In the early 1780s, the father of Louis-Philippe, the last king of France, built an oblong, arcaded quadrangle enclosing a garden divided by graveled paths. It was the Palais Royal. Having ruined himself gambling, this duc d’Orléans turned the place into an immense “temple of impurity—a den of Desperation,” where “you can see everything, hear everything, know everything” and where, within its precincts, “you may eat, drink, sleep, bathe, … walk, read, make love, game and, should you be tired of life, you may buy powder and ball or opium to hasten your journey across the Styx.”1
Haunting its galleries were pickpockets, con men, prostitutes, gamblers, procuresses, thieves, and spies. During the restoration, there were visitors of every class and nation; one English tourist remembered that “the military costume of every army in Europe, glared and rattled in the crowd.” The Palais Royal was to the Paris of the restoration what Piccadilly Circus or Times Square have been to London or New York—the center of things. It was a focus for excitement and buzz, and tourists would make for its riot of “unsanctioned dissipation,” where, in its gambling dens, thousands would suffer “shipwreck of fortune and character.” As night fell, within and behind its brilliantly lit arcades, the Palais Royal became a “laboratory of Venus,” “a world in itself … the temple of animal gratification,” full of “the most disgusting scenes of debauchery and vice.” There, as Balzac observed in his novel La Peau de chagrin, “orgies began with wine and ended with suicides in the Seine,” going on to remark that if “Spain has its bullfights, if Rome had its gladiators, Paris is proud of its Palais Royal.”2
On three sides of the quadrangle, in the arcades under the stone galleries, were about 180 shops where tradesmen of every sort sold their goods and services at inflated prices. There were restaurants, florists, jewelers, print sellers, and an early incarnation of the Paris stock exchange, where bankers and brokers met between four and five in the afternoon to buy and sell shares. The forth side of the structure terminated in a double row of wooden galleries that had been constructed as a temporary space and contained tall, windowed shops lit generously by natural light. These premises were largely occupied by milliners and booksellers. The sale of books and prints was an important aspect of trade in the Palais Royal, which, despite its proximity to the Tuilieries palace and the Louvre, was a hotbed of anti-Bourbon protest. It had been in the Palais Royal that the first revolutionary meetings had been held in 1789. The first tricolor had been hoisted in its garden and it was there that the attack on the Bastille had been organized. More recently, during the Hundred Days, its Café Montansier was a hub of Napoleonic fervor. Other cafés, such as the Corazza, were also meeting places for the politically active, and, in the twenty-odd reading rooms scattered about the quadrangle, such people, “for a very moderate monthly or weekly subscription,” were able to keep up to date by consulting “all the ephemeral productions of the press … the different public journals, magazines, reviews and pamphlets of every description.”3
In the temporary wooden galleries there were about 125 shops, the occupiers of which, since 1807, had been under notice to quit so that the passage could be rebuilt in stone. While shopkeepers in the other arcades were subject to high rents, premises were cheaper in this temporary section, which may well account for the fact that it was here that Alexandre Corréard, when he obtained his licence on September 9, 1818, set up shop at No. 258, Galerie de Bois, an address that rapidly became an evening rendezvous for literary and political men hostile to the crown.
If the Palais Royal, this “Babylon in miniature,” was not only a honeypot of licentiousness but also a nest of sedition, then “swarms of spies and informers” were sure to be prowling. Relatively indulgent toward moral offenses, the police nonetheless kept a very keen eye on political agitators. This extensive spy network was a Napoleonic legacy, and these snoops, informers, letter interceptors, and plants were now, ironically, employed by the restoration government to keep tabs on Bonapartists and liberals. Corréard, having set himself up in the center of things, had also raised his cantankerous profile, rendering his subversive activities highly visible to the police.4
Corréard had bounced back. From penniless, uncompensated, and semi-invalided shipwreck victim, he had, within three years, coauthored a best-selling book and started up as a bookseller. Clearly, having lost everything on board the Medusa, he would have needed some kind of support or sponsorship.
One way in which the liberals scored public relations victories against the authorities was to set up subscription funds for anyone who had been exiled or imprisoned for their political views, for military widows, or for the victims of disasters caused by government incompetence. The fund created by the editors of the Mercure de France, Etienne Jay and Benjamin Constant, in favor of the victims of the Medusa had grown rapidly. When, because of governmental persecution, the Mercure cleverly rebaptized itself La Minerve française in February 1818, it was able to announce a response to the appeal totalling 18,278 francs. Not only was the sum substantial, the lists of donors published over the previous months in the Mercure and Minerve provided a demographic insight into liberal sympathy, with money pouring in from the professional and merchant classes as well as from the disaffected military and working class. Indeed, the cause met with such national support that no self-respecting celebrity seeker such as Clarisse Manzon, the star witness in the Fualdès affair, could abstain from making a donation.5
During February, a notice was placed in the Minerve summoning the shipwreck victims to their offices on March 5. With typical French bureaucratic wariness, they were requested to bring proof that they had been on the raft along with a second document proving that they were indeed the person they claimed to be. The fund was to be divided among the survivors. One such, Colonel Schmaltz’s secretary, Griffon du Bellay, having apologized to Savigny for the document he had signed in Saint-Louis, now accused Corréard of pocketing a large part of the money. With several of the survivors dead, several still in Senegal, and one gone off to the West Indies, there were only a few left in France to benefit from the cash. Though that would provide a considerable portion for each claimant, it required the further support of the wealthy liberal banker and deputy Jacques Laffitte, one of the administrators of—and largest and first contributors to—the Medusa fund, to provide Corréard with the extra finance necessary to establish himself as a bookseller and publisher in the Palais Royal.6 The shipwreck victim was thus able to become one of the most vociferous private advocates for the liberal opposition. Publishing was, as Corréard recalled, “a profession that, in giving me liberty, permitted me to serve the cause of that same liberty.”7
