agreement with the English fishermen and shipowners’.63 Following the beginning of the war, the French ambassador to London was recalled to Paris and was unable to act as middleman for the negotiators’ cause. It was therefore the Spanish ambassador, still in post, who was charged with granting them his protection.64 Once in Dover the French party immediately made contact with Monsieur Fector65 of the packet boat company Minet & Fector, which had already been a key actor in the negotiations of 1708 and 1744. They then left for Harwich, armed with letters of introduction to the mayor and principal shipowners, to take part with them in the meeting of the town council. On that occasion it was decided to unite several fishing ports: 60 61

62

63 64 65

See, for instance, his memorandum of February 1779, ADN, C4609, item 30. S.-S.-C. Lemoyne, Idées préliminaires, et prospectus d’un ouvrage sur les pêches maritimes de France. Par M. Lemoyne, maire de la ville de Dieppe (Paris: Imprimerie Royale, 1777), pp. 3–5. See, for example, his Rapport sur le projet de canal de Dieppe à Paris, du citoyen Lemoyne, suivi de l’avis du Conseil général . . . de la Seine-Inférieure (Rouen: Imprimerie de L. Oursel, 1793). Sartine to the Spanish ambassador (copy), March 1779, ADN, C4609, stamp 5. Ibid. Lemoyne and Gamba to Sartine (copy), 16 April 1779, ibid., n.f. On this company, see Chapter 8 infra.

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Two deputies were nominated, who came with us on Wednesday 7 of this month, to Loestof [Lowestoft], a maritime town in the Suffolk province, they went and saw the main shipowners, two of them came to our inn, but before reaching any decision they wished to confer with the shipowners of Yarmouth, a fair-sized maritime city in the province of Norfolk, where it was agreed that one of them would be with us on the following day.66

The interest group grew little by little and the French negotiators were invited to take part in the Yarmouth council meeting along with envoys from Harwich and Lowestoft. But differences of opinion surfaced. The mayor of Yarmouth showed at once his reticence: ‘He began by saying in a raised voice that if the French ministry had a similar request to make they should take it up directly with the British ministry.’67 The French were able to mollify the magistrate by claiming that the proposal had initially been made by their Harwich colleagues and that ‘the fisheries are of no interest to the French government and are absolutely alien to the issues that divide the two courts’.68 What is demonstrated here is a bargaining tactic, in which negotiators dissociated the interests of the state from those of coastal people. As we will see, this discourse was, however, very labile and changed depending on who was being addressed. In other situations the same individuals would, on the contrary, equate the cause of the fishermen with the public good. The mayor of Yarmouth was in any case won over and the meeting decided to send a delegation to London jointly with Harwich and Lowestoft, stopping along the way in Barking to increase the size of the interest group further. These envoys were charged with going to the metropolis to solicit the support of the MPs of the two boroughs, John Robinson and George Augustus North.69 Since Gamba and Lemoyne were always anxious to explain to Sartine the complexities of political decision-making in England, their letters provide a remarkable insight into how lobbying functioned. In London the envoys from Harwich were thus ‘sent from office to office’;70 on their own they visited Lord North’s office.71 Together with the French delegation, they met ‘a commissary responsible for the care of sailors and the exchange of prisoners’,72 then the Harwich MP John Robinson, Lord Weymouth, secretary of state, and finally Charles 66 69

70 71

67 Ibid. Lemoyne and Gamba to Sartine (copy), 16 April 1779, ibid., n.f. 68 Ibid. Harwich, traditionally loyal to the government, elected John Robinson, but also ‘the son . . . of Milord North’: Lemoyne and Gamba to Sartine (copy), 16 April 1779, ibid., n. f. However, George Augustus North, MP for Harwich from 1778 to 1784 (Namier and Brooke, History of Parliament, vol. III, p. 212), does not seem to have played any role in the negotiation. Lemoyne and Gamba to Sartine (copy), 20 April 1779, ADN, C4609, n.f. Same to same, 16 April 1779, ibid., n.f. 72 Ibid.

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Townshend, lord of the admiralty.73 Throughout this negotiation, the position of the two Frenchmen was unusual: they represented French interest groups without, however, speaking on behalf of the government. This ambiguous status is clear from certain letters to Sartine. Contradicting their previous letters, the two French envoys reported as follows: We made the resolution not to appear in person in any offices; we confined ourselves to inspiring in the envoys from Harwich the necessary resolve and steadfastness in such a case. . . . We flatter ourselves that Your Lordship will understand the predicament felt by negotiators who are obliged to keep themselves hidden behind the scenes . . . Furthermore we made it our duty to go hand in hand with them and introduced ourselves only as leaders of fishermen like themselves.74

The strength of Anglo-French ties: beyond the American War Despite rallying further English ports to the common cause (Harling in Norfolk, for example, and Rye in Sussex), the negotiation ran out of steam. In May 1779 privateers from Boulogne and Calais captured several fishermen from Dover and Harwich; this threatened to scupper all the lobbyists’ efforts. Acting in accordance with the same consultative procedure they had adopted in England, Lemoyne and Gamba therefore decided to cross the Channel in the other direction and meet the owners of the French privateers. The indefatigable negotiators brought their good offices to Calais and then went to Dunkirk to meet members of the chamber of commerce there. Finally, in order to secure the recovery of the English boats, they went to Versailles to converse with Sartine and some members of the Conseil des Prises.75 As a result, an ordinance proclaiming the decision not to capture English fishermen was published on 31 May 1779.76 This news was not relayed directly to the English

73

74 75 76

Charles Townshend (1728–1810), MP for Great Yarmouth from 1761 until 1784, was also at the time commissioner of the treasury in Lord North’s government: Lee, DNB (1899), vol. LVII (1899), p. 120. The very high rank of these MPs in the chain of power did not guarantee the success of their constituents’ demands. On the tension between local allegiances and national identities, see R. Sweet, ‘Local identities and a national parliament, c. 1688–1835’, in J. Hoppit (ed.), Parliaments, Nations and Identities in Britain and Ireland, 1660–1850 (Manchester University Press, 2003), pp. 48–63. Lemoyne and Gamba to Sartine (copy), 27 April 1779, ibid., stamp 8. Same to same (copy), 28 May 1779, ibid., stamp 11. ‘Copy of the letter from Monseigneur de Sartine to Monsieur d’Anglemont declaring fishing free for the English’, 31 May 1779, ADN C4609, stamp 38. The decision was relayed to the secretary of state for the Marine: ‘Lettre du roi à son altesse sérénissime monseigneur l’amiral’, 5 June 1779, in Isambert et al. (eds.) Recueil général, vol. XXVI (1826), p. 92.

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government but followed, as before, an alternative circuit.77 Gamba reactivated his cross-Channel networks, sending copies of the proclamation to the Minet & Fector company in Dover, to various Harwich merchants and to the mayor of Hastings, giving them the responsibility for informing ‘all the neighbouring towns, so that privateers and other English vessels can act with reciprocity’.78 The French proclamation thus reached the office of the admiralty via the owners of Harwich and Hastings fishing vessels, who bombarded the relevant members of parliament with petitions and requests for meetings.79 But the military situation soon became highly volatile in the summer of 1779: the rumour of a Franco-Spanish incursion into England once again dashed all hopes of a mutual truce for eighteen months.80 Despite signs of goodwill from the French authorities, the British government never adopted an official line on the issue.81 The English shipowners, however, remobilised. A petition was sent to George III by representatives of the ports of London, Harwich, Barking (Essex), Greenwich and Gravesend (Thames Estuary).82 All this agitation was ineffective, and in early June 1781 the French monarchy itself revoked for several months the freedom to fish, authorising French privateers and warships to raid English fishing trawlers.83 This diplomacy from below demonstrates the means by which 77

78

79 80 81

82

83

‘Abstract of the correspondence of Monsieur Gamba since his return from England, relating to negotiations for the mutual freedom of the fisheries of France etc.’, n.d., in Gamba to Sartine, 29 July 1779, ADN, C4609, stamp 16. Gamba summarises here the various letters he sent to English shipowners between 9 June and 15 July. ‘Extrait de la correspondance de M. Gamba depuis son retour d’Angleterre’, ADN, C4609. Gamba reviews here the different letters that he sent to English ship owners between 9 June and 15 July. Ibid. ‘Translation [into French] of the letter from Monsieur J. Deane to Monsieur Gamba in Dunkirk, Harwich’, 19 July 1779, ADN, C4609, stamp 37. Decision of the king’s council reiterating the order forbidding the harassment of unarmed English fishing boats (Versailles, 6 November 1780), in Isambert et al. (eds.), Recueil général, vol. XXVI, p. 388; [de Castries] to Louis XVI, AN, Marine C550, fo. 109. ‘Translation [into French] of the request presented to the king of England by Messrs Saunders and Whitings, representatives of the town of Harwich, a copy of which they sent to Monsieur Gamba in Dunkirk in their letter of 9 Dec. 1780’, enclosed with the letter from the Dunkirk chamber of commerce to Calonne, 21 December 1780, ADN, C4609, stamp 49. The English shipowners claimed to have the backing of ‘Bamber Gascoigne Ecuyer’, in other words Bamber Gascoigne of Bifrons, MP for Truro (Cornwall), and lord of the admiralty from 1779 to 1782. ‘Copy of the letter that I wrote to the minister, by Monsieur Lemoyne’, requesting the revocation of the suppression of the king’s order of 1780, 10 June 1781, ADN, C4609, stamp 58. The decision was communicated to the king in June 1781: draft of a letter addressed to George III, AN, Marine, C560, fo. 104. The freedom of fishing was newly re-established the following year. Several reports from the summer of 1782 mention the instructions given to the French court for a cessation of attacks on English fishermen and note that ‘our fishermen are being left in peace by the English’: ‘Report requesting the banning of foreign herring’, 21 August 1782, ADN, C4609, stamp 85.

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the coastal communities of the Channel maintained close ties, even when the two states formally broke off all diplomatic relations. In a report written in 1785 Lemoyne mentioned his personal investment in the negotiations about the freedom of fishing during the war, to which he claimed to have ‘sacrificed [his] status, [his] fortune, and ten years of continual study and application’. Fortunately, he added, he had not spent so much energy in vain, and ‘this tranquillity almost certainly bodes well for [the tranquillity] which fisheries will enjoy in future wars which might take place’.84 The end of the fishermen’s exceptional status? The French Wars The outbreak of the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars, often described as the birth of modern warfare, where the whole of Europe was swept up in the logic of ‘total war’,85 did not, however, sweep away the special status of fishermen. During the French Revolution, probably as never before, their freedom to circulate was indeed greatly restricted. Under the Empire, the combination of war and the control of the Channel by the navy disrupted the activities of French fishermen. In this context did the unique status of fishermen vis-à-vis other subjects vanish? And how did local interest groups adapt? At the beginning of the French Revolution the same pattern emerged as in previous wars. In 1793, after the declaration of war, a group of Calais council officers negotiated ‘indirectly with the commander of the Dunes’, that is, the admiralty representative in the area of the Downs in the south-east of England. After that the French town councillors requested and obtained from the Executive Council authorisation to negotiate officially with the English, to whom they submitted a draft settlement that, notably, banned fishermen from privateering.86 Despite its adoption, this ruling was badly enforced, and several French fishermen were captured in 1793.87 According to Florence Le Guellaff, there was continuity in the policies followed by successive French governments between the Revolution and the Empire, in contrast with English procrastinating.88 While, she argued, France scrupulously respected the immunity of fishermen, ‘save for some exceptions’, 89 the English dragged their feet. The contrast may be overstated, being overreliant on French 84 85 86

87 89

‘Origine de mon travail sur les pêches’ (1785), AN, Marine C553, fo. 177v. See, for instance, D.A. Bell, The First Total War: Napoleon’s Europe and the Birth of Warfare as We Know It (Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin Co., 2007). ‘Arrêté du Conseil exécutif’ (10 March 1793), in S. Lebeau, Nouveau code des prises, ou Recueil des édits [. . .] sur la course et l’administration des prises, 3 vols. (Paris: Imprimerie de la République, 1799–1801), vol. I, p. 66. 88 Le Guellaff, Armements en course, n. 407, p. 750. Ibid., pp. 750–3. Ibid., p. 750.

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sources. Furthermore, as we saw before, the breaking of truces did not always result from governmental choices, since political authorities were not the only protagonists involved. Finally, it is often difficult to know who was the first to violate the agreements. Thus, on 14 August 1795 English fishermen were exempted from the category of prisoners of war by an order of the Committee of Public Safety. But the same law retrospectively justified previous captures by the French as legitimate reprisals.90 And two years later in Dunkirk four English fishermen were clearly detained as prisoners of war.91 During the Consulate (1799–1804) and at the beginning of the Empire (1804–), other truces were adopted and were swiftly aborted as in 1800 (Year 8).92 Thereafter it seems that official positions illustrate a disagreement as to the treatment of fishermen. Faced with the unilateral revocation by Britain of the neutrality of fishermen in January 1801, the French envoy in London, Otto, complained of an act ‘contrary to all the practices of civilized nations’.93 Consequently, refusing to ‘make miserable fishermen the victims of the prolongation of hostilities’, the French government announced it would ‘refrain from retaliating’, while ordering its privateers to ‘leave fishing free and out of reach’.94 Only a few weeks later the order was withdrawn,95 and the issue was ultimately omitted for lack of an agreement from the Treaty of Amiens of 1802.96 In practice it was certainly the case that early on in the 1790s the two governments stepped up their surveillance of fishermen, who were more than ever implicated in the logic of war. In France as in Britain measures were therefore taken to stop them straying too far from the coastline. In France, from 10 March 1793, the provisional Executive Council (created following Louis XVI’s suspension and the dismissal of his ministers) issued a regulation for French fishing vessels, making it compulsory for them to convey a certificate of navigation, delivered by the commissaries of the Marine. Moreover, the name of the ship had to be painted on its sides. Lastly, vessels were not to wander ‘more than three leagues from 90 91 92 93

94 95 96

14 August 1795, in S. Lebeau, Recueil des lois relatives à la marine et aux colonies, 9 vols. (Paris: Imprimerie de la République, 1787–1800), vol. V, pp. 403–4. The case lasted between March and June 1796: ADN, L13162. Le Guellaff, Armements en course, p. 750. J.G. Alger, Napoleon’s British Visitors and Captives 1801–1815 (Westminster: Archibald Constable, 1904), p. 15. Otto to Hawkesbury, 16 February 1801, Pièces officielles relatives aux Préliminaires de Londres et au Traité d’Amiens (Paris: Imprimerie de la République, Year 11 – 1802–1803), p. 48. Ibid. According to the Times, dated 3 March 1801, quoted in Alger, Napoleon’s British Visitors, p. 15. Protocol of 19 January 1802 between Joseph Bonaparte and marquis Cornwallis, Pièces officielles, p. 114.

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the French coasts’.97 Some fishing regulations adopted at the end of the Ancien Régime for some regions or certain types of fish already stipulated similar measures, but the real novelty of this text was the prohibiting of all French fishermen in the Channel from straying far from the coasts.98 The legal distance would vary thereafter, but until 1815 any fisherman who wanted to venture off the coast would need to be provided with a special dispensation, and night fishing remained prohibited.99 At the same time the Royal Navy also forbade French fishermen from sailing too far off the French coasts, beyond a distance that varied between two and six leagues.100 Once again the two states’ policies converged on fixing the border on the French coastline, following a process similar to customs boundaries. In 1809 a regulation project for French fisheries was discussed by an anonymous author representing the interests of Dieppe.101 This proposed in particular to list the names of all fishermen going to sea. As a result of this ‘police prefects and municipal police commissioners will be able temporarily to . . . prohibit the sea [sic] to those fishermen whose intentions or principles may be suspect’ (Art. 4). Commenting on this project, our discussant suggested that it should be the prefects’ prerogative to establish a list of fishermen ‘to whom the sea might be forbidden, as suspect’.102 The shift in meaning is significant: the sea came under the remit of the infamous Law of Suspects of 17 September 1793, which made relations with émigrés an act of treason. Article 5 of the project thus established new rules for the circulation of fishing vessels, which would be inspected by policemen or customs officers on departure and on arrival to check the identities of the crew and fight against smuggling. Despite remarking that ‘the sailors from this district have never displayed any example of antinational perfidy’, the anonymous Dieppois accepted the proposition in the name of ‘general security’.103 In reality, even during a period in which the impact of war was deeply felt 97 98

99

100

101 102

Lebeau, Nouveau code des prises, vol. iii, p. 66. The edict of the parliament of Brittany of 5 August 1785 ruled on pilchard fishing, listed authorised fishermen, numbering the ships and forbidding them from casting anchor ‘less than two leagues of the roads in which pilchard is fished’ during the night: ADIV, 9B7, fo. 77v. These different measures were discussed by the deputies for the trade of Dieppe, SaintValéry-sur-Somme and Fécamp: folder ‘Réglementation de la pêche en mer (bribes, Year 14–1807)’, AN, F73643/1, file 1. English tract of 16 February 1804, ADSM, 1M207, quoted in S. Vautier, ‘Contrôler le littoral: Administration et surveillance côtière dans le Calvados et la Seine-Inférieure de 1803 à 1815’, unpublished Maîtrise, University of Rouen (1993), p. 155. ‘Projet d’un règlement pour la pêche’, with ‘Observations’ (also anonymous), ADS, 1C2911, n.f. 103 Ibid. Ibid.

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by the populations, contacts between both sides of the Channel never stopped entirely. The case of the conventions negotiated by the fishermen’s spokespersons shows the importance of intermediary institutions between state and population in the maintenance of relations between peoples. Why were town councils so important? Unlike other states, where consulates could serve the same function, France and Britain never managed to agree on installing consuls in their ports before the nineteenth century. Neither were there any corporations of fishermen in England, while professional seafarers’ organisations were quite rare in France.104 Above all, it was not the fishermen but the shipowners who spoke on their behalf and took negotiations in hand. The economic structure of the fishing industry was highly concentrated: in 1778, for example, 88% of Boulogne’s flotilla was in the hands of five families.105 In addition to their economic influence these leading families also had a presence in urban institutions, which explains why town councils were always at the forefront when it came to settling conflicts with foreign powers. Alliances between French and English fishermen relied on networks that remained stable throughout the period, and did not suffer from the often hostile relations between their states. Furthermore, the contrast between peacetime and wartime is striking, as shown by the analysis of the intense struggles for the appropriation of fishing resources and the tensions over the delimitation of fishing zones in the Channel. The decisive role of local communities in these international negotiations is to be explained by the very structure of the economy of fishing and overlapping markets of fish consumption. In peacetime, the activities of French and English fishermen, whether legal or not, were tightly interwoven, not least because the fish themselves did not respect political boundaries. Likewise, the fish trade was international. During the fishing season, French fishermen frequented English ports and ‘went ashore every week to buy bait there’.106 The English sold, but also bought, in the French ports. In spite of several parliamentary laws prohibiting the importation of ‘fresh fish caught by foreigners in this kingdom’,107 104

105 106 107

Cabantous, Dix-mille marins, pp. 218–22. If there was no ‘apparent professional structure’ among the fishermen of Boulogne, Dieppe and Fécamp, there was on the other hand a confraternity of fishermen in Dunkirk (ibid., p. 220). The principal shipowners, Gillodts, Gimonpré and Gamba, banded together in the chamber of commerce, which in fact represented the industry’s interests. Ibid., n. 86, p. 560. M. de Neuville, commissaire des classes in Dieppe, 6 January 1737, AN, Marine, B3380, fo. 207. See, for example, in 1714: An Act for the better preventing fresh fish taken by foreigners being imported into this kingdom; and for the preservation of the fry and fish (2 Geo. I, C17,18); in

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demand in England was so high that English fishermen often stocked up on supplies in France when their own catches were insufficient.108 The fish trade between France, England and the Flemish ports was therefore vital for certain port economies.109 The organisation of work was moreover tightly dovetailed, and when work dried up in the French ports, fishermen went to English ports, or to Ostend and Nieuport.110 The closeness of economic links was not sufficient to guarantee the efficacy of the conventions, which were, as we saw, exploited by the states as well as by the fishermen. On the one hand, governments did not hesitate to use fishermen to spy on the enemy or prepare invasions, while demanding that they should be protected from privateers.111 On the other hand, fishermen themselves often violated fishing truces, taking advantage of them to provide the enemy with supplies, to privateer or to smuggle. Official regulations show that it was difficult for the authorities to take into account the plurality of social identities and the interests and economic strategies of seafaring people, who often practised a wide variety of trades. Despite this failure, the mere fact that these negotiations could be contemplated by governments in wartime needs to be explained. Why, from the point of view of the state, should fishermen be exempted from the rules of war, even though it was known that many were using the protection they enjoyed to devote themselves to illicit activities? This tension was the result of two conflicting issues: how the authorities perceived seafaring people and the image that the latter created of themselves. Frenchmen, Englishmen and ‘German quarrels’: the fluidity of alliances Commenting on a conflict between the privateers of Ostend and the fishermen of Dieppe, an anonymous naval officer explained to the

108 109 110 111

1736, An Act to render the law more effectual for preventing the importation of fresh fish taken by foreigners (9 Geo. II, C33). Many other laws of this type were passed during the course of the eighteenth century. A local expression was used in Calais and Boulogne to designate this kind of trade: ‘selling “in the roads” to the English’: Dardel, Pêche harenguière, p. 97. Between 1770 and 1773, for example, 700,000 herrings a year on average were sold to the English by Calais fishermen: ibid. Ibid., p. 74; Cabantous, ‘Le hareng’, pp. 67–8. A ‘mémoire concernant la pêche du maquereau’ thus proposed the plan of landing in the Portsmouth area: ‘L’on verrait lesdits bateaux s’approcher des côtes dangereuses, sous prétexte de cette pêche’, each shipping fifty infantry men (included in the letter of M. du Guay, Dunkerque intendant, 10 April 1710, AN, Marine B3177, fo. 103). After the rupture of the Peace of Amiens, both governments continued to use the fishermen for espionage or to transport newspapers and pamphlets, 19 October 1803, TNA, 27/69, n.f.; Alger, Napoleon’s British Visitors, pp. 185–6.

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Dunkirk intendant that these populations were engaged in ‘a local war of animosity’, which he described as a ‘German quarrel’.112 This expression, which drew on the reputation of German princes to fight over trifles or for bad reasons, downplayed the significance of these disputes.113 The way in which the fisherman was characterised by outsiders differed from the way in which fishermen themselves mobilised various categories of self-identification in the context of their disputes with competitors.114 Moreover, multiple alliances and the interplay of diverse interests further complicate the equation. Did border populations use the rhetoric of the nation and the patrie in a particular way? Peter Sahlins has shown that disputes between the French and the Spanish were increasingly formulated in the eighteenth century in terms of a national rhetoric. According to him, ‘the idea that appeals to political authorities evoking national identities were only strategic or instrumental – that nobody in the borderland really took their national identities seriously – disregards the varied and diverse ways in which peasants and rural propertied elites could define their identities’.115 Thus, he argues, the language of national identity slowly evolved into a feeling of belonging to the nation, and the frontier was the place where a modern definition of the nation was first invented. But how are we to interpret the absence of the language of nation when disputes pitted populations belonging to two different states against each other? Should we have recourse to another set of explanations, for instance, economic rivalries? Conversely, as we saw, cross-national alliances were regularly negotiated between French and English fishermen: should this be seen as an erasure of national sentiment, in certain situations? The categories of self-identification used by these local actors need to be situated in the specific context in which they occurred and were developed, following David Bell’s suggestion: ‘How, in what circumstances, and in what terms did different groups define their relationship to the larger national community?’116 When, how and, above all, why were Channel fishermen defined – and defined themselves – as ‘French’ or ‘English’ in the eighteenth century? Were these terms used in a specific way by the communities bordering the Channel and how did they compare with the practices of these groups? Does one find a similar 112 113 114 115 116

Expressions used in letters addressed to the intendant Du Guay at Dunkirk, 30 October 1708, AN, Marine B3 155, fo. 372, and 14 November 1708, ibid., fo. 406. On ‘querelle d’Allemands’, see A. Rey (dir.), Le Grand Robert de la Langue Française (Paris: Dictionnaires Le Robert, 2001), vol. V, p. 1468. R. Brubaker and F. Cooper, ‘Beyond identity’, Theory and Society, 29 (2000), p. 15. Sahlins, boundaries, p. 165. D. Bell, ‘Recent works on early modern French national identity’, JMH, 68 (1996), p. 108.

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logic and patterns in France and England? Depending on the circumstances, the fishermen claimed, or saw attributed to them, a sense of belonging to and solidarity with either their little local homeland (their pays), or the nation or the whole of humanity. The historian is thus faced with methodological problems. In wartime it is common to change sides without, for obvious reasons, always proclaiming it loud and clear. It can therefore be difficult ‘to uncover the real preferences and intentions of individuals’ and indeed ‘of whole communities’.117 Ultimately, we need to question the very usefulness of the notion of national identity, at least for our period. A ‘localist’ methodology has been proposed by historians of the seventeenth-century English civil wars to explain the shifting nature of alliances. It was less for ideological reasons, so the theory goes, that people rallied successively to the royalist camp, then to the parliamentarian camp, but rather as a ‘rational defence’118 of the local community. As previously shown, a very similar interpretive approach has been proposed concerning the voluntary enlistment of the British in the militia during the French Wars, where local factors played a key role. The problem is knowing how far the notion of ‘localism’ can be stretched. This line of enquiry would seem to be especially applicable to Channel fishermen, who were constantly reformulating their alliances – be it with local rivals or with foreigners – depending on the circumstances. Rather than a reading in terms of identities, I will argue here that the choice of one particular category of identification over another can be explained in terms of discursive strategies.119 Fishermen from above In peacetime, when French and English fishermen were locked in disputes, diplomats and ministers used a paternalistic rhetoric and the discourse of utilitarianism at one and the same time. In England it was this latter vision of the industry – as a key element in the defence of the islands 117 118

119

D. Underdown, Riot, Revel and Rebellion: Popular Politics and Culture in England, 1603– 1660 (Oxford, 1987) (1st edn: 1985), p. 163. Underdown, Riot, p. 176. The bibliography on this subject is very rich; see, for example, R. Howell, ‘Neutralism, conservatism and political alignment in the English Revolution: the case of the towns, 1642–9’, in J.S. Morrill (ed.), Reactions to the English Civil War (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1983), pp. 67–87; D. Pennington, ‘The war and the people’, in ibid., pp. 115–36; J. Morrill, ‘County communities and the problem of allegiance in the English civil war’, in The Nature of the English Revolution (London and New York: Longman, 1993), pp. 179–90. See P. Bourdieu, ‘Le langage autorisé: les conditions sociales de l’efficacité du discours rituel’, in Ce que parler veut dire: L’économie des échanges linguistiques (Paris: Fayard, 1982), pp. 103–19.

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and as a source of wealth for the state – that predominated. For instance, a 1720 pamphlet requested that the British parliament set up a fisheries company in the following terms: ‘seamen . . . of all subjects are the most useful to their country in time of danger, and in time of peace they contribute a great deal towards its trade and riches . . . Of all trades in the world, the fishing trade is the greatest nursery for seamen’.120 Beginning in the seventeenth century and continuing throughout the eighteenth, rivalry with the fisheries of the United Provinces and France was a central theme in foreign policy debates in the British parliament. Innumerable pamphlets flooded the capital while new fishing laws were discussed in Westminster, binding together the identity of the nation and commercial interests. In their descriptions of the disputes, French and English naval administrators appropriated this rhetoric, frequently setting up an opposition between ‘our fishermen’ and ‘their fishermen’. In response to the accusations of English diplomats, according to whom the French were smuggling under the guise of fishing, English fishermen were accused by French administrators of transporting arms, ‘something ours would never dare do’.121 Just as French officers accused English fishermen of all manner of evildoing, roguery, hypocrisy and violence, and argued that English grievances were groundless, these agents of the state praised the honesty, candour and gentleness of the French. A mirror image of this can be found in English descriptions of French fishermen, whom they accused of dishonesty and spying while vaunting their own unfailing pacifism: ‘several French boats . . . instead of fishing, as they pretended, sounded our roads and coasts, which . . . His Majesty could not nor would not suffer’.122 In response to repeated communications from English diplomats on this point, cardinal de Fleury blamed Britain for being oversensitive, insinuating, according to the British ambassador in Paris, ‘that complaints about such minor subjects show a propensity and a readiness to pick quarrels with France’.123 Evidently, these opinions say as much about the state of diplomatic relations as they do about the fishermen themselves. Thus, in the wake of the Seven Years War the French ambassador in London complained about the behaviour of the English coastguards, who had stolen fish and nets from French fishermen, asserting that ‘it would be dangerous to allow this animosity between the 120 121 122 123

Britain’s Golden Mines Discovered: or, the Fishery Trade Considered. In a Letter from Sally Fisher, at Paris, to Mally Loverus, at London (London, 1720), pp. 14–15. Disque, class commissioner in Boulogne, to Ricouart, intendant of the navy in Dunkirk, 5 January 1737, AN, Marine B3380, fo. 7v. Waldegrave to the duke of Newcastle, 8 August 1739, recounting his meeting with the cardinal de Fleury, TNA, SP78/221, fo. 64. Same to same, 8 August 1739, TNA, SP78/221, fos. 65–6.

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two nations to become established’.124 Conversely, when in 1771 relations between the two states eased, similar incidents gave rise to a very different interpretation: John Blaquiere, secretary of the British embassy in Paris, reported that the king of France dissociated himself from the actions of his subjects, talking of the ‘indecent proceedings of these people’ who were fishing too close to the English coasts.125 Beyond the significance of these quarrels for the honour of the two kingdoms, certain local administrators sought to explain their causes. In a letter to Maurepas in 1739 Hervé, a commissaire des classes in Dieppe, was equally dismissive of the French and English fishermen. According to Hervé, ‘an element of jealousy’ lay at the root of these conflicts. Added to this was the ‘antipathy that exists between the subjects of the two nations’.126 Here, Hervé articulated two factors that are often found in the identities attributed to the fishermen by those that came into daily contact with them. The two groups were fighting over the same resource – the fish to be found off the English coasts – with each claiming legitimate ownership of it. Their actions were therefore driven by the need to defend their economic interests. Furthermore, by attributing to the fishermen the same feelings of hostility towards England as the rest of the population, Hervé was also placing himself in the long-standing tradition of refusing to recognise that the people might have political motivations that differed from those of their sovereigns. A man of the people, the fisherman enjoyed a very particular relationship with the elements. Such a discourse, deriving from climate theory, was a recurring theme right down the century and showed the ‘direct influence of the marine environment on people’s bodies and spirits’.127 Just as people’s vision of the sea changed, so the way in which seafaring people were perceived altered in the middle decades of the eighteenth century. The fisherman, mainly described at first as ignorant, vulgar, intemperate, disorderly or lazy, soon came to embody ‘the national or European version of the good savage’, for ‘he personified an immutable time and space over which upheavals had little hold’.128 To what extent did the characteristic seen as typical of maritime communities influence the political identities ascribed to them? In the first half of the eighteenth century, the writings of those who advocated the freedom of fishing in 124 125

126 127 128

Letter to secretary of state Conway, 25 July 1765, TNA, SP78/267, fos. 90–1. Blaquiere expressed furthermore how anxious Louis XVI was ‘to prevent every cause of dispute, and to cement and strengthen the good understanding now subsisting between the two courts’: Blaquiere to Rochford, 24 September 1771, TNA, SP78/283, fo. 121v. Letter of 16 July 1739, AN, Marine B3390, fo. 375. A. Cabantous, Les citoyens du large: Les identités maritimes en France (xviie–xixe siècle) (Paris: Aubier, 1995), p. 66. Ibid., p. 61.

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wartime emphasised the extreme poverty of fishermen, and adopted a paternalistic rhetoric. One such advocate was Pontchartrain, secretary of state for the Marine, who thanked Dartmouth in 1710 for the ‘talents that you bring to the success of an affair that affects the impoverished coastal inhabitants of the two realms’.129 A report requesting neutrality during the Seven Years War seems to mark a noticeable shift. In 1761 the vicomte de Bouville, a former officer in the French navy and a former prisoner of war in England, sent a memorandum to the British lords of the admiralty in which he sought to prove that the fisherman, ‘a friend of all nations’, should be exempt from the rules of war governing relations between states.130 Evident in this text is the ascendancy of the trend towards the humanitarian treatment of the civilian victims of war, which began to win over public opinion in the second half of the century among both the French and English elites. Bouville had been a prisoner of war, and he mentioned his captivity and the ‘feelings of magnanimity, generosity and humanity that [he] encountered in England during that time’.131 Indeed, Bouville had himself played a part in an unprecedented charitable campaign for clothing the French prisoners in Britain, which started in 1760. He proposed a ‘fresh fish cartel’ modelled on the cartels for the exchange of prisoners of war.132 The use of a humanitarian rhetoric was part of a long tradition of monarchical paternalism and came to the fore in the edicts of fishing neutrality adopted during the War of American Independence.133 In making the fisherman out to be a poor wretch, weak and oppressed, an innocent who should arouse ‘the most tender charity’ and ‘pity’, 134 Bouville was taking up contemporary elements of the discourse on the common people. But the author also pushed to the limits a

129 130 131

132 133

134

Pontchartrain to Dartmouth, 4 September 1710, AN, Marine B2 222, fos. 787–8. Vicomte de Bouville, report sent to the lords of the admiralty (1761), TNA, SP42/42, fo. 302. Bouville to the lords of the admiralty, 8 Febuary 1761, ibid., fo. 299. The report was attached to this letter. Bouville’s frigate was captured in 1755 and he remained in England for several years, notably taking care of the sailors and soldiers of his crew: E. Goepp and H.M. D’Ectot, La France biographique illustrée: les marins, 2 vols. (Paris: Fume, Jouvet & Cie, 1877), vol. I, pp. 237–8. ‘Fresh fish cartel’, TNA, SP42/42, fos. 305r–8v. Thus in the Lettre du Roi à M. l’Amiral, concernant le commerce de la pêche, du 5 juin 1779 (Paris, 1781): ‘I thought that the example that I would give to my enemies, and that can have no other principles than the feelings of humanity that inspire them, would impel them to grant to the fisheries the same accommodation that I would agree to be party to’, AN, Marine C560, fo. 103. Bouville concluded furthermore by identifying the fisherman with the people, by using an archetypal formula of Roman law: salus populi suprema lex (report sent to the lords of the admiralty [1761], TNA, SP42/42, fo. 303v.

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neo-Hippocratic description of seafarers135 that equated the danger of storms with the damages of war. It was the sea itself that lay at the heart of this idea. The abundance of fish and the respective position of land and sea were the fruits of divine providence: ‘The sea offers benefits on the very edges of the two realms that are separated only by the slenderest of spaces. Fish, which do not follow a direct route, are available in the greatest abundance now along one coast and now along another.’136 In the eighteenth century the argument from design still influenced the way in which geographical space was read,137 as in Le Spectacle de la Nature by the Abbé Pluche: ‘The sea is a means prepared by God to unite all men, to compensate for what he has refused them, and to facilitate the transport of their goods which would be impracticable without this help.’138 This topic hinged on the liberal discourse of ‘sweet commerce’, which represented the sea as the privileged space of peaceable exchange between peoples, in which rivalries between states and national allegiances dissolved. In the writings of Bouville the ocean was a vast cosmopolitan space in which French and English fishermen would rescue one another with no concern for danger, while Dutch, Danish or ‘ships of all nations’ also benefited from the altruism of the fishermen.139 This scenario set aside national specificity, the fisherman being ‘a type of man of all nations’140 and not simply a Frenchman or an Englishman. The descriptions of fishermen’s political identities therefore oscillated in the discourse of the elites between two tendencies: fishermen were either inspired by patriotic feeling towards the traditional enemy or else were citizens of the world, wedded to the sea. It remains to be seen whether these discourses took into account the complexity of fishermen’s allegiances. International rivalries or local disputes? The language of the fishermen It is difficult to access the actual words of the fishermen, since their voices were always filtered through the elites. However, there were numerous commentators writing about seafaring people in the eighteenth century. The commissaires des classes – officers of the French admiralty in charge of 135

136 137 138 139 140

A. Corbin, The Lure of the Sea: The Discovery of the Seaside in the Western World, 1750– 1840, translation J. Phelps (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994) (French edn: 1988), pp. 207–13. Bouville, report to the lords of the admiralty [1761], TNA, SP42/42, fos. 301v–302. See Chapter 1. Pluche Abbé, Le Spectacle de la Nature, 8 vols. (Paris: Vve Estienne, 1732–1750), vol. III (1735), pp. 211–12. Report to the lords of the admiralty (1761), TNA, SP42/42, fo. 302v. Ibid., fo. 302.

