State of the Art and Sources

In maritime history, as in so much French historical writing, there is a great divide around the beginning of Louis XIV's personal reign in 1661. That regime marked the emergence of the Caribbean and Indian trades and the development of a large navy, manned by sailors conscripted, rather than impressed, from the maritime labour force. At the same time, the French state developed civilian-managed administrative services which not only ran the recruitment and logistical services of the navy but also came eventually to oversee many of the relations between maritime capital and its labour force. This new bureaucracy, which left an abundant and centralised documentation, has in turn had a massive impact on historical writing on French shipping and sailors. Such works on the period before the 1660s usually take the form of the port-based monograph, grounded in research in often recalcitrant regional sources, such as local port records, notarial archives and registers of baptisms, marriages and burials. After this date, centralised and uniform administrative documentation is more abundant, which makes it easier to write about the situation in each port as a part of a whole.

If 1661 forms one boundary in maritime history, 1789 forms another. Maritime historians follow the convention of their colleagues in other branches of French history by dividing into experts on “modern” and “contemporary” France on either side of that fateful watershed. French trade as it had developed during the eighteenth century was seriously disrupted by warfare and blockade during the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars, and whole sectors of activity were eradicated permanently, so that the student of the eighteenth century who looks at the situation under the Bourbon Restoration finds the familiar landmarks of French maritime history much displaced. Although there is a much greater continuity of sources, particularly administrative, between 1780 and 1820 than from, say, 1640 to 1720, and although it would quite feasible to write about themes over a longue durée from the late seventeenth to the late nineteenth century, in fact it is rarely done, and nineteenth-century French maritime history is still relatively unexplored territory.