Happily, the book trade was flourishing; in the first years of the century, improvements in the production of paper had reduced costs, and one result of this was that the number of titles published annually in France nearly doubled between 1812 and 1825.8 Despite the three hundred-odd booksellers in Paris, Corréard, already a famous writer, chose a promising and lucrative line of business. Early on in his new career, however, he was forced to pursue three men who had pirated The Shipwreck by inserting twenty-nine pages of its text into a collection entitled History of Shipwrecks. Corréard lost the case, the judgment somewhat spuriously maintaining that because The Shipwreck was four hundred pages long and the History eleven hundred, the twenty-nine pages copied represented only a trifling act of piracy. Furthermore, the judge ruled that Corréard’s narrative was historic and belonged to everybody and could only be recounted with the same words. Astoundingly claiming that the accused had no intention of piracy and even took the trouble to praise the original work, the judge suggested that there was no cause for protest. Although, as Corréard noted in summarizing the affair, the accused had actually confessed to having taken all the words from his text, the guilty parties were absolved by what seems a decidedly unjust ruling and Corréard was ordered to pay costs.9
From early on in his new career, Corréard was harassed as a bookseller and publisher. In 1819, the author of one of the first works that he published, Claude-Henri de Saint-Simon, was called before the tribunal for offenses against the Royal family. The author was cleared by a judgment of the Assize Court but the work was ordered to be destroyed and new proceedings were directed against him for his follow-up pamphlet, which Corréard also published. Between 1819 and 1822, Corréard went on to publish several inflammatory and contentious works by Saint-Simon. A typical proposition offered by the author was that if France kept its craftsmen, its thinkers, or its artists but lost all its rulers, it would hardly be affected. Corréard’s publication of such material drew not only police attention but menacing anonymous letters:
Publisher Corréard, you are a madman and a scoundrel …. I warn you that the authorities are watching you; make sure that they do not remain unsatisfied by just seizing the absurd inanities of the vile and contemptible Saint-Simon.10
Corréard was in obvious danger and set on a collision course with the new law of May 17, 1819, which ruled for the suppression of books that were offensive to God, to the crown, and to public and religious morality. In 1820, with the resurgence of the right after the assassination of the duc de Berry, it was obvious that agitators such as Alexandre Corréard would be hounded. What is more, in the face of this deteriorating situation, Corréard was expanding his activity. In the spring of 1820, his list of projected publications ran to over 150 brochures, priced at 50 centimes each, and among which could be found such provocative titles as: Let’s Defend Our Rights; The Wake-Up Call; Let’s Speak, They’ll Shut Up; The Alliance of the Government with the Ultras; What’s Bred in the Bone Will Come Out in the Flesh; Does the Government Have a System?; and The Sleepwalking Minister, a Tragedy in Five Acts.
Corréard was also rashly distributing seditious texts in the royalist south; a bookseller in Montauban, instead of selling works that he received from Corréard, took them straight to the police. The district attorney of Toulouse wrote to the director of criminal affairs, insisting on Corréard’s audacity in “spreading the poison of false doctrines, disorder and rebellion everywhere.” The authorities, at last, decided to bring Corréard to trial.11
On June 14, 1820, Corréard and the twenty-three-year-old Jacques Bousquet-Deschamps were tried as publisher and author of a pamphlet entitled Questions of the Day. On April 11, the king’s attorney had seized ninety-three of the thousand copies of the work at Corréard’s bookshop as well as the manuscript at Dupont, the printers. Consistent with Articles 1, 3, and 6 of the law of May 17, 1819, Bousquet-Deschamps was accused of provoking the destruction of the government and Corréard was arraigned as an accomplice. With the challenging winged head of a snake-haired Medusa printed boldly on the title page above a garland reading, “At the Victim of the Shipwreck of the Medusa,” it appeared as if Corréard was indeed the publisher of the work. However, the printer testified that Corréard had told him that he was only its vendor. Furthermore, the bookseller maintained that he had not even read the pamphlet. Given its mere sixteen pages, its subject matter, and the fact that Corréard’s establishment sought to attract and serve the liberal opposition, this claim seems farfetched, if not downright mendacious.
“The moment that a government threatens liberty,” we read in the pamphlet, “its relationship with society ceases to be legitimate.” Although the defense counsel sought to establish that such passages were merely philosophical considerations and not incitements to violence, and despite an impassioned plea for Corréard that played on his sufferings and his valor during the Medusa crisis, the author was sentenced to a year in prison and a fine of 3,000 francs for encouraging civil disobedience and the alleged publisher to four months in prison and a fine of 1,000 francs.
The authorities, keen to wipe “At the Victim of the Shipwreck of the Medusa” off the face of the capital, had Corréard back in court nine days later. His codefendant was, once again, Bousquet-Deschamps, this time accused of having written a pamphlet called Attention!, which had been published a year to the day after the law censoring books had come into effect. Designating the ultras as “the mortal enemies” of France, the work reflects upon the considerable cost of the revolution and asserts that, in France, “there are today a million of our young men, children of the Revolution, who have sworn to defend to their dying breath, our constitutional liberties.”
Corréard, the vendor of the work, appeared in court without the young writer. Having already been arraigned before the assize courts twice, Bousquet-Deschamps had fled to England to escape his penalties. On this occasion, the authorities charged the author and publisher with the provocation of an attack against the person of the king. The assistant public prosecutor pointed out that since the restitution of the laws of censorship governing newspaper and periodical publication, several writers or publishers had adopted the tactic of launching a series of pamphlets in quick succession with the intention of exciting public opinion and insulting the government. He insisted that the cheapness and frequency of such pamphlets allowed the author and publisher to disseminate articles that would be censored if written for the press. The long list of the titles offered cheaply by Corréard suggests that this was exactly his tactic. The assistant public prosecutor, anticipating Corréard’s ruse of disclaiming knowledge of the pamphlet’s contents, drew attention to the brevity of the document. It was unlikely, given Corréard’s political sympathies, that he would have failed to enjoy the contentious passage, restricted as it was to just eleven lines on the final page. Corréard was found guilty, sentenced to four months in prison and fined 1,200 francs. Bousquet-Deschamps, in his absence, received the stiff default penalty of five years in prison and a 6,000 franc fine.
