André Breton, the twentieth-century French writer and principal founder of surrealism, wrote in his novel Nadja that Nantes was “perhaps, with Paris, the only city in France where I have the impression that something worthwhile might happen to me . . . where a spirit of adventure beyond all adventures still lives on.” This ancient city, lying on the Loire River near the Atlantic coast, was also the childhood home of Jules Verne, whose splendid accounts of fantastical voyages found their inspiration in this bustling port. Today, Nantes exploits this sense of surreal adventure with an annual avant-garde arts festival and a hangar full of gorgeous steampunk contraptions (including a giant mechanical elephant that you can ride around on and a towering carousel of Verne-inspired creatures).
But there is a dark side to the adventurous spirit that has made Nantes one of the most prosperous and genteel cities in France since the late seventeenth century, one that is unwittingly preserved in some of the city’s most loved food products, such as the multicolored candies known as berlingots nantais—and especially the rum-soaked vanilla cake called gâteau nantais. The city’s prosperity and its dedication to sweet delicacies are a legacy of its participation in the transatlantic slave trade, which brought enormous amounts of sugar through its port for several hundred years. It is a past that has recently been acknowledged more openly in Nantes, with the city organizing several major museum exhibitions since the mid-1990s and constructing a riverside memorial in 2012. But the tragic nature of the sugar trade remains a mostly hidden strand of history to tourists and residents alike.
The giant grass known as sugarcane was gradually transplanted westward from its ancestral homeland in Southeast Asia by more than a thousand years of trade and conquest. The ancient Assyrians and Persians established a robust sugar industry in the Middle East, which was further expanded by the Arabs when they wrested control of the region in the early medieval era. (The English word candy derives from the Arabic qandi, or crystallized sugar.) By the time of the Crusades, the Middle East hosted a vast number of sugar farms and refineries, and rising powers such as Venice soon made their fortune in the sugar trade. Sugar remained a very expensive product, and as we have seen, only the wealthy classes of Europe could afford it (which only fueled elite demand).
But the rise of the Ottoman Empire in the fifteenth century gradually shut down Europe’s sugar supply from the Middle East. Efforts were made to grow sugarcane in the hottest locales of southern Europe, such as Sicily and Spain, but these areas were too small to supply the European market. Colonization, however, opened up vast new lands for cultivation, and the Spanish and Portuguese rapidly established sugarcane plantations and refineries in the Canary Islands, Madeira, Brazil, and the West Indies. Sugar flooded the European market, and as early as 1600 it began to be more accessible to the general population—just in time to sweeten the new colonial drinks of chocolate, coffee, and tea. This, in turn, increased demand further, spurring ever more colonial production.
France was a latecomer to the sugar trade, after it established colonies in the Caribbean in the seventeenth century: Guadeloupe and Martinique in 1635, and Saint-Domingue (modern-day Haiti) in 1664. These islands offered ideal conditions for growing sugarcane, but harvesting and processing the cane was an extremely arduous and labor-intensive process. It proved too difficult and expensive to import Frenchmen to do the work, and the native population was rapidly dying or debilitated by new European diseases. The French turned to the same solution as other European colonial powers: the African slave trade, which had been developing since the earliest attempts to grow sugarcane in southern Europe.
In this diabolical trade pattern, ships set out from European ports with goods such as weapons, alcohol, and textiles. Once they arrived in slave ports in West Africa, or farther south in Angola, they exchanged these goods with local slave traders and filled their ships with several hundred enslaved Africans. Chained and packed into inhumane conditions and ravaged by disease, one out of every ten people usually did not survive the months at sea. Those who did were sold to plantation farmers when they reached the Americas, destined to a brutal life of often backbreaking labor. Slave traders were usually paid in sugar, coffee, or other commodities instead of currency. They then sailed back to their home ports in Europe to sell their cargo. Over the course of nearly four centuries, more than 12.5 million slaves were brought to the Americas, nearly 1.4 million of them by French traders.1
While sugar and coffee remained the primary imports from the Caribbean, French-bound ships also began to carry stocks of rhum, or rum, from the West Indies. Europeans ensconced in the “sugar islands,” longing for some kind of alcoholic libation to soften the ugly reality of colonial life, invented rum by applying new distillation techniques to molasses (the syrupy by-product of sugarcane processing). French and English styles of rum emerged with distinct tastes, as the French borrowed distillation methods from cognac production, which were a bit different from English methods for distilling scotch. Rum became increasingly popular in the eighteenth century and proved a valuable side business for French sugar plantations.
As the slave trade expanded in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the merchants of Nantes enthusiastically participated, and eventually Nantes became the most important slave port in France. While nearly twenty French cities participated in the trade, including La Rochelle, Le Havre, and Bordeaux, roughly 45 percent of the total French slave trade was conducted through Nantes. More than fourteen hundred slave expeditions left the city, bringing more than five hundred thousand Africans to the Americas.2 These figures were dwarfed by the Portuguese and the English, the dominant sea powers and slave traders of the time (Liverpool, for example, organized more slave expeditions than all the French seaports put together), but it still sufficed to make Nantes a newly wealthy town. Many of the elegant white stone mansion blocks gracing the finest streets of Nantes were built with the proceeds of this barbaric trade.
