Charente-Maritime

 

It is fitting that the notarial minutes of La Rochelle – which were Gabriel Debien’s principal source for one of the greatest works of overseas history of the 20th century, Les engagés pour les Antilles (1634-1715), initially published, in part, in Cairo in 1942 – should now be among those which are most profusely available online.

La Rochelle was a major Atlantic port throughout the seventeenth- and eighteenth- centuries, an important administrative centre for the French navy, and a centre of the French slave trade, with some 484 slaving voyages leaving from the port between 1679 and 1792. It was a busy commercial scene, as depicted in 1762 in Joseph Vernet’s Vue du port de La Rochelle. So the remarkable project of digitization undertaken by the Archives Départementales of the Charente-Maritime is a potentially exceptional sources for multiple different histories of economic life.

There are eight notarial études for whom the minutes or acts are available, two from Rochefort, one from Jonzac, and five from La Rochelle. At this point, online, there is the vertiginous feeling of where to start. (Requesting a liasse in the reading room of the archives, and staring at it, is vertiginous in a different way.) I decided to look for a particular individual, a slave ship captain called Michel Delage who died in 1773, and I started with the étude of Guillaume Delavergne, whose records are available online from 1746 to 1782. Delage appears, fleetingly, in An Infinite History. When “Jean L’Accajou,” “a native of Africa,” “aged fifteen,” was baptized in Angoulême in 1775 – one of the signatories of the record of his baptism was also a signatory of the marriage contract that is at the centre of the book -- he was described as having “arrived in France on the ship La Cicogne, Captain Delage, or so it appears, and declared at the admiralty in La Rochelle” in 1773.

Captain Delage was not there in the Delavergne acts. But there were many other Delages to be found, according to the irresistible instrument de recherche. I was distracted, in particular, by an intricate case involving an extended family of Delages from La Rochelle, La Rochefoucauld, and Angoulême, over more than thirty years, that turned on the sale of two houses in Angoulême that had belonged to two Protestant women, or réligionnaires fugitifs. The act began, in an exemplary sort of way, with an accounting of the expenses incurred over the past nine years by one of the five co-heirs: the costs of eight huissiers, the charges of the lawyer in Angoulême who negotiated with the régisseur of Protestant property, the notary’s own fees, and twenty bottles and twenty-four half-bottles of Malaga wine, together with packaging and carriage, “sent as a present” to the secretary of the intendant of the generality, in Limoges.

There are 500 references to the Antilles in the instrument de recherche for the Delavergne practice, and it is in respect of the vast, still very little known history of French overseas exchanges that these acts are of most interest. The case that I came upon, and that I will find difficult not to pursue, was from 1755. The comparante, in an act dated 17 April 1755, was a woman called Marie Anne, who was aged “around 23,” and whom the notaries described as a mulâtresse, a native of Nippes (in the southwest of Saint-Domingue, the modern Haiti.) She was living at the time in the convent of the Ursulines. About fourteen years earlier, she recounted, her natural father had brought her to France, and placed her in the care of a woman in La Rochelle, in order to “give her an education, which task she acquitted perfectly.” But her teacher died, and Marie Anne was sent to live in the convent, as a paying guest. The arrangements were made by a local merchant, André Bernon, who said that he was acting on the instructions of the heirs of her father, who had himself died some years earlier.

Marie Anne’s father, she recounted, “had given her her liberty, with a sum of money, as was stated and justified in an act in the proper form that the said Sr. Bernon had in his hands, and that in the absence of this she was threatened on a daily basis, for no valid subject or reason, with being sent back to Saint-Domingue to be returned to captivity.” “Since it is in her interest to be assured of her destiny,” Marie Anne stated, she was asking the notaries to recover on her behalf “the act which contains her freedom.”

The following day, 18 April 1755, the notaries visited M. Bernon at his home in La Rochelle. It did not go well. In the notaries’ summary, he said that “he is in no respect the holder of an act which proves that the said Marie Anne is in a condition of freedom, that he does not even have any knowledge of it, and that he does not know whether the late Sr. Regnier, her natural father, gave it to her as she alleges, but that he knows perfectly well that Sr Regnier fils is kindly diposed towards her, that it is on his instructions that her pension is paid, and that it is possible that he will grant her her freedom if she behaves in a manner which is satisfactory to him, that this is his entire response, which he refused to sign even though he was charged and required to do so.”

Two months later, there was a surprising sequel. Marie Anne, who now signed her name “Marianne Regnier,” was again the comparante, on 16 June 1755. She declared that she had been “emancipated by virtue of royal letters.” She was proceeding “under the authority” of a lawyer in the royal courts of the district, Claude Etienne Petit de Beaupoivre, who authorised her to state that she had been informed that the late “Jacques Joseph Regnier,” her father, had left a will in which he provided for her subsistence and maintenance by means of the legacy of a “fairly substantial sum.” The will had been sent by Sr. Regnier fils, together with the legacy, “or part of it,” to M. André Bernon, in order that it should be passed on to her. This had not happened, and M. Bernon had done no more than to pay for her lodging in the convent of the Ursulines. But Marie Anne Regnier now, “by virtue of her emancipation,” had the “right to enjoy her property, and the authority to undertake a search for it.” She therefore requested the notaries to go the residence of M. Bernon, and to require “immediately, in her name, that he remit to her, within no more than three days, the will of her father or any other act containing the legacy he had given her.” In case of refusal, he was to be pursued by law, and condemned.

The notaries proceeded to M. Bernon’s house later that day, and his response was no more satisfactory. “He did not have the will in question,” he said, and “he did not know if there had even been one.” He had “no funds belonging to” the complainant, and he again “refused to sign his response.”

This is where the story ends, in the minutes of the notary Delavergne. To find out what happened next, the historical inquiry into the life and times of Marianne Regnier will have to move to other sources. But it is possible to know more.