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recruiting seamen for the navy – and aldermen of the ports, in particular, played a central role, for they were ‘in direct and permanent contact with seafaring people, both on land and at sea’.141 In addition to the administrative capacity and social class of elites who attributed political identities and feelings to fishermen, there are other key factors to consider, such as the state of Anglo-French political relations at specific times and contemporary debates about poverty. It is reductionist to read the conflicts between French and English fishermen solely from the point of view of international rivalry. One could instead hypothesise that these quarrels have more similarities with local conflicts that concerned the appropriation of a common resource. The development of the rhetoric used by the fishermen’s spokesmen, which varied according to circumstances, is a very revealing indicator. In peacetime, when French and English fishermen were locked in conflict, petitions were sent to the respective governments to elicit their support. In this context the fishermen’s representatives employed a specific rhetoric that reiterated – as it suited their interests – the very stereotypes traditionally ascribed to them. A petition presented to the king in 1771 by the Lord Warden and the mayors and bailiffs of the Cinque Ports is typical of this kind of reasoning, which skilfully connected economic and strategic arguments: The great number of French vessels . . ., interfere with the portsmen and being as many as a thousand in number, gain an equal knowledge of the soundings of your Majesty’s said coasts with the Pilots employed in your Majesty’s Service; by this means the ‘nursery’ of fishermen is reduced to the detriment of the navy and that the present dearness of provisions arises in part from this cause.142

To the traditional themes of overfishing and poverty were added the strategic interest of the state, with references to the navy and, above all, the way in which soundings were undermining the territorial sovereignty of the state on its coasts. From the sixteenth century this type of accusation was already being levelled at the Dutch, with the idea that the latter were exhausting stocks, cutting nets, sounding the coasts and ultimately impoverishing the English.143 French fishermen for their part deployed 141 142

143

Cabantous, Citoyens du large, p. 43. ‘General Brotherhood or Guestling held at New Romney on 23 July 1771’, in F. Hull (ed.), A Calendar of the White and Black Books of the Cinque Ports 1432–1955 (London: H.M. Stationery Office, 1966), p. 564. The same argument is found in a petition by fishermen of Looe and Polperro in Cornwall in March 1739: ‘the said French fishing vessels, by frequenting our coasts, may become acquainted with the ground, creeks, and anchoring places’, TNA, SP36/47, fo. 171. J. Dee, General and Rare Memorials Pertayning to the Perfect Arte of Navigation (1577), cited in Fulton, Sovereignty of the Sea, p. 100. The Tudor government made the link between the prosperity of fishermen, the power of the navy and the need to control the

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the rhetoric of natural law, putting forward as an argument the limitless freedom of fishing on the world’s seas. The use of the same reasoning over a long period of time can be interpreted as the expression of a territorial consciousness founded on notions of customary law.144 But one might also consider the specifically political nature of these texts, which reveal rhetorical strategies that were aimed at obtaining the support of governments by using the language of general interest. Taking oyster fishermen as a case in point, it becomes possible to see how conflicts interlocked at the local and international levels. One can also examine whether the arguments used varied according to the geographical origins of the fishermen. Oysters raised a legal problem, since they lived on the seabed, but were alternately covered and uncovered by the tide. Were shellfish the property of coastal populations or were they rather, like fish, freely available to whoever caught them? On the English coasts, this issue divided Kent and Sussex fishermen. The arguments used by the different parties in these quarrels were precisely the same as in the conflicts between French and English fishermen cited above: overfishing, poverty and fishing as a nursery for seamen (see Table 6.1). In 1694 the oyster fishermen of the vice-admiralty of Kent, which included the ports of Middleton, Rochester and Chatham, protested against a proposal to authorise the fishermen of London and the Thames to come and dredge for oysters in their jurisdiction. In 1729 the alliance among the fishermen of Kent was shattered, and violent disputes this time brought the fishermen of Chatham into conflict with those of Rochester, which led parliament to pass a bill on the subject.145 The language of state interest appears here in a struggle between two French interest groups, but its rhetorical function was still the same: to

144

145

number of foreign fishermen on Britain’s coasts, but it was only from the time of the reign of James I & VI that concrete measures were taken to this effect: G. Jackson, ‘State concern for the fisheries, 1485–1815’, in D. Starkey, C. Reid and N. Ashcroft, England’s Sea Fisheries: The Commercial Sea Fisheries of England and Wales since 1300 (London: Chatham Publishing, 2000), pp. 47–9. For the political and intellectual background to this shift, see D. Armitage, The Ideological Origins of the British Empire (Cambridge University Press, 2000), pp. 108–13. R. Morieux, ‘Mer-terroir ou mer-territoire? Les querelles de pêche franco-anglaises au 18e siècle’, in Simonetta Cavaciocchi (ed.), Ricchezza del Mare, Ricchezza dal Mare, Secc. XIII–XVIII (Prato: Le Monnier, 2006), pp. 979–81. The petition from the mayor of Rochester requesting the adoption of a bill was read before a House of Commons committee on 28 March 1729: HCJ, vol. XXI (1727– 1732), pp. 298–9. The oyster fishery of North Kent was essentially oriented towards the United Provinces, which explains why it was not as badly affected by the wars with France in the eighteenth century as was the herring fishery: J.H. Andrews, ‘Geographical aspects of the maritime trade of Kent and Sussex, 1650–1750’, unpublished PhD thesis, University of London (1954), pp. 223–6.

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Table 6.1 The fishermen’s reversible arguments Middleton, Rochester, Chatham vs. London (1694)

Rochester vs. Chatham (1729)

The said oyster-fishery will be in danger of It will ruin all the local fishermen being utterly lost and destroyed, and (numbering thousands of families) and thereby many numerous families destroy the best nursery and breeding depending upon the said oyster-fishery ground for sailors and seamen in England will be ruined and undone, and a good by removing their trade and their only nursery for seamen be lost to the public. encouragement and support. The case of the fishermen in Kent: Humbly An Act for Regulating, Well-Ordering, Governing, and Improving, the Oysteroffered to the consideration of the Parliament. Fishery, in the River Medway, and Waters BL, HS 74/1056 (23). thereof . . . 2 Geo. II, C19 (1729).

equate the individual’s interest with the ‘general good’.146 In these intra-national disputes, it is noteworthy that the same discourse served to eliminate economic rivals, even when the latter had previously been allies. Furthermore, the rhetoric of the nation was not used in order to discredit local competitors in the eyes of state authorities, for the French were not involved in this business. On the French side of the Channel, the oyster fishery involved several groups of individuals, both French and English. In the Bay of Cancale (near Saint-Malo), fishing disputes pitted Bretons – in other words, natives of Cancale – against Normans from the Cotentin, as well as against the English. In this context, referring to foreigners was a way of discrediting regional economic competitors. Thus, the Breton fishermen, who considered the oyster-beds to be their property, frequently complained to the provincial and national authorities about the English and especially the Normans, who were tarred with the same brush: they were above all forains (‘foreigners’ or ‘outsiders’), whatever their state of origin. The argument of collusion with England was therefore used in the context of inter-provincial rivalry between Bretons and Normans. So it was that the Breton Pouget, a bitter adversary of the Norman oyster fishermen, sought to blame the latter for the depletion of the Cancale oyster-beds. In support of his argument, the author provided a table in which he set the Norman fishermen alongside their English counterparts. However, according to Pouget’s own

146

Dunkirk chamber of commerce to Calonne, 3 January 1781, ADN, C4609, stamp 52.

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figures, compared with the Normans, the percentage of English boats in the Bay of Cancale never exceeded 31% (in 1775).147 Conflating the claims of their Norman competitors with those of English fishermen proved an effective political strategy for the Bretons, who were able to convince state authorities of the illegitimacy of all ‘foreign’ interests, whether close or distant. But such jockeying occurred at the intra-provincial level as well. In 1786 Monsieur Baron, a merchant from Dieppe in Normandy, was accused by a rival from Étretat, another Norman port, of betraying the national interest. Indeed, Baron was buying back oysters that the English had caught in Cancale and transferring them to beds in Dieppe and Fécamp: he would then sell them ‘under the name of English white oysters’, thus taking advantage of the ‘Anglomania that he himself told us was all the rage’.148 In the 1780s the taste for English products aroused the criticism of French industrialists and merchants, who were soon to suffer as a result of the Eden treaty of commerce. The dominant feature of this report, however, was not hostility towards England as such but rather condemnation of an individual who promoted his own interests above those of the state and his fellow subjects. The reference to the English was for internal consumption, its purpose being to represent Baron as a wicked person who derided the fundamental principle of the state’s territorial sovereignty at its margins. The shore belonged to the Crown and was therefore, in theory, inalienable. What was more, it was foreigners who benefited from this illicit behaviour: ‘This individual will have ventured to make [this shoreline] serve as a bed for foreign oysters, to the great detriment, or rather loss, of our fisheries and our national trade in oysters.’149 The true causes of the fish shortage were more complex, but the choice of attributing it to direct competitors was not insignificant. Was the accusation of overfishing not a ‘stratagem of rivalry’, 150 as an administrator at the time of the French Revolution suspected? According to the context, the protagonists modified the meaning they attached to the general interest and altered their argument as need demanded. The fishing truces analysed above constitute the best example of the great adaptability of arguments and fluidity of alliances. The solidarity exhibited between Norman and Flemish fishermen during the 147

148 149 150

According to the ‘record of the number of ships both French and foreign that loaded oysters in Cancale from 1766 to 1786’, AN, Marine C560, fo. 268v. Reynald Abad attributes this report to Pouget, in Le grand marché: L’approvisionnement alimentaire de Paris sous l’Ancien régime (Paris: Fayard, 2002), n. 839 p. 947. [Bellevert], ‘Report in response to the assertions of Monsieur Baron, merchant in Dieppe’, AN, Marine C560, fo. 181. Ibid., fo. 185. ‘Details of the different fisheries that are conducted in Grandville’, n.d., ibid., fo. 792.

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War of American Independence to obtain a fishing treaty was fragile. Thus, following the seizure of several French fishermen by English privateers, the ports affected (Dieppe, Fécamp and Saint-Valéry-surSomme) came up with the idea, at the end of December 1780, to send another deputation to England to speed up the release of hostages and request a new treaty. The Dunkirk shipowners were opposed to this plan. The two former allies – Gamba from Dunkirk and Lemoyne from Dieppe – thus found themselves in opposing camps and tried to outdo each other with contradictory arguments before the French authorities, both provincial and ministerial. The Dunkirk chamber of commerce then wrote a letter to the secretary of state for the Marine denouncing the scheming of the Norman shipowners ‘who are acting in a manner diametrically opposed to the interests of the state and to their own interests’. Such a demand would be ‘humiliating not just for them but indeed for the whole nation’.151 The Dunkirk letter shows that the French state itself risked being caught up in a mission that might replace official diplomacy. In this context reference to the nation translated less a feeling – which is hard to put down – than a rhetorical strategy that was tailored according to who was being addressed. In order to convince state authorities of the divergent interests of Dunkirk and Dieppe, the very arguments that had previously demonstrated their solidarity were reworked to the contrary effect.152 This move proved highly successful and Calonne, the intendant of Artois, in his turn, used the same language to show that the Norman shipowners were motivated solely by individual interests, endangering ‘the harmony that should exist between towns with the same interest in fishing’.153 Behind this exchange of letters one can of course detect an ancestral rivalry between the ports of Dieppe and Dunkirk, whose on-off alliance was cemented or shattered depending on the current circumstances. In the spring of 1781 the Maréchal de Castries, minister for the Marine, prepared a statement detailing the seizures carried out on French fishermen since the 151

152

153

‘Copy of the letter written to Monseigneur de Castries by the officers of the Dunkirk chamber of commerce’, 13 December 1780, ADN, C4609, in a letter from the Dunkirk chamber of commerce to Calonne, 14 December 1780, ibid., stamp 47. It is in this respect remarkable to note that the Norman representatives, by going to negotiate in England, never had any intention of using a different method from that used in the first Lemoyne–Gamba mission, and yet the provincial authorities totally reinterpreted their approach, as one of the Dieppe shipowners complained bitterly to Gamba: ‘You will agree that three Frenchmen in London do not create any greater sensation than three Englishmen in Paris, especially when they are not likely to have any direct contact with the Ministry’ (Cavelier fils to Gamba, 27 December 1780, ADN, C4609, n.f.). Draft letter from Calonne to ‘M. Le Moine’, 15 December 1780, ibid., stamp 40.

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beginning of the conflict.154 Covering the years between 1778 and 1781, it revealed a great disparity between the losses suffered by Norman fishermen (twenty-six boats) and those suffered by the Flemish port (none). The Norman shipowners, in their letters to the French authorities, stressed the extreme hardship endured by their towns – for which fishing was the only resource – and denounced the privileges enjoyed by Dunkirk, which did not suffer the privations of war as acutely as the other French ports.155 But the discourse of general interest was flexible and was capable of patching up fractured solidarities when a new adversary appeared. Six months after having denounced the egoism of the Dunkirk chamber of commerce, Lemoyne wrote to Gamba to berate a Calais privateer that had captured two English oystermen; the incident sparked reprisals from Dover privateers and thereby sounded ‘alarm bells against our common interests’.156 In England too privateers were regularly described as fishermen’s foremost enemies, whatever their nationality. Thus a letter from a Harwich shipowner to Lemoyne dated 11 May 1781 reads as follows: A great many ruined families would melt the hard hearts of anyone apart from those people of Dover whom I believe to be thoroughly evil. . . . One of us is going to go to Dover to try and stop the depredations of these people who are worse than the Turks.157

Paradoxically, the fishermen’s enemies were not so much to be sought abroad as on home soil. Through the above examples it is evident that the category of enemy could be stretched and was often independent of the geopolitical context. In the thick of war against Great Britain, it is remarkable to find fishermen denigrating not foreigners, but fellow subjects. Just as ‘enemy’ was not necessarily synonymous with ‘foreigner’, so ‘foreigner’ was not necessarily synonymous with ‘enemy’. Lemoyne, the mayor of Dieppe, replied to the Harwich shipowner that even if authorisation were once again given by the French Crown to raid English fishing boats, those from Harwich deserved to be exempted from the general rule. In the first place, communication between France and England had by necessity to be channelled via patiently consolidated networks: ‘We must have lines of communication that are always open. If they break down completely, how would we

154 155 156 157

AN, Marine C560, fo. 105. Lemoyne to Calonne, Ostend, 17 October 1780, ADN, C4609, stamp 45. Lemoyne to Gamba, Paris, 6 June 1781, ADN, C4609, stamp 56. ‘Translation [into French] of a letter from Mr Saunders, one of the representatives of the English fisheries’, to Lemoyne, 11 May 1781, ADN, C4609, stamp 61.

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communicate were we to wish to be reconciled?’158 This letter shows evidence of a rarely glimpsed expression of cross-Channel solidarity in the face of state politics. The nature of the links that the French fishermen forged with the people of Harwich implies that they would have favoured Harwich over other English ports: ‘justice demands that one distinguishes from the crowd those men who have shown so much zeal for our common cause and have acted with so much good faith’. But Lemoyne himself formulated the clearest objection to such a move, which could ‘make these good people suspect in the eyes of their minister’.159 If the fishermen sought – often successfully – to influence government policies, the Channel remained an international boundary from the point of view of the states at war.

*** This survey of Anglo-French relations in the eighteenth century from below demonstrates how certain sections of the population were able to gain access to governmental authorities and influence the decisionmaking processes of the two states. What makes these practices remarkable with respect to other neutrality agreements negotiated elsewhere at other times is the fact that they survived over a relatively long period. Thus, it is important not to interpret the interactions among the ‘common people’ of the eighteenth century, both French and English, solely in terms of national rivalry. The negotiation of fishing truces over centuries is a first indicator of this. If fishing treaties were not always observed, it was due less to any hostility between the two nations’ fishermen than to conflicts of interest that were quite separate from national ties or that involved privateers and smugglers as well. The boundaries between these groups fluctuated, making it difficult for either state to apply diplomatic agreements effectively. The Channel fishermen constantly reformulated their alliances not only across the ill-defined state frontier but all along it as well. The fishermen’s ‘territory’ had variable boundaries, their resource was ever-moving and the notion of neighbourhood was very relative, all of which made the maritime ‘territorialisation’ of national identities elusive. The language of the fishermen, in wartime as in peacetime, sometimes defended the interests of the local community and sometimes those of the state, while they might or might not adopt a patriotic rhetoric depending on the circumstances. The language of patriotism was not always profitable for the fishermen in their dialogue with the state, and it was often their utility that they preferred to put forward 158

Lemoyne to Gamba, Paris, 6 June 1781, ADN, C4609, stamp 56.

159

Ibid.

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instead. Furthermore, fishermen had multiple allegiances and localism was just as valid an explanation as any for the disputes that unfolded in the Channel. Nevertheless, local alliances were themselves also regularly reconfigured: just as it does not necessarily make sense to talk of Anglo-French hostility in the cases we have studied, so the fishermen of Dieppe and Dunkirk knew how to bury their differences when the need arose. Fishermen were not rational protagonists solely driven by strictly economic motivations, but mobilised different languages according to the circumstances. This is not to say that communities of fishermen were impervious to national ideas; only that in the cases studied these ideas were not often brought to the fore. Paradoxically, it would seem therefore that war, far from creating a sense of national solidarity between all coastal communities, exacerbated conflicts of interests at a national level. The ‘nationalization of the local’, which Peter Sahlins noted in the case of Cerdanya, seems less readily applicable to the coastal communities of the Channel.

7

The game of identities Fraud and smuggling

Official trade between France and Britain as evidenced in port registers of imports and exports or balance of trade tables has never been the subject of systematic study.1 The protectionist legislation in force for most of the eighteenth century has often led to the view that trade between the two countries was negligible. Yet illicit trafficking continued to connect the two shores of the Channel, even in wartime: it was far from occupying a ‘secondary place’2 in trade between ports. Technically speaking, smuggling should be distinguished from fraud. In a memorandum to the French Directeur du Commerce in 1771 an English Jacobite and cotton manufacturer established in France, John Holker, differentiated between ‘armed smuggling’ and ‘smuggling performed by wilful misrepresentation or by artifice and in secret’.3 The first type refers to the pitched battles of the smuggling vessels’ with the customs boats in their endeavours to unload their cargoes in deserted coves.4 The second type is a synonym for fraud and refers to the concealment of banned products at customs.5 In practice, however, contemporaries often used the two terms interchangeably. Aside from this material definition of the kind, quantity and place of seizure of goods, fraud and smuggling were frequently described as ‘bad faith trade’, and the defrauder compared unfavourably to ‘the numerous 1 2

3

4 5

See, for instance, R. Davis, ‘English foreign trade, 1700–74’, EcHR, 15 (1962), pp. 285–303; P. Verley, L’échelle du monde: Essai sur l’industrialisation de l’Occident (Paris: Gallimard, 1997). Expression used by P. Dardel, who mentions the ‘secondary place’ of the trade with Britain ‘in the external relations of the ports of the generality of Rouen’: Navires et marchandises dans les ports de Rouen et du Havre au XVIIIe siècle (Paris: SEVPEN, 1963), p. 71. Memorandum from Holker to [Jean Charles Philibert] Trudaine [de Montigny], 16 March 1771, ADSM, C179, n. f. On Holker, see A. Rémond, John Holker, manufacturier et grand fonctionnaire en France au XVIIIe siècle, 1719–1786 (Paris: M. Rivière, 1946). The Directeur du Commerce was the minister who supervised all intendants du commerce. See Chapter 4. The same dichotomy is found in economic literature. See M. Fasquel, Recueil raisonné de tous les moyens de fraude et de contrebande, déjoués par l’administration des douanes. Par un employé de la direction de La Rochelle (Paris: Adrien Egron, 1816), p. 11.

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249

class of honest merchants’ and to ‘honest tradesman’.6 The moral sense of the term ‘fraud’, already present in its etymology (from the Latin fraus, fraudis – ‘bad faith, deceit, trickery’) was thereby underlined. This meaning is present in all definitions of fraud and smuggling. It is to be found in dictionaries,7 legal texts and official speeches, where economic definitions and moral condemnation are almost always mingled. Smuggling ‘not only threatens the destruction of the Revenue, but is highly injurious to regular commerce and fair trade, very pernicious to the manners and morals of the people, and an interruption of all good government’.8 But the condemnation was not unanimous and even in times of war between France and Britain voices were raised in defence of smugglers. Exporting contraband goods to the enemy reduced national wealth and thus inhibited the war effort. Ultimately it was the motivations of the economic agents which were crucial for contemporaries. Was an unintended fraud really a fraud? Was a crime that benefited the state still a crime? This structural ambivalence of fraud and smuggling took on a specific form in the eighteenth-century Channel. Trading with the enemy: smuggling In the last quarter of the seventeenth century France and England adopted protectionist legislation, characterized both by the prohibition of many goods and by the erection of a customs tariff wall. These laws had three ends: to increase public revenues in order to meet military needs; to protect national manufactures from competition; and to staunch the leakage of specie to the enemy.9 Attempts to circumvent the law 6

7

8

9

Ibid. Samuel Johnson defined the defrauder as ‘a deceiver, one who cheats’, a term which derived from ‘defraud’, i.e. ‘To rob or deprive by a wile or trick; to cheat; to cozen; to deceive; to beguile’: Dictionary of the English Language, 6th edn, vol. I (London: J.F. and C. Rivington, 1785). The term ‘fraud’ designates tromperie cachée or ‘concealed trickery’: J. Savary des Brûlons, Dictionnaire Universel de Commerce, vol. II (F-Z) (Amsterdam: Jansons, 1726), p. 167, quoted by Daniel Roche, Collège de France seminar: ‘La fraude et ses pratiques, économie et culture’ (12 January 2004). ‘First report of the Committee appointed to enquire into the illicit practices used in defrauding the Revenue’ (24 December 1783), in S. Lambert (ed.), House of Commons Sessional Papers of the Eighteenth Century (Wilmington, DE: Scholarly Resources Inc., 1975), vol. XXXVIII. Likewise, the law on smuggling of 22 June 1802 put forward the ‘protection of the Public Revenue and the fair Trader’: An Act . . . for the more effectual Prevention of Smuggling in Great Britain (42 Giii, C82). The customs duties on tea, in Britain, thus increased from 36% in 1712 to 64% in 1768 and 106% in 1780: G.J. Davies, ‘Incentive payments and the sale of smuggled goods in Dorset in the eighteenth century’, SoH, 14 (1992), p. 29. The 1784 Commutation Act, which brought down these duties to 12,5%, severely hit the smuggling economy: H.-C. Mui and L.H. Mui, ‘The Commutation Act and the tea trade in Britain, 1784– 1793’, EcHR, 16 (1963), pp. 234–53.

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inevitably increased and many products made it through illegally: from France to England this initially involved tea, coffee, wine, spirits and textiles, and in the opposite direction, wool, tobacco or coins. The historiography of smuggling in France and England has focused on three areas. A first group of historians has studied this activity from an economic perspective, favouring quantitative approaches over the study of fraudulent practices, and sidestepping the business dimension of this activity.10 These works have focused in particular on the period of the Continental Blockade11 and the free port of Dunkirk.12 A second body of work has investigated the social history of smuggling as crime.13 Lastly, cultural history has focused on certain mythical figures, such as Louis Mandrin or the Hawkhurst Gang.14 It is this last, more romantic aspect, that has prompted most works on smuggling. These three approaches have three drawbacks. First, the scale of analysis is often local and national, whereas smuggling, by definition, transcends political boundaries. In the Channel, smuggling has solely been considered on the importing side, without attention being paid to the blurred boundaries between legal and illegal trade: ships carrying smuggled goods did not return empty. Recent works on geographical areas other than the Channel have been concerned with approaching the phenomenon ‘by either end’ of the border.15 Second, when the social dimensions of smuggling is considered, emphasis is 10

11

12 13

14

15

W.A. Cole, ‘Trends in eighteenth-century smuggling’, EcHR, 10 (1958), pp. 395–410; H.-C. Mui and L.H. Mui, ‘Trends in eighteenth-century smuggling reconsidered’, EcHR, 28 (1975), pp. 28–43. F. Crouzet, L’économie britannique et le blocus continental (1806–1813) (Paris: PUF, 1958); S. Marzagalli, Les boulevards de la fraude: Le négoce maritime et le Blocus continental 1806– 1813. Bordeaux, Hambourg, Livourne (Lille: Presses Universitaires du Septentrion, 1999); G. Daly, ‘English smugglers, the Channel and the Napoleonic Wars, 1800–1814’, JBS, 46 (2007), pp. 30–46; G. Daly, ‘Napoleon and the “city of smugglers”, 1810–1814’, HJ, 50 (2007), pp. 333–52. C. Pfister-Langanay, Ports, navires et négociants à Dunkerque (1662–1792) (Société dunkerquoise diffusion, 1985). C. Winslow, ‘Sussex smugglers’, in D. Hay et al., Albion’s Fatal Tree: Crime and Society in Eighteenth-Century England (New York: Pantheon Books, 1975), pp. 119–65; C. Denys (ed.), Frontière et criminalité 1715–1815 (Arras: Artois Presse Université, 2001). See, for example, N. Holmes, The Lawless Coast: Murder, Smuggling and Anarchy in the 1780s on the North Norfolk Coast (Dereham: The Larks Press, 2008); M. Waugh, Smuggling in Kent and Sussex, 1700–1840 (Newbury: Countryside Books, 1985). However, two recent books offer more wide-ranging studies, combining cultural, political and economic history: M. Kwass, Contraband: Louis Mandrin and the Making of a Global Underground (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2014); N. Rogers, Mayhem: Post-War Crime and Violence in Britain, 1748–53 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2013), ch. 7. N. Planas, ‘La frontière franchissable: normes et pratiques dans les échanges entre le royaume de Majorque et les terres d’Islam au XVIIe siècle’, RHMC, 48 (2001), pp. 123–47.

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generally laid on violent confrontation between smugglers and state representatives. But to interpret the phenomenon only in terms of conflict, whether class conflicts or conflicts between state and society, is unsatisfactory: smugglers were also recruited from local elites and from within port administrations. The centre-periphery model is undoubtedly better adapted to explaining how the ties joining entire littoral communities were formed around these kinds of exchanges. Last, smuggling does not consist merely of economic transactions. Behind the material exchange there lies both symbolic exchange and social interactions. And yet it is striking that, with rare exceptions, the relationship between smuggling and political or religious affiliations – real or fantasized – of the groups that practised it has been passed over.16 The geography of Anglo-French smuggling was organized around two polygons. The first brought together Devon, Cornwall, Normandy and Brittany, with the Channel Islands at the hub of the traffic. The second was centred on the Strait of Dover, and took in Kent and Sussex as well as the whole north-eastern quarter of France, with Dunkirk at its heart. In both cases smuggling prospered because of privileges guaranteed by the states, and the status as legal enclaves was ‘the consecration in law of a geohistorical fact’:17 it partly derived from their geographical situation at the periphery of states, and partly from the fact that both regions had been under English and French sovereignty at different times. Dunkirk and the Channel Islands were fought over throughout the eighteenth century because of their strategic importance, and the inhabitants knew how to gain concessions by playing off one state against the other. The Channel Islands: French or English? The Channel Islands enjoyed a special legal and fiscal status since the Middle Ages. They had the privilege of neutrality since at least the fifteenth century, confirmed at the request of the diocese of Coutances by a papal bull from Sixtus IV in 1483.18 In 1671, in Les Us et Coutumes de la Mer, Étienne Cleirac mentions this neutrality in connection with prizes: ‘Frenchmen & Englishmen, whatever war may be between the two

16 17 18

P. Monod, ‘Dangerous merchandise: smuggling, jacobitism, and commercial culture in southeast England, 1690–1760’, JBS, 30 (1991), pp. 150–82. L. Dermigny, Escales, échelles et ports francs au Moyen-Age et aux temps modernes, reed. of ‘Les grandes escales’, Recueils de la société Jean Bodin (1974), vol. XXXIV, p. 599. Selden, On the Dominion, p. 376, p. 412; P. Heylin, The Second Journey, containing a Survey of the Estates of the Two Islands Guernzey and Jarsey, with the Isles Appending . . . The Sixth Book (London: Henry Seile, 1656), p. 300.

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Crowns, have not to offend or privateer one another, for as much and as far as the aspect or view of the aforesaid Isles extends.’19 This neutrality, which allowed the Islanders to trade with France in time of war, was revoked by an order in council of William III in 1689.20 From then on trade between the Islands and France was prohibited, though this did not prevent smuggling from increasing. The Islands also had a special tax regime, established in charters granted in the reigns of Richard II (1377–1399) and Edward IV (1461–1483). So raw materials could be exported to the Islands from England duty free on condition that they were used for manufacturing. In the other direction the Islands could export the products and manufactures of their soil duty free. However, reexporting to or importing from abroad was taxed. This special regime encouraged traffic in prohibited goods in two directions: wool and tobacco to Normandy and Brittany, and wine and spirits to the counties of Hampshire, Devon and Cornwall on the south coast of England. This local economy had connections with both England and France, and the populations of the Islands showed considerable ambivalence towards the two states throughout the eighteenth century, even in times of war. As is often typical of the inhabitants of border regions, the Islanders fluctuated between revolt and loyalty to the central states. Geographical proximity with France facilitated trade with the continent, whereas the Islands were often cut off from Britain by the vagaries of the weather. Moreover, the population itself was very mixed: the Islands, a privileged land of asylum for the Huguenots after the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes (1685), had a large French community. An anonymous memorandum of 1748 noted that ‘there may be on [Jersey] 8 thousands of [sic] inhabitants of either sex, including the natives of the country and French refugees, Huguenots, defrauders and wrongdoers’:21 many of these Frenchmen smuggled with Normandy. The same document underlined the difficulty of knowing their loyalties: For the successful execution of the plan to seize the isle of Jersey, it is necessary for all consequent preparations to be made in great secrecy. The number of smugglers 19

20 21

E. Cleirac, Us et Coutumes de la Mer (1671 edition), quoted in P. Falle, An Account of the Isle of Jersey, The Greatest of Those Islands that Are Now the Only Remainder of the English Dominions in France (London: John Newton, 1694), p. 211. H.G. Keene, ‘The Channel Islands’, EHR, 2 (1887), p. 33. ‘Mémoires sur les îles anglo-normandes’, 1748, ADC, C2459, item 6, fo. 1. This figure seems vastly underestimated. In 1694, Philip Falle estimated the population of Jersey between 15,000 and 20,000 inhabitants: Falle, An Account, p. 82. In his Carte topo-hidrographique de l’Isle de Jersey (1757), the chevalier de Beaurain considers that ‘17 or eighteen thousand inhabitants of all [sic] genders including the naturals of the country and French refugees, Protestants, smugglers, malefactors, etc.’ In 1764, the captain of a sloop of the British customs gave the figure of 30,000 inhabitants: BL, Add MS36220, fo. 48.

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spread along these French coasts, most of whom provide for their own families and those of the inhabitants of the aforesaid island, who trade together, would be inevitably informed . . . of any preparations that were made.22

Smugglers trafficking between French and English coasts were employed as spies throughout all the wars of the eighteenth century. From 1744, in return for a pardon, the British crown tried to enlist smugglers in the fight against France.23 The major parliamentary investigation into smuggling, which began in 1745, revealed that English smugglers were ‘admitted into the French ports, to carry on their illicit trade, and give our enemies information of the situation of publick [sic] affairs’.24 During the Seven Years War and the War of American Independence smugglers helped plan the invasion of the Channel Islands and the south of England.25 Again, during the French Revolution, the admiralty paid smugglers to keep the fleet informed about the enemy navy’s movements.26 The Islanders were able to make the most of this strategic asset to oppose their incorporation within the customs border. In Jersey as in Guernsey local populations effectively waged a more than century-old war against the board of customs, to preserve their tax privileges.27 From the end of the seventeenth century the Crown tried to impose on the islands a customs administration similar to other ports in England. In 1679 a permanent customs officer was appointed in Jersey in order to apply the clause of the Navigation Acts stipulating that any trade with the English colonies must pass through an English port. So a ‘register of certificate’ was appointed in Jersey in 1680, and another, in Guernesey in 1683.28 In 1688 the people of Jersey sent a petition to the English king, calling for the removal of these officers and complaining about being ‘treated like foreigners, as well by the said officer at home, as by the 22 23 24

25

26 27

28

ADC, C2459, fo. 14. ‘A Proclamation for inviting smugglers to enter into His Majesty’s Service’, The Gentleman’s Magazine, and Historical Chronicle, 14 (1744), p. 277. Interview with Stephen Theodore Jansen (Esquire), HCJ, vol. XXV (1745–1750), p. 102. At the same time, in Granville English smugglers were accused of being spies: letter from marquis of Coetmen, 17 July 1744, AN, Marine B3 428, fo. 47. Anon., 5 February 1756, ADC, C2460, item 16, n.f.; Hippeau, vol. II, p. 44. Conversely, some English smugglers offered to serve their country against the threat of a French invasion: A.T. Patterson, The Other Armada: The Franco-Spanish Attempt to invade Britain in 1779 (Manchester University Press, 1960), pp. 112–13. R.W. Avery, ‘The naval protection of Britain’s maritime trade, 1793–1802’, unpublished PhD thesis, Oxford University (1983), p. 330. See also Daly, ‘English smugglers’. A.G. Jamieson, ‘The Channel Islands and smuggling, 1680–1850’, in A.G. Jamieson (ed.), A People of the Sea: The Maritime History of the Channel Islands (London: Methuen, 1986), pp. 195–219. Ibid., pp. 196–7.

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French abroad, who have imposed so great duties upon the commodities of the said island that the inhabitants thereof cannot sell them to any profit’.29 Neither James II nor his successor to the throne, William of Orange, followed up their requests.30 Twenty years later the customs system set up in the Channel Islands, already understaffed, was dismantled. In 1708, orders drawn up by the privy council increasing the powers of customs officers were revoked following petitions from the Islanders, who even obtained the relaxation of the customs administration on the Islands. An order in council of December 1709 thus ordered the removal of customs officers, except for two registers of certificates in Jersey and in Guernsey, who were placed under the supervision of the Islands’ royal court.31 This was made up of bailiffs and jurats [magistrates], who were themselves traders or relatives of Channel Island merchants. From then on the way was officially clear for smuggling to prosper.32 To understand this volte-face we must remember that the abolition of the Channel Islands’ neutrality in 1689 saw the rise of a flourishing activity for their inhabitants, one that was also highly profitable for the state: namely, privateering. During the Nine Years War these privateers inflicted severe damage on the French merchant fleet. The Crown did not therefore wish to run the risk of seeing the Islanders swing over to the French. This calculation of gains and losses provided the backdrop to the whole history of eighteenth-century smuggling from the perspective of the state.33 Up until the Seven Years War British governments felt it was more beneficial to tolerate smuggling in order to encourage the Islanders to prey upon enemy trade. When privateering became less damaging to the French and public deficits worrying, the will to punish smuggling more severely took hold. In 1767 an instruction from the privy council established customs offices in Jersey and Guernsey. Customs officers and a naval cruiser were sent to the Islands, but the hostility of the population forced them to withdraw after two years. Again, the escalation of 29 30 32

33

Customs answer to a petition from the inhabitants of Jersey, 14 May 1688, BL, Add. MS18463, quoted in ibid., p. 197. 31 Ibid., pp. 197–8. Jamieson, ‘Channel Islands’, p. 204. Memorandum of J. Culliford, surveyor of Southampton, 28 October 1714, annotated by the commissioners of the customs, 26 May 1716, TNA, T1/202, fo. 97. A 1717 project encountered the same fate: TNA, T1/211, fos. 159–63. A similar process of negotiation happened in the Isle of Man, which had become an entrepôt for smuggling in the Irish Sea. In order to put an end to it, the treasury bought out the right to collect customs duties from the local magnate. In exchange, a grant was made to promote the economy of the Isle of Man. See P. Walsh, ‘The fiscal state in Ireland, 1690–1769’, HJ, 56 (2013), pp. 1–28.

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international tensions led the government to compromise, and the Islands retained their essential strategic value.34 The French Revolution changed very little. From February 1793 the lord commissioners of the treasury planned to seize all suspect ships at a given distance from the Islands, before concluding that ‘They do not consider the clause . . . as proper at this time to be adopted.’35 How to explain such a decision when war with France had just been declared, unless by a concern to attend to the interests of the Islanders, who were equipping privateers? This central contradiction in the Navigation Acts’ system had thus still not been resolved by the end of the eighteenth century. During the French Revolution the British administration had no legal means of opposing imports of French wine and spirits to Britain, which found their way in neutral ships by unstoppable routes, notably through Jersey and Guernsey.36 Finally, the need for money became a pressing one and the privy council’s instruction of 1767 was repromulgated in two laws (1805 and 1807) that put an end to the Islands’ privileged status and dealt smuggling a fatal blow.37 The persistence of these practices for over a century can also be explained by the strategies of the smugglers, who blurred the dubious boundaries of sovereignty that separated them from the continent. The Islanders traditionally insisted on their unwavering loyalty to their sovereign, guided by religious criteria, political (hostility towards France) and economic (the right to grow rich by smuggling). This is how Peter Heylin (1600–1662), chaplain to the duke of Danby, expressed himself on the occasion of his journey to Guernsey in 1628: ‘These privileges and immunities . . ., seconded of late days with the more powerful brand of religion, have been a principal occasion of that constancy wherewith they have persisted faithfully in their allegiance, and disclaimed even the very name and thought of France.’38 The same kind of language was employed in 1692 in an address from the States of Jersey to William III, thanking him for his protection: ‘Though our tongues be French, our hearts and swords are truly English.’39 But this attachment to the English crown was predicated on maintaining the Islands’ privileges. Thus a major enquiry into smuggling originating in the Channel Islands was launched in 1764 through the customs 34 35 36 37 39

Jamieson, ‘Channel Islands’, p. 207. J. Hume, customs officer in Dover, to Charles Long Esq, assistant secretary to the treasury board, 20 February 1793, TNA, T1/715, fo. 404. J. Hume to George Rose Esq, secretary of the treasury board, 5 March 1793, TNA, T1/715, fo. 535. 38 Jamieson, ‘Channel Islands’, p. 209. Heylin, Survey, p. 294. Address of 6 February 1692, quoted in Falle, An Account, p. 47.