Five days later Corréard was back in the same court, accused, once again with Bousquet-Deschamps, author of As Things Are, of having outraged public and religious morality. This time the bookseller was awarded three months in prison and a fine of 400 francs, and the writer a year in prison and a fine of 500 francs. The court ordered the destruction of the brochure as it had done with the previously condemned publications.
Just under a month later, on July 26, Corréard was charged, along with the booksellers Béchet and Mongie, with having distributed History of the First Fortnight of June by Bousquet-Deschamps. They were accused of producing a work that provoked rebellion and disobedience. The printer testified that the writer had instructed him to place the names of the three booksellers on the title page. Although the two other vendors were acquitted, Corréard, dubbed by the assistant public prosecutor “a great entrepreneur of sedition,” was condemned to four months in prison and a 500 franc fine, while the absent author piled on another two years in prison and another 4,000 franc fine. Maintaining his innocence in the face of the charges, Corréard claimed that the work in question had never appeared in his catalog but that, as a bookseller, it was his job to sell books and, therefore, he would accept what was offered to him. In answer to observations about the unhealthy relationship between himself and the accused author, Corréard simply responded that, as a bookseller, he necessarily met men like Bousquet-Deschamps when they came to buy and sell.
The following day, July 27, as a result of a complaint made at the end of May by the ambassador of the king of Portugal and Brazil against a pamphlet entitled Political Documents, Corréard found himself back in the assize court. The assistant public prosecutor demonstrated that the pamphlet contained the libelous contention that the aforementioned ambassador, the Marquis de Marialva, benefiting from the lack of a legitimate sovereign, was plotting to install a new family on the Portuguese throne. Taking Corréard to task as “no ordinary editor,” the assistant public prosecutor seized on the scam behind the announcement in the bookseller’s brochure, promising “a political pamphlet per day.” The prosecutor again stressed that this was nothing other “than a Daily in another format.” Corréard was really a newspaper publisher and therefore responsible according to the laws governing journals. The result of the hearing was that Corréard was handed down another three-month prison sentence and a 400 franc fine.12
Within forty-three days, the public prosecutor’s office had initiated five proceedings against Alexandre Corréard. Not only was he being targeted as a dangerous and key subversive, he was also extremely active. Lithograph portraits of Spanish revolutionary generals who had risen up against the Bourbons were displayed in his bookshop. He published documents in support of the parliamentary candidature of the abolitionist and supposed regicide Abbé Grégoire. Seventeen works in all had been seized from his shop that year, and, hounded by the justice, Corréard went to prison.13
In a back street on the Left Bank of the Seine, surrounded by thick, high walls, stood Saint-Pélagie, an ancient convent and refuge for prostitutes, which was serving as a prison for debtors and political offenders. It was the third largest prison in Paris with a population, in the year that Corréard was committed, of nearly 650 inmates. It was split into four divisions, including a section for young offenders between eight and sixteen years old, some of whom were serving prison terms of up to six years. To the left as you entered, there was the debtors’ prison; on the ground floor to the right was the Détention, which held two hundred thieves and crooks “with names like Massacre and Quatre-Sous.” When not silently “familiarizing themselves with the Penal Code” so that when they got out they could “specialize in crimes that carried low maximum penalties,” they were loudly clattering about in their clogs, chorusing obscene songs. Above their cacophony was the Corridor Rouge, home to political prisoners, a “paradise” compared with the other parts of Saint-Pélagie. In 1820 these inmates—men of letters, journalists, booksellers, printers, and soldiers from the imperial army—were free to wander as far as the prison’s inner grill and they ceded the exercise yard to the debtors only in the hottest part of the day. They were not locked up in their cells at night and had the privilege to be visited at all hours. Indeed, the freedom enjoyed by these inmates meant that the political discussions of the Palais Royal could continue, their activities merely frustrated in the short term by their inability to turn words into actions. For a price, better food was available than elsewhere in Saint-Pélagie. Certain prisoners imported their own effects and furniture to make their stay more comfortable, Corréard among them, to judge from the Motte engraving of his cell printed in the later editions of The Shipwreck. During the period of Corréard’s incarceration, numbers grew after the failure of the Bazar Conspiracy of August 1820, which had aimed to overthrow the Bourbons by capturing the Château de Vincennes and other strategic points around Paris before instituting a provisional government led by the Marquis de Lafayette. A delay resulted in the discovery of the plot and many conspirators were subsequently committed to Saint-Pélagie.
Despite the privileges and relative comfort, Corréard’s time in prison was not one of uninterrupted calm; at six a.m. on the morning of August 30, Police Commissioner Valade burst into his cell and seized works that were considered to be seditious. Forty-eight hours later, Corréard spent the day before the magistrate answering an unrelated police accusation. Two weeks later, on September 14, he was issued with the order that he would be detained in prison until he had paid the fines imposed upon him.
Since the beginning of his detention, Corréard had been petitioning to be transferred to a nursing home. Supported by a letter from Dr. Piron at Saint-Pélagie, Corréard claimed that scorbutic wounds from his thirteen days on the raft reopened frequently and that he was prone to rheumatism. These pleas were in vain and he was left in Saint-Pélagie with his fines unpaid. He wrote to the lord chancellor claiming that his shop had hardly been open before his enemies earmarked him as an opposition bookseller just because he sold, as did many of his competitors, works from across the political spectrum. He noted that five works of which he had not been the publisher were seized in 1819. The seventeen works already seized in 1820 had not been, with one exception, confiscated from the shops of his competitors. He also appealed an unjust fine of 3,700 francs, which it would, in any case, be impossible for him to pay.
