India in the French Imagination

Peripheral Voices, 1754-1815

Kate Marsh

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN: 9781851969944
• eBook ISBN: 9781317313830
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Indian & South Asian History
• Index: History

Examines metropolitan French-language representations of India from the period between the recall of Dupleix to France to the Second Treaty of Paris. This book explores what a European power, territorially peripheral in India, thought of both India and the administrative rule there of its rival, Britain.

1 THE FRENCH PRESENCE IN INDIA BETWEEN 1754 AND 1815: FROM THE ‘BEAUX JOURS DU GOUVERNEMENT DE DUPLEIX’ TO ANNIHILATION?

On 2 August 1754, when Dupleix handed command of the French territories in India to his successor, Charles Godeheu, French influence over Indian affairs was at its apogee. The chef-lieu, Pondichéry, had been expanded to form a settlement of several dozen kilometres in width; Karikal had been enlarged; in the province of Mazulipatam over one hundred and twenty kilometres of land had been obtained.¹ This was what historians writing under the Third Republic would describe, in all earnestness, as ‘Dupleix’s empire’; but whatever grandeur it had was to be short-lived.² By 1761 all of the French territories had been invaded by British East India Company forces, and the five trading posts had capitulated. The total area of the five French établissements or comptoirs (establishments or trading posts) returned to France under the terms of the Treaty of Paris (1763) measured about 56,000 hectares in total and remained this size until France formally ceded control in 1962.³ Politically and geographically circumscribed, French influence in India was marginal in comparison with that of the British and lacked the territorial unity of the Portuguese enclave of Goa. Even before the settlement of 1763, India was a region of the world not considered vital to the French national destiny.⁴ Nevertheless, French interests on the subcontinent remained. Between 1754 and 1815, France’s relationship with India was conditioned by three factors: trade links, ongoing control of the comptoirs and European colonial rivalry.

In common with its European competitors (the English, the Portuguese, the Dutch, the Danes and the Swedes), France’s encounter with India began through trade.⁵ La Compagnie des Indes was created under the auspices of Jean-Baptiste Colbert in 1664, sixty-four years after the foundation of the English East India Company; Colbert expressed the desire ‘procurer au royaume l’utilité du commerce [d’Asie] et empêcher que les Anglais et les Hollandais n’en profitassent seuls comme ils avaient fait jusqu’alors’ (to procure for the kingdom the advantages of Asian commerce and to prevent the English and the Dutch alone from profiting from it as they have up to now).⁶ Following its English and Dutch exemplars, the Compagnie had a national monopoly on trade relations between the state and Indian clients, the right to maintain an army and negotiate treaties, and the authority to mint money and exercise justice.⁷ The Compagnie, however, rapidly encountered financial difficulties. Colbert’s demand that it create a colony in Madagascar (to rival the Dutch settlement and exploitation of Java) necessitated the recruitment of pioneers and their installation. When this failed, chiefly due to the hostility of the inhabitants of the island, more expense was incurred with the creation of an establishment on the uninhabited Ile Bourbon (later the Ile Bonaparte and finally renamed Réunion). Unable to provide its shareholders with any profit after 1680, the Compagnie ceded its monopoly to a group of merchants from Saint-Malo, under whose direction the East India trade became successful. After the War of the Spanish Succession, the profits of the group attracted the attention of the government, anxious to pay off its wartime debts. The chief finance minister, John Law, proposed the creation of a new Compagnie perpétuelle des Indes that would link together trade in the Atlantic and in Asia; it would be supported by a state bank, and its profits could be used to regulate state debt. Created in 1719, this new company had its problems. Law’s système was precarious, relying on the multiplication of bank notes and thus generating extensive speculation. Anxious to regulate the situation, the government closed the bank, reduced the monetary mass and limited the number of shares to 56,000. To offset shareholders’ dissatisfaction, the Compagnie was given the right to farm tobacco, ensuring a dividend for shareholders whatever the financial health of the Compagnie itself.⁸

Trade with India was essentially based on the importation of luxuries. Haudrère, France’s leading economic historian of the Compagnie, estimates that textiles (white and blue cotton fabric, Guinea cloth, muslin, Bengal silks and painted fabric known as indiennes) accounted for approximately half of all imported goods, with the remainder comprising spices, incense, coffee, tea, indigo, diamonds, opium, saltpetre and other commodities.⁹ From the outset, the French East India trade was only intermittently as successful as that of France’s competitors the English and the Dutch, and tended to run at a deficit which was regulated by the exportation of precious metals to India. The économiste Ambroise-Marie Arnould, writing in 1791, described this system, whereby French coins or gold ingots were exported to India in order to purchase luxurious items for importation, as monstrous, estimating that over the preceding century, billions had flowed into the ‘gouffre d’Asie’ (Asian abyss).¹⁰ The exportation of precious metals linked East Indian trade with the West Indies and the slave plantations on Saint-Domingue: piastres were imported to France from la traite in the West Indies and then exported to India and exchanged for cotton and calicoes.¹¹ Of this network, the sugar islands in the West Indies were the most profitable, with Saint-Domingue regarded as the axis of the French colonial system, while India never played more than a negligible role.¹²