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commissioners by the lords commissioners of the treasury. A series of supporting documents submitted to the privy council in 1766 allows a general view of the positions advanced.40 One anonymous author felt that reactivating the plan to send customs officers to the Islands would only put the Islanders and their fellow countrymen on an equal footing: [The states of Jersey and Guernsey] are not satisfied with being treated as native Englishmen but under colour [sic] of their constitution & charters set up a right to privileges inconsistent with the laws of Great Britain, & to which no Englishman lays claims.41

This discourse casts doubt upon the people of Jersey and Guernsey’s attachment to England. For their part the Islanders’ memoranda and petitions emphasized their loyalty and recall that these privileges were granted to them for services rendered: ‘Those charters were the glorious reward of their faithful services & bravery, in preserving these islands in the possession of the British crown & defending them against repeated attacks of the French, & in consideration of the great expences they are at & the fatigues they undergo in wartime.’42 The Channel Islanders also claimed, rather oddly, to be defending the general interest: if their ports gave up smuggling, it would benefit their French competitors. Morlaix and Roscoff were well-placed to attract smugglers from Cornwall or Devon, while Cherbourg, Le Havre, Fécamp, Boulogne and Dunkirk were ideal bases for smugglers from Sussex or Kent. To duck the charge of circumventing prohibitive laws, Guernsey’s merchant lobbies played down their role in smuggling circuits. While the Islands were used as warehouses, the ‘active’ smugglers, those transporting goods by boat, were described as English or French. In a word, ‘it is not the Guernsey people that smuggle’.43 A bullionist line of reasoning clearly shows that the Islanders’ and the nation’s interests coincided: All the goods which the English smugglers purchase in France, are paid for in ready money with English coin, which as soon as [it is] in the hands of the French is carried to their mint, & never returns to England, but every British shilling carried to Guernsey in the course of trade or otherwise, is brought back to

40

41 42 43

These documents were gathered in June 1766 by George Henry Lee, 3rd earl of Lichfield, in a ‘Brief on the part of the crown. In regard to the establishment of Officers at Guernsey Jersey & Alderney’, to be heard by the privy council: BL, Add MS36220, fos. 1–49. ‘Observations’, BL, Add MS36220, fo. 21. ‘Reasons humbly offered to considering the sending Custom Houses Officers to the Islands of Guernsey & Jersey’, BL, Add MS36220, fo. 1. Ibid., fo. 2.

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England in the same coin, so that the nation is not deprived of it, as it is when carried to France.44

The richer the people of Guernsey and Jersey became, the more motivated they were to equip privateers and attack their ‘natural enemy’,45 the French. But if their privileges were removed, there was nothing to guarantee that the Islanders would remain loyal to the British crown. Economic interests and national sentiment seemed to go hand in hand: if the former were threatened, the latter would be jeopardized. The 1764 memorandum mentioned the offers of joint ventures made to the Islanders by the merchants of Cherbourg. Having got wind of the plan to remove their special fiscal privileges, the Channel Islands tried to obtain free-port status in order to divert smuggling to Cotentin. The Guernsey merchants then threatened to accept the French proposal ‘considering the sending Custom Houses Officers to the Islands of Guernsey & Jersey’.46 The principle of a joint venture combining French and Anglo-Norman capital was not out of the question, and was taken very seriously by the British authorities. The activities of the smugglers were in fact very difficult for state administrators to track. Furthermore, it was often impossible to tell whether they were English or French. On 21 May 1767, the French ambassador to England, the comte de Guerchy, sent a memorandum and various official proceedings to lord Shelburne, then secretary of state for the southern department, ‘concerning various attacks committed on the coasts of France by the Captain and Crew of an English smuggling ship’.47 At the beginning of March one Gauthier, who was scouring the bay of Mont Saint-Michel, fired a broadside at a vessel belonging to Le Havre customs, fatally wounding one of the sailors. The event was recounted in detail in a report written by the boat’s crew. The smuggling schooner was captained ‘by the said Gautier claiming to be of Gerzey, or Garnezey’48 and was flying the colours of British sovereignty: ‘We noticed that it bore an English flag atop Its mainmast, and a Flag of the same nation atop its Foremast.’49 When the captain of the customs ship ordered the schooner to strike its sails and inform him of its crew, origin and cargo, the answer came back loud and clear: The aforesaid individuals answered us by shouting Come you B. rogues, If trouble it is you are looking for, you shall have it, and passing within Pistol range of our 44 47 48 49

45 46 Ibid. Ibid. Ibid., fos. 1–2. Guerchy to Shelburne, 21 May 1767, TNA, SP78/272, fo. 281. ‘Copie du Procès Verbal des employés de la Patache du havre du 9 Mars 1767 contre l’Equipage de la Goëlette armée’, TNA, SP78/272, fo. 285. Ibid., fo. 285v.

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said Patache, doffed their Hats while shouting thrice in the French tongue, Long Live The King, and let us have their starboard broadside, composed of 3. Pieces of Canon . . . accordingly we requested and shouted with our speaking trumpet to the Crew whether they did not recognize the French Flag that we were flying on the stern of our boat, what designs, if they were English, as their Lights and Flag denoted, they had assaulted us which was against the intentions of the States, that the infraction committed by them can only be regarded as an Act of Piracy.50

The use of the French language to cheer a king who might have been either George III or Louis XV, the hoisting of a British flag and the hostile behaviour towards a French customs ship, all during peacetime, distorted the interpretation of the event by the patache’s crew, who were reduced to making guesses (‘if they were English’). The fermiers généraux also wrote a memorandum of complaint that illustrates the difficulty they had in classifying the captain, Gauthier, in straightforward national categories. He was described as ‘a Frenchman taking refuge in Jersey or Garnezey’, who commands ‘an armed Schooner in Gerzey’, but who ‘for nearly 18 months has only left the Coasts of Normandy for as long as was necessary in order to collect cargoes of contraband Salt and contraband Tobacco in the English Isles’.51 Nor could the identity of his sailors be ascertained, but ‘one supposes that the Crew is also French for the most part’.52 The site of his misdemeanours was the harbour of Vierville, near Honfleur, where he frequently landed and maintained ties with the inhabitants. His attitude towards the Ferme Générale employees is not easy to decipher, fluctuating as it did between threats and corruption.53 This incident ultimately triggered an official complaint from the Ferme Générale to the British Crown because ‘it is not merely a matter of Troubles caused to the Employees of the King’s Farms in the exercise of their duties, and of excess committed against them, but of an affront to the French Flag, a violation of the Law of Nations, and infraction of the Treaties existing between their Most Christian and British Majesties.’54 The French ambassador repeated the same passage almost verbatim in his complaint to Lord Shelburne, who made no secret in his reply of his wish to punish the culprit.55 Even though Gauthier and his crew were French, it was his ship’s base of anchorage that was decisive in this specific case. This example clearly shows that defining smugglers in terms of ‘nationality’ makes little sense. They could be French and they could be English. Gauthier was no exception and can even be regarded as 50 51 52 55

Ibid., fo. 286–v. Underlined in the source. Memorandum of the fermiers généraux, n.d., TNA, SP78/272, fo. 289. 53 Ibid., fo. 289v. Ibid., fo. 289v. 54 Ibid., fo. 290v. Memorandum of Guerchy, 21 May 1767, TNA, SP78/272, fo. 283; Shelburne to Guerchy, 16 June 1767, ibid., fo. 312.

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emblematic of the game of identities inherent in smuggling. Clearly, the ambiguous legal and political position of the Channel Islands was the source of this confusion. But the omnipresence of the language of the nation and the manipulation of signs of national identification are a feature of border regions, maritime or terrestrial. Significant differences appeared nevertheless depending on state policy. Dunkirk, national interest and interest of the smogleurs While British authorities tolerated smuggling in Jersey and Guernsey, it was officially encouraged by the French in Dunkirk. Dunkirk profited from its status as a free port after its unification with France under the terms of an edict of Louis XIV on 2 December 1662: ‘We wish . . . all merchants, traders or traffickers, of whatever nation they be, to be able to land there in all safety and unload, sell and retail their goods generally exempted of all foreign, domanial and other import duties.’56 The town thus enjoyed exceptional legal privileges, putting it on the same footing as foreign ports: sailors were not subject to the impressment regime; the town was exempted from the taille (land tax) and the gabelle (salt tax), while foreigners paid no droit d’aubaine (right of escheat).57 This situation of extraterritoriality, which continued until the French Revolution, explains the omnipresence of foreign – particularly English and Dutch – communities and complicates national affiliations. It was also used to vindicate recurrent complaints by the neighbouring ports of Boulogne and Calais.58 As in the Channel Islands, all the contributors to the debate, whether for or against Dunkirk’s franchise, claimed to speak and act in the name of ‘the national interest’, and strongly rejected any charges of partiality or defence of their private interests. In Dunkirk the question took on particular significance because of the economic structure of the port. The town’s prosperity rested initially on privateering and smuggling, two activities supported by the state against the backdrop of competition with England. It is well known that, after the notorious career of Jean Bart at the end of the seventeenth century, Dunkirk privateering was one of the strengths of French maritime strategy. Less attention has been paid to the specific nature of the smuggling trade.59 The English smugglers who trafficked between the 56 58

59

57 Quoted in Dermigny, Escales, p. 598. Dermigny, Escales, pp. 599–600. If Dunkirk was the pivot of French smuggling, this trade encompassed a vast hinterland, as the marshal of Castries wrote to Vergennes: ‘Vous n’ignorez pas, Monsieur, combien le commerce des smugglers est utile aux habitants des côtes de la Picardie et de la Flandres [sic]’, 1 July 1785, AMAE, CPA553, fo. 318. This question has been studied, but almost exclusively in its quantitative dimension: Pfister-Langanay, Ports, pp. 323–60. The old thesis of A. de Saint-Léger, La Flandre

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Table 7.1 Number of English smugglers in Dunkirk Year

Average no. of smugglers/year

1768 1774 1765–1785 1786–1791

300 1,000–1,500 968 1,037

southern part of England, Dunkirk and the Flemish ports of the North Sea were locally known as ‘smogleurs’.60 They had been plying their trade in this region since the seventeenth century, and enjoyed the official protection of the municipal authorities, supported by every French government until the French Revolution. Throughout the eighteenth century, in peacetime as in wartime, these subjects of the British Crown freely and officially came and went through the port of Dunkirk to trade (Table 7.1). Dunkirk’s exceptional geographical location at the crossroads of trade in north-western Europe makes the problem even more complex than in the Channel Islands. There were no longer two states, but four (France, Great Britain, the Empire and the United Provinces) that were competing to attract this trade. Landing at Dunkirk, hundreds of English smugglers bought goods in hard cash from large wholesalers who kept a variety of products in their warehouses: Dutch gin, French cognac and wine, tea from China or India, coffee from Saint-Domingue or fabrics from Lyon and Rouen.61 They then set out again for England, equipped with false bills of lading and fake destinations for France or Spain that allowed them to mislead English privateers and men of war they met on their way.62 These documents were often issued by the Dunkirk admiralty and enabled them to elude French privateers and warships. The smugglers would unload their cargoes close to the English coasts, into smaller boats, which would in turn unload them in the innumerable inlets and coves of Kent or Sussex, in order to limit overland transport, which was very costly and complicated. The logistics required for such operations involved not

60

61 62

maritime et Dunkerque sous la domination française: 1659–1789 (Paris: Ch. Tallandier, 1900), puts a great emphasis on privateering, but only mentions smuggling in passing. The term might come from the Flemish smokkelaer, which means ‘defrauder’: P. Olinger (Abbé), Nouveau Dictionnaire classique français-flamand (1852) (cited in PfisterLanganay, Ports, p. 327). But the English word is as close to the French. Either way, the terminology reflects the international nature of this trade. Memorandum on the tax exemption of Dunkirk, 1778, AN, B3647, fo. 172. See, for instance, the case of one captain who used two bills of lading, one for Lisbon, the other for Calais, in 1777: quoted in Pfister-Langanay, Ports, p. 331.

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just finance and transport but also handling, which mobilised broad swathes of the coastal populations on both sides of the Channel. As we have seen,63 when British customs boats tried to intercept these smugglers, they fled to France, and took shelter on the seashore. Besides diplomatic considerations, French support for English smugglers made sense from a mercantilist point of view: the boats came to load up with French products, enriching the French economy with English currency, while depleting the rival state’s treasury. This view of the trade was advanced during the negotiation of the Eden treaty of commerce: exports of ‘eau-de-vie, Dutch gin and tea, by the smogleurs’ were first and foremost ‘a deprivation of revenue for the customs of England’.64 The same logic prevailed in wartime: trade was the sinew of power and smuggling a means of putting a strain on British tax revenues. The state thus granted immunity to foreign smugglers, who were protected not only from British customs but also from the privateers of Dunkirk by the same clearance, bills of lading or passports. To put it in another way, in wartime Englishmen obtained privileges from the French monarchy at the expense of French subjects. But nothing prevented the smogleurs from altering the rules of trade in turn by taking their trade elsewhere. Indeed, runners of prohibited goods were perfectly capable of using the documents issued by the Dunkirk authorities to mislead the cruisers of the French navy itself. Smuggling thus revealed the contradictions inherent in policies of nation states on their maritime peripheries. The discourse elaborated around the smogleurs shows the distance between ‘virtual’ social identities and ‘real’ identities, to borrow Erving Goffman’s terminology.65 The smogleurs do not speak to us directly in the sources. Very little is known about these men, whose trade was secret by nature, and that silence made it possible to attribute to them all kinds of virtues and vices. To demonstrate how representations of the English smuggler were constructed we can analyse the discourse in its social context. During the War of American Independence, which marked the peak of smuggling between England and the continent,66 the smogleurs 63 64

65

66

See Chapter 5 supra. Anonymous memorandum, [January 1787], AMAE, CPA559, fo. 7. For the same reasons, Calonne, intendant of Flanders and Artois, was reluctant to ‘make it known to the English the quantity of imports of French goods to England by the way of smogleurs’: letter to Vergennes, 24 January 1787, ibid., fo. 79–v. E. Goffman, Stigma: Notes on the Management of Spoiled Identity (London: Simon & Schuster, 1963). Virtual social identity corresponds to the expectations regarding a specific category of persons: it refers to a social norm. Real social identity corresponds to the concrete individual. When a discrepancy appears between these two levels, stigma occurs. According to a report from the customs commissioners to parliament, dated 1783, the smuggling of brandy and gin, tea and coffee was multiplied by three between 1780 and

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were the object of intense discussions in Dunkirk. Early on in the conflict their right to put in at the port was upheld. The mayor of Dunkirk Taverne de Montdhiver welcomed the decision in March 1778, evoking ‘universal joy among all our inhabitants’. As in Guernsey, the foreign smuggler, who brought into the town ‘the largest amount of cash’ and ‘much gold’, was celebrated.67 But this discourse of unanimity concealed major discord among Dunkirk traders. On 10 July 1778 a proclamation by Louis XVI was issued in Dunkirk, authorising privateering against all subjects of the ‘King of England’.68 This law contained one important exception: the smogleurs. The privateers’ interests thus came into conflict with those of the traders and wholesalers, who sold goods to the smogleurs and were in a majority in the chamber of commerce. The situation was complicated by the fact that at the beginning of the conflict some of the English smugglers based in Dunkirk moved their activities along the coasts of the Channel and the North Sea.69 Many went to Flushing in the United Provinces, taking with them thirty-odd smugglers.70 From this base, which was almost a free port because of its moderate customs duties, the smugglers also operated as privateers. In August 1778 a rumour spread that an ‘English smogleur without commission, coming into the port of Flessingue’71 seized a prize made by a French privateer. The Prince de Robecq, commander-in-chief of Dunkirk and Maritime Flanders, expressed the contradiction the French authorities found themselves in: This infraction by the English smogleurs, under the protection wholeheartedly granted to them by the Court in the port of this town in this time of hostility between their nation and ours is beginning . . . to become improper and detrimental to our privateers.72

From then on the two camps were at loggerheads, each striking opposing attitudes towards the smogleurs. The Prince de Robecq asked the

67 68

69 70 71 72

1783. Out of 215 smuggling vessels which were listed in the report, 114 were coming from Essex, Kent and Sussex, traditional hives of smugglers: A.G. Jamieson, ‘Devon and Smuggling, 1680–1850’, in Duffy (ed.), New Maritime History of Devon, vol. I, p. 246. Letter to [Sartine], 27 March 1778, AN, Marine B3647, fo. 170. Archives CCDk, register 42, fos. 67–8, quoted in extenso in R. de Bertrand, ‘Le port et le commerce maritime de Dunkerque au XVIIIe siècle’, Mémoires de la Société dunkerquoise (1864–1865), vol. X, pp. 280–1. On the Normand side, the same phenomenon could be observed, with the short migrations of Granville smugglers to Roscoff in Brittany: Jamieson, ‘Channel Islands’. ‘État des Français qui se sont émigrés et retirés de Dunkerque à Flessingue au moment des hostilités’, August 1779, ADN, C4624/1, item 40. Anne de Montmorency (1724–1812), Prince de Robecq (lieutenant general of the king’s armies), to Sartine, Dunkirk, 23 August 1778, AN, Marine B3 647, fo. 161. Ibid., fo. 161v.

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secretary of state for the Marine to withdraw the permission to the smogleurs to come to Dunkirk. But on 23 October 1778 the court of admiralty of that port introduced ‘conditions under which the trade of the smogleurs to the port of Dunkirk is to be tolerated’ which, while setting out a number of requirements for English smugglers to enter the town, authorised the continuation of such trafficking.73 Anti-smogleur propaganda only became more vociferous. In order to contest the admiralty’s regulation, Poirier, a lawyer hired by the privateer lobby, interpreted all economic exchanges through the prism of the nation: ‘A host of spies of the King of England are creeping in disguised as smugglers. . . . These people are admitted everywhere and go to their merchants to collect and prepare their contraband, depart thence instructed, and disclosing at home what they have learned, the enemy profits from it, and makes use of it when the time is right.’74 The criticism was a clever one, being founded on the two states’ actual use of smogleurs as spies. The language of interests was also mobilised to dissociate the smogleur’s profits from the general interest. Thus, fraud was barely profitable for Dunkirk, its sole beneficiaries being English commissioners or Spanish brandy producers: The sole consequence of the fraudulent trade is to sustain foreigners, specifically our immediate enemy who preoccupies us! . . . The English are the only ones who are practising this trade; not six men in Dunkirk do so, a point of particular note; on the one hand we seek to destroy the enemy, on the other we enrich him.75

The lawyer was here likening urban identity to national identity: although resident in Dunkirk, an Englishman could not at the same time be a Dunkirker. Just as the individual could not break away from his national origins, his political choices were determined by those of his state. A Frenchman trading with an Englishman in wartime was thus a traitor: ‘The smuggler is an Englishman, the Englishman is our enemy . . ., yet one has more confidence in him, than one has in a Frenchman.’76 Poirier was here referring to the French traders established in Flushing, who equipped English smugglers and privateers in that port. In an earlier memorandum to the French ambassador in the United Provinces Poirier bitterly lamented ‘seeing patriots, people who owe their fortune to Dunkirk, working against them by trading, loading [their ships] and 73 74

75

ADN, C4624/1, n.f. Poirier, ‘Mémoire établissant les inconvénients de recevoir les fraudeurs à Dunkerque pendant les hostilités’, 19 March 1779, ADN, C4611, item 14, n.f. On these fantasies, see A. Dewerpe, Espion: Une anthropologie historique du secret d’État contemporain (Paris: Gallimard, 1994). Poirier, ‘Mémoire établissant’, n.f. 76 Poirier, ibid., item 5.

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openly encouraging these pirates’.77 No trust could therefore be placed in defrauders, whose activity relied on deceit. They were rootless and as such could not be easily situated in networks of interpersonal knowledge. Nor were the smogleurs’ actual activities clearly identified either, while their moonlighting threatened the social order: ‘They are more dangerous than if they were working openly against France, for they are spies, privateers, and pirates.’78 The private wrongdoings of ‘that kind of man that cheats’ bore the hallmark of their odious trade. We can see in these denunciations the traditional elements of a rhetoric of conspiracy, which was particularly effective in wartime. The enemies of the state were groping ‘in the dark’ and their manners were dissolute: These people accustomed to transporting gin, brandy, in a word strong liquors, devote themselves to their use, overindulge in them, and reduced to that state where a man forgets himself, will they not constantly expose the town to their extreme behaviour, for as long as they are admitted there? Dunkirk is thus exposed, and for whom? For intruders.79

Another recurrent accusation was that of promoting the emigration of soldiers or of being ‘débaucheurs’80 of workers. This was a serious criticism in these border regions, where economic emigration was severely punished by law.81 Smogleurs had no personal identity: they were not known by their names, faces or histories. Their social identity was built around two hubs: economic operations and national origin, which formed the basis for endless remarks about their greed or duplicity. We come across the same elements, but with the opposite meaning, in the arguments of those who defended the smogleurs. These people, led by the Dunkirk chamber of commerce and the mayor, denied the relevance of the national origins of the smugglers and stressed instead the economic 77

78 80

81

‘Mémoire pour Mrs les armateurs de Dunkerque présenté par M. Poirier avocat, à Mr. le Duc de la Vauguyon ambassadeur de S.M.T.C. à La Haye le 12 janvier 1779. Etant l’ensemble de leurs griefs contre les fraudeurs de Flessingue’, ADN, C4624/1, n.f. In this excerpt the term ‘patriot’ is not laudatory and means ‘national’. Poirier, ‘Mémoire établissant’, item 14. 79 Ibid. Poirier, ‘Mémoire établissant l’avantage idéal que Dunkerque a retiré du commerce de fraude pendant les hostilités, ainsi que le bénéfice net résulté pour l’Angleterre’, 15 May 1779, ADN, C4611, item 4, n.f. In French, débauchage marked the end of the working day; in this excerpt the English smugglers were accused of encouraging workers to emigrate in search of jobs abroad. Quite clearly, the use of the term also has a moral meaning, which is intentional: débaucher means ‘to cause to forsake allegiance’ and to ‘corrupt morally’. R. Morieux, ‘La fabrique sociale des réseaux migratoires: les ouvriers du lin entre Cambrésis, Pays-Bas autrichiens et Sussex dans la seconde moitié du 18e siècle’, in I. Gouzévitch and L. Hilaire-Perez (eds.), Les échanges techniques entre la France et l’Angleterre (XVIe–XIXe siècles): Réseaux, comparaisons, représentations (Paris: CDHTECnam, 2010), pp. 43–57.

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prosperity they brought to the town as a whole.82 Cosmopolitan and rootless, smugglers gained nothing by helping England. According to Torris, an English commissioner in Dunkirk, national sentiments were meaningless to a smuggler driven only by ‘greed’ and private interest: Far from being attached to their patrie, they have for it only the estrangement inspired by fear, and they have for France the firmest attachment that can reside in such people, as it has for a principle their interest, their benefit, and the conservation of their means of subsistence. Is it likely [that] a class of men that has no other profession than fraud . . . will prefer the nation where they are pursued and banished to the one where they are supported and where they grow rich?83

For all that they were English, smogleurs could be of use to France: an ambiguity explained by the transnational nature of the trade, but also by the context of war and the omnipresence of the rhetoric of the nation in France from the 1760s on.84 Like Poirier’s discourse, Torris’s analysis is laced with social prejudice in that it excludes smugglers acting from ideological motives and presents them as rational individuals unaffected by national passions, as if the two aspects were irreconcilable. But where Poirier lumps all the English together as enemies, Torris accepts that there were exceptions to the rule: ‘These Englishmen cannot be viewed as the same as their other compatriots, who are enemies of the state.’85 Attachment to a nation was not inherited at birth; it was cultivated or lost. Here we see expression given to a fundamental and enduring tension in the interpretation of national feeling, as a product of culture or nature. For the advocates of the smogleurs it was the policy adopted in Dunkirk towards these Englishmen which determined their attitude towards France. It was therefore dangerous, as the Dunkirk chamber of commerce noted, ‘to make this source of riches wither away by completely discouraging and driving out the smogleurs’.86 Chased away from Dunkirk, these smugglers would have ‘no other recourse but to arm against us’:87 it was economic need, not national hatred, that explained the behaviour of the smuggler. Lastly, according to this mercantilist reading of fraud the feelings of smugglers for France mattered little. Whatever their motives, they actually contributed to the struggle against their homeland:

82 83 85 86 87

Taverne de Montdhiver, bourgmestre of Dunkirk, to Sartine, 27 March 1778, AN, Marine B3647, fo. 170. 84 1779, ADN, C4611, item 3. Bell, Cult of the Nation. Torry, ‘Réponse aux nouvelles instructions inspirées au S. Poirier jeune homme sortant du collège passé avocat’, n.d., ADN, C4615, item 23. Dunkirk Chamber of Commerce, ‘Mémoire sur les smogleurs de Dunkerque’, handed over to Sartine on 5 February 1779, ADN, C4611, item 16. ADN, C4611, item 3, p. 2.

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Nothing could harm the enemies of His Majesty more effectively than speculation, the result of which is on the one hand directly to deprive England of resources . . ., and on the other hand to defraud this country of the immense duties that it imposed on the introduction of French goods, duties that form one of the main branches of this state’s revenues.88

The smogleurs’ private interest could thus contribute to the public good. Measuring how much the pursuit of one’s own particular interest might contribute to the common good or the general interest had become an omnipresent heme after Bernard Mandeville’s Fable of the Bees (1714), not only in economic writings but also in political tracts, in pamphlets or in the press.89 For most of the eighteenth century the French authorities privileged an economic over a political interpretation of fraud and constantly encouraged smoglage in Dunkirk. After the French Revolution the situation was reversed, with the franchise of the Flemish port once again coming under attack from traders in the rival ports of Boulogne and Calais. In 1792 Charles-Bruno Francoville, a deputy of the Constituent Assembly and judge of the Calais district court, expressed his opposition to Dunkirk’s special status by reprising the dialectic of interests: ‘[The Dunkirk trader] shall deliver to foreigners Spanish wines and brandy, always at a price lower than ours, to the detriment of our traders of Cherbourg, Fécamp, Boulogne and Calais.’90 In this logic of interurban rivalry, already mentioned in connection with debates on coastguards or fortifications, the evocation of the foreigner was for domestic use. In revolutionary France the maintenance of franchises was an obstacle to republican equality, as some citizens of Calais wrote using an organic metaphor: Since the Constitution was completed the French Empire can be regarded as a precious tree whose 83 departments form the branches; trade breathes life into this tree, and the fruits which it produces belong to all the citizens that cultivate it. Any tax exemption is a parasitic plant that attaches itself firmly to the tree, rises, grows at the expense of its subsistence; it devours it, makes it constantly sluggish and utterly sterile.91 88 89

90

91

Mrs Gamba and Archdeacon, Dunkirk traders, to Sartine, navy minister, n.d., ADN, C4611, item 2. A.O. Hirschman, The Passions and the Interests: Political Arguments for Capitalism before Its Triumph (Princeton University Press, 1977); C. Lazzeri, ‘Peut-on composer les intérêts? Un problème éthique et politique dans la pensée du XVIIe siècle’, in C. Lazzeri and D. Reynié (eds.), Le pouvoir de la raison d’État (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1992), pp. 145–91; Morieux, ‘Les nations et les intérêts’. ‘Mémoire sur les ports francs’, par M. Charles-Bruno Francoville, in Adresse du Conseil général de la Commune de Calais, à la Convention nationale (Calais: Leroy-Berger, Year 3), p. 11. Observations des citoyens de Calais, sur les abus de la franchise de Dunkerque (1792), in ibid., p. 14.

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Such discourse forms part of the more general condemnation of privilege, as contravening equality before the law. Initially, in spite of the declaration of war in February 1793, the Executive Council of Ministers92 authorised Calais, Boulogne and Dunkirk to welcome smogleurs. On 10 February 1793 the commercial court of justice sitting in Bergues thus wrote a regulation for Dunkirk very similar to the one in force during the War of American Independence.93 But this exceptional situation was no longer thinkable under the Revolutionary Government (July 1793–July 1794), which hardened the opposition between ‘national’ and ‘foreign’. On 9 May 1793 a decree of the National Convention banned these boats from entering the ports of the Republic: ‘Under the general denomination of enemy ships are included the ships known by the name of smogleurs or fraudeurs.’94 This ban was only the first stage in the withdrawal of the privileges of the Flandres port. In the name of republican equality the convention soon abolished the franchises of Dunkirk, Bayonne and Marseille by the law of the 11 Nivôse Year 3 (31 December 1794).95 During the war smuggling between France and England primarily benefited the Channel Islands and the Dutch ports, while the French ports declined. The Dunkirkers never gave up appealing for a return to the former system. A memorandum of 31 July 1799 from the general council of the Nord department skilfully combined a cosmopolitan rhetoric, at a time when there was talk of a return to peace, and the language of national interest. The free port was presented as ‘a permanent fair, where all the peoples rush to exchange their riches; it is a neutral ground between foreign trade and our own . . .; a cordon has separated it from the rest of the territory’.96 Like the Channel fishermen, these merchants from the north of France argued that they had no stake in the war between Britain and France. At the same time the memorandum demonstrated that the free port remained a weapon in the rivalry with England: Hope of a sincere fraternity between all people is a very sweet illusion, yet it is an illusion all the same. Whatever the treaties and shared interests which bind them, other interests shall divide them. In the midst of a profound peace they shall wage 92 93 94 95

96

The ministerial council set up following the fall of the king, which lasted until the Committee of Public Safety took command in the spring of 1794. ‘Navigation of the English smuggling vessels to the Port of Dunkirk’, 18 February 1793, TNA, T1/715, fo. 399. Lebeau, Recueil des lois, vol. III, pp. 435–6. E. Dejongue, ‘Les activités maritimes de Dunkerque de la rupture de la paix d’Amiens à la chute de l’Empire’, unpublished Diplôme d’Etudes Supérieures, University of Lille (1957), pp. 49–50. ‘Mémoire sur la nécessité de rétablir la franchise du Port de Dunkerque’, 1 August 1800, AN, AFIV/1020, p. 2.

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a commercial war of attrition. The English will remain our prime and most terrible enemies.97

In Dunkirk, the conflict of interests dividing French privateers and French merchants who invested in the smuggling trade faded away, thanks to the smogleurs themselves: ‘This port became the scourge of our enemies, a priceless advantage of illicit commerce: persecuted at home, the English smugglers themselves came to offer us their arms. Our privateers have on occasion been manned by these skilful and intrepid sailors, and steered into the most secret coves of their motherland.’98 The debate over the re-establishment of the franchise continued after the Peace of Amiens, but the demands of Dunkirk’s merchant interests went unheeded.99 In spite of the signing of the peace, smoglage never reached pre-Revolution levels. Rather than the 1,285 smugglers who docked in 1789, the port received just 290 at the time of the Peace of Amiens.100 It would not be until the Decree of Saint-Cloud on 15 June 1810 that this activity would be authorised again in the port of Dunkirk.101 In spite of the often confrontational relations between France and Britain, the persistence of armed smuggling for over a century confirms that populations could adapt to the international political and economic situation. Ascribing an unchanging national identity to these smugglers is impossible because of the insufficient legal differentiation of the categories of national and foreign. From the revolutionary wars onwards economic and political borders tended to overlap. In France the smogleur started to be defined as an Englishman, whatever his relationship with his government. In Britain the attitude of the authorities vis-à-vis Channel Islands smugglers was initially less radical, even during the Revolution. The Islands privateers still represented a considerable strategic asset in the war against France, and successive British governments spared them for a long time. However, after Trafalgar, when the British fleet’s maritime superiority over the Channel was definitively established, this exception to the customs border was removed. Fraud as negotiation: customs States had at their disposal several ways of limiting fraud and smuggling. Lowering customs tariffs helped cut defrauders’ profits: the 1784 97 99

100

98 Ibid., p. 4. Ibid., p. 5. Maybe because the lobbying of Boulogne and Calais was more efficient: see, for instance, the petition of the Boulogne traders to the ‘citizen councilor of state’ Fourcroy, who emphasises the merits of warehouse trade over the franchise: AN, AFIV/1020, folder 18, n.d., n.f. Dejongue, ‘Les activités maritimes’, p. 60. 101 Ibid., p. 148.

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Commutation Act aimed at making smuggling unprofitable, while securing greater revenues for the state.102 Moreover, smugglers could be called upon as privateers in wartime. Surveillance of the coasts was another solution, but we have mentioned the difficulty of implementing such a policy. Improving the collection of duties in customs offices located in the ports was a last option. It is hard to be strictly comparativist here. For a start, customs administration did not have the same status in the two countries. In France it was leased until the great reform of 1791, which made the Ferme Générale a national company. But until the Revolution this institution was a private body, in which the concept of profit was paramount and the operating costs were low. Its main function remained the collection of duties, even if it was incidentally responsible for extra-fiscal tasks. In England, however, the customs had been run by the state since 1671. The importance of this difference should not be overemphasized because the public/private division was not always significant in practice: while the English customs employed riding officers to patrol the coast, the Ferme Générale employed brigades of guards to control the frontiers.103 A second obstacle to comparison is the range of sources. In France the archives of the Ferme Générale suffered a great deal during the revolutionary period and are full of gaps. In the English case, however, the archives of customs, centralised in the National Archives in 1958, are very rich indeed. Lastly, the difference is historiographical: in France the history of the customs has first and foremost been a history of institutions,104 whereas in England there has been some interest for the work of customs officers.105 We can study customs fraud through the administrative correspondence between merchants and the institutions in charge of applying the British laws. At the heart of the interaction that emerges in the customs bureau lies the question of the good or bad faith of the suspected defrauder. At every stage of economic exchange the definition of fraud is the product of a negotiation: the judgments and interpretations that lead to

102 103

104

105

Chapter 4 supra. W.J. Ashworth, Customs and Excise: Trade, Production, and Consumption in England 1640– 1845 (Oxford University Press, 2003), pp. 169–70; G.T. Matthews, The Royal General Farms in Eighteenth-Century France (New York: Columbia UP, 1958), p. 122. Y. Durand, Les fermiers généraux au XVIIIe siècle (Paris: Maisonneuve et Larose, 1996) (1st edn: 1971); V. Azimi, Un modèle administratif de l’Ancien Régime: Les commis de la Ferme générale et de la Régie générale des aides (Paris: Éditions du CNRS, 1987). E.E. Hoon, The Organization of the English Customs System 1696–1786 (New York: Augustus M. Kelley Publishers, 1968) (reedited in 1937); Ashworth, Customs and Excise, pp. 133–83.

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describing one practice as fraudulent and another practice as legal are subject to constant re-evaluation. The customs bureau as observatory When a border was crossed, a customs officer was usually the first contact with the state administration. To understand how, in everyday practice, the categorisation of individuals and interpretation of legal rules worked, it makes sense to focus on the customs house in the ports. At the customs, a negotiation took place between the ‘public’ (i.e., the traveller taking goods through) and the state’s representatives on land (i.e., the customs officers).106 These practitioners daily applied a complex law and, with the aid of their ’books of rates’,107 collected duties and possibly seized smuggled products. It was hard work: in 1787, for example, 1,425 items were subject to duty in England.108 To see how the system worked exactly, let us take the example of Dover, the main point of entry and exit for passengers in England (Figure 7.1). Occasional travellers or merchants often carried with them ‘small amounts of goods’.109 Upon embarking, the captains of the packet boats were required to draw up a list of the luggage carried by the travellers, and its contents. On arrival in or departure from Dover so-called tidewaiters would board the boats to prevent luggage being secretly loaded or unloaded. A searcher would check the cargoes on board and open cases, which were sometimes taken to a warehouse and searched again. The traveller for his part would go to the customs house, where senior officers would collect the duties (the collector) and record the accounts (the comptroller).110 So there was ample opportunity for fraud: on board the boat, during the transport of the bags, in the warehouse or even in the customs office. There were no British consuls in Calais or Boulogne, and the Dover customs reported to the London board of customs in 1786 that ‘as

106

107

108 109 110

J. Brewer, ‘Servants of the public – servants of the crown: officialdom of eighteenthcentury English central government’, in J. Brewer and E. Hellmuth (eds.), Rethinking Leviathan: The Eighteenth-Century State in Britain and Germany (Oxford University Press, 1999), pp. 127–47. In every customs bureau were found the standard manuals of Henry Crouch, reedited throughout the eighteenth century: A Complete View of the British Customs; Containing the Rates of Merchandize (London: J. Osborn, W. Bell, 1724); Id., A Complete Guide to the Officers of His Majesty’s Customs in the Out-Ports (London: Printed for the Author, 1732). Davies, ‘Incentive payments’, p. 29. Report of the Dover customs to the London bureau, 15 December 1786, TNA, CUST54/2, n°611. The procedure is detailed in the instructions of the board of customs, 24 March 1787, TNA, CUST54/148, fos. 160–2.

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Figure 7.1 Roger Book’em, Custom House Dover (1821).

passengers are generally in great haste and averse to all forms of detention, they drive the masters of these vessels to illegal practices’.111 In laws that mention seizure, ‘objective’ elements making it possible to determine fraud include the following: whether the merchandise was imported or exported, which country it was manufactured in, where it came from and in what quantity, its quality, whether it had been declared for a duty or weight lower than its value, whether it was banned and so on.112 ‘Subjective’ elements derived from the suspicion of customs officers or tip-offs that an act of fraud had been committed. This second point was key: customs officers had a discretionary power, a certain freedom of decision when applying the law to interpret whether there had been fraud or not on a case-by-case basis. When goods were seized on grounds of suspicion, which is what concerns us here, they were taken to the local customs warehouse. If the 111 112

Report of the Dover customs to the London bureau, 15 December 1786, TNA, CUST54/2, n°611. See, for example, An Act for the further improvement of His Majesty’s Revenue of Customs, and for the Encouragement of Officers making seizures, and for the prevention of the clandestine running of goods, 3 Geo. III (1763).

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travellers from whom these goods had been confiscated protested, they went to the customs office and put in an official claim for the goods to be restored to them. They had to swear under oath to a justice of the peace that they had already paid the duty, that they were not the real importer or that they were unaware of the amount involved. This claim was then sent to the board of customs in London by the collector, along with a report of the seizure by the customs officer concerned. The board would then rule on the disagreements, sometimes after consulting Crown lawyers. Two scenarios, described by customs historian Elizabeth Hoon, emerged from this: (1) The board would be convinced by the defendant’s explanations and decide the goods should be returned without penalty. But the customs officer could be forced to pay a fine if he did not respect the forms prescribed by the law, or if the elements that made it possible to prove the fraud were inadequate. In the event of proceedings being brought by the traveller, the officer was not backed up by the treasury. Commissioners’ directives to local officers often refer to this danger, as in 1785, regarding the many complaints from tradesmen about the high duties charged by Dover customs officers in breach of the law: We caution you . . . against exacting any fees contrary to the said order [the act of parliament of 17 May 1762], . . . because, where an Officer claims any fees by virtue of his office, it is incumbent on him to make out his right thereto at his own risk and expence, without expecting any relief from this Board.113

(2) The board would decide that it was necessary to take legal action. In this case the customs officer could choose to stand trial at his own expense, and, if he won, he would gain a third of the product of the sale of the goods, the other two thirds going to the Exchequer and the Crown. However, if he lost the suit, he would have to pay any penalties out of his own pocket. Such procedures could ultimately lead to profit or loss for each party in financial, professional or reputational terms. After the 1791 customs reform the system in France became rather similar: customs officers shared profit in the seizure and were given discretionary powers, and if the accused challenged the report of the seizure, the case would be adjudicated by a justice of the peace.114 In 1816, Fasquel, an employee of the La Rochelle customs, advised customs officers who carried out a 113 114

Circular of the Dover customhouse to the customs bureau of Dover, 8 July 1785, TNA, CUST54/148, fo. 104. On the new ‘Code des Traites’ of 1791, see J. Clinquart, L’administration des douanes en France sous la Révolution (Paris: Association pour l’histoire de l’administration des douanes, 1989), pp. 73–92. On the legal procedure regarding seizures, see DujardinSailly, Codes des Douanes de l’Empire français (Paris: Archives du Droit Français, 1809), Livre V, Titre III, Sections I–II, pp. 299–345.