Providentially, another subscription fund came to his rescue. The text accompanying the appeal’s launch pointed out that “since 1814, magistrates have not pursued booksellers”—that is, “until the judgment against Corréard.” Persuasive in its appeal to French patriotism, the subscription fund provided Corréard with the wherewithal to terminate his imprisonment on November 28. Summing up his incarceration for allegedly publishing seditious works, Corréard called it his “second shipwreck.”14
Yet Corréard remained undaunted. In 1820, as the ultras once again became a force to reckon with, the liberals, anxious about the future, became increasingly militant in their behavior. By the spring of 1821 a network of secret cells of resistance was set up, known as the Charbonnerie. According to a police report, it was at “Corréard’s bookshop in the Palais Royal” that, every evening, “a Jacobin circle met and shared news.” Corréard was marked by the police as an influential member of the Charbonnerie, as well as being a man who had links with other known subversives and agitators.15
By naming his bookshop At the Victim of the Shipwreck of the Medusa, Corréard had effectively created a trademark for sedition. The Medusa, and all that name had come to signify, was now the flagship of the liberal opposition. Corréard was selling and publishing his own book in its third, fourth, and fifth editions and he was the champion of those writers and thinkers who sought to bring down the monarchy.
Whatever he pleaded before the courts, so long as Corréard kept his bookshop open, he sold and published material critical of the Bourbon regime. During this period, he claimed that he was the victim of a “permanent police initiative”:
I had works seized 130 times. I was accused 36 times and condemned 9 times to a total of 8 years in prison. Unjustified action never stops, and although the confiscation of belongings had been abolished, the authorities ordered the closure of my book shop in the Palais Royal. I was hunted. My door was sealed and it was guarded for more than a month by the gendarmes. In 1823, 1 was again expelled from my premises, and pressured to sell all my merchandise for a base price.16
Though his skirmishes against a suspicious and threatened establishment undoubtedly furthered the liberal cause, during the militant years between the opening and closing of his shop Alexandre Corréard also involved himself with the greatest humanitarian crusade of the epoch. Born of his knowledge of what was in truth going on in Colonel Schmaltz’s Senegal, Corréard became a force in the fight against slavery.
In Géricault’s Raft of the Medusa, the outstretched hand of Alexandre Corréard leads the spectator’s eye toward the signaling arm of the black man standing on the barrel. Corréard is, in a sense, confirming the selection and positioning of the figure, as if he himself had something to do with the decision to show a black optimistically heralding a new dawn. There are certainly elements in his book The Shipwreck of the Frigate, the Medusa suggesting that such a reading of Corréard’s gesture is justified. In the narrative, the would-be colonist shows himself eager to understand the cultures of various African peoples. He questions earlier writers such as Adanson who noted that “the Moors … either made captives, or killed, such Europeans, as had the misfortune to be shipwrecked on their coast.” By contrast, Savigny and Corréard’s account of the interview that the naturalist Kummer had with the Moorish king Zaide revealed the ruler’s civilization, his self-interested but intelligent curiosity about Napoleon and the Hundred Days, and his fair-mindedness. Furthermore, Corréard’s choice of a portrait of King Zaide for the frontispiece of the second edition was surely a provocative act, suggesting that it was this comparatively enlightened ruler rather than the barbarian Frenchmen Chaumareys or Schmaltz, or even Louis XVIII, who deserved to preside over the events that occurred along the West African coast. The juxtaposition of Zaide’s seemingly impeccable leadership with the maelstrom of French incompetence and cowardice that litters the pages of The Shipwreck acts as a strong reproach to Corréard’s malefactors.17
Savigny and Corréard’s text, even in its earliest editions, made it clear that the eventual health and success of any colonial project depended on the abolition of slavery. When they published the information that the slave trade was thriving in Senegal, it was a provocative and somewhat surprising revelation. Although reports were beginning to circulate that French slave ships were active along the West African coast, there was, at the time, little talk of slavery. Their narrative, therefore, makes a trailblazing contribution to the burgeoning abolitionist critique of the French government’s continued and devious complicity with the trade. The timely appearance of the third edition of The Shipwreck just weeks after Benjamin Constant made a celebrated abolitionist speech to both chambers, again demonstrates Corréard’s ability to exploit opportunity. Abolitionism, with the growing awareness of the persistent flouting of France’s antislave trade laws, was newsworthy and Corréard’s text would capitalize on the growing concern about what was actually going on in Senegal.18
England had dominated the slave trade in the second half of the eighteenth century. But under increasing pressure from humanitarian thinkers, coupled with a commercial desire to exploit the natural resources rather than the manpower of West Africa, the English abolished the slave trade in 1807. Although in France slavery and the slave trade had ended with the convention in January 1794, Napoleon had reversed the decree in May 1802. With the return of the Bourbons, England urged France, once again, to renounce the trade, but the artful Talleyrand, the principal architect of the Treaty of Paris, negotiated a five-year delay in implementing the ban, a period during which tax incentives were actually made available to stimulate the lucrative activity. As the French abolitionist Abbé Grégoire noted in a tract published in England,
it is stipulated, that, for five years longer, the French shall be allowed to … steal or buy the natives of Africa, to tear them from their native country, from every object of their affections, to transport them to the West Indies, where, sold as beasts of burden, they shall moisten, with their labour, that soil, the fruits of which shall belong to others, and shall drag out a painful existence, with no other consolation at the close of each day, than that of having taken another step towards the grave.
