Abstract
The French Revolution and the upheavals it caused forced contemporaries to rethink the issue of commercial and diplomatic relations between states, as well as reconsider the paradigms of political economy in the international order. In this sense, the French Revolution also must be understood as a revolution in the interstate trade system. From 1792 until 1799, numerous commentators—political economic writers, trade administrators, consular agent and politicians at the highest level—inquired into how a France régénérée was to lead the way to a reformed European and global order by reorganizing its trade.
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Notes
- 1.
See Manuel Covo, ‘Commerce, empire et révolutions dans le monde atlantique: la colonie de Saint-Domingue, entre métropole et Etats-Unis (ca. 1778–ca. 1804)’ (Thèse de doctorat, histoire, EHESS, 2013). The ideas in the present chapter need to be seen in the general frame of the restructuring of Atlantic trade structures patterns in the course of the American, French and Haitian Revolutions.
- 2.
See the first part of Covo, ‘Commerce, empire et révolutions’.
- 3.
Marc Belissa, Fraternité Universelle et Intérêt national. Les cosmopolitiques du droit des gens, 1713–1795 (Paris: Kimé, 1997).
- 4.
The first period is discussed in Marc Belissa, ‘Handel, Diplomatie und nationale Macht in der Französischen Revolution (1789–1799)’, in: Der moderne Staat und ‘le doux commerce’. Staat, Ökonomie und internationales System im politischen Denken der Aufklärung, ed. Olaf Asbach (Baden-Baden: Nomos, 2014), 229–250.
- 5.
On Ducher, the only existing study is Frederick L. Nussbaum, Commercial Policy in the French Revolution. A Study of the Career of G. J. A. Ducher (Washington, DC: American Historical Association, 1923). See also Allan Potofsky, ‘The Transatlantic Political Economy: French “Interests” and the Debate Over the US Debt 1777–1795’, Transatlantica 2 (2002); Allan Potofsky, ‘The Political Economy of the French-American Debt Debate: The Ideological Uses of Atlantic Commerce, 1787 to 1800’, William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd series, 63 (2006), 489–515 and Allan Potofsky, ‘Le corps consulaire français et le débat autour de la “perte” des Amériques. Les intérêts mercantiles franco-américains et le commerce atlantique, 1763–1795’, Annales Historiques de la Révolution française 363 (2011), 33–58.
- 6.
Michel Beaud, ‘Le Bureau de la Balance du Commerce, 1781–1791’, Revue d’histoire économique et sociale 42 (1964), 357–377; Loïc Charles and Guillaume Daudin, ‘Le Bureau de la balance du commerce au XVIIIe siècle’, Revue d’histoire moderne et contemporaine 58 (2011), 128–155.
- 7.
Moniteur no. 296, 20 October 1792, ‘Consulats et affaires étrangères’, 243.
- 8.
Antonella Alimento, ‘La concurrence comme politique moderne: la contribution de l’école de Gournay à la naissance d’une sphère publique dans la France des années 1750–1760’, in: L’économie politique et la sphère publique dans le débat des Lumières, ed. Jesús Astigarraga and Javier Usoz (Madrid: Collection de la Casa de Velázquez, 2013), 213–228.
- 9.
G. J. A. Ducher, ‘Acte de Navigation’ (12 February 1793) reproduced in Archives Parlementaires de 1787 à 1860. Recueil complet des débats législatifs et politiques des Chambres françaises, 1ére série, Paris, P. Dupont, 1867–1875, 72: 393.
- 10.
Nussbaum, Commercial Policy in the French Revolution, 130.
- 11.
Moniteur no. 127, 7 May 1793.
- 12.
Covo, ‘Commerce, empire et révolutions’, II: 389 shows that the fall of the Girondins was not the only factor favouring Ducher’s projects. Other actors, less visible, such as the Parisian Americans, the delegates of the Antilles and the interested shipowners equally played a decisive role. The collation in favour of a Navigation Act was large, but also very heterogeneous in its interests.
- 13.
Moniteur no. 160, 9 June 1793.
- 14.
