The story is unknown. Normandy and its major ports played an important role in slavery and the triangular trade. For the first time, a major regional exhibition held simultaneously at three museum sites – Le Havre, Honfleur and Rouen – unveils Normandy’s involvement in the Atlantic slave trade. Its name: “Slavery, Norman memories”.
Each site features an exhibit based on the city’s role in this triangular trade. In Le Havre, the focus is on the actors and protagonists who took part in trafficking. In Honfleur, the question is approached from the maritime angle, that of the preparations, the fitting out of the ships and the conditions of the crossing. In Rouen, the exhibition reveals the financial role of the regional capital – a bit like the City in the 18th century – in triangular trade and its impact on the economic development of the region.
“These three communities decided to work together. We have made an inventory of the collections of museums, municipal and departmental archives, libraries. This first inventory allowed us to bring out a real richness to show, in addition to university research, “comments Guillaume Gaillard, general curator of the regional exhibition, director of heritage enhancement of Le Havre. “The issue of trafficking could not be limited to the city of Le Havre. We are on a fairly classic phenomenon, economic, of regional production with a financial network and industrial production. »
Nearly 600 ships left Normandy ports for the African coasts, carrying “junk” that will be traded for captives, including with local slave traders. Thus, 150,000 Africans, men, women and children, will be crammed into the holds of boats and deported to the West Indies. These human beings will be sold “like movable property”, in particular in Santo Domingo and Martinique . Before returning to their home ports, the ships will be loaded with sugar, cotton, tobacco, indigo, coffee…: goods resold in France and Europe. This triangular trade will reach its peak in the middle of the 18th century and will not be abolished until 1848. “You should indeed know that in the 18th century, Nantes was 1,700 shipments. Over the same period, the Le Havre-Honfleur port hub reached 600 shipments. Finally, Le Havre-Honfleur is the second pole, before La Rochelle and Bordeaux,” explains Guillaume Gaillard. The port of Le Havre thus came in 3rd position behind Nantes and La Rochelle while Honfleur landed in 5th place.
At the Hôtel Dubocage de Bléville in Le Havre, the exhibition “Fortunes et servitudes” addresses the role of individuals, figures involved or trained in this economic system based on the exploitation of human beings, but also producers, traders, consumers, activists for or against the abolition of this trade. Around a few figures from Le Havre, the motivations, issues, mechanisms and human consequences of the Atlantic slave trade are discovered throughout the rooms.
“Very early on, Normandy was affected by human trafficking and the distribution of colonial products,” comments Emmanuelle Riand, director of the Art and History museums in Le Havre and co-curator of the exhibition. In 1646, Jean Le Vasseur, who had become governor of Turtle Island, near Santo Domingo, mentioned the benefits of the development of slavery in a letter addressed to Isaac Boivin.
Visitors can discover maps of the navigators, a sales account with a row of names of people to whom the slaves were sold – 469 slaves (men, women and children) without their identity -, a travel diary that evokes revolts on board. The living conditions on the plantations are also addressed through illustrations, maps, objects, including irons and torture collars.
We discover the history of these five great families of Le Havre merchants (Begouen, Foäche, Chauvel, Feray, etc.) through writings and paintings. While the eldest of the Foäches, Martin Pierre, supervises transactions in mainland France, the younger Stanislas manages the counter and two sugar plantations in Santo Domingo (Haiti) which was considered a site specific to the Normans.
The exhibition also recalls the commitment of supporters of the abolition of slavery such as Le Havrais Bernardin de Saint-Pierre who “revolted against the living conditions on the plantations”, or even Abbé Dicquemare.
The Eugène Boudin Museum in Honfleur breaks its image as an art museum mainly devoted to Impressionism in Normandy with the exhibition “From one land to another” which looks at the question of the slave trade from a maritime angle . “How this small port of Honfleur, today much better known for its aesthetic image of a postcard, could it, almost two and a half centuries ago, become a powerful player in the Atlantic slave trade in Normandy, but also in France to the point of becoming on the eve of the French Revolution the 5th French port? asks Benjamin Findinier, director of the museums of Honfleur, co-curator of the exhibition.
The objective is to shed light on the course of the different stages of navigation, the places, the African coasts from which the people enslaved are torn away: places of embarkation, on the one hand, on the African coasts , and landing places on the other side of the Atlantic, in the West Indies and in Santo Domingo. “Honfleur was a port for seafarers experienced in distant expeditions when in the 18th century the Atlantic slave trade took off,” explains Benjamin Findinier. More than 30 shipowners from the city will engage in it, the most active of which are the Prémord, the Picquefeu de Bermon and the Lacoudrais. The exhibition reveals the model of a brig, a two-masted ship used for the Atlantic slave trade. The cross-sections of the holds show the crowding of the captives and allow us to imagine the living conditions.
In a century and a half, no less than 140 ships will leave Honfleur for the African coasts, heading for the Los Islands, the island of Bence in Sierra Leone, but also the coast of Angola, the bay of Biafra, the Côte d’Or (Accra), the island of Gorée, Saint-Louis, and the bay of Benin. Nearly 50,000 Africans will be embarked for the Caribbean.
The conditions of the crossing are clarified by the logbooks which relate the revolts, the diseases, the suicides of the Africans who prefer to throw themselves overboard, but also death in Africa for the Europeans carried away by fevers. Like their Le Havre counterparts, Honfleur residents, traders, former ship captains or shipowner representatives settled in the West Indies, particularly in Santo Domingo, to open their plantations there or supervise the triangular trade.
The exhibition “The other side of prosperity” at the Corderie Vallois industrial museum in Notre-Dame-de-Bondeville reveals the hidden face of regional prosperity linked to the slave trade. If Rouen is a maritime city, it is its financial power of the time which registers it in this trade of the slave trade. Tobacco, sugar, cocoa, coffee, cotton…: these materials from the triangular trade actively participate in the economic development of the city and the region.
Triangular trade requires large start-up funds to outfit ships and buy the goods traded on African shores. Families like Le Couteulx, Levavasseur or Quesnels finance and enrich themselves considerably. Among the products exported, we find textiles, weapons, tools and alcohol. These expeditions can earn up to 10 times the initial bet. These massive purchases will thus benefit local producers. This exhibition traces this heavy past both through objects, paintings and books.
To the obvious question “why this late restitution”, Guillaume Gaillard answers: “The first element is the disappearance in the public urban space of the traces of this trade. In 1944, Le Havre was bombed and largely destroyed. The second explanatory element relates to the relatively recent opening of the University of Le Havre, with in particular the creation of a human sciences center in the 1980s. University research on these subjects therefore started later. Our project here is to do a work of scientific history and restitution to the general public. We have in our heritage collections, libraries, municipal archives, and museums sources that allow us to talk about this subject. »
“Beyond the renewal of the scientific view on the question, there is as much in this exhibition a didactic issue linked to the general presentation of a period and processes that are poorly known to the general public as a moral issue which is that of the construction of a memory which, nourished by historical facts, makes it possible to raise awareness of each and every one of us”, affirms Benjamin Findinier.
Why is this exhibit worth seeing today? Its interest is also in its contemporary perspective, with artists such as Elisa Morts Via, Gilles Elie-Dit-Cosaque (in Le Havre in the shipowner’s house) or even Emmanuelle Gall and Nicolas Lo Calzo (in Rouen, La Corderie Vallois), who share their work and their own memory and seize this past.
* “Slavery, Norman memories”, until November 10 at the Dubocage hotel in Bléville (in Le Havre), at the Corderie Vallois (in Rouen) and at the Eugène Boudin museum (in Honfleur). slavery-memoirs-normandes.fr