When Napoleon returned for the Hundred Days, seeking to appease England, he declared the trade illegal and, on his second return to the throne, Louis XVIII, much indebted to the English, could hardly do anything but maintain abolition.19 However, while his Ministry of Foreign Affairs was attempting to mollify the English, DuBouchage was besieged by shipbuilders, ship owners, and the chambers of commerce in ports such as Nantes and Bordeaux who were anxious not to lose so abundent a source of income. About thirty of the naval officers who, at the outset of the restoration, had been forcibly retired on half pay and thus denied their livelihood had turned to the slave trade, and in 1816 at least thirty-six slaving ships left French ports.20
Contemporary accounts of the appalling inhumanity and degradation of this commerce were appearing in English. The noted abolitionist Thomas Clarkson described the now infamous conditions of the transatlantic crossing.
In the best regulated ships, a full-grown man has no more space allowed him to lie upon than sixteen English inches in breadth, which gives him about as much room as a man has in his coffin, and about two feet eight inches in height. But there are very few vessels in which even this limited allowance is afforded …. Besides this they are naked; and they have nothing to lie upon but the bare boards: on this account they suffer often very severely from the motion of the ship, which occasions different parts of their bodies to be bruised, and which causes their irons to excoriate their legs.
But the situation is the most deplorable when it blows a heavy gale, and when the hatches or gratings are obliged to be fastened down. Their sufferings are, at this time, such as no language can describe. They are often heard, on such occasions, to cry out in their own language, “We are dying, we are dying.”
Clarkson went on to describe that when they had “fainted from heat, stench and corrupted air,” they were brought up on deck where, affected by dysentery, they covered the deck “with blood and mucous like a slaughterhouse.”21
In March 1820, an English squadron patrolling the West African coast boarded La Jeune Estelle and discovered two slaves crushed into casks in an attempt to conceal them. Another twelve had been flung overboard in the barrels that Commander Sir George Collier had noticed bobbing about on the sea as they had approached the French ship, jettisoned by a captain hoping to escape the penalties of being caught engaging in the forbidden trade. The French were clearly continuing to participate in a traffic that they had, once again, outlawed in 1818.
The marquis of Lansdown stated in the House of Lords, in July 1819, that the slave trade was “carried on to a very great extent under the flag of France,” and, three years later, a distressed Thomas Babington wrote from Paris, “No member of the Ministry cares a fig for the abolition of the Slave Carrying Trade, and many are really interested in its continuance.” There were, however, voices beginning to be raised against what Benjamin Constant called “the unspeakable and sacrilegious commerce” that had, in the previous quarter of a century, carried off more than a million and a half Africans.22
The sheer barbarity of the trade had been recorded in Geoffrey de Villeneuve’s Africa, which had appeared in Paris in 1814. He described how the tribes from the north side of the River Senegal would cross it on horseback in bands of about twenty well-armed men. When they drew close to a targeted village, they would watch and wait near a spring until the women and children came for water. Seizing them, they would carry their prize back to their horses, fixing their victims’ fingers between their teeth, ready to bite if anyone cried out. Alternatively, they might attack by night, yowling savagely as they set fire to an entire village and capturing their prey as they fled the flames. Their prisoners were, at length, brought to the European trading posts in single file, necks bolted into six-foot-long, forked wooden yokes. The traders to whom the captives were sold inspected the merchandise thoroughly; if a tooth was missing or the eye dull, that would lower the price. They put the captives through their paces, making them run, jump, and speak and subjecting the women to a humiliating examination by a doctor. Breast size, held to be an indication of fertility, helped determine their price, while the stature of the men, often acquired for studding, determined their value. Once purchased, they would arrive in Saint-Louis or Gorée, where they were chained, branded, and left—sometimes for months—in dark, dank, and infected prisons in which dysentery was rife, awaiting transportation. While the European nations slowly became aware of the infamy of their actions, certain African tribes, obviously encouraged by local white slave traders, were reluctant to forgo the profitable commerce.23
When Julien Schmaltz eventually took possession of Senegal from the English on January 25, 1817, he was instructed to rebuild forts, strengthen trading posts, and reestablish relations with local chieftains. He was to improve hygiene, combat disease, and spread Christianity. Slavery in the colony was to be terminated and blacks were to become hired labor, working to purchase their freedom. Schmaltz was, in short, supposed to transform what was little more than a commercial and military base into a tolerable settlement.
With severely depleted troops as a result of the shipwreck, and with disease devastating the camp on Cap Vert, Schmaltz set about reorganizing the remaining troops into two battalions, which, by mid-December, were strengthened by reinforcements arriving from France. He was then able to turn his attentions to costly and impractical projects for establishing plantations as well as to planning expeditions to explore and forge trading relations with the interior. But Schmaltz seemed to be curiously dilatory in carrying matters forward. It was not until the autumn of 1817 that an expedition, in which Brédif and Dechatalus were charged to assess the commercial interests of the natural resources around and about the Senegal River, was ready to depart. They made their way upriver until, after two months, they were forced to turn back because of Brédif’s deteriorating health. Arriving in Saint-Louis on December 29, the man who had kept an eyewitness account of his first voyage, shipwreck, and survival in the Sahara was dead in a matter of weeks.
Procrastination, bluff, and a certain dissipation of his energies seem to have compromised Schmaltz’s large plans and promises. A laxity was apparent in his sanctioning of the shameful plunder of the Medusa by the merchant ships of Saint-Louis, and once Senegal came back into French hands he unhesitatingly revealed his appetite for less arduous and more rapid ways to enrich himself and his colony.24
A series of letters from English observers to the directors of the African Institution in London leave us in little doubt that when Schmaltz took repossession of Senegal, “slave deals were waiting to be concluded as soon as the British quit the colony.” By June a Mr. Macauley writes that “the coast is crowded with slave ships.” In July, the slave trade was seen to be “raging dreadfully on the coast” and “Gorée is become quite an emporium.” Writing from Saint-Louis on November 8, 1817, an Englishman gives a clear picture of how radically things had changed in the first nine months of Schmaltz’s administration.