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seizure to write their official reports giving a ‘most faithful account of the circumstances’, ‘freeing themselves from any motive of personal interest’ and distinguishing the action the law wishes to repress, from the involuntary contravention for which the rigour of the forms would be contrary to the administration’s principles of justice. This judgment belongs particularly to the receivers, who, responsible for the reports to their office, must be able to recognize the need, or injustice, or even the ridiculousness of a seizure.115

Actors’ strategies: the struggle to define fraud British customs archives contain the correspondence of three types of protagonists: captains, shipowners, merchants or travellers defending themselves from the accusation of fraud; customs officers justifying themselves over a seizure; and the response of the customs commissioners in London, who held the ultimate authority to rule as to what constituted a fraudulent act. In 1791 the London board of customs received 10,400 letters from the so-called ‘outports’ (all English ports except London), as well as letters and petitions from merchants.116 These exchanges took place within a codified framework: the customs house was a closed space with two protagonists trying to convince the same interlocutor. By focusing on the port of Dover, the role of political conditions in the development of the legal and economic norms elaborated at an international border can be assessed. For this purpose I will concentrate on three moments: the years 1786–1788, so as to examine the application of the Eden Treaty to customs; the years 1792–1793 for the consequences of the beginning of the war between France and Britain; and the 1802–1803 Peace of Amiens, when thousands of travellers laden with banned goods crossed the Channel after ten years of war. The rhetorical strategies deployed were a reflection of power struggles in which the aim was to discredit the opponent’s argument while referring to tried and tested value systems, according to an interpretative framework we used when analysing fishermen’s discourses.117 A central dimension of this struggle was to interpret signs and classify behaviours. The customs commissioner had to be convinced that fraud had or had not been committed, and that the traveller deserved to be prosecuted or cleared. There was a horizon of expectation present in the minds of both protagonists: the possibility of a lawsuit. As Luc Boltanski and Laurent Thévenot point out, it was a question of understanding 115 117

Fasquel, Recueil raisonné, pp. 24–5. Chapter 6 supra.

116

Hoon, English Customs, p. 65.

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the capacities that actors bring into play when they have to justify their actions or their criticisms. When one is attentive to the unfolding of disputes, one sees that they are limited neither to a direct expression of interests nor to an anarchic and endless confrontation between heterogeneous worldviews clashing in a dialogue of the deaf. On the contrary, the way disputes develop . . . manifests efforts toward convergence at the very heart of a disagreement.118

The disputes which took place in the customs bureau turned around the problem of defining what constituted fraud. In order to defend themselves, travellers resorted to three types of argumentative strategies: they alleged their ignorance of the law; they questioned the professional competence of customs officers; they appealed to the patriotism of their interlocutors. Ignorance In front of the customs administration, travellers usually claimed to be ignorant of the law, to be unfamiliar with the system of duty collection and to be guilty only of ignorance: they thus presented themselves as outsiders. However, this last criterion was central in the application of the law, since any fraud was necessarily intentional. This point was upheld systematically in the official memoranda detailing seizure. The court responsible for judging these cases was effectively a common court: in common law the criterion of intent was needed if an offence was to be punished.119 For an act to be intentional in criminal law its author had to be aware of performing an illicit act which he intended as such.120 In French law too deception was a central criterion in the interpretation of the law and determined the severity of the sentence.121 In 1787 some Jerseyans complained that their velvet and cotton fabrics had been seized by the Saint-Malo customs. In a paper addressed to Dorset, Britain’s ambassador to France, they declared they had not been informed of a recent decision by the king’s council requiring cotton to be packed: the law ‘was not posted in St Malo and was not even known there by the inhabitants’.122 Unlike in France, the issue of the publicising of customs laws was fundamental in England on both the legal and 118 119 120

121 122

L. Boltanski and L. Thévenot, On Justification: Economies of Worth, translation Catherine Porter (Princeton University Press, 2006) (French edn: 1991), p. 13. Hoon, English Customs, 92–6. As William Blackstone put it, ‘an unwarrantable act without a vicious will is no crime at all’: Commentaries on the Laws of England, 4 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1765– 1769), Book 4, Chapter II, p. 21. See A. Laingui, La Responsabilité pénale dans l’ancien droit: XVIIe–XVIIIe siècles (Paris: Librairie générale de droit et de jurisprudence, 1970). Petition of Jean Albier, Sara Pirvaux, Elizabeth Oulès, Jeanne Hénéré, Jeanne Decan, [1787], TNA, FO148/5, n.f.

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political levels.123 The Jerseyans accordingly demanded that their diplomatic representative should intercede with the king of France and argue their ‘good faith, for in the end where there is no spirit of fraud, there is no offence’.124 Even once acknowledged, innocence was not always enough to guarantee the leniency of the customs officers, as is shown by the example of one passenger who was notified in Calais of the death of her father. She hastily bought some black silk for a mourning dress and cape. The Dover customs officers did not doubt her good faith, but seized the goods all the same.125 However, it was the intention to defraud that was usually decisive in the board’s decision. This was the case with Madame Durfort, challenged in Dover just before the signing of the Treaty of Amiens on 1 February 1802.126 A solicitor acting on behalf of the defendant categorically refuted the conclusions of the customs officers who made the seizure.127 The symbolic battle was visible in her title, or rather its absence: while the man of law spoke of ‘Comtesse’ Durfort, the officers refused her this status, calling her ‘Madame’ Durfort.128 The quantity and quality of the products in question varied greatly between the two testimonies. The solicitor conceded that the trunk contained ‘five black silk gauze coats’, as well as ‘four pair of lace sleeves, and the 4 lace handkerchiefs’, all of it ‘old and worn’. But it highlighted the good will of the passenger, who presented herself to the customs officers spontaneously, handing these goods to them ‘that the duties might be paid’, when she had been ‘informed they could not be admitted to entry’ – which implied her ignorance of the law. On the countess’s behalf he asked that the clothing be returned to her ‘for her use’. These details take on their full meaning when this letter is compared with the customs officers’ inventory:

123

124 125 126 127

128

As John Brewer has shown, every controversy, in Britain, was followed by a debate in parliament and by a public investigation, a transparency which publicised the honesty of the system. In France, on the other hand, speculations and rumours of generalised corruption were never denied by the Ferme Générale: J. Brewer, The Sinews of Power: War, Money and the English State, 1688–1783 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1990) (1st edn: 1988), p. 130. Petition of Jean Albier et al., n.f. Mrs Jonchere to the customs commissaries and customs officers’ answer, 18 and 20 October 1802, TNA, CUST54/15, fos. 184–5. TNA, CUST54/14, February 1802, fos. 269–70, fo. 279. The surveyor was in charge of inspecting ships to check that their papers were in order, and that the cargo and the bill of lading correspond. The land waiter looked after the unloading of foreign cargoes. In fact, she was Georgiana Amelia Seymour, married to the comte Louis de Durfort, and daughter of the British politician Henry Seymour.

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we cannot distinguish which are the four pair of lace sleeves, and the 4 lace handkerchiefs alluded to, having on the 1st Feb. 1802 seized from the above Lady the undermentioned articles: 67 pairs of lace and needle work sleeves 35 habit shirts 10 handkerchiefs 4 caps and 25 tops for dresses 62 yards of black silk lace. 7¼ yards of white thread d°. 54 yards of velvet trimming. 168 fans, 6 embroided girdles. 37 necklaces, 35 pairs of ear drops, 15 pair bracelets of glass.129

In addition to the worrying quantity of goods being transported by the countess, the customs officers demonstrated the intent to mislead, patent in the fact that the five coats were ‘all quite new and prohibited’, and ‘sewed up in an old pelice, to imitate the wadding and to defraud the Revenue’. Moreover, ‘the whole of the above articles were artfully concealed in a trunk made up for deception: having a false top, bottom, sides, and ends’. It was a question of countering the argument of ignorance with that of premeditation. Against the countess’s supposed good will was set her lying: ‘when Mdme. Durfort was questioned . . . she denied its being double [sic]’. Last but not least, most of them had ‘tickets on them, with the price marked thereon’, and were not for her own use. It is not known how the affair turned out, but it is likely that the customs officers carried the day. In the same spirit certain travellers questioned in regard to possession of banned goods played the foreign card. The Channel was not only a spatial border but a linguistic one. Interpreters were not to be found in every port, and many traders claimed they spoke nothing but their mother tongue. Yet once again it is difficult to know if this was truth or pretence. Arriving at Dover on 14 February 1793, François Gosse de SaintGermain attempted to smuggle through some watches and silk handkerchiefs by distributing them to other passengers. When stopped, he accounted for his behaviour by his ‘ignorance of the English language’.130 Magdalena Dunn, arrested on 5 July 1802 in possession of men’s silk gloves, is another example: I am a native of Florence, and I set sail from thence about 2 months ago for this country, where I never was before, consequently an entire stranger to its laws and 129 130

To the collector and comptroller of Dover, 11 February 1802, TNA, CUST54/14, fo. 270. Petition to the customs commissary, 22 February 1793, TNA, CUST54/7, fo. 104.

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customs. . . . if there is any thing irregular in the importation, it was thro’ ignorance that the articles were brought into this country for my wear.131

While this Italian lady referred to a separate system of legal norms to protest her innocence, the customs officers proved the intent to defraud by the concealment of the gloves, which showed that the woman knew the English law.132 Precisely the same behaviour was seen in one Mr Le Valois, who claimed he was ‘ignorant of the language and the customs of the country’, and so ‘could not make [his] reasons understood’.133 This reasoning left the customs officers stony-faced: not only was he questioned ‘in the French language’ but he was travelling with a false-bottomed trunk filled with banned goods complete with price tags. To make matters worse he tried to bribe them.134 Competence Here is the second scenario: head-on confrontation. Here, the defrauder refused to acknowledge the customs officer’s state authority and thereby his right to label an act as fraudulent. The argument of the lack of competence of customs officers was deployed by all travellers who reported abusive behaviour. The number of such criticisms soared among English merchants in 1787, for example, at the time of the implementation of the Eden treaty of commerce in French ports. Scores of letters complaining about undue seizures and the quibbling spirit of Ferme Générale employees were sent from all French ports to the British ambassador to France. Conversely, the clerks of the Ferme reported the use of false customs stamps by the British, and the undervaluing of goods declared at French customs. Customs control also relied on face-to-face encounters, and the comparison of goods and certificates of authenticity. Proving the intent to defraud thus required a high degree of competence from customs officers.135 Class conflict can often be detected behind these attacks against lowerranking customs officers. This was obvious when the traveller was an important personage, such as an ambassador or minister. It was not uncommon to see letters of complaint written by people of quality about the fussiness of customs officers. The secretary of state for war, William Windham, sent an inflammatory missive to the customs commissioners in London in August 1793, criticising the Dover customs’ 131 132 133 135

5 July 1802, TNA, CUST54/15, fo. 72. Surveyor, land waiter and sea waiter to collector and comptroller, 3 August 1802, ibid., fo. 101. 19 June 1802, ibid., fo. 55. 134 Dover officers to board, n.d., ibid., fo. 56. ‘Observations sur la perception des droits sur les marchandises anglaises’, AMAE, MDA46, fos. 269–72v.

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opening hours. According to him, the customs opened only at nine o’clock in the morning, which forced travellers to spend the day in Dover and miss the coach for London. The tone of the letter illustrates the negative light in which customs officers were viewed: The inconveniences resulting necessarily from the system of Customs are sufficiently great without enhancing them by such as arise solely from the indolence & indulgence of the subordinate officers. There can be surely no reason, why those who make it a rule to do no business after it is dark, and who take care, moreover, to be paid by the travellers merely for forbearing unnecessary vexation, should not attend in summer time at an earlier hour than 9 o’clock.136

The Dover customs officers replied that their offices were open every day, including the weekend, from six in the morning to nine at night, in order to cause the public as little inconvenience as possible.137 As this example indicates, customs officers were caught in the crossfire between the traveller in a hurry, who did not want to be held up, and their own superiors, who put them under pressure to make seizures, but judiciously. Arrested in Dover on 5 September 1802 in possession of five boxes of jasmine oil and four boxes of pastels, Eliza Urmstow shrugged off her responsibility quite casually, mentioning ‘which things he seized for what cause I am ignorant being perfectly ready to pay any duty demanded for such a trifling thing’.138 The most serious criticism in the passenger’s letter rested on a description ‘of one of the inferior Officers of the Custom House in the rudest [sic] manner possible’. The officer in question, a simple ‘seizing officer’, was defended by his immediate superior, who described him as ‘A very civil man . . . who had done his duty very properly’. But this was not always the case. Questioning the behaviour of a customs officer was not without its dangers. The charge of impoliteness was significant in a society governed by the code of honour, in which government officials had to conform to the model of the gentleman and not lose face. Indeed, eighteenth-century customs administrations laid down a veritable ethics for the civil servant that bore the stamp of the ideology of ‘politeness’ permeating British society.139 But, in response to rising tariffs over the century, customs were also the target of a vicious 136 137 138 139

William Windham to [lords commissioners of the customs], 5 August 1793, TNA, CUST54/7, fo. 246. Letter to the lords commissioners, 13 August 1793, ibid., fo. 248. 9 September 1802, TNA, CUST54/15, fo. 133. P. Langford, A Polite and Commercial People: England 1727–1783 (Oxford University Press, 1989); L. Klein, Shaftesbury and the Culture of Politeness: Moral Discourse and Cultural Politics in Early Eighteenth-Century England (Cambridge University Press, 1994) and ‘Politeness and the interpretation of the British eighteenth century’, HJ, 45 (2002), pp. 869–98.

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press campaign orchestrated by certain commercial lobbies, which denounced the offensive meticulousness of customs officers. This anonymous lampoon of 1779, for example, has a lower-ranking customs officer conversing with a traveller named Harlequin: harlequin: But, pray, Mr. Officer, how do you manage it, to live at the rate you do; and upon such a small salary? custom-house-officer: By imposing upon the unwary, plundering the merchant, and cheating the King.140

In cases such as these it had to be ascertained whether the customs officer’s insult was intentional or not. In the internal correspondence of the customs administration the incompetence of officers was a recurring theme. An attempt was made to solve this problem with an array of directives and regular checks on the quality of the service. In 1787 the board in London complained about ‘the incompetency, either from ignorance or inexperience, of some of the Collectors and Comptrollers in the Out-Ports’,141 and required these employees to obtain training certificates from their superiors. The circulars sent to the ‘out-ports’ regarding the recruitment of local officers offer us a glimpse of the criteria of the ‘good servant’. In 1802 a certain Robert Brown was sent a letter of recommendation in order to become a tidewaiter: He is sufficiently active and capable (tho’ he is [sic] lost his left hand) of performing the duties of the said office and can write sufficiently to keep the Book directed to be kept by Tidewaiters stationed on board ships: that he is by profession a mariner. He is an excellent character and has never to our knowledge been concerned in smuggling or has obstructed any Officer of this Revenue in the execution of his duty.142

From between the lines emerges the model of the honest, conscientious, mild-mannered customs officer with a sense of the general interest, as he appears in legal texts and administrative correspondence, the mirror of the ‘fair trader’. In actual fact, many customs officers were disciplined for being drunk on the job, for abusive language, violence, negligence or insubordination. The main problem remained corruption, which the central administration fought hard throughout the period.143 There was 140

141 142

143

The Necessity and Expediency of an Association of Merchants and Traders, to Oppose and Get Redress of Many Abuses Arising from Law, and Insidious Practices of Custom-House-Officers (London: Printed for the Author, 1779), p. vii. Board to collectors of the outports, 29 December 1787, TNA, CUST54/148, fo. 184. 8 October 1802, TNA, CUST54/15, fo. 159. Port archives give a precise idea of the recruitment and day-to-day work of the customs officers. On the customs staff, see Hoon, English Customs, pp. 195–242. Ashworth, Customs and Excise, pp. 154–64.

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temptation on both sides: customs officers were in the habit of asking for backhanders from travellers, who also tried to bribe them. According to a customs officer’s report, Eliza Urmstow tried to give them money, claiming that ‘if we would take a guinea nobody would know anything about it but we insisted on doing our duty’.144 This explicit accusation was a reflection of constant practice. These lower-ranking officers were poor indeed and most of the time, in spite of laws to the contrary, were recruited in the very region where they held office.145 In addition, clientelism accounts for many lawsuits for corruption or collusion with the defrauders. The dividing line between defrauder and ‘fair trader’ was often internal to the customs administration. The logic of patronage or local solidarity was put before service to the state. That is why, even if a defrauder was intercepted, it was still difficult to have him sentenced by local magistrates.146 Anglophilia Recourse to political arguments in order to arouse pity or sympathy was evident in a third kind of behaviour: here defrauders withdrew from the strict sphere of the law. The frequency of this type of language depended on the political situation, the traveller’s national origin and the recipient of the complaint. After the implementation of the treaty of commerce in 1787 disgruntled English traders often used patriotic, anti-French rhetoric in letters to their ambassador in order to establish a complicity with the state representative. This was the case with Samuel Simon, who wrote to the duke of Dorset from Saint-Malo on 9 May 1788. This unhappy merchant, who armed himself with certificates and invoices, and had every case numbered and every product labelled, was nevertheless refused entry to France on the grounds that the invoices were in English. He concluded that ‘this place has the character of injuring the English traders, for the inhabitants as well as strangers, inform me that not even one English person has arrived here since the treaty was settled, but what they have done their utmost to injure him’.147

144 145 146

147

9 September 1802, TNA, CUST54/15, fo. 133. Hoon, English Customs, p. 207. The Dover collector suggested a radical solution in 1803, with regard to goods wrecked on the shore whose ownership could not be identified: ‘the Parish, Hundred, or District, in which the same was made, should be sued for the penalty, or at least should be taxed for the offence, which the individual might have committed, within the country he might have been detected in’. By doing so, the chain of local solidarity could be broken. Letter to board, 1 January 1803, TNA, CUST54/15, fos. 299–301. Samuel Simon to Dorset, Saint-Malo, 9 May 1788, TNA, FO148/5, n.f. The same file box contains a great deal of other similar letters, sent from Rouen, Le Havre, Calais or Bordeaux.

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Conversely, the petitions of French travellers questioned in Dover after the Convention’s declaration of war on England in 1793 harped on the state of disorder reigning in their homeland. Julien Thibault, for example, a resident of Philadelphia in the United States, was arrested on his departure from Dover, in possession of a belt stitched under his waistcoat containing 270 guineas in unstamped coin (i.e., 3,866 French pounds). The smuggler claimed to be going to France to settle some matters of succession and to remove part of his family still living in France, ‘from the disorders that now afflict this country’.148 The lawyer of Mr Griegson, an Englishman who tried to smuggle some watches on 15 March 1793, insisted on the personal history of his client, who had been a trusty servant of the Ancien Régime: That Your Petitioner resided upwards of 28 years at Paris had the honour to be employed by the late French King and the rest of the Royal Family. That Your Petitioner not chusing to stay longer in that distracted country disposed of his house, goods and the greatest part of his stock in trade and as soon as he could procure a passport sat out to return to England.149

When some other passengers offered to help him conceal his watches, this good subject refused: ‘as he was returning to his own country he would return without having to accuse himself with having done any thing contrary to the laws of the country in which he sought protection’.150 According to the Dover customs collector, Griegson was, however, ‘one of the greatest smugglers in the above article that comes to England’.151 Anglophile discourse was not the prerogative of the English. At the time of the Peace of Amiens it was not uncommon to hear Frenchmen praising the quality of English institutions that protected an innocent like one Madame Commun. Furnished with a letter of recommendation from Bonaparte, she was arrested in possession of five finely worked pairs of sleeves, two muslin handkerchiefs, four shawls and a cambric tartan dress: ‘And as the English nation, & its laws are renowned for its Justice and Liberality your Memorialist will rely entirely on the generousity of the Honble Commissioners of His Majesty’s Customs to grant her an order for the restoration of her property.’152 Certain merchants did not hesitate to concede the intention of fraud. A case in point was an English draper who, unable to pass his entire cargo of lace through Calais, was forced to unload it again at Dover. He justified 148 149 150 152

Letter to customs commissioners, 14 February 1793, TNA, CUST54/7, fo. 98. ‘The Humble Petition of John Gregson’ to customs commissioners, signed Thomas Hell on behalf of the petitioner, n.d., ibid., fo. 142. Ibid., fo. 143. 151 28 March 1793, ibid., fo. 144. ‘The Memorial of Mad.me Commun’, addressed to the customs commissioners, June 1802, TNA, CUST54/15, fo. 44.

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concealing it by claiming it was banned in France and went on to remark that ‘no fraud whatever being intended or possible on those goods to His Majesty’s Revenue, but on the contrary the introduction of British manufactured goods into France being an advantage to this country’.153 This merchant was here reproducing the official rhetoric used in Britain during the war against France, the fight being waged on fiscal as much on military ground.154 The argument seems to have been an effective one: the London customs commissioner returned his goods to him.

*** Economic exchange between France and England involved numerous actors, who are often pigeonholed into neat national and sociological categories: A was a French privateer, and B was an English smuggler. But the study of practices shows that these activities were many and varied, and that the same men were often involved in smuggling, privateering and fishing at the same time. The ‘national’ framework is also inadequate for describing men and women who switched identity depending on context, sporting the colours first of one nation then another. States were a major factor in maintaining this fuzziness of categories in that they issued certain individuals with fraudulent signs of identification. Finally, the very definition of fraud varied with a range of criteria: reputation, wealth, national origin, networks or national and local politico-economic context. Instead of ascribing a national identity to the actors involved in smuggling, I prefer to give attention to the way ‘nation’ was used as a category of practice.155 The continuing success of fraud and smuggling resulted from both the strategies of individuals and the economic policies of states. The array of labels applied to the smogleurs is a reflection of the contradictory roles assigned to them, such as spying on the enemy while trafficking gold and coins with them. Similarly, defrauders who went through customs knew how to manipulate legal rules, but also benefited from the collaborative inattention of the customs administration.

153 154

155

William Elgar to customs commissioners, 21 February 1802, TNA, CUST54/14, fo. 285. The similitude with the rhetoric used in parliamentary laws against smuggling is striking; they underlined the necessity of ‘the Preservation of the public Revenue, the Protection of the fair Trader, and the Quiet and good Order of the Kingdom’: An Act for the more effectually preventing the pernicious practices of smuggling (1779), 19 Geo. III, C69, par. 1. R. Brubaker, ‘Ethnicity without groups’, Archives Européennes de Sociologie, 43 (2002), pp. 166–8.

8

Crossing the Channel

Because of their strategic and economic importance, many borders have high concentrations of surveillance infrastructures. To cross a border is to pass from one sovereignty to another, and often to encounter different cultural codes. Arriving in foreign territory also has real material consequences: on disembarking, passengers are divided into different classes, some being allowed to continue their journey immediately, while others are directed into administrative formalities, ranging from passport control and baggage searches to interrogation by local police. The control of mobility thus goes hand in hand with the assignation of identities. State borders are filters, ‘political membranes through which people, goods, wealth and information must pass if they are to be deemed acceptable or unacceptable by the state’.1 The categories of thought of the administrators operating this filtering system in the eighteenth century depended on the context and on the state of Anglo-French relations. For some groups the border was a wall, for others a gateway. One of the questions asked in the eighteenth century, when the idea of ‘nation’ became commonplace, was the importance of the migrant’s place of origin in this management of flows. The Channel was a road parting the boundaries of sovereignty between states, which attempted to control traffic by imposing itineraries and means of transport on travellers. We therefore need to assess the extent to which state monitoring and control affected the dynamics of international exchanges. This will help us understand the meaning of the border for territorial states. In this chapter, I will first explore the material conditions of crossChannel journeys; this will involve an analysis of the packet boats that had linked Dover and Calais since the seventeenth century. The chapter will then consider the state monitoring of international migrations that was introduced in the eighteenth century and tested on a large scale 1

T.M. Wilson and H. Donnan (eds.), Border Identities: Nation and State at International Frontiers (Cambridge University Press, 1998), p. 9.

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during the so-called ‘French Wars’ of 1793–1815. To what extent did this decade of war end a long process of cross-Channel mobility? The Calais–Dover packet boats: serving the state or defending private interests The glory days of Channel crossing are well known. The pioneers Blanchard and Jeffries, who flew from Dover to Calais by hot-air balloon on 7 January 1785, were celebrated in poems, cartoons and novels, which emphasised the happy marriage between scientific progress and cosmopolitanism.2 Far less celebrated was the traffic of cross-Channel packet boats between Calais and Dover, regular since the seventeenth century: this chapter in the history of transport has been of little interest to historians, who have gravitated towards the study of land routes or nineteenthcentury transatlantic liners. Packet boats were first mentioned in the French language in the mid-seventeenth century. In Estienne de Cleirac’s Us et Coutumes de la Mer, ‘Paquebouc, are service vessels, which ordinarily traverse from Calais to Dover in England carrying passengers & messengers.’3 The term appears at about the same time in English, in a work by John Evelyn, who crossed the Channel on 12 July 1649 aboard a ‘pacquette-boat’.4 In 1666 the packet boat was defined by Balthasar de Monconys (1611–1665), who was travelling to England for pleasure: ‘A small boat with decks, which sails back and forth from Calais to Dover twice weekly, bearing merchants’ letters, and which charges five chelings [sic] for the fare of each person.’5 The etymology of the French word ‘paquebot’, borrowed from the English ‘packet boat’,6 reveals the binational dimension and the original link between this mode of transportation and the space traversed. This single term in fact covered two types of craft.7 The first, strictly speaking, were only authorised to carry mail and 2

3 4 5

6 7

R. Fontaine, La Manche en ballon: Blanchard contre Pilâtre de Rozier (Dunkerque: Westhoek-Editions, 1982). The Aerostatic Spy: Or, Excursions with an Air Balloon. … By an Aerial Traveller, 2 vols. (London: Edmund Fawcett, 1785), was directly inspired from Blanchard’s crossing. E. Cleirac, Us et Coutumes de la Mer (Bourdeaux: G. Millanges, 1647), p. 35. Quoted in C. Graseman and G.W.P. McLachlan, English Channel Packet Boats (London: Syren & Shipping, 1939), p. 7. B. de Monconys, Journal des voyages de Monsieur de Monconys (Lyon, 1666), quoted in W. Kennett, Un voyage à Calais, Guines, Ardres et Saint-Omer en 1682 (Paris: Alphonse Picard et fils, 1893), p. 24. Rey A. et al. (eds.), Dictionnaire historique de la langue française (Paris: Dictionnaires Le Robert, 1994), p. 1420. See the definition given in A. Jal, Glossaire nautique. Répertoire polyglotte de termes de marine anciens et modernes (Paris: Firmin Didot, 1848), p. 1127.

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were directly dependent on post offices. They usually belonged to the state, but could also be the property of private shipowners under contract with the postal administration. The circulation of these ‘official’ boats was attested in the fourteenth century during the reign of Edward III.8 This first category also included vessels specially chartered by the state to carry diplomatic mail, separately from the ordinary mail coach. The second meaning of packet boat referred by extension to craft belonging to private companies and permitted to carry passengers or horses. At the end of the eighteenth century these light ships, which weighed between fifty and seventy tons, had at most crews of ten men.9 By virtue of the royal monopoly on postal services French and English inland roads were strictly supervised by the states, which would significantly improve their internal communication networks in the latter half of the eighteenth century.10 The consolidation of the packet boat service between France and England in the eighteenth century illustrates this process on an international scale. The mercantilist state played a central role in the regulation of economic competition at sea as on land. However, shipping contractors from the two countries did not contribute equally to this traffic. The transport of letters and passengers: a sovereignty issue It was not until 1664 that the first postal treaty was concluded between France and England, establishing a packet boat service between Dunkirk and Dover.11 The treaty of 28 November 1670 opted for the Dover– Calais route.12 In either direction and for an extended period of time the crossing of the Channel was handled by British packet boats. At the end of each conflict, from the Peace of Ryswick in 1697 to the Peace of Amiens in 1802, agreements re-established postal communications. The convention of 21 June 1698, concluded ‘to establish the agreement and mutual 8 9 10

11

12

Graseman and McLachlan, English Channel, pp. 1–3. J.H. Andrews, ‘Geographical aspects of the maritime trade of Kent and Sussex, 1650– 1750’, unpublished PhD thesis, University of London (1954), pp. 149–50. See G. Arbellot, La Grande mutation des routes de France au milieu du XVIIIe siècle (Paris: Armand Colin, 1973) and Autour des routes de poste: Les premières cartes routières de la France XVIIe–XIXe siècles (Paris: Bibliothèque Nationale, 1992); K. Ellis, The Post Office in the 18 century: A Study in Administrative History (Oxford University Press, 1958); H. Robinson, The British Post Office: A History (Princeton University Press, 1948); D. Roche, Humeurs vagabondes: De la circulation des hommes et de l’utilité des voyages (Paris: Fayard, 2003), p. 216. E. Vaillé, ‘Relations et conventions postales franco-britanniques sous l’Ancien Régime’, Bulletin d’informations, de documentation et de statistique du ministère des P.T.T., 7–8 (1939), p. 33. The full text of the treaty is in ibid., pp. 41–7. See E. Vaillé, Histoire générale des postes françaises (1668–1691), 6 vols. (Paris: PUF, 1947–1955), vol. IV (1950), pp. 306–12.

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understanding that must be in the future between France and England with regard to the postal service’, implemented the postal exchanges that would be the rule throughout the eighteenth century.13 According to this treaty, mail coaches would depart twice a week from London (on Mondays and Thursdays), and from Paris (on Wednesdays and Saturdays) to cross the Channel ‘with the greatest diligence possible’ between Dover and Calais, ‘weather and sea permitting’.14 The two states undertook to uphold the monopoly of the official postal services over this route.15 In wartime the opposing sides often managed to ensure the continuity of mail delivery. In 1703 the ministers of the postal services agreed to guarantee the packet boats ‘full safety when coming from Dover to Calais and returning to Dover while the war lasts, provided that they carry only letters and are loaded with neither goods nor passengers’; the agreement was short-lived.16 By the beginning of the next conflict, in 1744, British diplomatic mail was blocked for several weeks by the governor of Calais in retaliation for the immobilisation of packet boats carrying letters to Dover.17 Though officially suspended, correspondence continued via circuitous routes, as merchants sent their parcels and letters to Dover via the United Provinces.18 During the Seven Years War and the War of American Independence, the French and British governments regularised this circumvention of the ordinary Channel route via Amsterdam and Ostend.19 In peacetime the transport of letters was the prerogative of British packet boats up until the 1780s.20 The grammarian Pierre Nicolas Chantreau (1741–1808), who embarked on a French vessel at Calais in 1788, recounted in 1792 his conversation with the captain as follows:

13

14 15 16

17 18 19

20

During the War of Austrian Succession as well as during the Seven Years War, the 1713 convention was renewed: copy of a letter from Egremont to Bedford, 20 November 1762: TNA, SP78/254, fo. 55. Art. 1, 2 et 3, BNR, NAFR24066, fos. 2–3. Treaty of 9 November 1713, art. 18, TNA, SP78/157, fo. 351. Torcy to Robert Cotton, postmaster general, 16 June 1703, TNA, SP78/153, fo. 73; Osserosse, ‘Président de Calais’, to anon., 15 July 1711, TNA, SP78/154, fos. 114A–115. See Anthony Thompson to Amelot, 12 March 1744, TNA, SP78/229, fo. 237, and the latter’s answer of 14 March (ibid., fo. 239). Vaillé, Histoire générale, vol. IV, p. 451. Ibid., pp. 452–3. The count of Vergennes to the intendant of Lorraine, 15 July 1779, amae, MDF1657, fo. 324; art. 1 of an ‘Avis’ printed by intendant of Lorraine, Nancy, Veuve Leclerc (1779), ibid., fo. 323; agreement with the Austrian Netherlands, 10 November 1779: Vaillé, Histoire générale, vol. VI (1953–1955), pp. 460–1. The treaty of 4 August 1784 opened the Calais to Dover route to competition between French and English contractors: Vaillé, Histoire générale, vol. VI, pp. 461–2.

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It had been just four years … since competition had been restored [over the passage from Calais to Dover]; and today there were as many French packetboats as English ones. This made me feel that the competition was, in every respect, highly advantageous for passengers. It is the result of freedom, for one is never more poorly attended than by people with privileges.21

This hostility to privilege is not surprising, coming from a man who embraced the French Revolution early. During the long period of the British monopoly, passenger transport by mail packet boats was a source of tension between the two governments. From the beginning of the eighteenth century, the British resorted to contractors to ensure the transport of letters. As this was not sufficiently profitable, shipowners enjoyed the right also to carry passengers, which secured the companies a considerable income. The French for their part were anxious to keep the two trades completely separate and avoid any confusion between them. Officially, agreements signed between the two states applied only to mail, which justified the tax advantages enjoyed by Dover and Calais in comparison to other Channel ports.22 This privileged status was, of course, highly coveted, and trade ships sought to pass themselves off as packet boats so as to avoid paying admiralty duties. Throughout the century French governments complained about the laxity of this aspect of the British customs. In 1729 the comte de Toulouse, Admiral de France, wrote a memorandum on the ‘proliferation of so-called packet-boats’23 arriving in Calais. In 1763 the French ambassador to Great Britain was still complaining about the same problem.24 While the number of routes taken by the post was limited, passengers had greater choice when travelling between France and England. As the century unfolded, the sea came to be dotted with packet boats. In his Description historique-géographique des îles britanniques, a travel guide aimed at the well-to-do reader, Abbé Expilly recorded ten such routes between

21 22

23

24

P.N. Chantreau, Voyage dans les trois royaumes d’Angleterre, d’Ecosse et d’Irlande, fait en 1788 et 1789, 3 vols. (Paris: Briand, 1792), vol. I, p. 2. The Dover packet boats were for instance exempted from the duty of 50 sols per ton, which all British vessels arriving in France were supposed to pay: Andrews, Geographical Aspects, p. 149. ‘Mémoire sur l’abus que l’on fait en Angleterre des paquebots qui viennent à Calais’, 27 September 1729, AMAE, CPA366, fo. 276. The memorandum was then passed on to the Keeper of the Seals by the Prince of Bourbon, who was the ‘Surintendant général des Postes’. ‘Addition aux Instructions du Sieur Comte de Guerchy, concernant les paquebots anglois chargés de la malle à lettres’, Versailles, 3 October 1763, in P. Vaucher, Recueil des Instructions données aux ambassadeurs et ministres de France, vol. XXV: Angleterre, Tome III (1698–1791), p. 419.

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Paris and London.25 The shortest route, adding together the distances by sea and over land, was via Le Havre and Shoreham, but included twentyseven leagues at sea out of a total of eighty-seven leagues between Paris and London. Only slightly longer in total (ninety-four leagues), the route via Calais and Dover had the advantage of including only eight leagues at sea, reducing the hazards and discomforts of the journey. For the more affluent it was also possible to reserve a boat for private use: ‘A good seat, from Calais to Dover, on the packet-boat, costs 3 livres per person, French currency. One pays six louis or thereabouts to expressly charter a packet boat, and have it at one’s entire disposal as far as Dover.’26 In fine weather the trip could take several hours. The Welsh naturalist Thomas Pennant (1726–1798), for example, took three and a half hours to reach Calais in 1765, and Henrietta Marchant Liston, the wife of the British envoy to the Batavian Republic, made the same journey in three hours in 1802.27 But in the event of a storm, there was no guarantee of reaching the intended port. In 1783 the ship carrying the duke of Dorset, the freshly appointed ambassador in Paris, was blown off course by a fierce wind and, instead of reaching Calais, its initial destination, ended up in Boulogne, more than thirty miles to the south.28 In 1712 a packet boat line was opened between Dover and Dunkirk.29 Several other lines connected up with the Normandy ports in the second half of the century: 1763, Dieppe-London via Brightelmstone (Brighton);30 1764, Le Havre-Brighton;31 1771, Le Havre-Southampton;32 and 1783, Rouen-London.33 On the French side Calais faced strong regional competition from Boulogne when it came to trying to attract packet boats. Following the same logic of internal rivalry in the border area which we have encountered in the Cotentin peninsula between Coutances and 25 26 27 28 29 30 31

32 33

Abbé Expilly, Description historique-géographique des îles britanniques ou des Royaumes d’Angleterre, d’Ecosse et d’Irlande (Paris: Bauche, 1759), pp. 435–40. Abbé Expilly, Le géographe manuel, contenant la description de tous les pays du monde, 2nd edn (Paris: Bauche, 1747), p. 306. ‘Journals of Lady Liston’, NLS, MS5705, fo. 16; T. Pennant, Tour on the Continent 1765, edited by G.R. De Beer (London: Ray Society, 1948), p. 1. J. Black, British Foreign Policy in an Age of Revolutions 1783–1793 (Cambridge University Press, 1994), p. 22. Postmaster general to unknown lord, 1 August 1712, TNA, SP34/19, fo. 54. Annonces, Affiches, et avis divers de la Haute et Basse Normandie, contenant généralement tout ce qui peut intéresser cette Province, 9 September 1763, p. 64. E. Delobette, ‘Ces messieurs du Havre: négociants, commissaires et armateurs de 1680 à 1830’, unpublished PhD thesis, Université de Caen (2005), n. 3489 p. 1183. This line still existed in 1785: Journal de Normandie, 1 (1785), p. 210. Annonces, Affiches, et avis divers de la Haute et Basse Normandie contenant généralement tout ce qui peut intéresser cette Province, 19 July 1771. P. Dardel, Navires et marchandises dans les ports de Rouen et du Havre au XVIIIe siècle (Paris: SEVPEN, 1963), pp. 344–5.

