A Horrible Tragedy in the French Atlantic

I

An Interlude in the Navy

The administration of the economist and statesman Anne Robert Jacques Turgot, which began in the summer of 1774 and ended in his dismissal in 1776, is one of the most celebrated lost opportunities in the history of France. 'I perpetually recurred to them as others do to a favourite poet', John Stuart Mill wrote of the scenes depicted in Condorcet's Vie de M. Turgot, 'one of the wisest and noblest of lives, delineated by one of the wisest and noblest of men'.¹ Turgot, who had been the intendant of an impoverished and landlocked generality, the Limousin, was appointed by the new king, Louis XVI, as secretary of state for the navy and colonies in July 1774, and became controller-general of finances in August 1774. Over the next few months, he initiated reforms of the grain trade, of taxation, of internal transportation and of the privileges of corporations; he was defeated, in May 1776, by what Condorcet described in his biography as a coalition of courtiers, 'aristocratic powers' and 'enemies of the people'.²

In this drama of possibility, Turgot's initial appointment at the navy has been seen, as it was seen at the time, as an interlude. 'Mr Turgot is a Man of distinguished Ability and of the highest Reputation of Integrity and Honour', the British ambassador, Lord Stormont, reported on 20 July 1774; 'I believe however that he has no particular knowledge of Naval Affairs, but his Brother le Chevr. Turgot is a considerable Sea-Officer'.³ 'I am annoyed that M. Turgot has nothing more than the department of our ships and our colonies', Voltaire wrote in the same spirit, on 12 August, and added: 'I think he is no more of a sailor than I am; but he has seemed to me to be a very good man on land'.⁴

The only extensive contemporary description of Turgot's naval period, in Dupont de Nemours's biography of 1782, depicted a scene of ethereal enlightenment: 'his lofty and benevolent policy embraced the Universe', and he believed that the appropriate role for France should be one of 'protecting freedom on the entire surface of the globe'. When he left the navy, in Condorcet's account, Turgot 'appeared to be relieved of a weight which was overwhelming him'; he departed from a position where he was ill-informed, 'to take up the one for which his entire life's work had prepared him'.⁵

The scene with which this article will be concerned is very different. It has to do with one of the most tragic episodes in eighteenth-century colonial and naval history, the expedition to Kourou in French Guyana of 1763–5, of which Turgot's brother, the chevalier Étienne-François Turgot — the 'considerable Sea-Officer' — was the military governor, in which Turgot was himself involved until the last, painful days of his public life, and which extended into the lives of tens of thousands of individuals from Rochefort to Civitavecchia, and from Barbados to 'Fameline en hongrie'. The memories of the tragedy were ones to which 'few sensitive souls, few families are strangers', the editor of a memoir on Guyana, attributed posthumously to Louis XVI's foreign minister Vergennes, wrote in 1802.⁶ But they were also enveloped in a cloud of secrecy which was imposing even by the standards of the times: a sequence of lettres de cachet, removal of pieces of evidence ('soustraction de pièces'), files which turned out to be empty, letters from Louis XVI which were lost in the post, records which were burned in fires, registers which were captured by pirates, and evidence for the defence which was eaten by rats. It is this Atlantic tragedy, and its political consequences, with which I shall principally be concerned.

The events in the South Atlantic were of continuing importance throughout the period of Turgot's ministry. They provide part of the explanation for his own anxieties, or for his sense of being overwhelmed, and for the anxieties of other officials. But the consequences of the tragedy...