To give you an idea of the extent to which this traffic has been carried on, I need only mention that four French vessels have been loaded here, the cargoes averaging, by the best information I can obtain, about 100 slaves each; and there are two schooners now in the river waiting for their cargoes which they have contracted for.
Lamenting that war had broken out between the peoples of the interior who had been unscrupulously armed by the slave traders, the correspondent continues:
It must no doubt surprise you, as it does me, and the few English who remain in this settlement, that after the solemn manner in which the French Government engaged to Abolish the Trade, that it should be carried on here so openly without any interruption from the authorities.
In March 1818, the trade is seen to be “horribly increasing” and another correspondent noted that untold numbers of slaves are taken by Damiel, one of the most powerful kings in this part of Africa.
Damiel destroys his country, and for the purpose of selling for Rum and tobacco the last of his people, he has established a residence at Gandiol, nine miles down the river. What are the natives to think of the promise so repeatedly made by us, of the Slave Trade being abolished.
Arriving in London later that year, one of the correspondents reported that he had been spurned by Colonel Schmaltz. When he had confronted him on the subject of slavery, the French governor snapped that it was none of his business and said that “he would receive no information from him on the subject.” This eyewitness was convinced that the only time the administration interfered with the traders was when they were denied a portion of the profits.25
Coming under a good deal of pressure from the English during the winter and spring of 1818, the French pushed through an insufficient statute that punished a slave trader more leniently than a thief who had stolen a loaf of bread. The law, introduced by the minister of the navy, the comte Mole, provoked a thriving clandestine commerce and Molé’s successor, the baron Portal, a Bordeaux merchant and anglophobe, appeared indifferent to increases in the traffic. Such an attitude was hardly likely to placate abolitionists and liberals in France, particularly as appalled French residents and visitors to the colony wrote that Governor Julien Schmaltz was encouraging and participating in the renewed trade.26
During the wreck of the Medusa, Schmaltz exhibited scant regard for human life. It now seemed that rather than proceeding industriously to establish a genuine agricultural colony in Senegal, he appeared content to live off the ruin of the indigenous population. The Corsican priest Jean-Vincent Giudicelly, apostolic prefect to Senegal and Gorée, was well placed to observe the activities of the governor. Giudicelly was unequivocal in his condemnation of both Schmaltz and his deputy. On the first page of an 1820 pamphlet, he writes of “the execrable commerce in human flesh … conducted in Senegal and Gorée under the administrations of Schmaltz and Fleuriau.” After his arrival in the colony in 1816, and during Schmaltz’s “calamitous administration,” Giudicelly witnessed “hundreds of unfortunate blacks embarked.”27
Schmaltz was temporarily recalled to Paris in late 1817, arriving with his depressed wife, Reine, who had succumbed to a fifth attack of mania. In Paris, the governor defended himself against accusations that emanated from the English press. Schmaltz reassured the minister of his “good faith,” successfully whitewashing himself and deviously diverting blame onto Lieutenant Colonel Gavot, the commander of Gorée. Schmaltz secured more troops for the colony and steamboats to navigate the Senegal River. He also discussed plans to replace undisciplined soldiers, who were poorly adapted to the climate, with natives, slaves bought from their owners and press-ganged for a period of ten to twelve years as sappers and workmen.28
During Schmaltz’s absence from the colony, the interim governor, Aimé-Benjamin Fleuriau selectively seized and intercepted certain ships suspected of slaving, while allowing the trade to continue elsewhere. The Times published a list of five French ships that were loaded in Senegal between November 9, 1817, and March 19, 1818—ships from ports such as Nantes, Marseille, and Bordeaux, noting that as of mid-March some were back, anchored in the Senegal River, waiting along with two other ships to be reloaded.29
By the end of June 1818 a French patrol route had been set up in an attempt to intercept and arrest slavers but, perversely, the inconvenience of eluding capture made the trade more difficult and therefore even more profitable for those who escaped the authorities. What is more, interception didn’t lead to prevention as some ships carried two captains on board, and when one captain was arrested the other took over and the voyage continued.
When Schmaltz returned to Senegal, he pretended to make a stand against slavery by arraigning the owners and captain of the Scholastique who were guilty of carrying a secret cargo of twenty blacks.30 But this was mere public relations and the traffic, as Giudicelly recorded, was allowed to thrive.
In the streets of the colony, as in the surrounding countryside, all unknown or unprotected blacks were arrested, sold, and embarked …. What then is Monsieur Schmaltz doing, who claims there is no slave trade? He goes every morning to spend four hours in the captiverie of Potin, his accomplice, his consultant, his preferred …. I heard publicly from several slave traders their complaints against Schmaltz who has given Potin an exclusive monopoly of the trade.
Corruption was evidently rife and Giudicelly even coined a word for letters, ready for dispatch from the colony, being tampered with or censored: schmalisées, or “Schmaltzified.”31
There are reasons, perhaps, for questioning these reports about the extent and flagrancy of Schmaltz and Fleuriau’s involvement in the slave trade. Giudicelly was angry with both men over the question of arrears of pay, as well as costs of his passage back to France. His anger may have led him to exaggerate the faults of men “who can better manage their own interests than the affairs of the king.” Likewise, the British, who never doubted the desirability of Senegal, would not miss the opportunity to denounce or exaggerate a traffic that a good number of European governments had condemned as being “repugnant to the principles of humanity and universal morality.”32
However, we also have the testimony of another witness—the agricultural botanist, Joseph Morenas—who arrived in the colony in July 1818 as part of a team that would explore the River Senegal. Between his arrival and his departure in November 1819, Morenas confirmed many of Giudicelly’s observations, stating that “Saint-Louis continues to be a market where these unfortunate Africans are sold publicly.” He noted that blacks are loaded for America from Potin’s wharf, that the big traders such as the merchant Durécu go unpunished, and that Schmaltz and his aide-de-camp Gouraud are implicated in the trade. Morenas even claimed that a captiverie, or holding pen for slaves, was opened in the offices of the navy by Colbrant, a member of Schmaltz’s administrative team, and he provides a harrowing vision of the state of affairs in Senegal.