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Saint-Lô, the two cities were engaged in frenzied competition throughout the century, mobilising merchant interests, municipal authorities and military commanders in ports and trade directories. This did not prevent traders from owning interests in companies located in either port. A Monsieur Mouron held the privilege of transporting passengers from Calais to Dover, while financing another packet boat, The Duke of Orleans, between Boulogne and Dover.34 Owing to hostilities between the two countries during the Revolution, letters were mostly transported by private contractors. The Treaty of Amiens was concluded on 27 March 1802. On 17 May 1802 (27 Floréal Year 10) a postal treaty was signed, authorising the British and French packet boats to carry passengers in both directions.35 British shipowners quickly got the upper hand by charging much lower fares than their French counterparts. While diplomatic tension increased, especially over rival claims to Malta, and Napoleon’s exasperation at the insults hurled at him by British newspapers, the emperor decided in August 1802 to prohibit vessels from Dover from putting in at Calais to pick up passengers.36 Quite apart from its economic importance, the traffic of passengers and letters remained closely linked to state sovereignty. A transnational company: Minet & Fector of Dover A South London neighbourhood, the Minet Estate, still bears the mark of the Huguenot Minet family. In 1770 Hugues Minet had bought land in the parishes of Camberwell and Lambeth, in what was then a rural plot, now located in the borough of Lambeth. Until these lands were sold to the city in 1968, his descendants continued to play an important role in the architectural development and urban planning of the area. Lambeth’s Archives Department and Local History Library are housed in the ‘Minet Library’, a building given to the city in 1890 by William Minet, a descendant of Hugues, and one of the founders of the Huguenot Society of London. The names of the streets (‘Calais Street’) and buildings (‘Calais Gate’, ‘Dover House’) are the clearest indication of this. At 34 35

36

Contract of property established for Mr. Mouron by the amirauté of Boulogne, 25 May 1787, ADPDC, 12B24, n.f. This treaty was consequently endorsed in the British parliament: An Act for Repealing the Rates and Duties of Postage upon Letters to and from France, 42 Geo. III, C101 (26 June 1802). Copy of a letter from Lavalette to Merry, plenipotentiary minister of Britain in France, 17 August 1802, TNA, FO27/63, n.f. On the British press and the war against Napoleonic France more generally, see S. Semmel, Napoleon and the British (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2004).

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Figure 8.1 Haut-relief at Mary Minet District Nurses’ Home, 10 Halsmere Road, London.

number 10, Halsmere Road, where the Mary Minet District Nurses’ Home was opened in 1937, a haut-relief features a small boat recalling the founder of the family’s escape from France at the end of the seventeenth century37 (Figure 8.1). The same motif adorned the family’s coat of arms.38 It was, indeed, in Calais that this family saga began, because the Minets were Huguenots who had fled to England. The durability of an international trading company for over a century stems from its remarkable ability to adapt to the changing economic and political circumstances. The success of the Minet Company of Dover depended on keeping up links on both sides of the Strait of Dover. Isaac Minet, who was born in Calais on 15 September 1660 and died in Dover on 8 April 1745, recounted his family history in his ‘Receipt Booke’, a book of accounts interspersed with personal and family recollections, which cover the period from 1705 to his death; the book was subsequently continued by his son William until 1751. In 1722 and again in 1737, Isaac undertook to write ‘A Relation of Our Family’, which told 37

38

This nurses’ home was commissioned by Susan, Mary’s daughter. See J. Newman, A Short Walk in the Minet Estate (London: Environmental Services, 1997). I would like to thank Jon for sharing his knowledge with me. Family Minet’s coat of arms, in Some Account of the Huguenot Family of Minet from Their Coming out of France at the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes 1686 (London: Printed for the Author, 1892), n.p.

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among other things the story of his escape from France.39 The Minets hailed from Montreuil in the Boulonnais region. Isaac’s uncle, Jacques, held the office of postmaster in Montreuil, as did his son and grandson after him. Ambroise, his father, did business in Calais, until his death in 1675.40 The Minet family supplied tobacco to the Saint-Omer area during the mid-seventeenth century.41 In Calais the repression of Protestants preceded the revocation of the Edict of Nantes in October 1685. As early as 18 May 1683 the bishop of Boulogne Claude Le Tonnelier de Breteuil published a pastoral letter on the conversion of the Huguenots in the region, urging the utmost severity towards this city: ‘[Calais] may rightly be called the Babylon of our diocese, all the more so since it is very close to Holland at the doorstep of England (a country where it seems all the dark forces of the church are gathered up and preserved).’42 After several unsuccessful attempts to escape from Calais in 1685 and having been forced to recant his faith, Isaac Minet managed to escape in August 1686 with the aid of a boat sent by his brother Stephen, who had already settled in Dover. To do so he had to slip past coastal surveillance. Isaac mentions the presence, on the eve of his departure, of a detachment of ‘25 soldiers and an officer patrolling the coast to prevent the escape of Protestants’, as well as a cruiser from Dunkirk that was detailed to board and inspect vessels carrying runaways.43 To achieve his ends Isaac bribed some mounted customs officers and sailed at one in the morning for Dover, taking with him his mother, sister and four other members of the family. At the end of August 1686 Isaac joined the so-called ‘fourth foreign Church’, which brought together Protestants from the large Huguenot colony in Dover; it was founded in August 1685 and lasted until 1731.44 The listes de reconnaissances of the Church at Dover – the vows taken by the Huguenots, who, having been forced to recant in France, swore renewed loyalty to the Protestant religion once they were in England – allow us to reconstruct the migrants’ geographical origins. Among the 176 French refugees recorded in these lists as landing at Dover during the three years following the revocation of the Edict of Nantes, 137 were from the 39 40 41 43 44

A heir, William Minet, self-published in 1892 a book which contains long extracts of the ‘Relation of our familly’: Minet, Some Account. Ibid., pp. 9–10. Nothing is known, unfortunately, about Ambroise’s ‘considerable business’ (ibid., p. 10). Kennett, Un Voyage à Calais, p. 30. 42 Quoted in Minet, Some Account, p. 19. Quoted in ibid., p. 32, p. 34. The first foreign Church was Dutch and had been founded in the sixteenth century; the second Church was French, founded in 1621; the third one was Walloon, was founded in 1641 and disappeared in 1661: W. Minet, ‘The fourth foreign Church at Dover, 1685– 1731’, Proceedings of the Huguenot Society of London, 4 (1893), p. 211.

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Church of Guînes, which was the see of the Reformed Church at Calais. Almost all the migrants from the present-day French department of the Pas-de-Calais (Calais, Ardres, Marcq, Sangatte) arrived in 1686–1687, which is explained by the local context of persecution.45 This Church at Dover, which the pastor Paul Lescot described as ‘the great route from France to England’,46 was the main host institution for French refugees. Of these new arrivals, only 11% remained in the Dover region. Among them, the Minet family very quickly, within a single generation, became integrated into the fabric of the local community. Religious endogamy and commitment to their French origins continued to cement the family’s identity throughout the eighteenth century, as illustrated by the will left by William Minet, who died in London in 1767, bequeathing large sums of money to the French community.47 Loyalty to a distinct Huguenot identity, far from being an impediment to the local integration of the Minets into Dover, was an undeniable asset in their strategy of social ascent. In 1692 Isaac was made deacon of the Huguenot Church, and in 1694 an ‘elder’,48 enabling him to rub shoulders with city worthies. Foreign Protestants were very much involved in the political life of Dover, particularly as the Church also recruited English families. Isaac became a freeman of Dover in 1698, was naturalised English in 1705 and became a common councillor in 1706, before being elected ‘juratt’ of the town corporation in 1731.49 His grandson, Hugues, purchased the office of freeman in 1755, and in 1765 became mayor of the city. By the 1770s, the company was mentioned in works of regional history.50 When in 1785 Blanchard and Jeffries successfully made the first crossing of the English Channel in a hot-air balloon, from Dover to the forest of Guînes, the first names to appear in the departure records for the expedition were ‘John Minot [sic]’ and ‘Peter Fector’,51 a long-standing partner of the firm. The 45 46 47

48 49

50

51

Ibid., pp. 203–11. P. Lescot, minister of religion from 1719 to 1724, to the archbishop of Canterbury, letter in French of 12 January 1720, quoted in ibid., p. 136. Besides William’s own family, he left money to the poor of the French church in Threadneedle Street, the French hospital near St. Luke the Westminster charity school ‘for the education of poor children of French refugees, Protestants’ and finally to the poor of the parishes of St. Mary and St. James in Dover: ’Extracts from the Will of William Minet, of London, died January 18, 1767’, in Minet, Some Account, p. 214. Minet, ibid., p. 52. The church’s accounts were kept, between 1700 and 1731, by Isaac. Ibid., pp. 57–8. Dover’s town council consisted of a mayor and twelve jurats. Thirtyseven elected freemen made the common council. The mayor was chosen from the freemen for a term of one year. The jurats were chosen among the freemen by the mayor. See, for instance, ‘Dover’, in [Charles Seymour], A New Topographical, Historical and Commercial Survey of the Cities, Towns and Villages, of the County of Kent (Canterbury: T. Smith, 1776), pp. 321–2. Document reproduced (without source reference) in Fontaine, Manche en ballon, p. 237.

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conditions of adaptation to this foreign environment had in fact been prepared even before their departure from France. The Minet family’s trade was as international as their history. International trade was a cosmopolitan milieu, and commercial education was effected through international exchanges.52 The family already had links with the Dover region prior to their exile. In 1674, aged 14, Isaac was sent to an English trading firm, the Green House, in Dover, where he spent two years learning the language. In exchange, the English merchant’s two daughters were sent to Calais.53 These links certainly explain why England was chosen as the destination for emigration. William Minet (1703–1767), who helped his father in Dover from the 1720s on, acquired his business training abroad, like Isaac, first at an English merchant’s in Dieppe, and then in Amsterdam.54 Marriage alliances in this milieu were also international. Isaac Minet’s niece, Mary, married one Jeremy Fector of Mulhausen, who had settled in Rotterdam, where their son Peter was born in 1723.55 In 1739 Peter was sent to Dover to learn the trade of merchant. Employed by his great-uncle Isaac, he learned French at the counter of the trading house.56 Peter became an increasingly important figure, eventually obtaining a one-third capital interest in 1744. William decided to leave the management of the Dover business to him the following year and dedicate himself fully to his business in London. A few years later the alliance was sealed by Peter’s marriage to Mary Minet, the daughter of Reverend John Minet from Eythorne (Kent). In the nineteenth century the company became a definitive part of the Fector family heritage. While the company’s capital altered very little in the eighteenth century, remaining in the hands of one family, the list of commercial activities carried out by the Minets during the same period is striking for its diversity. Little is known about the Dover company’s origins other than that Isaac owned a boat from 171357 and that in 1721 he was in 52 53 54

55 56 57

D. Roche and F. Angiolini (eds.), Cultures et formations négociantes dans l’Europe moderne (Paris: EHESS, 1995). Minet, Some Account, pp. 21, 50. Ibid., pp. 113–14. The practice of professional training, through the sending of children abroad, lived on: in the 1780s, John Lewis Minet, Isaac’s great-grandson, worked in a firm in Arnhem in the United Provinces, then in Boulogne, before entering the service of the parent company in Dover in 1785: ibid., pp. 178–9. The memoir does not specify if it is Mulhausen in Alsace or Mülhausen in Thuringia: ibid., p. 118. Letter to William of 29 April 1742, quoted in ibid., pp. 126–7. In February 1713, Isaac Minet and Nathanael Matson, ‘owners of the Guardian Angel, master Thomas Reve’, sent a petition to obtain the release of their ship by the French authorities, a request which was granted: TNA, SP78/157, 18 April 1713, Prior to Dartmouth, fos. 127–8.

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possession of several packet boats carrying letters and passengers between Dover and Calais. In keeping with the French family tradition, their core business activity remained the transport of letters, passengers and horses. The success of the Minet firm lay in its founder’s talent – perpetuated by his successors – for displaying an opportunism that almost always enabled him to ride out major international crises. In a letter to William, dated 5 September 1744, Peter Fector thus explained that ‘the firm’s business has increased since the war, rather than the reverse’.58 The company’s boats were rented out to the administration responsible for the exchange of prisoners of war, thereby reaping the benefit of family alliances. William Minet’s godfather, for example, was a captain ‘in charge of transporting prisoners of war from Dover to Calais’.59 This trade proved highly profitable during the Seven Years War.60 Nor did the company suffer during the French Revolution: an anonymous memorandum from 1802 notes that these shipowners took advantage of the Peace of Amiens to ‘cover the sea with their packet-boats’.61 The horse trade also allowed the Minets to maintain very cordial relations with the French Crown, as is illustrated by an extraordinary story, which might be apocryphal. In a note written on the back of an engraving of Louis XV, Hugues Minet describes how, in the autumn of 1752, he took part in a hunt in the Fontainebleau forest with the French king, thanks to connections of his uncle William who knew a king’s squire (écuyer du roi): I … stood quite close to him, and for a considerable space of time during the formalities. The King did me the honor of speaking to me, I being handsomely dressed in green and gold, the livery of the hunt, without which no body could be there. He asked me how my grandfather at Dover (dead long before) [Isaac, d.1745] did who had sent him so many fine English horses, how I liked France, etcra. He appeared affable, and his debaucheries had not ruined his countenance at least.62

The Kentish port was also a formidable international base: for a time Isaac became the local agent of the Dutch East India Company63 and succeeded for a few years in persuading American ships to make a 58 60

61 62

63

59 Ibid., p. 133. Minet, Some Account, p. 110. As the long bills sent by the Dover company to the customs administration illustrate: TNA, SP42/42, fos. 448–v; TNA, SP42/136, n.f. Minet’s boats also carried British ambassadors and couriers. Report dated Year 10, quoted in C. Borde, Calais et la mer 1814–1914 (Villeneuved’Ascq: Presses Universitaires du Septentrion, 1997), p. 40. Minet, Some Account, p. 158. On the horse trade, see W. Minet, ‘Extracts from the letterbook of a Dover merchant, 1737–1741’ (1917), repr. in M. Roake and J. Whyman (eds.), Essays in Kentish History (London: Frank Cass, 1976), pp. 152–3. Minet, ‘Extracts’, p. 151.

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stopover in Dover, thus taking advantage of the transhipment of their goods for the United Provinces and Hamburg.64 The London bank owned by one of the brothers, William, made the firm a trading house, which served as a broker for merchants arriving in Dover65 or participated in commercial transactions across the Channel, exporting corn or importing brandy.66 Making the most of the strategic situation in the Strait of Dover, the company soon rendered itself indispensable to various branches of the British government. From Isaac’s time packet boat captains acted as intelligence agents on behalf of the admiralty, whom they informed of the movements of the French fleet in the Channel.67 The Minets also worked in close harmony with the Dover customs authorities, reporting sailors who helped travellers hide prohibited goods aboard their ships,68 while at the same time assisting wealthy passengers who wished to avoid paying duties.69 The company also fought against smuggling by informing the state about the comparative sale prices of contraband goods in France and England or by suggesting coastal surveillance techniques.70 In the 1780s the firm invested in the construction of warehouses, where seized goods were stored before being sold at auction.71 Smuggling resumed during the Peace of Amiens, to the chagrin of the customs offices at Dover, but much to the delight of the company, which made a small fortune renting out its warehouses to the public authorities.72 Nevertheless, Hugues Minet, who was at the helm of the packet boat company at the time, complained that the passenger trade, thus far spared from the international tensions, had become a political issue: ‘I am concerned that the difficulties of the passage from Dover to France are so 64 65 66

67

68 69 70 71 72

Ibid., p. 138. Dover lost the trade with the American colonies in the 1730s to the benefit of Cowes and Newcastle, on the North Sea. Baron Jacobi Kloest, Prussian ambassador to London, to Dover customs, 1 October 1802, TNA, CUST54/15, fo. 189. Minet, ‘Extracts’, p. 163. William also acted as a middleman in the wheat trade between London and Caen: ‘Blé envoyé d’Angleterre’ (1752), ADC, C6388, n.f. Colonial merchants from Le Havre also resorted to Hugues and William’s services, notably to contract maritime insurances: Delobette, ‘Messieurs du Havre’, pp. 496, 498, 585, 1324. Minet, Some Account, p. 63. This also took place during the Seven Years War: copy of a letter of Messieurs Minet & Cie to M. Cleveland, 29 June 1761, TNA, SP42/64, item 146/14. Reports from Dover customs to London customs bureau, 25 February 1802, CUST54/ 14, fo. 280; ibid., 12 April 1802, fo. 310. Isaac Minet to Mr. Shuckburgh, commercial assistant for the duke of Ailesbury, 29 March 1740, in Minet, ‘Extracts’, p. 159. Report from Dover customs to London customs bureau, 30 March 1802, TNA, CUST54/14, fo. 302. Ibid., 3 July 1786, TNA, CUST54/2, N°342. Report of 12 November 1802, TNA, CUST54/15, fo. 221.

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considerable. It was always a very troublesome business, however (formerly) profitable, but now it seems to be made by the French a point d’honneur, a national concern, and by individuals not to be redressed.’73 The French Revolution brought profound changes in the system for controlling migration flows. The control of cross-border mobility during the French Revolution The period of the Revolution and the Napoleonic Empire is often regarded, from a Weberian viewpoint, as a turning point in the history of the ‘monopolisation of the legitimate means of circulation’74 by the state. It is true that in this period more emphasis was placed on national criteria in the control of mobility, superimposing the borders of state and nation. Owing to the flood of émigrés flocking to England, the Channel ports found themselves at the centre of this process. The accentuation of the states’ control over their coastal fringes went hand in hand with measures for the surveillance of foreigners. Thus, laws were adopted on both sides of the Channel in 1792–1793: in Britain, to thwart partisans of the Revolution; in France, to take a stand against the advocates of counter-revolution. While the distinction between nationals and foreigners, clearly set out in English laws, was less well defined in French law, the main object of this legislation was to close the channel to undesirable travellers and limit their movement within the vicinity of the border. The question arises, however, as to whether the technical means were available to carry on these objectives. Public servants never passively applied the law, which they interpreted according to a given situation, while migrants sought to evade controls. Border surveillance: the British system Well before the outbreak of hostilities with France, the British government was concerned about the arrival of travellers from the Continent. After 10 August 1792, when the French monarchy was overthrown, British ministers feared an infiltration of emigration by spies in the pay of the Revolution,75 while radical movements were gaining an audience 73 74 75

Letter to his daughter-in-law, 25 août 1802, in Minet, Some Account, p. 166. J. Torpey, ‘Coming and going: on the state monopolization of the legitimate “means of movement”’, Sociological Theory, 16 (1998), pp. 239–59. D. Greer, The Incidence of the Emigration during the French Revolution (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1951); K. Berryman, ‘Great Britain and the French refugees 1789–1802: the administrative response’, unpublished PhD thesis, Australian National University (1980).

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and France was conducting an aggressive foreign policy. The influx of French refugees rapidly raised the issue of the adequacy of the legal resources available to the government to tackle the revolutionary threat. Following lengthy debates in the House of Commons and the Lords, the Alien Act (33 Geo. III, C4) was passed on 7 January 1793 and came into force on January 10. Its main functions were to provide information on the identity of foreigners entering and leaving the kingdom, control their movements and also provide the practical means for their arrest, detention and possible expulsion. Although it was presented as temporary and exceptional, the wording of the law was modified in 1798, and again in 1802, and it remained the cornerstone for the surveillance of foreigners throughout the revolutionary period and until 1826. Another bill was passed against British citizens suspected of revolutionary sympathies: The Traitorous Correspondence Act (33 Geo. III, C27), passed on 7 May 1793, sought among other things to control suspicious communications between France and Britain. While the early eighteenth-century legislation against the Jacobites already punished wartime smuggling and travelling to or from an enemy country without a passport, in 1793 the dissemination of revolutionary ideas was also made a crime of high treason. As Kimberley Berryman has shown, the English system for controlling migration flows was characterised by its flexibility and pragmatism.76 Even before the parliamentary debate, surveillance was set up at the south coast ports, where customs officers took note of the number and status of persons arriving from France and reported back to Home Office headquarters in London.77 Other institutions, such as the Post Office, the London police, British diplomats abroad, and mayors and local magistrates, were mobilised. As at the beginning of the century, surveillance relied on networks of spies abroad. The operation was soon awarded its own subdivision of the Home Office: the so-called Alien Office, which was gradually improved and centralised under the influence of the duke of Portland (Home Office secretary from July 1794).78 Customs officers at ports simultaneously played the role of inspectors of aliens.79 Indeed, customs law and legislation concerning foreigners were not autonomous legal universes, as is demonstrated in the case of Judge John Reeves (1752–1829). Clerk to the board of trade and author 76 77 78 79

Ibid.; R. Wells, Insurrection: The British Experience 1795–1803 (Gloucester: Alan Sutton, 1986), pp. 28–43. Berryman, ibid., p. 93. E. Sparrow, ‘The Alien Office, 1792–1806’, HJ, 33 (1990), pp. 361–84. For example, in Dover in 1799 and Falmouth in 1800: Berryman, ‘Great Britain’, p. 161.

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of a History of the Law of Shipping and Navigation (1792),80 he founded the highly conservative Association for Preserving Liberty against Republicans and Levellers (1792) and participated in interrogations of persons arrested under the Treasonable and Suspicious Practices Act of 1794.81 Appointed superintendent of aliens in 1803, he held this office until 1814, while at the same time writing on the subject of double allegiance.82 This example demonstrates the similarities in the administrative processing of people and goods at the border, reflecting the importance of mercantilist conceptions of movement, which centralised the flow of migrants in the ports. In Britain the key element in surveillance practices was discretion, which compensated for legislative shortcomings. The concept of ‘discretion’ used in administrative law83 comes from the Low Latin discretio (‘division’ or ‘separation’), hence ‘discernment’, ‘prudence’, ‘circumspection’.84 The first meaning of the word as used in the twelfth century was ‘discernment’. In legal terms this concept was based on the idea of the failure of law to define the variety of possible practices, a failure incorporated into the text of the law itself. Discretio denotes the freedom of decision left to the judge or administrator in the enforcement of the law. According to Peter King, the long eighteenth century was ‘the golden age of discretionary justice’85 in the English courts. The concept extended in fact to all administrative bodies responsible for applying the law. In Britain the Alien Act, and later the Traitorous Correspondence Act, broadened the scope of discretio to include the licence to travel. At each stage of the procedure this was left to the competence of the magistrates responsible for applying it. The procedures for identification and control of mobility were based on three principles. First, there was the discrimination between foreigners and British subjects on British soil, where only foreigners were subject to 80 81 82

83

84 85

R.C. Jarvis, ‘Ship Registry – 1707–86’, MH, 2 (1972), p. 157. A.V. Beedell, ‘John Reeves’s prosecution for a seditious libel, 1795–6: a study in political cynicism’, HJ, 36 (1993), pp. 801–2. P. Polden, ‘John Reeves as superintendent of aliens 1803–1814’, JLH, 3 (1982), pp. 31– 51; he was also the author of Two Tracts Shewing that Americans Born before the Independence are, by the Law of England, Not Aliens (London: Reed and Hunter, 1814) (written in 1809 and 1810). See the seminal article by D. Hay, ‘Property, authority and the criminal law’, in D. Hay et al., Albion’s Fatal Tree (London: Allen Lane, 1975), pp. 38–63. Also, from a legal perspective, D.J. Galligan, Discretionary Powers: A Legal Study of Official Discretion (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1986). ‘Discretion’, OED. This original meaning is present in the expression ‘at the discretion of’. P. King, Crime, Justice and Discretion in England 1740–1820 (Oxford University Press, 2000), p. 355.

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control formalities. At the border, procedures were also different for British subjects, governed by the Traitorous Correspondence Act, and for foreigners, subject to the Alien Act. Second, foreigners’ country of origin was not a selection criterion: all foreigners were subject to the law. However, certain categories were exempt from the most restrictive formalities: merchants (until 1798), ambassadors and their households, children under the age of fourteen, sailors and foreigners residing in England for more than a year – a category also deleted from the Alien Act of 1798. The duration of residence in the country was crucial, and the choice of the date ante quem was not neutral: it was a question of including in the Act recently arrived emigrants who were consequently likely to be sympathisers of the Revolution. Third, English identification techniques rested on what Gérard Noiriel has called ‘paper identities’. As in France, this period in Britain saw a ‘transition from a logic of identification based on face-toface contact to one based on written documents’.86 Among foreigners subject to the Alien Act, the law distinguished between those arriving after the Act came into force on 10 January 1793 and those living in Britain since 1 January 1792. In all cases controls were carried out in three stages. Foreigners landing in Britain first had to present themselves to a customs officer and give him their name, social status, occupation and previous places of residence. In exchange they were issued with a certificate of entry. Second, to exit the port travellers had to present their certificate to the local mayor or justice of the peace and obtain a passport stating their destination. They then had ten days to appear before the magistrates of their new place of residence and make the same declaration as on their arrival in the country. After the Alien Act of 1798 the same procedure was applied to leaving Britain through the issuance of a certificate of departure.87 Depending on the international context, the British government took measures to expel foreigners, remove them from the coast or place them under house arrest. A royal proclamation of 4 February 1793 forced foreigners to reside less than fifty miles from London and more than ten miles from the coast.88 The measure was renewed in 1795 to deal with the influx of new arrivals on the south coast in response to political and 86

87 88

G. Noiriel, ‘Surveiller les déplacements ou identifier les personnes? Contribution à l’histoire du passeport en France de la première à la troisième république’, Genèses. Sciences Sociales et Histoire, 30 (1998), p. 87. On the history of identification documents, see J. Torpey, The Invention of the Passport: Surveillance, Citizenship and the State (Cambridge University Press, 2000); V. Denis, Une histoire de l’identité: France, 1715– 1815 (Seyssel: Champ Vallon, 2008). For a more detailed presentation of the system and its modifications, see Polden, ‘John Reeves’, pp. 33–5. Berryman, ‘Great Britain’, pp. 120–1.

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military events on the continent.89 By the same rationale French prisoners of war were moved away from strategic areas whenever there was fear of an invasion.90 Border surveillance: the French system In France the inability to stabilise the political regime explains why the development of a surveillance filter at the border was slower. From the beginning of the revolutionary wars in 1792 the laws dealing with foreigners were viewed as temporary exceptions, related to the requirements and constraints of the Revolution. They were steadily worked out before being rigorously worded in the autumn of 1793, while still being regarded as exceptional. On 27 Germinal Year 2 (16 April 1794) the decree on general policing prohibited both nobles and foreigners from living in Paris and border towns, including ports; the law was abolished a few months later.91 With each crisis faced by the Republic – not just during the Terror – new laws against foreigners were adopted on the same principle. From the time of the Directory (November 1795–November 1799), these laws of circumstance were gradually institutionalised. How to explain this lack of systematic differentiation in the treatment of nationals and foreigners in France? First of all, the meaning of the term étranger remained a problem throughout the period. From 1792 onward the political boundaries between nationals and non-nationals became blurred, and a political definition of étrangers as enemies of the Revolution, encompassing at various times émigrés, priests, aristocrats or Girondins, was grafted onto the legal definition.92 Étranger was itself a highly ambiguous term, referring to both an outsider to the commune and a foreigner to the nation. Whenever the term was used in municipal policing laws, it was applied to disreputable persons and it was the criterion of residence in the commune that counted when a passport was issued. This polysemy of the word posed concrete problems on the ground, as shown by the enforcement of the law on the control of étrangers of 21 March 1793, obliging them to declare their place of residence. This 89

90 91 92

J. King to the mayors of Weymouth, 15 June 1795, TNA, HO5/1, fo. 211; Faversham, ibid., 23 June 1795, fo. 216; J Southampton, ibid., 30 June 1795, fo. 223; Dover, ibid., 3 September 1795, fo. 252. R. Morieux, ‘French prisoners of war, conflicts of honour, and social inversions in England, 1744–1783’, HJ, 56 (2013), p. 64. GN, 207 (16 April 1794), 208 (17 April 1794), 209 (18 April 1794), 210 (19 April 1794); Bulletin des Lois, 97 (8 December 1794). A. Mathiez, La conspiration de l’étranger (Paris: Armand Colin, 1918); R. Brubaker, Citizenship and Nationhood in France and Germany (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992), pp. 82–3; M. Borgetto, ‘Être Français sous la Révolution’, Crises, 2 (1994), pp. 75–86.

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measure was a source of confusion in the communes of the Montivilliers district in the department of Seine-Inférieure: ‘There are many opinions as to the meaning of the word étranger, yet most agree not to regard as étrangers those persons from neighbouring parishes who are wont to come to market … while others maintain that anyone not residing in the district or surrounding area should be deemed an étranger.’93 At the local level an étranger was first and foremost any stranger to the parish or village community: an outsider.94 The department’s public prosecutor thus responded that ‘the law only applies to foreign nationals and not régnicoles’, a legal term which defined a ‘native and resident subject of the French crown’.95 Here we find the old legal distinction from pre-revolutionary times between aubains (aliens) and naturels (native Frenchmen): this is why most of the passport laws were aimed simultaneously at French nationals and foreigners, both with regard to moving around inside the national territory and crossing its borders.96 For the history of the state, in France as in Britain, it was less the techniques for controlling migratory flows than their centralisation and the specialisation of administrative tasks that made the late eighteenth century a new age.97 Crucially, it was during this period that this infrastructure came to be increasingly focused on the state borders, illustrating a phenomenon we have already identified: namely, the role of the border in the construction of territorial nation states. From the Directory on, the reorganisation of the territorial administration and the dismantling of revolutionary government enabled a simplification of the surveillance apparatus to be incorporated into the legislation. From 1795 the French system very much resembled the Alien Act, thus 93 94

95

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97

The procureur syndic of the district of Montivilliers to the general procureur of the department, 14 June 1793, ADSM, L338, n.f. See K. Wrightson, ‘The politics of the parish in early modern England’, in P. Griffiths, A. Fox and S. Hindle (eds.), The Experience of Authority in Early Modern England (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1996); K.D.M. Snell, ‘The culture of local xenophobia’, Social History, 28 (2003), pp. 1–30; S. Cerutti, Etrangers: Etude d’une condition d’incertitude dans une société d’Ancien Régime (Paris: Bayard, 2012); R. Muchembled, La violence au village (XVe–XVIIe s.) (Bruxelles: Brepols, 1989); Morieux, ‘French prisoners of war’, p. 84. Ibid., 17 June 1793, n.f. The definition of régnicole comes from P. Sahlins, Unnaturally French: Foreign Citizens in the Old Regime and After (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2004), p. 31. For the description of the mechanics of the system, see R. Morieux, ‘Des règles aux pratiques juridiques: le droit des étrangers en France et en Angleterre pendant la Révolution française (1792–1802)’, in P. Chassaigne and J.-P. Genet (eds.), Droit et société en France et en Grande-Bretagne, XIIe–XXes: Fonctions et représentations (Paris: Publications de la Sorbonne, 2003), pp. 127–47. E. Higgs, ‘The rise of the information state: the development of central state surveillance of the citizen in England, 1500–2000’, JHS, 14 (2001), p. 177.

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bringing French and British monitoring principles into line. The law of 23 Messidor Year 3 (11 July 1795) obliged foreigners on their arrival in France to present themselves at the border municipality and hand over their passport, which was sent to the Comité de Sûreté Générale to be stamped. In the meantime these travellers remained under the surveillance of the municipal authorities, which issued them with a temporary security card. The ministry of Police Générale, set up in January 1796, gradually took charge of the surveillance of foreigners on a national scale. These procedures, supplemented by other laws, were still being applied in 1801, when numerous émigrés returned to France.98 Recourse to discretio, although less systematic than in England, is also mentioned in the text of several French laws, such as the passport laws of 1792 and 1797.99 Despite improvements in identification techniques, the problem remained the same as at the beginning of the eighteenth century: what were the criteria for identifying an étranger? Identification practices: similar problems The technical unsuitability of passports for monitoring mobility is well known, and it was easy for travellers to circumvent the controls. In January 1793 James Hume, a customs officer at Harwich, stated that the number of foreigners landing in England had been underestimated, as many of them disembarked before their boats reached Gravesend, the Thames port where the first control procedures were carried out. Moreover, the information on the backgrounds of these travellers was suspect, to say the least: ‘As to the description, and quality of these foreigners, the officers have no other account to transmit, but what is obtained from the parties themselves; who, being frequently much incensed at the interrogatories put to them, doubtless give such answers as are indirect, and evasive.’100 98

99

100

See, for instance, ‘livre servant à enregistrer les déclarations des passagers venant de l’étranger ouvert à la municipalité du Havre conformément à la loi du 23 messidor an 3’ (28 October 1795), ADSM, 1M203, n.f. ‘Art. 10. – Les officiers municipaux, suivant les réponses du voyageur arrêté ou les renseignements qu’ils en recevront, seront autorisés à le retenir en état d’arrestation’ (my emphasis), J.B. Duvergier, Collection complète des lois, décrets, ordonnances, réglements, avis du Conseild’Etat. Suivie d’une table analytique, 158 vols., 2nd edn (Paris: A. Guyot et Scribe, 1824– 1949), vol. IV, p. 55; ‘Art. 7. – Tous étrangers voyageant dans l’intérieur de la République … sont mis sous la surveillance spéciale du Directoire exécutif, qui pourra retirer leurs passeports …, s’il juge leur présence susceptible de troubler l’ordre et la tranquillité publique’, in ibid., vol. IX, p. 79. James Hume to Evan Nepean, under-secretary of state for the foreign office, 2 January 1793, TNA, HO1/1, n.f.

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The passport laws were frequently amended, but legislative inflation was above all indicative of the inefficiency of the procedures and made the job of local administrators even more difficult. Likewise, in France many circulars deplored the fact that ‘the execution of the passport laws has been neglected’.101 The situation on the French borders varied with time and place. During the Terror it was the personality of representatives on mission that determined the rigour with which the law was applied. The case of Boulogne illustrates this point well. The decree of 6 September 1793 ordering the arrest of foreigners born in countries at war with France was not initially enforced at the port. The arrival at the end of September of the representative on mission André Dumont (1764–1838) led to a round-up of all foreigners, followed by a selective liberation (the elderly, the sick, women married to Frenchmen): in neither case was the law respected.102 Indeed, for each of the laws relating to foreigners, local administrators were guided by pragmatism, rather than compliance with the letter of the law.103 The instructions of the Parisian central administration did not make their task any easier by bringing the most fanciful rumours to the attention of the prefect of Seine-Inférieure. Witness this letter dating from 1804, written by Pierre-François Réal (1757–1834), the then head of the imperial police: P.S. I have just this moment learned that the English government is to send as spies, women, traders and in particular foreign mts [i.e. merchants], peddlers and Jews; that those spread out inland are to send their reports to those of them residing on the coasts, who convey them to the English warships out at sea.104

This letter was treated with the utmost seriousness, and the sub-prefects of the municipal boroughs of Yvetot, Neufchatel and Le Havre passed it on to the institutions responsible for border control.105 The success of the enterprise remains in doubt. In Britain the problems and the solutions were similar, as demonstrated by the changes in the form of the identification documents used by the Alien Office. The very wording of the questionnaires printed in French and in English, and completed by émigrés from Jersey in 1798, shows that the process still hovered between the written and the oral: 101 102 103

104

‘Circulaire du comité de Sûreté Générale aux Administrations de Département, et aux Agents nationaux de District’ (11 May 1795) (www.gallica.bnf.fr). L. Petit, ‘Les étrangers dans une société provinciale: Boulonnais et Calaisis 1780–1820’, unpublished Maîtrise, University Lille III (1991), pp. 216–17. The situation in Paris was very similar: M. Rapport, Nationality and Citizenship in Revolutionary France: The Treatment of Foreigners 1789–1799 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2000), pp. 255–8. 14 August 1804, ADSM, 1M204, n.f. 105 24 August 1804, ibid., n.f.

304

Transgressing the border

‘Your name and occupation?’, ‘Place of birth and residence in your country?’, ‘Your age?’, ‘Your main place of residence before your arrival in this kingdom?’, ‘At which port did you disembark on your arrival in England, and when?’, ‘Your current residence?’, ‘Sign.’106

Visual inspection of the person was as important as perusal of the document. By 1801, the language had become more bureaucratic, as evidenced in this preprinted form completed by a servant on his arrival at Dover: Douvres, Le 30th September 1801. N°. 456. L Soussigné étant Etranger et étant arrivé à Douvres de Calais – sur le Navire appellé L A Flag of Truce declare comme s’en suive 1. Que son nom de Baptême et son sur nom ou nom de famille sont Pierre Swan. 2. Qui est né à Lausanne en Suisse. 3. Que sa demeure ordinaire est à Moulins en France departemens d’allier et part à Paris. 4. Qui a demeuré les six Mois avant son arrivée à Moulins et Paris 3.mois. 5. Que son Rang ou etat, son emploi ou Metier est Domestique de Mr. Lefassier. 6. Que les Motifs de son Voyage en Angleterre sont pour servir Mr. Lefassier. 7. Qui est connu de mon maitre. 8. Que sa conduite pendant sa demeure en Angleterre sera cautionée par lui. Age 33 Years. Height 5 feet 8. How made Slender Colour of Hair Chesnut [sic] Colour of Eyes Blue Complexion dark. Permission to proceed to London.107

The filling-out of written documents was never sufficient, and the Alien Office also resorted to the accreditation of identity via third-party testimony: Sir, A foreigner of the name of Da Costa who carries about a petition from a Madame de la Bretonière having mentioned your name to me as a person to whom he is known, and to whom he seemed disposed to refer for his character, I take the liberty of requesting you to inform me of any circumstances relative to

106

107

TNA, FO95/608. Even though the Alien Act did not theoretically extend to Jersey, where the ‘Code de Loix’ of 1635 on foreigners was in use (TNA, HO98/3, non folioted), similar measures were taken in practice, at the Alien Office’s request. ‘Dover, 30 September 1801. No. 456. / The undersigned being a foreigner and having arrived in Dover from Calais – on the ship named L A Flag of Truce Declares as follows / 1. That his Christian name and his surname or family name is Peter Swan. / 2. That he was born in Lausanne in Switzerland. / 3. That his usual residence is Moulins en France departemens d’Allier and partly Paris. / 4. That during the six months prior to his arrival he lived in Moulins and Paris for 3 months. / 5. That his rank or status, his job or occupation is Servant to Mr Lefassier. / 6. That the reasons for his trip to England are to serve Mr Lefassier. / 7. That he is known to my master. / 8. That his conduct during his stay in England will be guaranteed by him. / Age 33 years. Height 5 feet 8. How made Slender Colour of hair Chesnut Colour of Eyes Blue Complexion dark. Permission to proceed to London’: BL, Add MS 33056, fo. 294.