At its height in the eighteenth century, Nantes was importing 40 million to 60 million pounds of sugar each year, more than any other French port.3 Much of it required further refining before being sold, and so sugar refineries sprung up all along the Loire Valley from Nantes to Orléans. From here, sugar could easily be transported to Paris, the largest domestic market, or to export markets abroad. This central role in the French sugar industry may help explain the sweet nature of many of Nantes’s most notable food products, and why the city eventually became a center of industrial food production. And it certainly accounts for the early nineteenth-century creation of gâteau nantais, whose unique and delicious flavor depended upon sugar, vanilla, and the famous rum of the West Indies. It remains a popular local delicacy, its provenance usually tied somewhat obliquely to colonial imports rather than to the slave trade specifically.
While Nantes is now belatedly trying to recognize its bitter past, the slave merchants at the time did not worry about trying to find moral justifications for their participation in the trade. To them, it was just a trade like any other; slaves were perceived less as people and more as private property to be bought and sold. Indeed, the French population as a whole in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries was not overly troubled by slavery. By the late 1700s, the sugar trade accounted for about one-sixth of French export income, creating powerful economic incentives for sustaining the industry. The colony on Saint-Domingue alone produced 40 percent of the world’s sugar and nearly half its coffee, and its plantations were utterly dependent on slave labor.
But in the eighteenth century, voices began to be heard condemning the slave trade. In Candide, written by Voltaire in 1759, a slave who has lost a hand and a leg explains: “When we work at the sugarcanes, and the mill snatches hold of a finger, they cut off the hand; and when we attempt to run away, they cut off the leg. Both cases have happened to me. This is the price at which you eat sugar in Europe.”4 Other famous Enlightenment writers and thinkers such as Montesquieu criticized the trade, although he (like the English philosopher John Locke) objected mainly to slavery within his homeland, not the colonies, and he even profited from personal investments in the slave trade.
Then came the French Revolution. Thanks to pressure from slave merchants and colonial plantation owners, the grand ideas of liberty, equality, and brotherhood were not initially extended to slaves in the French colonies. But an abolitionist movement started to gather steam, as clubs like the Société des Amis des Noirs (Society of the Friends of the Blacks) petitioned the revolutionary assemblies and distributed antislavery literature to try to sway public opinion. The revolutionary regime became more radical and less subservient to the propertied classes, especially the planters in the Caribbean, many of whom supported the overthrown monarchy. When war with Britain broke out in 1793, these royalist planters actually aligned with the British, who wanted to expel the revolutionaries in Paris, restore the French monarchy, and maintain slavery in the colonies. British forces occupied the four most important French islands in the Caribbean, including Saint-Domingue, and the transatlantic slave trade shuddered to a halt due to the war. All of this created a new set of political and strategic incentives for emancipating French slaves, and in 1794, the National Assembly voted to end slavery in the colonies. A French expeditionary force landed in Guadeloupe and freed its slave population, and the British were expelled by the end of the year. The French then fomented a series of slave revolts in the British colonial territories.
In Saint-Domingue, Toussaint-Louverture, one of the leaders of a slave rebellion that had been simmering for several years, now aligned himself with the French revolutionary regime. After six years of war, factional infighting, and diplomatic negotiation, he wrested control of the entire island of Hispaniola from his political rivals and British occupiers. The increasingly autonomous colony proclaimed him governor in 1801. But when Napoleon came to power, he was determined to regain control of Saint-Domingue, the most important and most profitable French colony, and restore slavery. A vicious war ensued, during which Toussaint-Louverture was captured and imprisoned (he died in the imposing Fort de Joux, in the Jura Mountains of eastern France, in 1803). The French committed horrific atrocities in trying to repress the rebellion, but they also suffered enormous casualties themselves and were finally defeated in the decisive Battle of Vertières in November 1803. The independent nation of Haiti was declared on January 1, 1804, after the most successful slave rebellion in history.
Napoleon reintroduced slavery in the rest of the French colonial domain, and it was only formally abolished in 1848, with the establishment of the French Second Republic. By that time, most of the sugar on French tables actually no longer derived from sugarcane but from sugar beets. European agronomists had long attempted to develop cheaper, homegrown sources of sugar from various fruits and plants; as early as 1575, Olivier de Serres had discovered the high sugar content of beets. Extraction processes remained elusive, but the maritime blockades of the Napoleonic Wars, which cut off transatlantic trade, proved an effective spur to research. In 1811, a French banker and factory owner named Benjamin Delessert perfected an industrial method for obtaining beet sugar, for which he was made a baron by a grateful Napoleon.5 France became the largest producer of beet sugar in Europe, and today most of the sugar consumed in France is in fact beet sugar, not cane sugar.
As the food writer Maguelonne Toussaint-Samat once wrote, “So many tears were shed for sugar that by rights it ought to have lost its sweetness.”6 Nantes’s attempts to acknowledge this painful history are to be commended, but they have also come under criticism from two opposing quarters: from nationalist-minded French people who object to any manifestations of regret for French colonial practices and from activist groups who argue that remembrance without justice is ultimately hollow. Of course, no one is saying that you should avoid products of the sugar trade like the gâteau nantais, which at the end of the day is merely a delicious local cake. But the question of how to acknowledge the sometimes bitter roots of French gastronomy endures, with no consensus in sight.