On 1 December, 1817, a mother arrived in Saint-Louis to free her ten year old son. His proprietor demanded eight and a half ounces of gold. The unfortunate woman had only six and promised to go and fetch some more. Even before leaving, she was captured in the streets of Saint-Louis. In her despair, she committed suicide by bashing her head against a wall. On 17 of the same month, the father, hoping to find justice under the flag of the King, came to Saint-Louis to ask about his son, his wife and his gold. The reply he received was to be clapped in irons. When they offered him food, he drove a nail into his heart, screaming, “God will avenge me in another world.”33
The government, needing to protect French commerce while at the same time wishing to appear receptive to persistent international pressure, was facing a dilemma. In 1819 the baron Mackau was dispatched by the minister of the navy to refute the English accusation that slavery was thriving on the West African coast and to discredit the slanders heaped on the French governor of Senegal. Mackau’s suppression of incriminating evidence and his contention that accusations over slavery were “odious calumnies” provoked Morenas to petition the government with an eyewitness account. He presented this “Petition Against the Slave Trade” before the chamber of deputies on June 14, 1820.
The fact that it did not quite create the stir that his fellow abolitionists expected—the minister skillfully dismissed it—did not deter men such as Giudicelly, Abbé Grégoire, and Lafayette from making themselves heard. Morenas had, in fact, penned the first French abolitionist petition and the text was published by Alexandre Corréard. During the summer of 1820, Corréard’s bookshop in the Palais Royal—its proprietor already condemned to prison—was used as the address at which readers could participate in the abolitionist debate.34
In the face of growing concern over legal abuses in the colony, which were supported by a swelling volume of evidence, Schmaltz was soon removed. He left Saint-Louis on August 31, 1820, his departure having been delayed by his wife succumbing to yet another attack of mania. Although the slave trade was far from terminated, Corréard had helped to hound the inhuman commander who had done him and thousands of others untold damage. The accounts written by Giudicelly in 1820 and Morenas in 1820 and 1821 drew attention to the cause. Increased weight was added to the abolitionist movement by that important speech to the two chambers made by Benjamin Constant in June 1821 and by a lengthy address to the chamber of peers by the duc de Broglie in March 1822. Several years later, Morenas produced his Short History of the Slave Trade, a text that benefited from his knowledge of the writings of the British abolitionists Thomas Clarkson and William Wilberforce. Nonetheless, five hundred-odd slave ships set sail from France or from French colonial ports between 1818 and 1831, when a more rigorous law against the trade was passed. This was followed, seventeen years later, by a decree abolishing slavery in all French possessions.35 During the years in which the transatlantic trade thrived, France transported fewer than half the number of slaves that England shipped, but it was in the last decades of that traffic that the pressure brought to bear by British abolitionists led to a rise in French consciousness. Slowly, a trade was suppressed that Morenas prophesied would “shock future generations,” a trade that had ripped the heart and soul out of the peaceful residents of Senegal.36
Théodore Géricault’s awareness of the international humanitarian liberal struggle had been stimulated by his close association with the circle of intellectuals, artists, and soldiers who congregated in the studio of his neighbor Horace Vernet and through his friendship with Alexandre Corréard. His Raft of the Medusa had appeared before the public as the abolitionist movement in France was just beginning to coalesce. In June 1819, Lafayette spoke out on the subject. In August of the same year, Benjamin Constant published a translation of The Thirteenth Report of the Directors of the African Institution in La Minerve, which revealed the true state of things in Senegal.37
As Géricault had distorted the facts of the raft by presenting bodies less wizened and worn and by effacing the overt signs of cannibalism, so he modified the truth to make his plea for blacks. The account published by Savigny and Corréard speaks of only one black survivor on the raft whereas Géricault includes three, two of whom are very much alive. Writing about The Raft of the Medusa in 1845, Charles Blanc observed of the black man signaling against the sky that he is
not in the bottom of the hold but the one who saves everybody. Isn’t it admirable how great adversity has, all at once, reestablished equality between the races? It’s a poor slave who rescues these spurned and enslaved men and it takes place on the same coast where we go to take his brothers and put them in captivity.38
Spurred on by the gaining momentum of French abolitionism, by his continuing friendship with Corréard, and by his now firmly established habit of responding to the topical issues of the day, Géricault embarked on the preparatory drawings for what would be a shocking image, intended to bring home to the public the inhumanity of a Senegalese slave market. Certainly, the way slavers split up families, carrying off children, tearing them from their mothers and their fathers, resonated deeply in the painter’s own psyche.39
Sadly, The Slave Trade never got beyond the planning stage; Géricault’s deteriorating health and finances took care of that. He had returned from his long English visit in a precarious condition; his sciatica remained uncured and he was suffering from an overwhelming weariness caused by the early phase of tuberculosis of the spine. This physical weakness was soon compounded by two riding accidents. The exact circumstances of the first of these vary in early accounts; Géricault was out riding, either alone or with Vernet, when his particularly feisty horse threw him head over heels and he came down on his back on either a stone or the knot of his belt. Whichever it was, the object pushed between two vertebrae, reactivating the infectious focus of the tuberculosis and provoking abscesses. Other accounts say that Géricault landed on his sciatic thigh, resulting in an abscess on his leg. Shortly afterward, when the painter was traveling by carriage, a horse bolted, leaving him stranded. Determined to finish his journey on horseback, which in his condition would prove extremely painful, the artist suggested lancing an abscess in order to make the journey less awkward. Fortunately, he was prevented by those who were with him. As if bent on self-destruction, shortly afterward he met with another accident that ended his days as a horseman. Galloping in the Champs-de-Mars, Géricault collided with another rider. The shock of the impact opened an abscess and confined him to his bed.40 Accident and illness prevented him from preparing anything for the Salon of 1822, but he visited the exhibition and was struck particularly by Delacroix’s debut, saying of the small, powerful Barque of Dante that it was a painting “I would like to sign.”