Crossing the Channel

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him that you may be acquainted with, as there are some reasons to suppose both the above named persons to be impostors.108

A well-filled address book was often more useful than a valid passport. To make the local authorities’ work easier the Alien Office also tried to standardise the questioning at English ports. In January 1795, Philip Stanhope (1755–1815), the joint postmaster general, was sent to Harwich, the main port of arrival for refugees from the United Provinces, to improve procedures by customs officers for checking or allocating passports to migrants.109 The criteria for entry included possession of a written document authenticating the declarations, wealth or, as an ultimate sign of allegiance, willingness to serve in the British armed forces. Woe betide any servants, women unaccompanied by their husbands or priests, who were labelled the ‘most useless descriptions which we can admit into this country’.110 But there would always be cases that did not fall into these categories, and ultimately it was the use of independent judgment by the local administrators that prevailed. In 1797 the duke of Portland (1738–1809), who directed the Alien Office, wrote the following to major Gordon, the man responsible for controlling the entry of foreigners into Jersey: ‘every case must depend so much upon its own circumstances that it is not possible to give you any more precise rule than I have done, and that [sic] it must necessarily be left to your own judgment and discretion to determine what persons can safely be permitted to remain on the island’.111 The letter of the law could not be applied, and therein lay the difficulty of the task of the administrators, who interpreted it on a case-by-case basis. While the definition of ‘alien’ seems less problematic than that of étranger in France, there were still borderline cases where it was unclear who was designated by the Alien Act. Were Americans, for example, to be regarded as aliens? And what about black servants?112 More importantly, how was one to be sure of the qualities of an individual: that is to say, nationality, occupation or age? There was a fine line between legitimate and excessive suspicion. The customs at Yarmouth, for example, were reprimanded by the Alien Office for letting through too many suspicious individuals.113 Conversely, while fear of a French invasion in the spring of

108 109 110 111 112 113

2 December 1795, TNA, HO5/1, fo. 302. The same kind of letter could still be found in 1803: TNA, HO5/8, fo. 141. Berryman, ‘Great Britain’, pp. 128–9. P. Stanhope to T. Carter, 21 January 1795, TNA, HO1/3, n.p. 17 October 1797, TNA, HO99/1, fo. 328. Morieux, ‘Des règles aux pratiques juridiques’, n. 161–2, p. 144. 20 January 1787, TNA, HO5/2, fo. 261.

306

Transgressing the border

1798 led the government to renew a measure to move inland all French people living near the coast, the mayor of Bath was instructed not to apply it too punctiliously, as ‘it would be unadvisable to disturb families, or persons settled there, without some reason of disturbance or suspicion against them’.114 To solve the problems that had gradually arisen since the adoption of the first version, a new Alien Act was therefore drawn up. An anonymous memorandum of 1797 suggested improving this law, whose main flaw was ‘the want of an Express power to prevent Aliens quitting the Kingdom’.115 There were indeed no laws to prevent foreigners from leaving Britain, even though from the end of February 1793 the government in effect required them to present their passport to embark for France and enemy territories.116 For the author of the memorandum, therefore, it was a matter of reconciling the legislation and juridical practices as ‘there is no positive law which authorizes this practice, and it is at least questionable how far the common law prerogatives Justifies it’.117 In the end, the proposal was retained in the new Alien Act of 1798. The author of the memorandum of 1797 also suggested prohibiting French merchants from crossing the Channel more than once. But such a change in the spirit of the law was problematic, as one commentator noted in the margin: ‘It is needless to enact this with respect to Frenchmen, if it be not made general. It would at all events, as I should think, be better to make this a matter of discretion. It must be remembered that all limitations by Law limit also the Communications of Government.’118 Discretionary power was often an instrument of class domination in eighteenth-century English law.119 The problems facing the two border authorities were inseparable: the emigrant of one was the immigrant of the other. The chronology of the main laws on aliens, on both sides of the Channel, illustrates this well. The interconnectedness of French and English legislations stemmed from the internationalisation of the challenges the two states had to face. While a cooperative policy was out of the question in wartime, was this also the case once relations between the two states

114 115 116 117 119

Letter of the duke de Portland, 14 September 1798, TNA, HO5/2, fo. 139. On this council order, see Berryman, ‘Great Britain’, pp. 144–5, p. 152. BL, Add MS 37877, fo. 222v. Henri Dundas to the postmaster general, 25 February 1793, TNA, HO43/4, fo. 194. BL, Add MS37877, fo. 222. 118 Ibid., fo. 226. Hay, ‘Property, authority’, passim. Thus, after 1798 temporary passes were still granted at the JP’s discretion.

Crossing the Channel

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eased? And what was the impact of ten years of war on cross-Channel mobility? Travellers at the time of the Peace of Amiens: a quantitative analysis French travellers in England, and more so their English counterparts in France, have been the subject of numerous works, based almost exclusively on travel writings. They usually centre on a few famous characters, from Voltaire to Arthur Young, or else literary works analysing the conventions peculiar to the genre. More recently, attempts have been made to examine the social history of travellers or to study travel in its physical dimension.120 This approach brings into play a variety of sources and in the process spans a broader social spectrum. Numerous accounts record the large number of English travellers journeying to France between the Preliminaries of London (1 October 1801) and the declaration of war (20 May 1803).121 In April 1802 George Jackson, the younger brother of the British representative at the Amiens negotiations, wrote from Paris in a letter to his mother, ‘All the hotels are overflowing with the English; for we have an inundation from our shores since the signature of the treaty, and the flood increases daily, and will no doubt go on increasing.’122 The French press also commented on the arrival of travellers from England en masse. Take the Journal de Paris of 30 March 1802, for example: ‘Paris recovers its finery, peace will beautify it even more: foreigners come flocking in.’123 While the names of the most famous passengers, such as Charles James Fox, Jeremy Bentham, Thomas Malthus, the painter John Opie or the engineer James Watt, are well known, thousands of others crossed the Channel at the same time, records of whom also exist. ‘What is it that makes the usually invisible foreigners visible at a particular time?’,124 wondered Daniel Roche: the question is a relevant one with regard to the Peace of Amiens, which did not abolish the identity control measures introduced 120

121 122 123 124

A. Mączak, Travel in Early Modern Europe, translation U. Phillips (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1995) (Polish edn: 1980); Roche, Humeurs vagabondes; D. Roche, ‘The English in Paris’, in C. Charle, J. Vincent and J. Winter (eds.), Anglo-French Attitudes: Comparisons and Transfers between English and French Intellectuals since the Eighteenth Century (Manchester University Press, 2007), pp. 78–97. For a diplomatic study of the period, see J.D. Grainger, The Amiens Truce: Britain and Bonaparte, 1801–1803 (Woodbridge: Boydell and Brewer, 2004). The Diaries and Letters of Sir George Jackson, K.C.H., from the Peace of Amiens to the Battle of Talavera, 2 vols. (London: Richard Bentley, 1872), p. 81. Journal de Paris, 189, 30 March 1801, p. 1146. Roche, Humeurs vagabondes, p. 407.

308

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during the Revolution, leaving historians with abundant administrative archives at their disposal.125 ‘The urge to visit Paris … is desperate!’ The signing of the Preliminaries of Peace in London generated unprecedented curiosity in Britain about visiting France.126 Louis-Guillaume Otto, minister plenipotentiary of France in London, bore witness to this in a letter to Talleyrand, then in charge of Affaires Etrangères, dated 6 October 1801: Since the signing I have been ten times more burdened than before with passport applications. There is not a well-to-do man here who isn’t keen to see Paris and especially the First Consul. … Soon Parliament will be obliged to impose a special tax on those absent, so as not to see the finest districts of Westminster utterly depopulated.126

Frustrated by ten years of conflict, the desire to discover the continent re-emerged. But the two governments did not deal with this demand in the same way. The British remained extremely wary of Bonaparte’s intentions, and the number of subjects of the Crown wanting to travel to France was a continuing cause for concern. By contrast, French émigrés and prisoners of war had no difficulty obtaining passports. The French policy was exactly the opposite. On 14 October Napoleon authorised his ambassador to London to issue passports for France while filtering out any undesirables.127 Fouché, the minister of police, gave him very detailed instructions on the categories of French nationals warranting special treatment, such as ‘actual émigrés’, ‘settlers from Saint-Domingue’ and ‘Frenchmen in their sixties, who are sick and above all consumptive’.128 These instructions only complicated Otto’s job, with the hapless public servant complaining that ‘half [my] time is spent in meaningless answers to questions I am proposed [sic]’.129 For British travellers obtaining a passport from the French Embassy was not enough. The Traitorous Correspondence Act, which prevented travellers not in possession of a license from the king from reaching 125 126 127 128

129

See D. Eastwood, ‘“Amplifying the province of the legislature”: the flow of information and the English state in the early nineteenth century’, HR, 62 (1989), pp. 288–9. 6 October 1801, ibid., fo. 41. Copy of a letter of 2 December 1801 from Otto to minister of Relations Extérieures, sent to the ministry of the Police Générale on the 21st of the same month, ibid., fo. 202. Ibid., fos. 202–4. From December 1801, Bonaparte undertook to re-establish French authority and slavery in Saint-Domingue, following the proclamation of the constitution of Saint-Domingue in July by Toussaint-Louverture. Many French settlers fled this island during this period. 22 December 1801, AMAE, CPA597, fo. 105.

Crossing the Channel

309

France, remained in force. This document was only issued for health or business reasons, thereby excluding the majority of applicants, whose journeys were motivated solely by the charms of Paris.130 The journalist and author Francis Blagdon (bap. 1777–1819), who landed at Calais on 16 October 1801, claimed to be the first British traveller to visit France, not counting diplomats. In his travelogue, published in 1803, he recounts his journey in great detail and provides an elaborate description of the passenger surveillance system. After obtaining a royal license in London to travel in France, he embarked at Dover on board a ship carrying government dispatches. In Calais he obtained from the police commissioner of the Pas-de-Calais the right to disembark and arrived in Paris in early November.131 There he presented himself at the police station in the district where he had chosen to live in order to exchange his passport for a certificate. This final stage led him to the préfecture de police, where his personal details and address were taken down in exchange for a residence permit.132 This veritable obstacle course did not discourage British travellers, who applied to make the voyage to France in ever-increasing numbers. The British government, however, remained vigilant over the identities of the chosen few, which Otto attributed to the fear of ‘too high a level of emigration’.133 Otto was right, and the British laws prohibiting the emigration of artisans, which dated back to the beginning of the eighteenth century, were strictly enforced in peacetime, when it became easier to escape surveillance.134 In the other direction, from France to England, controls were less drastic. After the signing of the Preliminaries of Peace in London, the Alien Office wrote to the superintendents of aliens at the ports that ‘the regulation must not be enforced with too much rigour’135 for British subjects. From January 1802 on the British were able to return freely to their country, and the Traitorous Correspondence Act was abolished at the end of March 1802.136 This relaxation of the legislation was 130 131

132 133 134 135 136

Otto to Talleyrand, 23 October 1801, 30 October 1801, ibid., fo. 26, fo. 39. F.W. Blagdon, Paris as It Was and as It Is; … In a Series of Letters, Written by an English Traveller, During the Years 1801–2, to a Friend in London, 2 vols. (London: C. and R. Baldwin, 1803), letter dated 16 October 1801, vol. I, n.p. Ibid., 2 November 1801, n.p. 23 October 1801, AMAE, CPA597, fo. 27v. Otto used the same term on 30 October 1801 (ibid., fo. 39), and again on 16 November 1801 (ibid., fo. 61). Alien Office circular to Dover, Gravesend and Harwich, 20 February 1802, TNA, HO5/ 7, fo. 260. C.W. Flint (Alien Office London) to B.J. Stow Esq. (Dover), 7 October 1801, ibid., fo.122. Thereafter passports were not necessary anymore for British subjects travelling between the two countries: ‘Circular to the chief officers of the Customs’, 27 April 1802, ibid., fos. 330–1.

310

Transgressing the border

linked to the desire to reverse migration flows and encourage British workers to go home. For non-Britons also the Preliminaries of London marked a turning point: while the Alien Office allowed just 5 foreign passengers to travel from Dover to London in September 1801, the numbers rose to 38 in October, 75 in November and 127 in December the same year.137 From December a new method of control was launched: persons, both British and foreign, travelling from France and disembarking on English soil were required to produce a passport stamped by the ambassador to Paris.138 Without this document they were detained at the port of arrival while awaiting permission from the British government to continue on their journey. In either direction, the requirement to hold a passport was not necessarily enforced, and the stream of British travellers to France grew in October 1801.139 The vessel patrolling the Strait of Dover to prevent unlawful communications suspended its activities in late October.140 Packet boat traffic resumed in November. An ever-increasing number of individuals decided to embark without requesting authorisation, and the phenomenon only intensified with the signing of the Peace of Amiens, in March 1802. Not only were the wartime techniques for managing migration flows developed during the war maintained but the peace enabled state monitoring of migrants to be further refined. On the British side a new Alien Act, passed on 26 June 1802, simplified administrative procedures.141 The development of a state bureaucracy specialising in migration issues was the main innovation of the period: for the first time a standard version of the printed certificate retained by customs officers as well as a model of the duplicate given to the foreign traveller were reproduced in the text of the law itself, which also specified the manner in which the 137

138

139 140 141

Out of a total of 674 travellers who crossed the Channel in that direction (576 men, 65 women, 12 children and 21 servants whose gender was not mentioned), the British only represented a tiny proportion: 24 individuals, i.e. as many as the Swiss (22 individuals), less than the Italians (62), the Germans (36) and above all the French (268). Figures computed by using the letters of the Alien Office in Dover to the Dover headquarters, in TNA, HO5/7. Otto to Talleyrand, 30 November 1801, AMAE, CPA596, fo. 196; same to same, 24 November 1801, CPA597, fo. 77; Flint (Alien Office London) to B.J. Stow (Dover), 21 December 1801, TNA, HO5/7, fo. 197. Otto to Talleyrand, 16 November 1801, AMAE, CPA597, fo. 61. Lord Pelham to lords commissioners of the treasury, 31 October 1801, TNA, HO5/7, fo. 152. R. Morieux, ‘“An inundation from our shores”: travelling across the Channel around the Peace of Amiens’, in M. Philp (ed.), Resisting Napoleon: The British Response to the Threat of Invasion, 1797–1815 (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2006), p. 224.

Crossing the Channel

311

register was to be completed. The specialisation of administrative practices was thus taking shape. Day after day, the Alien Office encouraged customs officers to abide by the system, with varying degrees of subtlety: Having repeatedly had occasion to observe from the counterparts of alien certificates transmitted by you to this office, that they are extremely incorrect, both as to the manner in which they are filled up and the references you are required by your instructions to make to certificates of departure & also the column of remarks which is intended to contain the circumstances under which aliens have arrived or resided in the country … I am under the necessity of requesting you will pay a more strict attention to these circumstances in future, as I should be extremely sorry to find myself under the necessity of making such a representation to Lord Pelham of your neglect, as might induce His Lordship to supersede you in your present appointment.142

The British government even proposed collaborating with the French authorities over the monitoring of cross-border migrants, by obliging packet boat captains ‘to hand over to the border officials in our ports, the names, forenames and particulars of travellers embarking on these vessels’.143 The proposal was never put into practice. The migrant’s misfortune worked to the historian’s advantage, since two control systems coexisted. While dozens of British travellers arrived daily at French ports without identity papers, the French police continued to implement the formalities from before the peace, and thus travellers found themselves caught between two contradictory sets of legislation. In their travel writings the English visiting France at that period described a country that, after ten years of war, had become quite exotic. Despite the revolutionary upheavals, certain perceptions still endured, such as that of the cumbersome nature of French bureaucracy, embodied in the ceremony of passport controls. The travel writer Sir John Carr (1772–1832) humorously presented the problems he encountered at Le Havre, on account of not being in possession of this document: My companion had left England without a passport, owing to the repeated assurances of both the ministerial and opposition prints, and also of a person high in administration, that none was necessary. The first question propounded to us by the secretary was, ‘Citizens, where are your passports ?’ … We answered, that in England they were not required of Frenchmen.144 142 143 144

H.W. Brooke (Alien Office) to Geo Hake (Harwich), 17 September 1802, TNA, HO5/ 7, fos. 439–40. Decrès, minister of the Marine, to Talleyrand, 25 February 1802, AMAE, CPA596, fo. 313. Sir J. Carr, The Stranger in France; or, a Tour from Devonshire to Paris, 2nd edn (London: J. Johnson, 1807), pp. 23–4.

312

Transgressing the border

The blind spot in the migration experience, which means that by crossing a border one becomes a foreigner, often prevented British travellers from understanding that foreigners crossing the Channel in the other direction had the same feelings about the reception extended to them in Britain.145 Once in Paris the worries of the British were far from over, for in order to leave the city they were required, like all foreigners, to obtain a passport from their diplomatic representative.146 Thousands of travellers were subjected to these administrative procedures. Passports were not documents of freedom to move, but of permission to leave.147 The dynamics and composition of the traffic According to the late nineteenth-century historian Albert Babeau, there were between 10,000 and 12,000 Englishmen in Paris in September 1802, though he does not cite his sources.148 It is difficult to know how many English or British lived in France at the time, because the very definition of ‘nationality’ varied with the documents consulted. Passports registers nevertheless contain a wealth of information about these travellers. Thanks to a register originating in the chief clerk’s department of the ministry of foreign affairs, it is possible to reconstruct the traffic from England to France.149 Following peace, passports, it will be remembered, were not required of the subjects of the Crown when leaving British territory and were only issued upon request. Moreover, there was a charge for this document, which no doubt deterred people of modest means. There were other limitations too: national origin was not mentioned, and the passport was not individual, the same document often bearing the name of the paterfamilias and the mention ‘and wife’, or ‘wife and family’. Consequently, this list cannot possibly be exhaustive. The first passport for France was issued on 13 September 1801, and the last, on 15 June 1803, making a total of 2,598 for the period as a whole. The signing of the Treaty of Amiens, on 26 March 1802, had very little impact (Graph 8.1), as it was only in May that the British authorities 145

146 147

148

149

N. Green, ‘Modes comparatifs dans le regard de l’autre: récits de voyages chez Chateaubriand et Arthur Young’, in De Russie et d’ailleurs, Mélanges Marc Ferro (Paris: Institut d’Études Slaves, 1995), pp. 405–16. Merry to Hawkesbury, 6 May 1802, TNA, FO27/62, n°11. J. McAdam, ‘The right to leave any country: an intellectual history of freedom of movement in international law’, Melbourne Journal of International Law, 12 (2011), pp. 27–56. A. Babeau, Les Anglais en France après la Paix d’Amiens. Impressions de voyage de Sir John Carr. Étude, traduction et notes par Albert Babeau (Paris: Plon, 1898), p. 4. See also J.G. Alger, Englishmen in the French Revolution (London: Ballantyne Press, 1889). ‘Register of passes 1795–1821’, TNA, FO610/1.

600 550 500 450 400 350 300 250 200 150 100 50 0

313

England–France (total = 2,598) France-England (total = 3,055)

1801 Sep 1801 Oct 1801 Nov 1801 Dec 1802 Jan 1802 Feb 1802 Mar 1802 Apr 1802 May 1802 Jun 1802 Jul 1802 Aug 1802 Sep 1802 Oct 1802 Nov 1802 Dec 1803 Jan 1803 Feb 1803 Mar 1803 Apr 1803 May 1803 Jun

Number

Crossing the Channel

Year–month

Graph 8.1 Traveller flows during the Peace of Amiens.

informed the public that the French police required these documents. During the summer the number of travellers carrying a passport therefore soared from 17 in May to 217 in June and 525 in July. Traffic reached a peak between June and October before tailing off. These movements were influenced by diplomatic vicissitudes. In August relations between the two countries began to sour, with Napoleon’s unilateral suspension of the postal convention. In September Bonaparte annexed Piedmont, then Parma in October, while the question of Malta remained a festering sore.150 Both to help British travellers stranded in France and to gain a more accurate idea of the identity of those coming and going on the Continent, lord Hawkesbury (1770–1828), the future lord Liverpool, then secretary of state for foreign affairs, decided in May 1802 to issue passports to any British subjects that requested them. Anthony Merry (1756–1835), minister plenipotentiary in Paris, was therefore responsible for regularly dispatching to London ‘a detailed list of all the persons to whom you grant passports’.151 Paris became the first checkpoint for travellers heading to

150 151

A. Fugier, La Révolution française et l’Empire napoléonien, in P. Renouvin, vol. IV of Histoire des relations internationales (Paris: Hachette, 1954), pp. 137–58. Hawkesbury to Merry, 20 May 1802, TNA, FO27/62, n°8. Sent to Paris in July 1801, Merry was Cornwallis’ assistant during the Amiens negotiations, before coming back to Paris in April 1802, where he remained at the head of the embassy until December.

314

Transgressing the border

England. The use of ambassadors as spies was traditional in the eighteenth century, but after the Revolution monitoring international passenger traffic became their main task. Unlike the passports issued by the Foreign Office, the documents issued by Merry were mandatory for leaving France, suggesting that these lists are perhaps closer to the actual number of cross-Channel migrants. Between 21 April 1802 and 5 February 1803, 3,055 passengers – men, women and children – received passports to Great Britain.152 Since the administrative procedures for obtaining such documents were tedious and it was always possible to embark clandestinely, it may be assumed that these were used, even if it is not possible to extrapolate the total number of travellers. Although the period of the revolutionary wars is generally described as the origin of the modern conception of nationality, national affiliations were not yet clearly determined from a bureaucratic point of view, as is shown in the vocabulary used by Merry. Thus, depending on the moment, the diplomat wavered between the national adjective (‘Polish’), the country (‘Poland’) and the city of origin (‘Warsaw’). The subjects of the French colonies were especially difficult to classify, with ethnic and national labels being confused, as in the case of Mr. Chavannes, naturalised British, who was described as créole (passport no. 480). Not surprisingly, French and British travellers represented the majority of those crossing the Channel (Table 8.1). The make-up of the two contingents was, however, quite distinct. Sex was the first important variable. The sample includes 555 women, or 18% of the total passengers, 48% of whom were French (269) and 37% English (208). While the typical British female traveller belonged to the elite and travelled in the company of her family and servants, her French counterpart worked in the craft industry or as a shopkeeper and travelled alone. The differences become more apparent when the travellers as a whole by country of origin are considered (Table 8.2). Three categories account for almost three quarters of the total: merchants, the landowning elite and domestic servants. France and Britain were not alone in being affected by this logic of exchanges, and the Channel served as an economic hub for the whole Continent. Merchants, for example, account for 22% of Italian travellers, 39.5% of Scandinavians and 53% of Swiss. Among the French the proportion of professions related to trade and industry, which accounts for nearly half the travellers (46.5%, or 282), is 152

These lists are scattered in the following folders: TNA, FO27/62, FO27/63, FO27/64, FO27/67.

315

Crossing the Channel

Table 8.1 Distribution of passengers by state of origin Country of origin

Total

France Britain Italian states Switzerland America Northern Europe German states Other

1,108 1,380 146 101 40 78 101 101

Total

3,055

Men

Women

Children

Anonymous

820 948 102 88 37 58 82 84

276 216 24 6 3 8 11 11

5 28 4 4 0 4 2 0

7 188 16 3 0 8 6 10

2,215

555

47

238

striking. The end to the restrictions on trade, after ten years of war, greatly stimulated exchanges between the two states.153 This reorientation of flows was merely making up for lost time, since we also find the same types of exchanges as before the Revolution. British-manufactured goods flooded into France illegally, as one of the French consuls in Britain observed in December 1802: ‘Most of the French who come to London only do so to buy with gold the merchandise they introduce fraudulently, for which they find facilities on the coasts of the former provinces of Normandy and Brittany.’154 In the other direction French silks and chiffons were highly sought after and were also smuggled across. The large number of artisans and small shopkeepers reflects the attractiveness of the London market for the Parisian luxury goods industry, which regained its former pre-eminence. This commercial dynamic was part of a longue durée tradition, which held true for other types of exchanges between the two countries. This is evidenced by a detailed analysis of the social composition of British travellers to the Continent. The historiography of the period insists, and rightly so, on the number of British members of parliament and peers of the realm crossing the Channel during the Peace of Amiens, such as Thomas Bruce, Lord Elgin (1766–1841), Thomas Erskine (1750– 1823) and Sir Philip Francis (1740–1818).155 A large proportion of these travellers indeed consisted of members of the gentry or other members of the elite (39.6%), carrying on the tradition of the Grand Tour. France 153

154 155

The phenomenon has been studied for merchants from the Nord Department: M. De Oliveira, ‘Négoce et territoire: les passeports nordistes au XIXe siècle (1791–1869)’, RHMC, 48 (2001), p. 109. AN, AF IV/1672, fo. 116. J.G. Alger, ‘British visitors to Paris, 1802-1803’, EHR, 14 (1899), p. 741; Alger, Napoleon’s British Visitors, chap. 1.

Table 8.2 Passenger professions by state of origin

Activity/country

Servants Soldiers Sailors Craftsmen & tradesmen Artists Lawyers & teachers Medical professions Merchants Clergy Landowning elite Diplomacy Other Total (no. & per cent)

Britain

France

Italian states

German states

Switzerland

Northern Europe

United States

Other

Total

No. 313 96 5 13

% 34.4 10.5 0.5 1.4

No. 94 14 1 105

% 15.5 2.3 0.1 17.3

No. 23 3 10 3

% 23 3 0.1 3

No. 22 2 0 5

% 35 3.2 0 8

No. 10 2 1 6

% 16.1 3.2 1.6 9.7

No. 10 2 0 0

% 26.3 5.3 0 0

No. 5 1 0 0

% 26.3 5.3 0 0

No. 22 4 0 5

% 31.4 5.7 0 7.1

No. 499 124 17 137

% 26.7 6.6 0.9 7.3

3 11 12 62 18 361 17 0

0. 3 1.2 1.3 6.8 2 39.6 1.9 0

52 31 7 177 11 93 20 2

8.6 5.1 1.2 29.2 1.8 15.3 3.3 0.3

12 6 1 22 0 16 3 1

12 6 1 22 0 16 3 1

1 4 2 16 0 8 3 0

1 6 3 25.4 0 12.7 4.8 0

0 2 1 33 3 3 1 0

0 3.2 1.6 53.2 4.8 4.8 1.6 0

1 0 2 15 0 4 3 1

2.6 0 5.3 39.5 0 10.5 7.9 2.6

0 0 0 2 0 11 0 0

0 0 0 10.5 0 57.9 0 0

0 0 0 12 1 17 8 1

0 0 0 17.1 1.4 24.3 11.4 1.4

69 54 25 339 33 513 55 5

3.7 2.9 1.3 18.1 1.7 27.4 2.9 0.3

100

100

63

911

100

607

100

100

62

100

38

100

19

100

70

100

1870

100

Note: (The largest category for each country or region appears in bold.) Out of the dozens of labels used by Merry, which mixed status, profession and title, I have created eleven categories. 1,870 travellers (61% of the total) have been included in these calculations. Servants include employees, secretaries, cooks, maître d’hôtel, etc. Craftsmen and tradesmen group a heterogeneous collection of occupations, such as artificial flowers-makers, shopkeepers, plumbers, hairdressers, embroiderers and hat makers. The world of leisure groups artists, opera singers, ventriloquists and dancing masters. Merchants include bankers. The landed elite includes all travellers called ‘gentleman’, ‘Esquire’, ‘Lord’, ‘notable’, ‘renter’, ‘Chevalier’ and ‘Honorable’. Often the occupation was mentioned for the couple, without distinguishing between man and woman. In this case, the occupation has been attributed to the former, unless information is given about the latter (for instance: ‘Lady and Lord Elgin’). Such a choice underestimates the number of women in the sample.

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continued to be an obligatory staging post on the route to Italy and Southern Europe, as it had been prior to 1789. Another type of traveller also journeyed to France at that same time. Only a small proportion of the British returning to England at the time of the Peace of Amiens was employed in trade or industry (1.4% of artisans and shopkeepers, 6.8% of merchants in our sample). Many had in fact travelled to France before or during the war and remained there. Alien friends and alien enemies: workers and merchants In a mercantilist system managing the movements of persons, it is necessary to retain or attract individuals with technical knowledge – skilled workers, craftsmen, manufacturers – in order to retain this wealth within the border of the state. What Adam Smith termed ‘living instruments’ of trade (people) were subject to the same treatment as ‘dead instruments of trade’ (machines). Thus, just as a number of laws prohibited the export of tools from Britain, the act of providing any assistance to artificers and manufacturers travelling abroad was severely punished.156 By the same logic, in wartime skilled foreign workers were almost always exempted from the most repressive measures. During the Terror several laws included exceptions for individuals in trades deemed useful to the state. The decree of expulsion resulting from the Act of 21 March 1793 on the control of aliens did not affect property owners or those practising ‘a useful occupation’.157 The same applied to workers, in the law of 6 September 1793 arresting foreigners born in countries at war with the République.158 In 1802 economic mobility between France and Britain was still viewed in neo-mercantilist terms.159 In February a secret circular was sent by the Alien Office to the customs offices of Dover, Gravesend and Harwich to intercept British manufacturers travelling back and forth across the 156 157 158

159

A. Smith, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, 2 vols. (London: W. Strahan and T. Cadell, 1776), vol. II, Book IV, chap. 8. Art. VIII and IX of the decree of 21 March 1793, GN, 82 (23 March 1793). Art. II, AP, vol. LXXIII (Paris, 1908), pp. 462–3. The same mercantilist principles permeated the laws of 9 October 1793 and 16 April 1794: AMAE, CPA588, fo. 37; GN, 208 (17 April 1794). F. Démier, ‘Les ‘économistes de la nation’ contre l’‘économie-monde’ du XVIIIe siècle’, in G. Faccarello and P. Steiner (eds.), La pensée économique pendant la Révolution française (Presses Universitaires de Grenoble, 1995), pp. 281–303; J.-C. Perrot, ‘Les effets économiques de la Révolution: trente années de bilans (1795– 1825)’, in Une histoire intellectuelle de l’économie politique (XVIIe–XVIIIe siècles) (Paris: EHESS, 1992), pp. 441–69; J.E. Crowley, ‘Neo-mercantilism and The Wealth of Nations: British commercial policy after the American Revolution’, HJ, 33 (1990), pp. 339–60.

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Channel, who were suspected of transporting machinery to France and the United Provinces.160 In France, however, the policy was to encourage the immigration of skilled British workers. In May 1802 the Ministre de la Police ordered the prefects of Pas-de-Calais, Seine-Inférieure, Calvados and La Manche not to cause problems for English ‘artists or workers’, who ‘can but contribute, in various ways, to the prosperity of the Republic’.161 Thus, the English mechanic William Aitken obtained a passport to Calais on 14 September 1802 ‘to travel throughout the Republic’.162 The hope was also to entice away soldiers and sailors, and entering the territory was made easy for them, regardless of whether they were carrying passports. All other categories of British nationals, however, had to await the decision of the Ministre de la Police at the ports.163 This policy of attracting foreign workers also had its legal correlative in easier conditions for naturalisation.164 Comparable measures were adopted in Britain to ease the return of workers who had settled in France. It was essential to avoid being too scrupulous in the granting of passports to those wanting to return to the country, according to Lord Hawkesbury: ‘It is on the contrary extremely desirable to cultivate by a well timed lenity this disposition in them, and to afford them the necessary facilities for their return, without too nice an investigation of the improper views which originally induced them to quit England.’165 Once they were back on English soil, however, surveillance continued unabated to prevent these individuals from corrupting the local workforce.166 The laws punishing the emigration of workers remained in force during the Peace of Amiens. Attempts were also made to get them to return by engaging the assistance of British ambassadors and consuls abroad, as well as packet boat captains. These attempts ‘to initiate the process of artisan re-emigration’167 were only partially successful. Numerous British workers remained in France from the moment when diplomatic relations between the two states began to sour. While the industrial workforce was subject to constant monitoring by the states, merchants, on the other hand, enjoyed special status 160 161 162 164

165 167

TNA, HO5/7, 20 February 1802, fo. 262. The ministry of the general police to the administrative director of Pas-de-Calais, 22 May 1802, AN, F73643/1, n.f. 163 AN, F 15/3496, pp. 1–2. Ibid. According to the senatus consulte of 4 September 1802 which permitted ‘foreigners who … will bring [in the Republic] useful talents, inventions industries or who will create great establishments’ to become French citizens, after a year of residence on the French soil: Ministère de la Justice, La nationalité française: textes et documents (Paris: La documentation française, 1985), p. 55. 166 Hawkesbury to Merry, 28 August 1802, TNA, FO27/63, n°21. Ibid. D.J. Jeremy, ‘Damming the flood: British government efforts to check the outflow of technicians and machinery, 1780–1830’, BuHR, 51 (1977), p. 11.

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throughout the century, as compared to other foreigners. Moreover, peace treaties stipulated that, when a war was declared, expatriate merchants were to be given a certain amount of time to leave their country of residence and repatriate their assets. The status of merchants in France varied greatly with time and place, as is shown in the case of the droit d’aubaine (the king’s right to confiscate the property of foreigners dying on French soil), which was enforced in a variety of ways, depending on town, trade and ‘nation’.168 In Britain the special treatment of merchants in relation to other categories of migrants took root in the Middle Ages. Two categories of aliens were distinguished, according to the relations between their state of origin and the Crown. This principle appeared in Magna Carta in 1215: All merchants shall have safe and secure exit from England, and entry to England, with the right to tarry there and to move about as well by land as by water, for buying and selling by the ancient and right customs, quit from all evil tolls, except, in time of war, such merchants as are of the land at war with us.169

Two types of aliens were thus identified, termed ‘alien friends’ and ‘alien enemies’ in English law. The former could neither own real property nor inherit, but retained some civil rights; the latter could be expelled by the Crown without notice. The population exchanges between France and England, according to the political vicissitudes of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, contributed to the changing status of merchants. The mass emigration of the Huguenots to England was an important stage in this process. Technically speaking, these refugees were alien enemies, owing to the wars fought between England and France between 1689 and 1697, and later, between 1702 and 1713. Yet they were allowed to reside across the Channel, which demonstrates the emergence of a new vision: It came to be seen that, for commercial purposes, the law must look, not so much at the question of the nationality of the person, as at his residence, or the place at which he carries on his business; and, if we adopt this test, it may well be that 168

169

J.-F. Dubost and P. Sahlins, Et si on faisait payer les étrangers? Louis XIV, les immigrés et quelques autres (Paris: Flammarion, 1999), pp. 64–96; Sahlins, Unnaturally French, pp. 145–9. In Dunkirk, for example, foreigners were exempted from paying this tax: A. Vandenbossche, ‘Contribution à l’étude des privilèges: quelques problèmes posés par l’exemption du droit d’aubaine en Flandre maritime au XVIIIe siècle’, Annales de la faculté de droit de l’Université de Bordeaux. Série juridique, 2 (1955), pp. 117–50. Depending on the ports, the ‘capitation’ tax and the city watch would hang over foreign merchants or not. Quoted in Sir W. Holdsworth, A History of English Law (London: Methuen, 1982), p. 94.

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enemy character will attach to a subject, and, conversely, that an enemy subject must be regarded as an alien friend.170

The revolutionary wars witnessed the development of the corollary of this assertion: in the same way that enemy status could be erased when it was in the state’s interest, a subject of the Crown who maintained business relations with an enemy country could be treated as an enemy. In other words, my enemy’s friend is my enemy.171 Although in theory foreigners and British nationals were not subject to the same laws, their treatment at the border was in practice not dissimilar, as illustrated by the case of the few British to have been arrested under the Traitorous Correspondence Act. One exceptional case was that of Thomas Sanders Gillett, an English merchant from Bordeaux, married to a French woman: in 1796, after being arrested for making numerous round trips to France despite repeated warnings by the government, Gillett was brought to trial. Suspected of espionage by both governments, Gillett was officially prosecuted by the Alien Office for using an expired passport. The fervour with which this administrative authority dug up incriminating evidence also suggested he had to be convicted to set an example. In January 1796 the director of the Alien Office wrote to the mayor of Dover asking him to find the captain of the ship on which Gillett had embarked, ‘or any other person whose testimony seems to you necessary, or useful, to condemn Mr. Gillet [sic]’.172 In a defence statement appealing against his conviction, the latter explained the inextricable situation in which binational migrants found themselves during the Revolution, forced as they were to make a choice between the two states: If your wife does not inhabit France she is considered as an emigrant, and of course precluded from the inheritance of property, and if you reside there you are considered by the government of your own country as a suspicious and dangerous person, approving, and perhaps aiding and abetting, the enemies of your country. That a man who stands in my situation, with one foot in France and another in England, who has connections, friends, and affairs in both countries, should be deprived of an intercourse with both, for the most innocent of purposes …

170

171

172

Ibid., p. 73. French Huguenots were massively awarded letters of denisation, by an order in council of 1681, and were eventually naturalised in 1709: D. Statt, Foreigners and Englishmen: The Controversy over Immigration and Population, 1660–1760 (London: Associated University Press, 1995). This was partly a consequence of the status of neutrals constructed during the War of American Independence: J.B. Hattendort, ‘Maritime conflict’, in M. Howard, G.J. Andreopoulos and M.R. Shulman (eds.), The Laws of War: Constraints on Warfare in the Western World (Yale University Press, 1994), pp. 98–115. John King to the mayor of Dover, 19 January 1796, TNA, HO5/1, fo. 332.

