This chapter explores the connections between the French port of La Rochelle and Atlantic Africa during the era of the Atlantic slave trade. La Rochelle’s slave-trading activities had multiple dimensions. The city’s merchants loaded their vessels traveling to the Atlantic coasts of Africa with a variety of commodities and luxury products. The chapter shows how these material items shaped the commercial, social, and cultural exchanges between La Rochelle’s merchants and Loango coast local. Through this broad picture, the chapter seeks to examine the positions of La Rochelle’s agents Jean-Amable Lessenne, Le Montyon’s ship captain, as well as Daniel Garesché, the rich owner of the ship Le Montyon who gave Mfuka Andris Pukuta the silver kimpaba as a gift following the Cabinda conflict in 1775. An examination of these wealthy men’s activities allows us to situate La Rochelle’s position in relation to other ports involved in the trade of enslaved Africans, as well as to envision the links between the French port and the Loango coast, and even more specifically its connections with the West Central African ports of Malembo and Cabinda, where the Mfuka Andris Pukuta was established.

This chapter examines the eighteenth-century silver ceremonial sword fabricated in La Rochelle and given as a gift to Cabindas Mfuka Andris Pukuta following the conflict of 1775. The chapter argues that the object stands for a rich example of the complex interactions between French trades and Cabinda’s local authorities. The chapter explores the work and trajectory of the silversmith, who likely created the sword, and its connections to the shipowner Daniel Garesché and ship captain Jean Amable Lessenne. Like a large cutlass, the sword follows the format of a kimpaba, a Woyo insignia. The chapter explores the uses and meanings of this kimpaba, and its connections to other existing similar West Central African swords. The chapter argues that the sword symbolizes the increasing power acquired by coastal Woyo agents in detriment of the Ngoyo’s ruler whose powers were decreasing with the intensification of the slave trade.

Beginning with an analysis of the ceremonies held to celebrate Louis XIII’s capture of La Rochelle in 1628, this chapter explores how the psalms became central to the identity of the French monarch over the course of the sixteenth century. Originally ‘shared’ between Catholics and Huguenots, translations of the psalms into French began to adopt a more sharply divided confessional identity by the 1560s. At the same time, the concept of kingship, which had for some time been inspired by humanist writings, began to reflect Biblical models more closely. Jean Bodin’s seminal Six livres de la république of 1576, for example, was followed by numerous other treatises that framed the king as an agent of God in the temporal domain, especially after the assassinations of Henri III and Henri IV. By the time Louis XIII came to the throne, then, King David, author of the psalms, agent of the Holy Spirit, and known for his musical talents, had become the preferred model of kingship, a model that provided the context for numerous psalm translations, and for the identity of Louis XIII himself, now viewed as the perfect musician, warrior, and king.