An unsuccessful campaign to purchase The Scene of a Shipwreck for the king’s own collection had been started shortly after the 1819 Salon by the sympathetic comte Forbin, director of museums. In 1822, Forbin renewed his efforts to persuade the government to purchase Géricault’s masterpiece for a sum of 6,000 francs. Forbin’s plan was to place it in one of the large galleries at Versailles, arguing that it was a work highly esteemed both by French artists and by the general public in England. Perfectly aware that the subject matter would continue to prove a stumbling block for the government, Forbin unsuccessfully presented the canvas as revealing “man struggling against a cruel death, … a homage to Providence, which aided these unfortunate people” rather than “a critique of the incompetence which abandoned them to danger.”41
By the beginning of 1823 Géricault’s tuberculosis was firmly established. The disease, which had started with a bacterial infection in the lungs, had spread to other parts of the body where it lay dormant until it slowly destroyed his spinal column. Géricault was visited by the king’s eminent physician Dupuytren, who diagnosed bone decay, and by another doctor, Laurent-Théodore Biett, who tended him regularly and, as a token of gratitude, was presented with a sketch for the Medusa. Géricault was not, at this stage, completely bedridden, but he was depressed by the delays surrounding the crown’s purchase of his masterpiece.
The painter’s melancholy and his delicate balance of health were not helped by the bankruptcy, in mid-August, of the stockbroker Félix Mussart, who fled Paris with about 78,000 francs of his clients’ money, leaving behind him enormous debts. Mussart had undertaken investments on the stock exchange for a circle of liberal friends including Géricault. Much of the painter’s considerable inheritance had been sacrificed to his expensive lifestyle, including the maintenance of several horses, as well as the purchase of the time in which to pursue his art. Left in dire straits after the added loss of the investment made by Mussart, Géricault, on the advice of his friends Colonel Bro and Dedreux-Dorcy, sold some work. The ailing painter was astonished that he raised 13,000 francs from the sale of small paintings, whereas the French government, when faced with a cost of 5,000 to 6,000 for The Raft of the Medusa, seemed unable to come to any conclusion about its purchase.42
During the last weeks of 1823, Géricault’s disease became agonizing. He was wasting away. On November 30 he made his will in favor of his father, Georges-Nicolas, who two days later made his own will in favor of Georges-Hippolyte, his unfortunate grandson, Géricault’s illegitimate child. At the end of December, Delacroix described in his journal a visit he had paid to Géricault a few days earlier.
He is dying; his emaciation is dreadful to see—thighs no thicker than my arms and a head like that of an ancient, dying man. I want him to live with all my heart but I dare not hope any longer …. To die in the midst of all this, which he has created in the full vigour and fire of his youth. And now, he cannot even turn in his bed without assistance!43
In the early weeks of the new year, Géricault was close to the end. He had sufficient strength to make a drawing of his left hand with its transparent skin revealing sinew and bone, some morbid curiosity seeming to motivate him as it had done in his studies of the amputated limbs during his work on his masterpiece. Indeed, he was so thin that he had taken on the haunting look of a raft survivor. He had reached the state, starved of life, in which he appears in a posthumous portrait painted by his friend Alexandre Corréard, the fiery Jacobin, whom he had first met in a studio littered with death.
On January 17-18, Géricault suffered the excruciating pain of surgery. To no avail. He asked the lawyer Champion de Villeneuve to act as an adviser to his distant son, and as he drew near to death he repeated over and over again the phrase, “Nothing replaces the love of a mother.” He may have been thinking of his own, supportive mother who had died before he was old enough to show her how truly he merited her encouragement, but most probably he was dwelling on the predicament of his son, estranged from his mother, Géricault’s own beloved, Alexandrine-Modeste Caruel.
In the early morning of Monday, January 26, Théodore Géricault died, aged exactly thirty-two years and four months. Delacroix was painting the baby searching for the mother’s breast in the Massacre of Chios when he heard the news the following morning: “I cannot get used to the idea. Although everyone must have known that we would inevitably lose him before long, I almost felt that we could conjure death away by refusing to accept the idea. But death would not relinquish its prey, and tomorrow the earth will hide what little remains of him.”44
The funeral took place at the chapel of Saint-Jean-Porte-Latine on January 28. The oration was delivered by the lawyer Jean-François Mocquard, the man who had unsuccessfully defended Corréard in his trials of 1820. Mocquard spoke of the indefatigable dedication of those close friends who had attended the painter during his illness, most of whom had gathered on that bleak midwinter day to mourn. One striking member of the congregation was the shipwrecked Turk Mustapha, whom Géricault had found wandering the streets of Paris and taken on as a domestic. The howling man stood a little apart and, according to the custom of his country, flung fistfuls of cinders at his head in a sign of grief. Among the other mourners were the baron Jean-Baptiste Caruel de St. Martin and his wife, Alexandrine-Modeste. She had most probably not laid eyes on her handsome and beloved protégé since the early days of her pregnancy. Their son, Georges-Hippolyte, would now be left alone in the world, aged five and a half, prohibited by all the pressure of propriety from meeting his mother, denied by fate from ever knowing his father, and not even carrying his name.