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Crossing the Channel

because the two countries are at war, will appear a peculiar hardship, and unprecedented in any former wars.173

Gillett certainly exaggerated the novelty of such a phenomenon, since restrictions on free trade in wartime predated the French Revolution. But it is clear that the period of the revolutionary wars marked a further step in the process which saw merchant cosmopolitanism become a smear. However that may be, Thomas Gillett was released from prison and obtained the right to travel to France during the Peace of Amiens.174 This merchant’s misfortunes illustrate the difficulty, even for groups hitherto privileged in terms of freedom of movement, of freeing themselves from national affiliations in a context in which borders were becoming ever more rigid.

*** International tensions made themselves felt once again in the summer of 1802. This time it was the asylum granted to the enemies of the Napoleonic regime that was the focus of French grievances.175 Le Moniteur, the official voice of the French government, launched a smear campaign against the British ministers, who were accused of taking in Chouans and émigrés.176 A few days later the ambassador of France lodged a formal petition for the expulsion of émigrés still present on British soil, such as the bishops of Arras and Saint-Pol-de-Léon.177 Otto sought to demonstrate that this request complied with English law by referring to the Alien Act: There exists therefore in the Ministry a legal and sufficient power to restrain foreigners without having recourse to the Courts of Law; and the French Government which offers on this point a perfect reciprocity, believes it gives a new proof of its pacific intentions, by demanding that those persons may be sent away, whose machinations uniformly tend to sow discord between the two peoples.178 173

174 175 176 177 178

The Trial of Mr. T.S. Gillett … With an Address to the Public, in Justification of His Conduct (London: J. S. Jordan, 1796), p. 14. This raises the question of women’s independent or acquired nationality, which was different to men. See J.N. Heuer, The Family and the Nation: Gender and Citizenship in Revolutionary France 1789–1830 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2005), chap. 4. J. King to W. Dickinson, 29 January 1803, TNA, HO5/7, fo. 496. Otto to Hawkesbury, 17 August 1802, TNA, FO27/66, n.f. GN, 320, in Merry’s letter of 9 August 1802, TNA, FO27/63, n.f. Otto to Hawkesbury, 17 August 1802, TNA, FO27/66, n.f. Ibid. Among other papers relating to the diplomatic discussions with France at the time, Otto’s correspondence with the British government were discussed in the Commons, translated and published: PH, vol. XXXVI (1820), col. 1259–1385. See also O. Browning (ed.), England and Napoléon in 1803. Being the Despatches of Lord Whitworth and Others (London: Longmans, Green, and Co, 1887).

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This line of argument becomes truly piquant when we discover that Otto’s overseeing minister, Talleyrand, had himself been expelled from Britain under the Alien Act in 1794.179 The argument was plainly doomed to fail. Behind this whole affair was the clearly expressed idea that the control of individual mobility in the form of the right of asylum, expulsion or limitation of movement was an unquestionable prerogative of state sovereignty on both sides of the Channel. The case also reveals the impossibility of effective control of migration flows, which would have necessitated close collaboration between the two states. Yet, at no point in the eighteenth century did France and Britain make a concerted attempt to manage international flows, which, among other things, allowed fugitives to take advantage of the absence of extradition treaties when travelling from one country to the other.180 Moreover, in such a context, an individual considered threatening to either government stood every chance of being perceived as respectable by the other. This period saw the state asserting the right to prohibit access by foreigners to its territory, and the manipulation of the categories ‘national’ and ‘foreigner’ became a matter of diplomatic wrangling. In March 1803 eighty Frenchmen were landed on the French coast between Ostend and Dunkirk by British ships. In a formal complaint Talleyrand described these individuals as ‘brigands’, without mentioning their nationality, and ‘wondered in amazement who could have been induced to violate French territory in this way and cast onto its coasts wicked subjects from all countries’.181 The British ambassador Lord Whitworth later recounted his meeting with the French minister of foreign affairs: I observed to him that … with regard to the persons landed on the coast of France, whose claim to the title of brigands I should not dispute, it would, I made no doubt, appear that they were Frenchmen … who, having excited the attention of the police, had been conveyed back to the country from whence they came.182

The sea itself was soon affected by this nationalisation of the conflict. After the Peace of Amiens, the debate that followed the arrest of 179 180

181 182

J. Dinwiddy, ‘The use of the crown’s power of deportation under the aliens act, 1793– 1826’, BIHR, 41 (1968), pp. 201–2. The first convention of extradition between the two states was signed in 1843, and regarded crimes of murder, falsifications and bankruptcy, not political crimes: Morieux, ‘La prison de l’exil: Les réfugiés de la Commune entre les polices françaises et anglaises (1871–1880)’, in M.-C. Blanc-Chaléard et al. (dir.), Police et migrants: France, 1667– 1939 (Presses Universitaires de Rennes, 2001), p. 140 sq. Talleyrand to lord Whitworth, 24 March 1796, in Browning (ed.), England and Napoléon, p. 142. Lord Whitworth to lord Hawkesbury, 26 March 1803, in ibid., p. 141.

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‘Englishmen’ aged 18–60 located on French territory in the decree of 2 Prairial Year 10 (22 May 1803) centred on the interpretation of customary international law.183 Talleyrand explained that, by attacking French trading ships, Britain had set an example to France, which had chosen ‘to follow on the continent the same rules she wishes to establish at sea’.184 With difficulty Lord Hawkesbury attempted to defend his government’s position by demonstrating that, in legal custom and usage, the sea was not subject to the same rules as the territories of states.185 It was in vain, and, while France regarded all British nationals present on the Continent as enemies, Britain for its part arrested all Frenchmen at sea: the entire expanse of the Channel had now become an international border. Yet the logic of the exception endured by virtue of the criterion of usefulness to the state: despite the decree, most British workers living in France were not arrested. In the interests of national industry the Ministre de l’Intérieur Jean-Antoine Chaptal worked in concert with prefects to guarantee that ‘foreigners who bring and secure on its territory their industry and their capital’186 could remain in France without impediment. In the history of cross-Channel mobility the period of the French Revolution stands at the crossroads of two contradictory processes. On the one hand, national states increasingly asserted a hold over their territory and increased their surveillance of border zones; the restrictions on the traffic of cross-Channel packet boats are an illustration of this. The strengthening of the distinction between ‘national’ and ‘foreigner’ proved a decisive element in this process. Indeed, while gathering information on migrants circulating within the territory was nothing new, the systematisation of these practices at the maritime border was an innovation of the revolutionary period, in France as well as in Britain. The methods utilised by the two states to control the arrival and departure of foreigners on their soil were very similar in this respect. On the other hand, the Revolution did not completely interrupt transborder exchanges. There were still many technical limitations on the surveillance of a moving target. The political vicissitudes of the French Revolution were not the only explanation for the difficulties French governments faced in making France’s borders watertight. Unlike Britain, France also had non-maritime borders,

183 184 185 186

‘Extrait des registres de délibérations du gouvernement de la République’, Saint-Cloud, 22 May 1801, in ibid., p. 278. Talleyrand to Hawkesbury, 9 June 1803, in ibid., p. 288. Hawkesbury to Talleyrand, 15 June 1803, in ibid., p. 291. The minister of the interior to the minister of justice, 28 May 1803, AN, F15/3496, n.f.

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which made closing off its territory virtually impossible. Migrants to England fitted their journeys to these geographical realities and very often bypassed the French coasts when the need arose, walking across the border to the Austrian Netherlands and embarking at Ostend instead.

Conclusion

Victor Hugo wrote, ‘The indivisible cannot produce separate action. No partition divides wave from wave. The islands of the Channel feel the influence of the Cape of the Cape of Good Hope. Navigation everywhere contends with the same monster; the sea is one hydra.’1 One of the enduring debates in ocean studies is the question of the unity and disunity of maritime spaces, what links them and what distinguishes them from surrounding areas, lands or seas. The delineations between different oceanic and maritime spaces have for a long time been taken as absolute, which has led to the segmentation of research along supposedly natural lines.2 While remaining aware of the risk of dissolving all sense of regional specificities in the salted waters of global oceanic history, it is worth trying to apply some of the conclusions and the methodology of our study to other maritime spaces. In many ways, the key question raised by ‘the new thalassology’ is the problem of delimitation.3 Is there a way of studying maritime spaces in the eighteenth century without being constrained by the parameters set by histories of nation states? The first limits which needed to be historicised are those between England and France. This book originated in a dissatisfaction with a stereotype, that of the eternal hostility between the two countries. In 1 2 3

V. Hugo, Toilers of the Sea, translation W.M. Thomas (London: J.M. Dent & Sons, 1911) (1st French edn: 1886), p. 265. M.W. Lewis and K. Wigen, ‘A maritime response to the crisis in area studies’, GR, 89 (1999), pp. 161–8. J.H. Bentley, ‘Sea and ocean basins as frameworks of historical analysis’, GR, special issue ‘Oceans Connect’, 89 (1999), pp. 215–24; P.E. Steinberg, ‘Lines of division, lines of connection’, ibid., pp. 254–64; P. Horden and N. Purcell, The Corrupting Sea: A Study of Mediterranean History (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2000); E. Peters, ‘Quid nobis cum pelago? The new thalassology and the economic history of Europe’, JIH 34 (2003), pp. 49–61; N. Purcell, ‘The boundless sea of unlikeness? On defining the Mediterranean’, MHR, 18 (2003), pp. 9–29; P. Horden and N. Purcell, ‘The Mediterranean and “the new thalassology”’, AHR, special issue ‘Oceans of History’, 111 (2006), pp. 722–40; M.P. Vink, ‘Indian Ocean studies and the “new thalassology”’, JGH, 2 (2007), pp. 41–62.

325

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Conclusion

this history of national hatred, which began in the Middle Ages and went on until the contemporary period, the ‘long eighteenth century’ has always been seen as a crucial period. In order to evaluate the pertinence of these discourses without adopting their presuppositions, it was necessary to choose an open-ended periodisation. Instead of taking it as read that the history of the relations between peoples and the relations between states necessarily followed the same rhythm and the same pattern, I have been working with the reverse hypothesis, that the Channel was a space which mediated the multiple relations between France and England, in both a metaphorical and a material sense. Seen from this perspective, the maritime frontier is not only a physical space or a political, military or economic notion used by contemporaries but also a historiographical tool. I have shown how, in the longue durée, the Channel became a maritime frontier between the two states. The use of diverse sources such as maps, legal treatises and diplomatic papers has revealed the intermeshing of cartographic representations of space, juridical concepts and political arguments. By the end of the seventeenth century, the Channel was thought of and managed as an international frontier. The study of iconography and toponymy illuminates the contrasting modes of political definition of the sea in France and England. Spatial imagination was closely related to the growth of Anglo-French rivalry at sea and the rise of territorial conceptions of maritime sovereignty. Beyond the symbol, the naming and demarcating of the sea were marks of sovereignty, the extension of which was vigorously negotiated when prizes or the salute to the flag were at issue. French and English definitions of the sea diverged in the eighteenth century. By the middle of the century, the two names increasingly applied, ‘The English Channel’ and ‘La Manche’, embodied the two contrasting modes of state-building which converged on the sea. Thus, despite the absence of a diplomatic convention formalising this development, the border was fixed on the French coast. On the British side, the notion that the maritime frontier was defined by the French coasts dates back at least to the Stuarts, in the name of the British claim to sovereignty on the Channel. By contrast, in France the notion of territorial waters asserted itself among diplomats from the 1760s on, coinciding with the cessation of political claims on the Channel. On maps as well as in geographical dictionaries, all indications of French sovereignty over the sea disappeared. More than a modification of the geopolitical balance of power, these differences have to be explained with reference to modes of internal statebuilding specific to each state, as well as the emergence of new legal theories. Just as was the case for landed borders, the delineation of the

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327

French kingdom took effect at sea in the middle of the eighteenth century. The discourse criticising the British pretentions at ruling the seas persisted, but without demanding, as had been the case under Louis XIV, a sharing of sovereignty. The sea became an external limit of the French territory, without belonging to it, while the opposite tendency developed on the English side. In this sense, the period of the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars continued a process initiated half a century earlier. Defensive strategies were another indicator of the divergence: while in France the coastline was dotted with fortresses as an extension of Vauban’s pré carré, the navy remained the pivot of the British strategy. At various times in the eighteenth century, the British Navy managed to control the passage and more generally to block the access to the Atlantic and the North Sea by patrolling the English Channel. The Continental Blockade was the apogee of this strategy. By combining longue durée and the focus on shorter periods, I have shown that these processes unfolded in fits and starts over several centuries. If the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars saw the triumph of the view of the Channel as a natural frontier, when official trade was completely forbidden and the conflict became national, none of this was predetermined. Indeed, the picture had been exactly the reverse a couple of years before the Revolution. On a map dated 1785, Maurille-Antoine Moithey (1732–ca.1810), ingenieur-geographe for the French king, coined what would remain a nonce expression: ‘La Manche ou le Canal de France et d’Angleterre’.4 Neither split between two sovereignties nor appropriated by one of the two states, maritime space seemed undividable, a triumph of the principle of freedom of the seas which Moithey defended throughout his life in his writings.5 The same year this map was published, the Channel was for the first time crossed by a balloon, while the scientific collaboration between France and Britain to align the Greenwich and Paris meridians began. It was also in 1785 that the negotiation of the Eden-Rayneval treaty of commerce entered its first phase. 4 5

M-A. Moithey, L’Europe divisée en tous ses royaumes et subdivisée en ses principales parties (1785), BNFCP, Ge C8195. During the French Revolution, this argument took on an anti-English tone. Thus in his Histoire nationale, ou Annales de l’Empire français depuis Clovis jusqu’à nos jours, 5 vols. (Paris: Moithey, 1791–1792), vol. V (1792), p. 122: ‘ce fol orgueil, de vouloir agir despotiquement sur les mers’, about British actions against neutrals during the War of American Independence. And again in 1803: ‘La source des richesses d’un État est de rendre libre le commerce des mers, et de ne pas souffrir qu’aucune puissance se l’approprie au bénéfice de celles qui y ont les mêmes droits et les mêmes intérêts’: Dictionnaire hydrographique de la France, ou Nomenclature des fleuves, rivières, ruisseaux et canaux, 2nd edn (Paris: Blanchon, 1803), p. ix.

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Conclusion

From the state’s viewpoint the main function of a frontier is to include and exclude, to trace the limits between nationals and foreigners, for fiscal reasons, commercial exchanges, migration control or military defence. But war and international competition never completely severed long-term connections within the Channel and between the Channel and the rest of the world. Viewing this space from the perspective of the populations produces a totally different picture, in which the emphasis has to be put on transversal relations. Between the border as defined by state politics and the space as redrawn by the practices of local actors, the gap was sometimes vast. In the longue durée, the relationship between ecosystem and social practices was very stable. Since the Middle Ages at least, coping with the winds, storms and currents, with changes in the coastlines and the movements of shoals of fishes, French fishermen had hovered along the English coasts. But the increasing military and economic competition of the two countries at sea changed the nature of the interactions between their populations. Despite doing their best to evade the states’ rivalry, Channel seafarers were increasingly led to accept its rules and rhetoric, while retaining room for manoeuvre as far as they could. Indeed, every limit traced at sea is necessarily the result of a convention, and there was never during our period an official agreement between France and Britain, whether about fishing or about customs. The limit of sovereignty was at the same time both imposed and negotiated, and this game reflected a dynamic balance of power not only between the two states but also between the states and their own populations. The focus on maritime border zones thus draws attention to the uncertainty of the delimitation of territorial states at sea in the eighteenth century and beyond. These remarks invite us to question the primacy given to the nation state in the analysis of the relations between French and English people in this period. While the arbitration or assistance of the state authorities was often called for in cases of conflicts with foreigners, it was common for the same individuals simultaneously to maintain contacts with those designated enemies in official propaganda. Anglo-French economic exchanges followed multiple channels which were often independent of the rules set by governments, in wartime as in peacetime. Indeed, in practice, those who invoked patriotism were the very same who circumvented the law and smuggled with the enemy. Moreover, to squeeze each of the two populations into an airtight and coherent category, isolated by the national frontier, does not make any sense for most of the eighteenth century: the definitions of national and foreigner were fuzzy.6 The 6

P. Sahlins, Unnaturally French: Foreign Citizens in the old Regime and after (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2004); S. Cerutti, Etrangers: Etude d’une condition d’incertitude

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revolutionary period, on the French side, considerably modified these categories, but we have seen how slowly new conceptions of the nation were implemented on the ground. Laws were reinterpreted according to local issues, and the multilayered attitudes of these populations cannot be accounted for by assuming that they contented themselves with passively applying decisions ‘from above’. Belonging to a nation, in this sense, was not a given, nor was it objectively constructed by law. Rather, it was negotiated on a case-by-case basis, which explains for instance why many Englishmen avoided the rigour of the laws on foreigners during the Revolution. Frontier regions were themselves torn by internal tensions and conflicts, as is illustrated by the alliances and rivalries between Dieppe and Dunkirk, Middleton and Rochester, or Coutances and St-Lô. Collective affiliations were not frozen in time, and modes of interactions between French and English people were constantly redefined. The diversity of individual behaviour should inoculate historians against simple generalisations. The classic question of whether the cases studied in this book are specific or whether they can be extended to the rest of the ‘national’ space, in the contemporary sense of this term, which has become synonymous with ‘state’, has been put in the wrong way. First, the equivalence between the boundaries of the state and those of the nation had yet to be established during our period. Second, such a formulation presupposes the unity of this national space, which, on the contrary, was characterised at the time by inner heterogeneity and blurred outer limits. Thus, it seems important to break with a conception of politics which explains the choices of populations and claimed identities only in the light of their membership of the national and territorial state. In order to rethink the question of ‘national identities’, I have argued for the necessity of attending to the discrepancy between discourses and practices. Patriotism, cosmopolitanism and xenophobia are notions whose usefulness is questionable if one does not try specifically to define what they entail in practical terms. The massive enlistment in the volunteer corps did not necessarily signify a hatred of France, just as the reluctance of French peasants to serve in the coastguard was not necessarily the sign of a mistrust of the state. The farming calendar and the reluctance to move away from home are also plausible explanatory factors. Conversely, to propose an irenic interpretation of the relations between French and English fishermen based on the fishing truces, and the existence of a sense of belonging to a seafarers’ community dans une société d’Ancien Régime (Paris: Bayard, 2012); A. Fahrmeir, Citizens and Aliens: Foreigners and the Law in Britain and the German States, 1789–1870 (New York/Oxford: Berghahn Books, 2000).

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transcending the nation in every context, would also be simplistic. It is more productive to view rhetoric less as the expression of deep and immutable sentiments, than in terms of strategies and process of justification. This allows one to account for the plural – and sometimes contradictory – discourses used by the same individuals in different contexts. In this book, manifestations of national hatred between French and English people have not been centre stage, though this is not the same thing as saying that they never happened.7 The notion that the protagonists mastered, made use of and twisted the official rhetoric to their advantage involves a reversal of perspective. It is less a question of studying how a national sentiment, formalised by men of letters and jurists, was imposed on the entire French and English peoples than of giving attention to the diverse and contextual forms of a language. The multitude of analytical frameworks that historians have used in the study of nationhood – variously defined as feeling, consciousness or identity – reflects the difficulty of elucidating this notion for the early modern period. Not only is it necessary to clarify these different concepts, but we must also look to the protagonists themselves for an explanation of this uncertainty. Smugglers, merchants, privateers and fishermen were often engaged in several trades over the course of a year; they also did not always observe the prohibitions or stick to the routes that the states sought to impose on them, whether at sea or on land. In order to back several horses at the same time, they always maintained a deliberate ambiguity in their allegiances. The success of these strategies of concealment, of dressing-up appearances and playing with the limits was only feasible because state policies themselves created the conditions under which the border could be transgressed. Choosing the Channel as our main object of study does not mean reifying its limits. Like oceans, seas ‘connect at a global as well as a regional level’.8 For certain kinds of exchanges, the academic distinction between the Channel and the North Sea is totally irrelevant. Thus, the circulation of people, goods and ideas defined a transnational space, between the nation state and the global scale. A new frame of analysis must therefore be adopted, which encompasses France, England, the Austrian Netherlands (Ostend, Bruges) and the United Provinces (Vlissingen in Zeeland). As we saw, geographers do not agree whether 7

8

But even conflicts explicitly couched in a xenophobic language are often more complicated to interpret than they would appear to be, as I showed for disputes between French prisoners of war and English local populations. See R. Morieux, ‘French prisoners of war, conflicts of honour, and social inversions in England, 1744–1783’, Historical Journal, 56 (2013), pp. 55–88. K. Wigen, ‘Introduction’, AHR, forum ‘Oceans of History’, 111 (2006), p. 721.

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this region belongs to the Channel or the North Sea, an uncertainty which derives from the overlaps of sovereignty which mark the history of that part of Europe. On the French side, the Northern frontier was slowly stabilised between the Treaty of the Pyrenees of 1659 and the Treaty of Utrecht of 1713.9 It took some time before the main ports of the region were integrated into France, as in the case of Dunkirk, which became French in 1662, after being Austrian, Spanish and English. One must therefore combine a microscopic scale of analysis, that of communities and individuals, with macroscopic considerations, since the region of study encroaches into several countries and two seas. Sociologists have proposed defining the notion of transnational migrants, or transmigrants, as follows: Transmigrants are immigrants whose daily lives depend on multiple and constant interconnections across international borders and whose public identities are configured in relationship to more than one nation-state. They are not sojourners because they settle and become incorporated in the economy and political institutions, localities, and patterns of daily life of the country in which they reside. However, at the very same time, they are engaged elsewhere in the sense that they maintain connections, build institutions, conduct transactions, and influence local and national events in the countries from which they emigrated.10

Developed by specialists of contemporary societies, this notion can also be applied to short-distance cross-border migrations in the early modern and modern periods.11 It was common for economic actors to practise their trade at the same time in France, Britain and the United Provinces. Did the frontier consequently vanish? What role did the states play in directing the migratory flow? By forcing migrants to skirt around the most closely watched borders, and by trying, often successfully, to attract or prevent the departure of certain categories of people, states and local 9

10

11

N. Girard-d’Albissin, Genèse de la frontière franco-belge: Les variations des limites septentrionales de la France de 1659 à 1789 (Paris: A. & J. Picard, 1970); S. Dubois, Les bornes immuables de l’État: La Rationalisation du tracé des frontières au siècle des Lumières (France, Pays-Bas autrichiens et principauté de Liège) (Courtrai-Heule: UGA, 1999); D. Nordman, Frontières de France: De l’espace au territoire XVIe–XIXe siècle (Paris: Gallimard, 1998), pp. 230–82. N. Glick Schiller, L. Basch and C. Blanc-Szanton, ‘From immigrant to transmigrant: theorizing transnational migration’, in L. Pries (ed.) Migration and Transnational Social Spaces (Aldershot: Ashgate, 1999), p. 73. A. Böcker and L. Lucassen (eds.), ‘Immigration and the construction of identities in contemporary Europe. Transnational ties and identities: past and present’, Workshop Report of the First Forward Look Workshop of the European Science Foundation (Wassenaar, NIAS, December 2002); M.O. Heisler, ‘Now and then, here and there: migration and the transformation of identities, borders, and orders’, in M. Albert, D. Jacobson and Y. Lapid (eds.)., Identities, Borders, Orders (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2001), pp. 203–23.

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institutions played their part in the building of migration networks. However, many migrants managed to slip through the net of surveillance, and the internal factors structuring transnational networks must be brought into the equation. The stereotypes of the eighteenth century involving maritime commerce are well known. For François Quesnay, for whom agriculture was the real wealth of nations, the trader was ‘a stranger in his homeland, [who] practised his trade with his fellow citizens as well as with foreigners’.12 Coming from a different theoretical tradition, Adam Smith also freed the merchant from all territorial rootedness, and thereby explained his characteristic lack of civic virtue and concern for the public good: A merchant, it has been said very properly, is not necessarily the citizen of any particular country. It is in a great measure indifferent to him from what place he carries on his trade; and a very trifling disgust will make him remove his capital, and together with it all the industry which it supports, from one country to another.13

Smith’s stance has to be understood in the context of his ambivalence to commercial society and his attacks on the mercantile system, in which merchants wage war for ‘a little enhancement of price’.14 These positions, which reflected long-standing concerns about the relationship between wealth and virtue, were not simply polemical.15 Depending on their needs, merchants moved their activities between the south coast of England and Dunkirk, Ostend, Bruges and Flushing (Vlissingen).16 These regions between Flanders and Brabant were at the heart of Anglo-French exchanges in time of war. Among the strategies they used in order to continue their business unhindered by war, economic actors took advantage of the plurality of statuses of belonging to defy bans on 12

13 14 15

16

F. Quesnay, ‘Du Commerce. Premier dialogue entre M.H. et M.N.’, in C. Théré, L. Charles, J.-C. Perrot (eds.), François Quesnay: Œuvres économiques complètes et autres textes (Paris: INED, 2005) (2nd edn: 1767), p. 914. The French uses the same word twice (‘étranger’). A. Smith, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, 2 vols. (London: W. Strahan and T. Cadell, 1776), Volume I, Book III, Chap. III, 24. Ibid., Volume II, IV, VIII, 53. D. McNally, Political Economy and the Rise of Capitalism: A Reinterpretation (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1988), pp. 191–4; I. Hont, Jealousy of Trade: Competition and the Nation-State in Historical Perspective (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005), p. 54; J.G.A. Pocock, Virtue, Commerce and History: Essays on Political Thought and History Chiefly in the Eighteenth Century (Cambridge University Press, 1985); I. Hon and M. Ignatieff (eds.), Wealth and Virtue: The Shaping of Political Economy in the Scottish Enlightenment (Cambridge University Press, 1983); J. Raven, Judging New Weath: Popular Publishing and Responses to Commerce in England 1750–1800 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992). Cabantous, Dix-mille marins face à l’Océan (Paris: Publisud, 1991), pp. 129–61.

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circulation between France and Britain. Thus, merchants skilfully exploited the complex articulation between the status of burgher of a town (bourgeoisie) and foreigner. In theory, French jurists, since the sixteenth century, had clearly differentiated between local citizenship (of a town) and state subjecthood. Thus for Jean Bodin, the former was an ‘honorary citizenship’, while the latter was ‘true’ citizenship, linked to the status of subject.17 Accordingly, lettres de bourgeoisie and letters of naturalisation were distinguished in principle. In France, from the sixteenth century on, national citizenship ceased to fall within the competence of towns and cities, but the situation was more complex in the Flanders region, where some towns ‘sometimes claimed the right to draw the boundaries of “royal” or “national” citizenship’.18 This legal fuzziness benefited French and English merchants, who obtained lettres de bourgeoisie in Dunkirk, Ostend or Flushing, and by doing so made it unclear to which nation they belonged.19 The example of the Holman family is typical. According to a former police inspector in charge of spying on the British residents in Dunkirk, the elder son, Jean, was ‘of English extraction, but a native of Boulogne, and naturalized as a Frenchman in Dunkirk’.20 The uncertainty of the legal terminology used by the administrators is blatant, since Holman did not need to be naturalised: being born in Boulogne was enough to become a subject of the French king.21 What this case illustrates is the failure of normative categories to constrain the mobility of these transmigrants. When the War of American Independence broke out, Jean and his two brothers migrated to Flushing in the United Provinces, where their father already resided, and where tea and gin entered and left duty free.22 Buying wholesale in Middleburg, investing in warehouses in Flushing and in smuggling ships in Folkestone, the Holmans targeted the London market for tea.23 Once the Dutch re-established a duty on tea, the family 17 18 20

21

22 23

P. Sahlins, Unnaturally French: Foreign Citizens in the Old Regime and after (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2004), pp. 19–21. Ibid., p. 21. 19 Ibid., pp. 165–9. Receveur to prince of Robecq, 27 October 1779, ADN, C4624/1, item 188. On Receveur’s role in Dunkirk, see [Robecq] to Calonne, 15 July 1779, ibid., n.f. The same man had previously modernised the police of Brest: O. Corre, ‘Guerres et ports militaires, le problème de la police: son rétablissement à Brest durant la guerre d’Indépendance américaine’, ABPO, 3 (2009), pp. 181–209. In fact, bourgeoisie and subjecthood were confused, since Holman had been made bourgeois of Dunkirk in December 1764: ‘Acte de bourgeois d’Holman du 14 décembre 1764’, copied by Poirier, lawyer, 29 August 1779, ibid., n.f. Receveur to prince of Robecq, 27 October 1779, ibid., item 188. ‘État des Français qui se sont émigrés et retirés de Dunkerque à Flessingue au moment des hostilités’, August 1779, ibid., item 40; Receveur to Robecq, 27 October 1779, ibid.; Torris, ‘Nécessité de favoriser le commerce d’interlope des cutters irlandais, &c’, 11 September 1778, ADN, C4611, item 13.

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again transferred its activities elsewhere, this time to Ostend.24 As the police spy François-Hubert Receveur de Livremont concluded, the Holmans were ‘perfect renegades of their homeland, in Holland as well as in the Austrian Netherlands’.25 The question is of course to know if it makes sense at all to label these economic actors according to national criteria. Traders crossed borders extremely easily. Transnational trading networks kept reorganising themselves, and could not be confined within state borders. The uncertainty of the authorities resulted from the merchants’ capacity to hedge their bets, which stemmed from their distinctive relation to space. Their trade was deterritorialised, blown from one country to another by edicts of prohibition, adapting to changes in political and economic circumstances. In one generation, the Holmans changed sovereign four times, and none of the measures which the Dunkirk authorities envisaged to repatriate them was satisfactory.26 It was impossible to seize their property in France, since they were English.27 And once back in France, nothing would prevent them from continuing their trade ‘under Dutch frontmen’.28 The same methods were used by merchants at sea in order to protect their cargoes from being seized.29 To elude the 1784 Smuggling Act, Deal and Folkestone smugglers came up with the following solution: All luggers & cutters . . . have foreign papers and colours; and altho’ most of these vessels formerly belonged to Deal, Folkestone, &c.; yet the Master thereof, altho’ Englishmen, having got themselves made Burghers of Ostend, call their vessels foreign vessels, notwithstanding the whole crew, or the major part of them are English.30

To justify the seizure of these goods, the Crown’s attorney general came up with two kinds of legal answers, which were the product of the 24 25 26

27 29

30

Receveur to Robeck, 4 September 1779, ADN, C4624/1, item 193. Ibid. On Receveur, see S. Burrows, A King’s Ransom: The Life of Charles Théveneau de Morande, Blackmailer, Scandalmonger and Master-Spy (London: Continuum, 2010). [Receveur], ‘Observations sur l’émigration’ (hereafter ‘Observations’), August 1779, ibid., item 40. These propositions were subsequently discussed by the intendant of Flanders and Artois and the commandant of Flandres: ‘Réponses et notes de M. le Prince de Robecq et de M. de Calonne sur les différentes lettres et observations envoyées par le Sr. Receveur’ (hereafter ‘Réponses’), ibid., n.f. Finally, Receveur answered these objections: ‘Répliques par le Sr. Receveur sur les réponses et notes de M. le Prince de Robecq, et de M. de Calonne sur les observations qui ont été faites à ces Messieurs &c’ (hereafter ‘Répliques’), 1779, ibid., n.f. 28 ‘Observations’; ‘Répliques’. ‘Réponses’. See the case of the ‘Bouteille’ merchant ship of Dunkirk, navigating under the flag of the United Provinces, seized in 1779: R. Morieux, Une mer pour deux royaumes: La Manche, frontière franco-anglaise, XVIIe-XVIIIe siècles (Presses Universitaires de Rennes, 2008), pp. 340–2. Opinions of Counsel (England), 1783–1788 [May] 1785, TNA, CUST41/9, fo. 123.

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legislation against neutral contraband elaborated during the War of American Independence. The first solution focused on the merchant’s status: being made a burgher of Ostend did not change the fact that allegiance to the British Crown was inalienable, and as long as at least some crew members were British, the ship could be seized. The second solution focused on the ship’s distance from the British coasts, and argued that if it carried illicit cargo, it had to be forfeited, ‘whether they are the property of Britons, or Foreigners’.31 These two approaches, the one emphasising the permanence of the state’s imposition of identity onto its subjects, the other state’s territorial sovereignty at sea, were two manifestations of the growth of new conceptions of state sovereignty in the eighteenth century, which revolved around concepts of nation and territory. State policies to counter illicit exchanges in the Channel and the constant adaptation of economic actors to changes in legislation illustrate the clash between two processes which were simultaneously at work in the eighteenth century. On the one hand, states tried to control flows across borders. On the other, economic exchanges kept transcending state boundaries. The two phenomena were deeply connected. Where nation states or empires intersected, illicit trade and unauthorised migrations thrived.32 But these practices should not be seen as contradicting state policies, because they were in many ways an indirect consequence of these. As we saw in the case of the Channel, customs administrators, in charge of collecting duties and seizing smuggled goods, were among the first to engage in smuggling. Whole subregions, such as the Channel Islands and Dunkirk, were prime redistributive centres of smuggled goods, and their inhabitants eroded the economic border with the authorities’ blessing. In Europe as in the colonies, ‘illicit’ forms of trade have to be understood as a direct consequence of state economic policies, like the Navigation Act system and the Exclusif system.33 Thus, just as English smogleurs were welcomed in Dunkirk throughout the eighteenth century, British merchants in the Thirteen Colonies traded with the French and Spanish Caribbean during the eighteenth-century wars.34 Because British governments needed the support of their colonial subjects in their imperial 31

32 33

34

23 June 1785, ibid., fo. 124. This opinion was henceforth circulated to serve as instructions for the captains of the customs cutters in the Channel: see duplicates in the archives of the Portsmouth customs (TNA, CUST 58/177, fos. 110–12) and Dover (TNA, CUST54/148, fos. 105–7). E. Tagliacozzo, Secret Trades, Porous Borders: Smuggling and States along a Southeast Asian Frontier, 1865–1915 (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2005). A. Lespagnol, ‘Mondialisation des trafics inter-océaniques et structures commerciales nationales au XVIIIe siècle: contradictions et compromis’, Bulletin de la SHMC, 1–2 (1997), pp. 80–91. T.M. Truxes, Defying Empire: Trading with the Enemy in Colonial New York (Yale University Press, 2008).

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wars, they had to consent to these practices. The transgression of the border thus took place with the tacit agreement of the states themselves. The fluidity and constant redefinition of the maritime frontier allows us to formulate what is at stake in the notion of frontier itself, which always implies a negotiation. A fuzzy frontier, the Channel was first and foremost a mode of relation between France and England. But this naturalisation of the frontier, which gradually merged with the sea, was never settled by a convention. Just as its limits with other maritime spaces could not be drawn on maps, the Channel was a perpetually shifting frontier. This opens up the question of the extent to which it can be compared with other maritime spaces. The Mediterranean has become a generic geographical notion, which has been used to construct typologies of other maritime as well as non-maritime spaces.35 Did the development towards the state territorialisation of maritime spaces take place in the same way and at the same time in the English Channel? Did coastal and maritime populations adapt in the same way to these state policies? What are the historical consequences of the specific geophysical characteristics of this sea? And is our approach applicable to other seas? The comparison between seas can shed light on the emergence of similar sets of political, economic or cultural problems in different parts of the world between the sixteenth and the nineteenth centuries, and on their connections. In the eighteenth century the idea that seas and oceans were interconnected was common: just as geographers argued that it was the same water which flowed everywhere on Earth,36 debates about sovereignty and property at sea drew from many of the same legal sources. For instance, the debate between mare liberum and mare clausum was mobilised in different maritime settings, across the world. While Grotius’ pamphlet was written at the Dutch East India Company’s instigation against the Portuguese claims in the Indian Ocean, it was understood in Britain as a Dutch attempt to justify their encroachment on the Scottish and English fisheries in the North Sea. This ‘battle of ideas’, which unfolded in the first half of the seventeenth century, raged for another two centuries. It also took place in the Channel into the nineteenth century as we saw, but also in the Mediterranean.37 A conflict between two states over oceanic sovereignty would inevitably carry 35

36

37

For an emphasis on the political, economic, religious and cultural dimension of these ‘Mediterraneans’ in the medieval period, see D. Abulafia, ‘Mediterraneans’, in W.V. Harris (ed.), Rethinking the Mediterranean (Oxford University Press, 2005). Enlightenment cartographers broke with the past by representing oceans as ‘stretches of water linking one basin to another’ and underlining human interactions: M.W. Lewis, ‘Dividing the ocean sea’, Geographical Review, 89 (1999), p. 203. The ‘battle of the books’ unfolded simultaneously in the Indian Ocean, in the Mediterranean and in the Atlantic: these are all part of an intertwined legal debate: G. Calafat, ‘Une mer jalousée: juridictions maritimes, ports francs et régulation du commerce en Méditerranée

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consequences all over the world. Thus, Denmark’s assertion of its ‘dominium maris over the Northern Sea’ around Iceland and Greenland, in the 1740s, which was mainly aimed at the Dutch fishermen, provoked other countries to react.38 Swedish, French and British diplomats warned the Danes to withdraw this pretension.39 Any dispute at sea was bound to involve more than two ‘nations’ and states, and it raised issues of precedent which were then redeployed elsewhere. Besides revealing something about geographical representations of oceanic and sea spaces, the conflicting nomenclatures of the sea which are features of the eighteenth century are also indicators of state competition to appropriate specific stretches of water. Thus, a similar process as in the Channel took place in the Mediterranean as Venice and Genoa put forward competing claims to the dominium maris of the Gulf of Venice/Mare Adriaticum.40 Disputes over the naming of the sea also followed the journeys of European missionaries and explorers, albeit with a time lag. Thus, the still ongoing dispute between Japan and Korea over the name of the sea between them (‘Sea of Japan’ vs. ‘Eastern Sea’) was expressed in a geographical idiom inherited from the European presence in the region. Throughout the eighteenth century, both names were used by European cartographers, while the sea itself had not yet become an area of confrontation between the neighbouring states, Japan, Korea, Russia and China. The use of a different name for the same sea became a bone of contention in the nineteenth century and manifested changing conceptions of these states’ maritime ambitions, as well as the export of European norms of international law.41 These disputes over naming had significant consequences for the populations who lived off the sea: from the nineteenth century on, disputes between Japanese, Korean, Russian and Chinese fishermen increasingly began to be interpreted in nationalistic terms. In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, as imperial and national rivalries involved new players, the naming of the world seas and oceans acquired a global political significance, leading to the creation of

38

39 40 41

(1590–1740)’, unpublished PhD thesis, University of Paris I/Università di Pisa (2013), pp. 21–338. Account prepared by the secretary of state for Titley, British minister at Copenhagen, 28 March 1741, quoted in Charles Wilson, ‘Fishing Reports in Norwegian Waters. 2nd Report’, Jesus College Archives, Cambridge. H.S.K. Kent, ‘The historical origins of the three-mile limit’, American Journal of International Law, 48 (1954), p. 543. Calafat, ‘Mer jalousée’, pp. 139–214. Maritime toponyms were first used for this sea by European Jesuits in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries (Matteo Ricci) and ultimately popularised by explorers such as the Frenchman Lapérouse in 1787, the British William-Robert Broughton in 1797 and the Russian Adam-Johann Von-Krusenstern, 1804 and 1805: P. Pelletier, ‘Tumulte des flots entre Japon et Corée: à propos de la dénomination de la “mer du Japon”’, Annales de Géographie, 613 (2000), pp. 279–305.

