La Rochelle

La Rochelle is now a yachting port about half way down the west coast of France in the old province of Aunis and the modern département of the Charente Maritime. During the sixteenth century it became the greatest of the Huguenot fortified towns and defied a royal siege in 1572. Huguenots and foreign Protestant merchants were attracted by its remoteness from Paris, whence came persecution, there being no big river leading inland like the Garonne for Bordeaux, the Seine for Rouen, and the Adour for Bayonne; and it was then surrounded by swamps. With several satellite ports, notably fishing centers such as Marennes and La Tremblade on the Arvert Peninsula, others on the Charente River some 30 miles south, and on the Sèvre-Niortaise River a few miles north, La Rochelle built up a great trade with ports in Protestant Holland and England, the Caribbean colonies, the Baltic Sea, and the Newfoundland fisheries. Dutch and English merchants intermarried with local Huguenot families to form cosmopolitan Protestant communities that traded with others around the Atlantic and the North Sea. These communities grew larger with every wave of emigration to escape from persecution.

In 1552, when La Rochelle had about 20,000 inhabitants, its Huguenot forces seized control of it in an insurrection, but remained loyal to the royal government. During the civil war in 1568 the town defended itself against Catholic forces and four years later survived a siege by royal armies, which marked it as a rebellious Huguenot stronghold. It was to remain the strongest of Huguenot fortified towns until October 1628, when it surrendered after another long siege by royal forces that, in 1620, had launched campaigns against the Huguenots in southwestern France. Louis XIII (1601–1643) and Cardinal Richelieu (1585–1642) made it the headquarters of their new Company of New France (Compagnie des Cents Associés), a missionary agency to which they awarded a monopoly of trade with Canada in order to pay for missionary work. Until the conquest of Canada in 1759, more ships sailed to Quebec and Acadia from La Rochelle than from any other port, except during wars at sea when the bigger port of Bordeaux eclipsed La Rochelle in the Canada trade.

Beginning with the "sugar revolution" of the 1640s, La Rochelle developed a brisk trade with Martinique and Saint-Domingue in sugar and slaves. It had always traded in the brandy and cheap white wines of Saintonge, and the paper produced by Dutch immigrants in Angoumois, and from 1665 it was the mainstay of the new naval base at Rochefort on the Charente River, supplying the navy and helping to finance it. Rochefort was assigned to the naval care of New France, and so these twin ports, with their smaller satellite ports, became the French center of shipping to and from North American colonies. As one of the great ports of medieval and early modern France, La Rochelle was granted its own Royal Academy of Belles-Lettres in 1734.

Over the two centuries after France lost Acadia and Newfoundland in 1715 and Canada in 1759, the Rochelais turned to fishing, Great Britain having allowed French ships to fish for cod on the Newfoundland banks from the islands of Saint Pierre and Miquelon. La Rochelle's ancient harbor was too small any longer for ocean-going freight, but trade went on out of La Pallice, almost a suburb, the only big ocean port directly on the Atlantic between Brest and Lisbon. In the 1980s Spanish fishermen took over the fisheries and La Rochelle languished until it built a large yachting basin at Les Minimes nearby.

SEE ALSO Agriculture; Bordeaux; Canada; Cargoes, Freight; Cargoes, Passenger; Chambers of Commerce; Containerization; Empire, French; France; Free Ports; Harbors;Marseilles;Nantes;Paris;Port Cities.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Bosher, J. F. Business and Religion in the Age of New France: Twenty-Two Studies. Toronto: Canadian Scholars' Press, 1994.

Faust, Katherine Louise. "A Beleagured Society: Protestant Families in La Rochelle, 1628–1685." Ph.D. diss. Northwestern University, 1980.

Parker, David. La Rochelle and the French Monarchy: Conflict and Order in Seventeenth-Century France. London: Royal Historical Society, 1980.

Robbins, Kevin C. City on the Ocean Sea: La Rochelle, 1530–1650, Urban Society, Religion, and Politics on the French Atlantic Frontier. Leiden, Netherlands: E. J. Brill, 1997.

J. F. Bosher