France and Africa, 1500–1700

This article examines the history of French expansion to Africa in the Renaissance, which created a particular network of commercial, cultural, and epistemic relationships. Although Africa figured as a continent in Renaissance France that was well known from ancient sources, such as Ptolemy and Aristotle, it simultaneously appeared to early modern travel accounts as an enigmatic terra incognita. It was, however, neither a “New World” nor a tabula rasa prepared for conquest. From 1500 on, Africa exerted a fascination in French culture that combined mercantile interest in profits and a certain exotic imaginary of its people, geography, and material culture. And French culture influenced Africans as well, letting them adapt to certain cultural practices of diplomacy and civility that could serve French observers as a mirror of themselves. In the heyday of French imperialism in Africa during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, this history promoted the creation of various legends about early French voyages to Africa, but the history of these voyages remains obscure. The first records of French voyages to Africa exist for the late fifteenth century. During the reign of Francis I (1515–17), French corsairs from Dieppe, operating under a letter of marque, attacked Portuguese ships at sea and opened trading routes to Africa. In addition to Dieppe, French traders with Africa came from other port cities, such as Rouen, Saint-Malo, La Rochelle, and Nantes. From the 1540s to 1558, Rouen sent up to five vessels a year to Senegambia and Guinea. In this exchange, Africans figured as equal partners with French traders. New navigational knowledge contributed to the accurate maps produced by the Dieppe School of cartography, which featured West Africa, Brazil, and Canada richly illustrated, thus denoting the territories of interests for French colonization in the Atlantic. The French Wars of Religion in the second half of the sixteenth century halted colonial ambitions of the French crown. Only after 1620 did French colonial ambition in Africa receive attention by state officials, such as Cardinal Richelieu, who privileged the first trading companies with concessions along the African coast. French merchants exchanged goods, such as brass kettles and pots, iron, glass beads, gunpowder, muskets, and Indian cloth for African products like malaguetta pepper, gold dust, ambergris, ivory, ostrich feathers, and gum arabic. By 1638, the French had established a permanent trading emporium, named Saint-Louis, on an island at the mouth of the Senegal River. Richelieu’s concessions of privileges operated according to a feudal-seigneurial system, in which private landlords received royal privileges to manage and profit from trade. Louis XIV and his finance minister, Jean-Baptiste Colbert, started a process of royalisation of the formerly private and semi-feudal system. Africa stood at the center of Colbert’s geopolitical plan to establish the French economy as the most powerful in the world. The emerging Atlantic slave trade and the system of plantation economy, relying on African labor, incentivized the state to participate in the profits made by the overseas commerce. Previously private concessions were integrated into new royally chartered trading companies, modeled after the Dutch East India Company, such as the Compagnie du Sénégal, established in 1673 and the Compagnie de Guinée established in 1684. They were part of the French Atlantic system that combined sugar plantations in the Caribbean, the production of trading goods in French port cities, and the African slave trade. Colbert also pursued diplomatic relations with African rulers. One such attempt involved bringing an African prince, Aniaba of Assini, to Versailles, where he spent fourteen years as a courtier before returning to his country in 1701. Ultimately the attempt to establish French-styled kings, such as Aniaba, on African thrones failed. In Africa, French traders were mostly regarded as having interests not too different from those of other European nations. African merchants had, however, a very good understanding of the small differences in habits and commercial dealings that distinguished the French from those of their neighbors. French traders were impressed by the ability of some Africans to deal with them in French, and they prided themselves on the Africans’ recognition of the courtly behavior they exhibited before African rulers as being a particularly French characteristic. With the growth of the slave trade in late seventeenth century, the tide in Franco-African relations turned. Africa and Africans lost the economic and cultural initiative in framing and forming relationships with France. After 1700, Franco-African relations deteriorated, while Africans were more and more trivialized and victimized by a French literary discourse. The intensification of the slave trade lowered the standing of Africans as a whole in the eyes of Europeans.

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