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international institutions in charge of adopting a universal nomenclature and delimitation of oceanic spaces.42 It is no coincidence that in Europe, the definition of the law of the sea in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries simultaneously emerged in the Mediterranean, the North Sea, the Baltic and the Channel. The problems of maritime dominium which were discussed by Gentili, Grotius, Selden, van Bijnkershoek and Pufendorf were a manifestation of the state territorialisation of the sea, which occurred in the Adriatic as well as in the Baltic Sea from the Middle Ages onwards. These developments were a direct consequence of the growing commercial and military importance of the seas for states. These legal debates focused in particular on closed and semi-closed spaces, small seas, gulfs, islands or straits, where sovereignty was contested and entangled and maritime connectivity high.43 In the eighteenth century, the Channel was a major maritime crossroads on a world scale. Its function of connection between the European Continent and the British Isles dated back to the Phoenicians. Its role of maritime passage between America and north-east Europe became central in the eighteenth century, when the dense traffic of ships crossing the Atlantic laden with Birmingham toys, Newfoundland cod or German migrants met Indiamen carrying tea or pepper, convoys from the Baltic laden with naval stores as well as fleets of men of war. But considered as a unit, the Channel was a maritime region unified by multiple interactions between France and England, which were never more than 150 nautical miles distant. Short-distance coastal shipping stimulated social and economic exchanges between coastal societies. In this way, the Channel had much in common with other ‘narrow seas’ elsewhere, which were often vibrant zones of economic, social and cultural contact between coastal societies, while also being connected to the wider world. Thus, between the Mozambique coast and Madagascar, the Mozambique Channel had been the locus of multiple exchanges since the first millennium.44 By the middle of the eighteenth century, it was at the centre of a ‘tightly interwoven commercial nexus’, which was dominated by Hindu and Indian Muslim merchants networks, who traded slaves from the Swahili coast against livestock and agricultural products from the Comoros Islands and 42 43

44

The International Hydrographic Bureau was created in 1921. Horden and Purcell, Corrupting Sea; P. Horden and N. Purcell, ‘Four years of corruption: a response to critics’, in W.V. Harris (ed.), Rethinking, pp. 366–7; also A. Bresson, ‘Ecology and beyond: the Mediterranean paradigm’, in ibid., pp. 94–114; L. Benton, A Search for Sovereignty: Law and Geography in European Empires, 1400–1900 (Cambridge University Press, 2010). E.A. Alpers, ‘Littoral society in the Mozambique Channel’, in H.P. Ray and E.A. Alpers (eds.), Cross Currents and Community Networks: The History of the Indian Ocean World (Oxford University Press, 2007), pp. 123–41.

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Madagascar.45 These economic networks, strengthened by religious and family ties, linked the region together and with the Western Indian Ocean. As this example shows, straits are often major international corridors of circulation; they are also interfaces between the countries which border them.46 While narrow seas can be studied as trade gateways, they are also choke points. In the English Channel, nowhere was this dual function of passage and barrier more obvious than at the Strait of Dover. A ‘maritime strait’ can be defined as a structuring spatial division: the term designates the narrowest point between two lands, facilitating the exchanges between them, or a passage between two seas, facilitating navigation, somewhat in the manner of a canal. But this particular physical geography created constraints on human interrelations as well as opportunities. Conditions of navigation were notoriously difficult in the Strait of Dover, due to its relative shallowness (twenty-one meters deep at some points), its narrowness (eighteen nautical miles at its narrowest point), the moving sandbanks at the North Sea entry and the strong currents. The seabed was littered with wrecked ships, which had had no other choice than to try and pass through the strait. Navigators faced comparable technical problems in the Strait of Malacca, Gibraltar or the Sound. Straits are often maritime bottlenecks, locations which can only be bypassed with great difficulties, and which international shipping lanes are forced to converge. Their strategic and economic importance derives from this. The particular physical geography of straits sometimes made it possible for a single state to control these passages. Thus, the Bosphorus Strait, which is, at is narrowest point, only half a nautical mile wide, was the principal commercial point of transit between the Black Sea and the Mediterranean Sea, and had been so since ancient times. In the eighteenth century, the Ottoman Empire fought with the Russian Empire over its control. Likewise, the Sound, the strait connecting the Baltic and the North Sea, was controlled by Denmark from the fourteenth century. Again, its narrowness (two nautical miles at its narrowest point) favoured such an outcome: the Danish monarchy, which held both sides of the strait until the seventeenth century (when it lost the Eastern coast of the Sound to Sweden), managed to levy a toll on all ships crossing the strait between 1429 and 1857.47 It was 45 46

47

Ibid., p. 131. Human geographers have highlighted the connecting function of maritime straits, such as the Strait of Malacca: see, for instance, N. Fau, ‘Les spécificités d’une frontière maritime: l’exemple du détroit de Malacca’, in C. Bouquet and H. Velasco-Graciet (dir.), Regards géopolitiques sur les frontières (Paris: L’Harmattan, 2007), pp. 47–58. The economic and military importance of the Sund cannot be overestimated. In the eighteenth century, innumerable goods passed through it in both directions: Finnish tar and Estonian wood, which were used to build French and British ships, Swedish iron for

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also thanks to their control of this passage that Sweden and Denmark managed, during the Seven Years War, to close the Baltic to French and British privateers by the 1756 Convention.48 In many ways, the history which was at the centre of this book, that of the creative tension between the building of a state maritime frontier and its structural transgressions, could have been told largely by looking at this narrow stretch of water. Neither exclusively French nor exclusively English, the Strait of Dover/le Pas de Calais is a microcosm of the English Channel as a whole. Between September and November 1744 the London Magazine published a dialogue between a Japanese merchant and an English traveller conversing about a map of the world. The discussion revolved around an analogy between the geographical situations of Britain and Japan: We know that Japan is a cluster of islands, the largest of which, by our geographers called Niphon [Honshu], appears among them with as much distinction as Great Britain among the British Isles; that Bongo [Kyushu?], tho’ not quite so big in proportion, may pass for the Ireland of Japan; and that Japan is divided from Corea, a part of the Chinese Empire, which is the France of Asia, by a straight not comparatively wider, with respect to the magnitude of the countries, than that which divides European France with South Britain. We have long known, that the Japonese are a trading people, excellent in many arts; and yet that they have no great union with this mighty empire of China, nor with any of the other countries.49

By the middle of the eighteenth century, the comparison between Britain and Japan had become a cliché.50 This article was published

48 49 50

arms and manufactures, Polish wheat from the Baltic, herring from the North Sea, wine and salt from the south-west of France and spices from the colonies. See C.-E. Hill, The Danish Sound Dues and the Command of the Baltic (Durham: Duke University Press, 1926); H.-S.K. Kent, War and Trade in Northern Seas (Cambridge University Press, 1973); S.-P. Oakley, War and Peace in the Baltic 1560–1790 (London: Routledge, 1992); P. Pourchasse, Le commerce du Nord: Les échanges commerciaux entre la France et l’Europe septentrionale au XVIIIe siècle (Presses Universitaires de Rennes, 2006); Id., ‘La Baltique: une zone active du grand cabotage européen (XVIIe–XVIIIe siècles)’, Revue d’Histoire Maritime, 8 (2008), pp. 39–66. Pourchasse, ibid., pp. 267–9. ‘Japan and Grande-Bretagne compared, as to their situation, true interest, and politicks: from the Westminster Journal’, The London Magazine, September 1744, p. 457. Engelbert Kaempfer’s History of Japan, published in English in 1727, was very influential on European representations of this country in the eighteenth century. Kaempfer wrote that ‘Japan is, properly speaking, not one, but a whole set of islands, broken through by many gulphs, straights, and arms of the sea, not unlike the Kingdoms of Great Britain and Ireland, and situate in the remotest part of the East. Nature herself hath done the best part towards making this Empire invincible, by making it almost inaccessible, and by surrounding it with a dangerous, and exceedingly tempestuous sea’: E. Kaempfer, The History of Japan. Together with a Description of the Kingdom of Siam 1690–92, 3 vols., translation J.G. Scheuchzer (1727), vol. III (Glasgow: James MacLehose and Sons, New York: The Macmillan Company, 1906), appendix, p. 306.

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during the War of the Austrian Succession, while the debate was raging about Britain’s strategy and its support for its continental allies. The dialogue argued that both archipelagos had been separated from their powerful and threatening neighbours, Korea (a mere extension of China) and France, by ‘some great convulsion of the globe’.51 Japan had successfully cultivated its natural isolation by limiting its contacts with its neighbours from the beginning of the seventeenth century: Britain should likewise abstain from any political and military involvement with Europe.52 The author did not display any direct knowledge about SinoJapanese relations, nor any real curiosity for these countries.53 The comparison ignored the differences between Japan’s and Britain’s relationship to the sea.54 Despite its limitations, the analogy was rooted in the belief that the same geographical forms were replicated in different parts of the Earth, but could lead to different political or economic outcomes. ‘What is admirable’ about Japan and Britain, remarked the author, ‘is both our separation and proximity from the continent’.55 In order to understand how and when the Channel became a metaphor for the differences between France and England, we need to break away from representations inherited from the nineteenth century and study the ‘divisions of time and space’ in longue durée.56 The Channel is not a selfevident, bounded geographical entity but a construct whose nature and definition have been a matter of constant dispute and controversy. While propagandistic discourses have promoted the description of the Channel as a natural frontier, intellectual traditions such as ethnic theology or fossil theory have preferred to view the sea as a visible reminder of a 51 52

53

54

55 56

The London Magazine, October 1744, p. 498. Japan’s prosperity despite or rather because of its self-closure had been the subject of wonder in Europe ever since the publication of Kaempfer’s History of Japan. See D. Mervart, ‘A closed country in the open seas: Engelbert Kaempfer’s Japanese solution for European modernity’s predicament’, HEI, 35 (2009), pp. 321–9. There were in fact many cultural and economic exchanges between Japan and China, and the idea of sakoku (‘closed country’) during the Edo period (1600–1868) has been revised: M.B. Jansen, China in the Tokugawa World (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992); Ôba Osamu, Books and Boats: Sino-Japanese Relations in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries, translation Joshua A. Fogel (Portland: Merwin Asia, 2012) (1st edn: 1980). Until well into the nineteenth century, neither Japan nor Korean or China really had regional maritime ambitions. This was linked to geo-cultural conceptions in which land territory featured prominently, whereas the sea was an infinite and unnamed space. Tellingly, no maps of the Sea of Japan were produced in Japan until the late eighteenth century, and it was only in the 1830s that the coastlines themselves were mapped: M. Yonemoto, ‘Maps and metaphors of the “small Eastern Sea” in Tokugawa Japan (1603–1868)’, GR, 89 (April 1999), p. 178. The London Magazine, September 1744, p. 457. A. Corbin, ‘Divisions of time and space’, in P. Nora (ed.), Realms of Memory, vol. I, pp. 427–66.

342

Conclusion

very ancient connection between England and France. The idea that the two countries once belonged to the same land mass, separated over time, was part of a broader interrogation which coloured eighteenth-century thought: when, how and why was this world, once integrated, segmented? Traces of this past unity were still visible and these underlaid the enduring fascination with physical ruptures between land masses. They provided the basis for enquiry into the formation of continents and islands, the past or present unity of Europe and the boundaries and connections between cultures.

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Index

Illustrations are italicized, and the tables line numbers appear as roman numbers. Aiguillon, duc d’: 126, 138 Alien Acts: 297, 298–9, 305–6, 310, 321. See also Foreigners, laws on Alien friends, alien enemies. See Merchants, legal status of Amiens, Peace of: 273, 281. See also Travellers, Treaties, Treaty of Amiens Anglo-Dutch wars: 156 Atlantic history: 9 Atlantis (England as): 42 Army. See Fortifications; Garde-côte; Militia; Volunteers Aubaine, droit d’ (right of escheat): 259, 319, 319n168 Baker, Henry: 42 Balloon, Channel crossing: 284, 292 Baltic Sea: 339–40 Banks, Joseph: 94, 95 Barère, Bertrand: 55 Bath (Somerset): 306 Beautemps-Beaupré, Charles-François de: 103 Bell, David: 234 Belloy, Pierre-Laurent Buirette de: 111–12 Blaeu, John: 64 Blagdon, Francis: 309 Bloch, Marc: 19n92 Bodin, Jean: 333 Boltanski, Luc: 273 Borders: border zone, competition and conflict within (not across): 123, 130, 137, 189–90, 212, 241–5, 247, 262, 266, 288–9; demarcation and delimitation of: 83, 162, 230–1; maritime, different conceptions in France and in England: 82–3, 122, 125–6, 128, 148–9, 180, 183, 208, 326–7; surveillance of: 230–1, 283,

396

291, 322–4; surveillance of during French Revolution, Britain: 296–300, 303–5; surveillance of during French Revolution, France: 300–2, 303; surveillance of, during Peace of Amiens: see Travellers; populations’ alleged cosmopolitanism: 267; populations’ identity, as defined by the state: 125–6. See also Frontier; Sovereignty; Territory Bosphorus Strait: 339 Boulogne-sur-Mer: 178–9, 205, 216, 217, 219, 268n99, 303 Bourdieu, Pierre: 54 Bouville, vicomte de: 238, 238n131, 238n134, 239 Braudel, Fernand: 12, 13, 24–5, 104 Brewer, John: 172, 172n104, 275n123 Brittany: 130, 135, 186, 242 Brubaker, Roger: 16, 18n87 Brunet, Roger: 104 Buache, Philippe: 47, 85–6 Buache de la Neuville, Jean-Nicolas: 31, 89–90n111 Buffon: 45, 49 Burke, Edmund: 55 Bynkershoek, Cornelius Van: 155 Cabantous, Alain: 25, 232 Caesar, Julius: 34 Cahiers de doléances: 125, 125n75, 145, 190 Calais: 176, 245, 266, 309; in the Middle Ages: 7, 110–12, 229; English town: 110–12; English loss to France: 7. See also Dover, Strait of; Packet boats; Travellers Calonne, Charles Alexandre: 244 Camden, William: 35, 36n20, 79 Canterbury: 40 Carr, John: 59, 311 Cassini, cartographers: 94, 95

397

Index Castries, Charles Eugène de la Croix, marquis de: 244 Cerutti, Simona: 208n86 Champagne, Jean-François: 154 Channel, English: boundaries of: 24, 162, 164–7; in caricatures: 56–7, 58 (figure 1.2); classified as Atlantic or European: 24, 88–90, 103, 105; historiography of: 19; measurement of: 91–6, 98; names given to: see Toponyms; narrowness of stimulating conflict: 56, 57; narrowness of facilitating exchanges: 25–6, 32, 35, 59n134, 338; navigation in: 25, 85, 98–104; scientific knowledge of: 89–90; See also North Sea Channel Islands: 154, 187, 206, 303; demography: 252n21; fishermen: 217; geological theories and myths about: 49–53, 52 (figure 1.1); incorporation into English customs system: 253–5, ; as military frontier with Cotentin Peninsula: 120, 123–4; religious connections with mainland: 51–3; tax privileges of: 124, 252; neutrality of: 251–2, 254; privateers: 124, 216, 254, 257; smugglers: 217, 252–3, 255–9. See also Seaweed, Victor Hugo Channel tunnel: 5, 19, 46–7n76, 90, 90n114 Chaptal, Jean-Antoine: 323 Chapuis, Olivier: 102 Charles I Stuart: 153, 157 Cherbourg: 113–14, 138, 189, 257. See also Cotentin Peninsula Chichester: 170 China: 340 Cinque Ports: 202, 240 Classes system: 125, 138, 239–40. See also Marine Royale Cobbett, William: 56 Colbert, Jean-Baptiste: 47, 74 Colley, Linda: 16, 142 Commons, sea as a: 188, 190, 204. See also Customary law and practices Comparative method: 19n92, 20. See also Entangled history; Oceans and seas Continental Blockade: 109, 162n63, 181–2, 250 Conway, Stephen: 139 Cookson, John: 143 Cooper, Frederick: 16 Coquebert de Montbret, Charles: 182 Cornwall: 86, 203, 240n142 Cotentin Peninsula (Cherbourg Peninsula): 113, 125, 145, 242; as a military frontier:

122–3. See also Channel Islands; La Hogue Customary law and practices: 130, 165, 187, 202–3, 241 Customs: 126, 295; boundaries of: 167–82, 168 (table 4.2), 171 (table 4.3), 173 (table 4.4); comparison of English and French: 269; corruption: 277, 279–80, 291; fraud at the customs bureau: 269–82, 271 (figure 7.1), 295; incidents with fishermen: 196; incidents with smugglers: 257–8; jurisdiction, conflicts of: 181; legislation: 249–50, 268–9, 305; officers’ confrontation with travellers: 277–80. See also Channel Islands; Legal knowledge; Smuggling; Territory, violations of; Travellers Cuvier, George: 42, 43n58 Dardanelles: 342 Deal (Kent): 334 Delano-Smith, Catherine: 101 Denmark: 337. See also Sound, Strait Desertions: 137, 140n157 Desmarest, Nicolas: 46n76, 46–8 Dieppe (Normandy): 195, 203, 211n2, 215, 218, 223, 225, 231, 237, 244, 244n152 Discretion (law): 298 Domain, royal: 153n16, 167, 185–6, 201, 205. See also Foreshore Dominium: 150n2, 150, 337, 338 Dover: 112, 218, 225, 245, 291, 304, 320; fishermen: 218; customs: 198 (table 5.1), 200 (table 5.2), 268–82. See also Calais; Dover, Strait of; Fraud at the customs bureau; Packet boats Dover, Strait of: 85, 93, 181, 339, 340; formation of: 38, 39, 41, 42, 43, 44, 47, 48, 51n98; uncertain location of: 85; shallowness: 90 Dumont, André: 303 Dunkirk: 100, 217n29, 219, 223, 225, 227, 244, 250, 251, 331, 333; privileges of: 259, 285, 319n168, 333. See also Smogleurs Émigrés: 231, 296, 300, 302, 303, 308, 321. See also Migrations Entangled history: 23, 23n108 Falle, Philip: 50, 124 Faversham (Kent): 170 Febvre, Lucien: 20, 20n93 Ferguson, Adam: 133 Fichte, Johann Gottlieb: 57

398

Index

Finalism: 35. See also Providence, providentialism Finé, Oronce: 63, 67 Finisterre, Cape: 158, 162, 165 Fish: overexploitation of: 189, 193, 203, 206, 240, 243 Fishermen: Dutch: 117, 152, 153, 214, 240; fishing disputes: 192–207, 198 (table 5.1), 200 (table 5.2); fishing permits: 152, 202; fishing treaties and conventions: 204–7, 221; fishing truces: 211–30, 224 (chart 6.1); fishing zones, delimitation of: 181, 199–202, 205, 206; identities attributed to: 235–9; self-description of: 239–46, 242 (table 6.1) Fisheries, as ‘nurseries for seamen’: 236, 240 Flag, disputes about salute to: 155–9, 159n45 Flessingue. See Flushing Fleury, cardinal: 205, 236 Flood (Biblical). See Genesis Flushing (Flessingue, Vlissingen): 262, 263, 333 Folkestone (Kent): 122, 197 (table 5.1), 216, 217, 333, 334 Foreigners, laws on: 317; France: 300–1, 323; British laws: See Alien Acts; Discretion. See also Burghers; Merchants; Travellers Foreshore: 130, 152, 184, 185, 186, 190, 203, 208. See also Customary law and practices; Territory, coastal Fortifications: France: 93, 110, 112–16, 148; England: 119, 120–2, Fossils and formation of the English Channel: 38–44, 45 Foucault, Michel: 37, 73 Fouché, Joseph: 308 Fraud. See Customs Freedom: of the seas, principle of: 153, 162, 327; of fishing: 195, 203, 204, 205, 228n83, 241. See also fishing truces Freeman, Edward Augustus: 4–5 French Revolution: fraud during: 281; ‘French Wars’ (revolutionary and napoleonic wars): 114, 121–2, 124, 141–8, 229–32, 273, 320, 327n5; customs borders during: 180–2, 255. See also Smogleurs Froissart, Jean: 66, 110, 111 Frontier, frontiers: concept of: 13, 22, 24, 109, 110–12, 122; and state power: 22, 126, 130, 328; as social

and cultural spaces: 21n101, 21–2; England’s land frontiers: 9; natural frontiers: 20, 31, 54; the Channel as a natural frontier: 1, 2, 3, 14, 20, 55, 116, 336. See also Borders; Customs, boundaries of Fulton, Thomas: 152 Garde-côte: 129–31, 135–8, 140–1, 145–7; comparison with English militia: 126–8; See also Militia Genesis, Book of, and biblical chronologies: 31–2, 33, 39, 41, 44, 45 Geographers, and history of geography: 88–91. See also Mackinder; Reclus; Vidal de la Blache Geographical metaphors: 9, 10–14, 14n62, 55–6, 59, 71, 117, 341. See also Insularity; Japan; Maps Geography, Ptolemy: 66–7 Gildas: 65 Gillett, Thomas Sanders: 320–1 Goffman, Erving: 261 Greenwich observatory, junction with Paris observatory: 91, 93–6, 97 (figure 2.8) Grotius, Hugo: 151–2, 336 Guettard, Jean-Etienne: 86–8 Hale, Matthew: 33, 44n64, 201 Halley, Edmond: 91, 92–3, 103 Harley, J.B.: 103n171 Harwich: 222, 223, 226, 245, 302, 305 Hastings (Sussex): 199, 215 Henri IV Valois of France: 157 Heylin, Peter: 123 Hobsbawm, Eric: 15 Holman, family: 333 Hooke, Robert: 40, 92 Hugo, Victor: 49–50, 325 Huguenots: 252, 290, 291–2, 319–20, 320n170. See also Channel Islands; Packet boats Hundred Years War: 8, 13, 66, 77, 111, 113, 213 Hutchins, Edwin: 100 Hutton, James: 43 Hydrographers. See Map literacy Ilay, Earl of: 174 Imperialism: 6, 7 Impressment: 125 Insularity, Britain’s: 3, 4, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 12n55, 13–14, 20, 37, 55, 117. See also: Channel Islands; Japan

399

Index Intermediary institutions, role in crossChannel and in local/central relations: 224 (chart 6.1), 224–7, 232, 239–40; chambers of commerce: 219, 220, 220n44, 223, 225, 244, 264; intendants: 136n136, 137, 191; mayors and town corporations: 216, 217, 218, 219, 223n59, 225, 226, 229; members of parliament: 223, 226, 228 International law. See Law of nations Invasions and landings, real and fantasized: 5, 5n16, 56, 118, 120, 123, 129, 131, 132, 134, 137, 138, 139, 143, 144, 220n46, 221, 228, 233, 233n111, 252, 253, 253n25, 300. See also Naval warfare; British navy; Marine Royale Ireland, Irish Sea: 174; fishing disputes: 203; smuggling in: 254n33 Isidore of Seville: 65 Jacob, Christian: 71n36, 78 Jacobite rebellions: 118, 132, 220 James I: 205, 240n143 Japan: 337, 341n52, 341n53, 341n54; analogy with Britain: 340–1 Jenkinson, Charles, 1st earl of Liverpool, Lord Hawkesbury: 313, 318 Kent: 134, 170, 241, 241n145 Kidd, Colin: 33 King’s Chambers (Scotland): 181, 205 Kopytoff, Igor: 21n101 Korea: 337 La Hogue (Normandy): 114, 115. See also Cotentin Language: of communication: 276–7; on maps: see Toponyms La Métherie, Jean-Claude de: 43 Lapradelle, Paul de: 175, 183 Law of nations (jus gentium): 155, 170, 174, 192, 201, 205, 207, 230, 258, 323, 337. See also Grotius, Hugo; Prizes of war; Selden, John; Territory, violations of; Vattel, Emerich de Legal knowledge and legal strategies: defrauders’: 274–7; sailors’: 169, 171, 172–4, 178, 179 (table 4.5), 179, 194, 196–9, 203, 204–5, 208n86 Le Havre (Normandy): 257, 295n66, 311 Lepetit, Bernard: 61 Lighthouses: 103. See also Shipwrecks Littoral societies: 25, 251, 338. See also Border populations’ identity; Foreshore; Smuggling

Lizard (Cape): 156, 165, 166 Louis XIV: 74, 83, 158, 162 Louis XV: 294 Louvois, marquis de: 113 Lowestoft (Suffolk): 226 Mackinder, Halford: 90, 91 Manche, La (name). See Toponyms Mandelbrot, Benoît: 98 Mandeville, Bernard: 266 Maps and nautical charts: 92, 93, 98, 99, 163, 327; coastal profiles: 99 (figure 2.9), 99–101, 100 (figure 2.10); demarcation of the Channel on: 61, 84–5; ‘scientific’ maps: 47n80, 85–8, 87 (figure 2.7), 89n111, 102; map literacy: 101–2; as state knowledge: 47, 51, 52, 62, 63–4, 74–5, 93, 252n21, 326–7. See also Toponyms Marine Ordinance (1681): 129, 185, 188, 189 Marine Royale: 125, 141 Maurepas: 219 Mediterranean Sea: 336 Medows, Philip: 157, 205 Merchants: legal status of in wartime: 318–21; networks: 293n54, 293; burghers of towns: 333, 335; stereotypes about: 332. See also Foreigners, laws on; Holman, family Merleau-Ponty, Michel: 26 Michelet, Jules: 9–11 Migrations: economic migrations: 264, 264n80, 309; elephants: 42; family networks: 291, 333–4; first peopling of England: 33–6; fish along the North Sea and Channel coasts: 193, 195; mammoths: 43; manufacturers and artisans: 191, 317–18; as resistance: 131, 138, 141; transmigrants: 320, 331, 332–4; wolves: 39. See also Borders, surveillance; Émigrés; Travellers Militia (England): 127, 128–9, 132–4, 139–40, 148. See also Garde-côte; Patriotism; Volunteers, England Minghi, Julian V.: 122 Minet & Fector. See Packet boats Monmouth, Geoffrey of: 65 Mozambique Channel: 338–9 Namier, Lewis: 21 Napoleon, Napoleonic Empire: 182, 308, 313, 321. See also Continental Blockade; Coquebert de Montbret; ‘French Wars’

400

Index

Nation: definition: 15; exceptionalism of: 3, 6, 9, 15n73, 333; national character: 5, 6, 7, 8; as situated language: 211, 234–5, 242, 243, 244, 282, 322, 329–30; uncertainty/plurality of national belonging: 257–9, 314, 332–4. See also Foreigners, laws on; National Identity; Nationalism; State, nation state; Patriotism National identity: 15n73, 15–16. See also Nation Nationalism: 142, 143, 337 Natural law: 186, 188n16, 190, 208, 241 Naval warfare: 115–16, 117, 119, 120, 157; See also Privateering Navigation Acts. See Customs; Smuggling; Channel Islands, smuggling Navy, British: 117, 119, 121, 121n54, 121n56, 121n58, 159, 181, 201, 231, 327. See also Marine Royale; Naval warfare Neeson, Jeanette M.: 187 Newfoundland: 206 Nieuport (United Provinces): 215 Nine Years War: 119, 54, 124, 158, 254 Nordman, Daniel: 112, 163, 207 Norman Conquest: 4, 4n9, 7 Normandy: 129, 136, 137, 141, 146, 186, 187, 190, 191, 242, 243, 258. See also Channel Islands; Cotentin Peninsula; Seaweed North Sea: limits with the Channel: 85, 105, 161, 165, 330; smuggling in: 171, 172, 262; fishing in: 195. See also Migrations Oceans and seas, historiography of: 18–19, 325, 330, 336–42 Ostend: 215, 334, 335. See also North Sea Otto, Louis-Guillaume: 230, 308, 321 Ouessant. See Ushant Packet boats: 270, 284–9, 310, 311; definition: 284–5; Minet & Fector company: 225, 228, 289–96, 290 (figure 8.1); postal treaties: 285–6, 289 Passports. See Alien Acts; Borders, surveillance of, during French Revolution; Foreigners, laws on; Gillett, Thomas Sanders; Traitorous Correspondence Act; Travellers Patriotism and sense of belonging to the locality / to the nation: and military service: 127, 128, 132, 133–4, 135, 138, 139, 140, 141, 143, 144, 146, 147;

language of patriotism, of national vs private interest: 136, 192, 241–2, 246–7, 255–7, 259, 263, 265–6, 267, 280–2, 328. See also Nation, as situated language; Volunteers Pilots (and conflictual relation with hydrographers): 98–104 Pitt, William, the Younger: 177 Place-names. See Toponyms Plot, Robert: 41 Plymouth: 115, 119, 120 Political economy: 255, 261, 265–6, 317 Pomponius Mela: 154 Pontchartrain, comte de: 129, 216, 218, 238 Porter, Roy: 38, 91 Portland (Dorset): 159 Portland, duke of: 305 Portsmouth: 119, 120 Prisoners of war: 211, 222, 227, 230, 238n131, 238, 294, 300 Privateering, privateers: 109, 194, 217, 259, 262, 340; and fishermen: 194, 227, 230, 245; and smugglers: 262; Spanish: 162, 215. See also Channel Islands, privateers; Prizes of war Prizes of war: 160 (table 4.1), 160–6, 181, 194. See also Law of nations; Privateering Propaganda and the English Channel: 1, 53n110, 53–7, 57n132, 59n133, 117, 124 Property rights (ownership of the sea’s resources): 150, 187, 192, 195, 237, 241, 242. See also Commons, sea as a; domain; dominium Providence, providentialism: 34, 90 Quesnay, François: 332 Race and ethnicity: 4–5, 5n14, 6, 7, 10–12, 11n49, 11n51; ethnic theology: 32–7 Réal, Pierre-François: 303 Reclus, Elisée: 11–12, 89 Reeves, John: 297–8 Refugees. See Migrations Renan, Ernest: 15 Richelieu, cardinal: 157 Richmond, duke of: 120, 140 Riots: 133, 134, 140, 143n170 Rivers: 13, 19n91, 152, 153, 201 Robinson, John: 222, 226 Rochester: 170 Rogers, Nicholas: 144 Roy, William: 95

Index Sahlins, Peter: 18, 176, 212, 234 Sartine, Antoine de: 222, 223 Savile, George, Marquess of Halifax: 54 Scales (of analysis): 14, 16, 22–3, 27, 61, 84n84, 84, 250, 330, 331 Scilly Isles: 84, 105 Seashore. See Foreshore Seaweed: 186–92; gathering of in Normandy: 187–92; in Guernsey: 187 Second Hundred Years War: 1–2, 14 Seeley, John R.: 1, 7 Selden, John: 153–4 Seven Years War: 111, 115, 119, 125, 131, 135, 138, 221, 238 Shakespeare: 77–8, 116–17 Shelburne, earl of: 176 Shipwrecks: 185, 188. See also Lighthouses Smith, Adam: 317, 332 Smogleurs (Dunkirk): 172, 259–68, 260 (table 7.1); definition: 260n60; end of privileges during French Revolution: 266–8; numbers: 260 (table 7.1); uncertain fidelities of: 263–6 Smugglers, smuggling: 177–8, 181, 295, 334–6; and fraud, definitions: 248–9, 249n6, 249n7; historiography of: 250–1; smuggled goods: 260, 261n66, 315. See also Customs; Channel Islands; Smogleurs Somner, William: 40 Sound, Strait: 339–40 Sovereignty, maritime: 83, 151, 155, 167, 172, 176, 177, 199, 205, 240, 326, 336; English claims to sovereignty on the Channel: 111, 111n9, 152–5, 156, 157, 159, 170, 180, 181, 199, 201, 202, 207. See also International law; State; Territorial waters; Territory Space: conceptions of: 26; social representations and perceptions of: 61, 98–104. See also Maps; Toponyms Spectacle de la Nature (Le), Pluche: 239 Speed, John (cartographer): 63 Spying: 214, 233, 233n111, 236, 240, 240n142, 253, 263, 295, 303, 320 State: British: 9; central and metropolitan state: 17, 18, 21, 22; nation state: 7, 8, 17, 17n85, 18n87, 301. See also Sovereignty; Territory; Transnational St-Malo: 242, 274, 280 Straits, maritime: 338–40 St-Valéry-sur-Somme: 217 Sussex: 134, 140, 144, 170, 178 Tacitus: 34 Talleyrand: 322, 323 Teliamed, Benoît de Maillet’s: 45

401 Territorial waters: 150, 155, 192, 199 Territory: coastal, and recruitment in the militia and garde-cöte: 126, 129, 130, 131, 136, 140, 144, 145; coastal, and economic activities: 186, 188–9, 242; definitions of: by historians: 162; in the eighteenth century: 176, 207; territorialisation of maritime peripheries by the state: 21, 60, 105, 167, 177, 181, 184, 207, 336, 338; violations of: 176–80, 179 (table 4.5). See also Domain; Dominium; Foreshore; International law; King’s Chambers; Sovereignty; Territorial waters Theatrum Orbis Terrarum, Ortelius: 68–71 Thévenot, Laurent: 273 Tides: 90, 130, 185, 241. See also Foreshore; Territory, coastal Time, conceptions of, and the temporalities of the English Channel: 6, 32, 44–53, 57–9. See also Genesis, Book of Toponyms: combination of in different languages on maps: 60, 64, 66, 67–8n32, 69, 71; in English: 65, 77–9, 78 (table 2.2), 81; in French: 64 (graph 2.1), 66, 71–7, 80–4; legal/political debates: 80, 154, 155–6, 161–2, 163, 337–8; power and: 60, 336 Traitorous Correspondence Act: 297, 308, 309, 320. See also Foreigners, laws on Transnational: alliances and networks: 191–2, 211–12, 215, 222, 223, 228, 245, 332; history: 17, 18n86, 18, 328–9; space: 92, 330–1. See also Entangleed history; Fishing truces; Intermediary institutions; Migrations; Nation; Transmigrants Travellers: 287–8; travel writing; 26n115, 307–17, ; during the Peace of Amiens: 307–17, 313 (graph 8.1), 315 (table 8.1), 316 (table 8.2). See also Customs bureau; Packet boats Trevelyan, George Macaulay: 7–9 Treaties: Aix-la-Chapelle (1748): 161 (table 4.1), 163; Amiens: 161 (table 4.1), 167, 230, 289; Breda (1667): 156, 160 (table 4.1), 161; Congress of Vienna (1815): 159; Eden-Rayneval (1786–7): 261, 273, 277, 280; Ryswick (1697): 160 (table 4.1), 162; Tordesillas (1494): 151; Utrecht (1713): 160 (table 4.1), 162; Westminster (1654): 156; Whitehall (1662): 156; Fishing treaties and conventions, fishing truces: see Fishermen. See also Peace of Amiens

402

Index

Triangulation survey of the Channel. See Greenwich, observatory Tucker, Josiah: 119 Turner, Frederick Jackson: 21n101 Twyne, John: 37 United Provinces: 156, 286, 293, 295, 305. See also Flushing Ushant: 84, 99, 99 (figure 2.9), 103, 104, 105, 156, 166 Valin, René-Josué: 185, 205, 213 Vallaux, Camille: 50, 51n104, 105 Vattel, Emerich de: 150, 162, 177 Vauban, Sébastien Le Prestre de: 112–14 Venerable Bede: 65 Verstegan, Richard: 38–9 Vidal de la Blache, Paul: 12n55, 12, 89, 90 Vlissingen. See Flushing Voltaire: 45–6

Volunteers: England: 139, 142–5; France: 146; historiography: 141 War of American Independence: 94, 120, 139–41, 177, 222–9, 238, 244, 261, 335 War of the Austrian Succession: 115, 195, 219–21, 294, 341 War of the Spanish Succession: 92, 115, 130, 172, 214–18, 286 Wallis, John: 42 Windham, William: 277 ‘Whig’ historians: 3–9 White, Richard: 37 William III of Orange: 158, 252 Work: fishermen’s: 211, 232; fish trade: 232–3; seafarers’ occupational pluralism: 218n35, 218, 262, 329; job markets: 233 Yarmouth: 226, 305

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