For the text in English, see American State Papers: Documents, Legislative and Executive, of the Congress of the United States (Washington, DC: Gales and Seaton, 1833), I: 316–323.
- 15.
Moniteur no. 276, 3 October 1793.
- 16.
The different forms of fraud used to ‘franciser’ ships have been studied by Silvia Marzagalli, Les boulevards de la fraude. Le négoce international et le blocus continental, 1806–1813 (Villeneuve d’Asq: Presses du Septentrion, 1999). See also Éric Schnakenbourg, Entre la guerre et la paix. Neutralité et relations internationales, XVIIe–XVIIIe siècles (Rennes: Presses Universitaires de Rennes, 2013).
- 17.
Covo, ‘Commerce, empire et révolutions’, II: 391.
- 18.
Moniteur no. 75, 15 Frimaire Year II (5 December 1793).
- 19.
Moniteur no. 268, 28 Prairial Year II (16 June 1794).
- 20.
For instance Moniteur no. 201, 21 Germinal Year V (10 April 1797), 803. The article by Eschassériaux, ‘De la Hollande et de ses colonies’.
- 21.
Anna Maria Rao, ‘Républiques et monarchies à l’époque révolutionnaire: une diplomatie nouvelle?’ Annales Historiques de la Révolution française 296 (1994), 267–278: 273.
- 22.
Rao, ‘Républiques et monarchies’, 273.
- 23.
Raymond Kubben, Regeneration and Hegemony. Franco-Batavian Relations in the Revolutionary Ear—A Legal Approach, 1795–1803 (Leiden: Brill, 2011). On the neutrality debate, Koen Stapelbroek, ‘The Dutch Debate on Commercial Neutrality (1713–1830)’, in: Trade and War. The Neutrality of Commerce in the Inter-State System, ed. Koen Stapelbroek (Helsinki: COLLeGIUM: Studies Across Disciplines in the Humanities and Social Sciences, 2011), 114–142.
- 24.
Nussbaum, Commercial Policy in the French Revolution, 298.
- 25.
Moniteur no. 165, 15 Ventôse Year III (5 March 1795), 596–599, treating the session of 13 Ventôse Year III (3 March 1795) and issue 33 of 3 Brumaire Year III (24 October 1794), Ducher’s article ‘Diplomatie régénérée’.
- 26.
Bertrand Barère, La Liberté des mers ou le gouvernement anglais dévoilé, in 8°, 2 vol, Paris, 1er ventôse an VI.
- 27.
Barère, La Liberté des mers, I: 161.
- 28.
Barère, La Liberté des mers, I: 163. The meaning of the expression ‘commission de marine’ used by Barère is not quite clear. Does it represent an attempted merger of commercial and naval politics of the French Republic and its allies? Or simply the idea that the alliance between the Franco-Hispano-Italo-Batavian forces would inspire the Brits to tone down their ambitions?
- 29.
Barère, La Liberté des mers, I: 172.
- 30.
Barère, La Liberté des mers, I: 381.
- 31.
Marcel Reinhard, ‘Les aspirations de la bourgeoisie française à l’hégémonie’, in: Mélanges Pierre Renouvin (Paris: PUF, 1966), 88.
- 32.
Nussbaum, Commercial Policy in the French Revolution, 311.
- 33.
See Georges Dejoint, La politique économique du Directoire (Paris: Rivière, 1951), 161–223.
- 34.
Archives Nationales [AN], BB/16/713, bb 609.
- 35.
AN, F/III/69, Rapport au Directoire exécutif, 12 floréal an V (1 May 1797).
- 36.
Roger Dufraisse, ‘Les relations économiques entre la France et l’Allemagne’, in: Deutschland und die Franzosiche Revolution (Munich: Artemis, 1983), 232.
- 37.
Jacques Godechot, La Grande Nation (Paris: Aubier, 1956), 449.
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Belissa, M. (2017). What Trade for a Republican People? French Revolutionary Debates about Commercial Treaties (1792–1799). In: Alimento, A., Stapelbroek, K. (eds) The Politics of Commercial Treaties in the Eighteenth Century. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-53574-6_16
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