The success of the Indian trade was further hampered by restrictions imposed on imported cloth from India. The first prohibitive order placed on the sale of Indian goods was issued in 1688, as owners of the burgeoning French textile industry attempted to protect their wares.¹³ Despite the increasing vogue for indiennes, the entry of such fabric into France was strictly forbidden until 1759, although the growing number of prosecutions for flouting the law suggests the inefficacy of this protectionist measure.¹⁴ Sales of Indian goods increased, peaking between 1740 and 1755 to rival those of the British East India Company during the Austrian War of Succession; but, following the Seven Years War, commerce with Bengal and the Coromandel coast steadily declined. Troubled by mounting debts, the Compagnie rapidly deteriorated.¹⁵ Voltaire, himself a shareholder, assessed the impact of the Seven Years War in his Précis du siècle de Louis XV (1763), concluding that the cost of trade with India had always far outweighed its returns:

Enfin il n’est resté aux Français, dans cette partie du monde, que le regret d’avoir dépensé, pendant plus de quarante ans, des sommes immenses pour entretenir une Compagnie qui n’a jamais fait le moindre profit, qui n’a jamais rien payé aux actionnaires et à ses créanciers du profit de son négoce; qui, dans son administration indienne n’a subsisté que d’un secret brigandage, et qui n’a été soutenue que par une partie de la ferme du tabac que le roi lui accordait: exemple mémorable et peut-être inutile du peu d’intelligence que la nation française a eu jusqu’ici du grand et ruineux commerce de l’Inde.

(Finally there remained with the French, in this part of the world, only the regret that they had spent, over the course of more than forty years, immense sums of money in the upkeep of a Company which never provided the least profit, which never paid anything from its trade profits to its shareholders and its creditors, which in its Indian administration survived only by means of secret brigandry, and which has been upheld only by the share of the farming of tobacco accorded to it by the king: a memorable and perhaps useless example of the lack of intelligence which the French nation has had up to now in the grand ruinous trade with India.)¹⁶

In the years preceding the liquidation of the Compagnie, there was a proliferation of mémoires written to the Minister of the Marine emphasizing the detriment of the India trade to the French economy.¹⁷ Between 1725 and 1769 the Compagnie lost a total capital of 169 million livres and, while shareholders continued to receive a dividend from the farming of tobacco, the income from trade with India after 1763 failed to support either the costs of importation or the expenses of the Indian establishments.¹⁸ The decision by the Government to suspend the privileges of the Compagnie on 13 August 1769 was partly a political one. Despite the debts accrued over the Seven Years War, a conflict which was disastrous for the Compagnie, sales began to rise again between 1765 and 1768; but Étienne-François Choiseul, the French foreign minister, influenced by the économistes, favoured commercial freedom over the continuation of a monopoly and asserted that administrative costs were detrimental to the financial health of the Compagnie.¹⁹ The privileges of the Compagnie were abolished by edict on 7 August 1770,²⁰ inaugurating a new commercial system run by private importers. Although trade with India over the life of the successive French East India companies had been beset with problems, certain commodities had become established within French society and company trade still had vocal supporters at Court and in Paris.²¹ Accordingly, a new Compagnie des Indes was established in 1785. Trade temporarily prospered as the Compagnie made use of the Masacrene islands as an entrepôt for Indian goods, allowing merchants to benefit from a voyage time of only five months (rather than the seven or eight it took to reach the subcontinent). The new Compagnie enjoyed a monopoly on Indian trade until March 1790, when it was abolished by the Assemblée constituante. Subsequently, individual merchants began to flourish, particularly in Bordeaux and Marseille, and the commercial centre of the Indian trade moved south from the Breton ports of Lorient and Saint-Malo, and the Loire port of Nantes.²²

While the commercial imperative was the primary motivating factor behind the French encounter with India, French political influence on the subcontinent was largely determined by the extent of territory controlled. An essential part of trade with India was the acquisition of ‘concessions’: land containing warehouses and shops where the Compagnie could store cargo and stock ships on arrival. Mogul law allowed foreign communities administrative and judicial autonomy (for a high price) and Europeans accepted their part in a ‘suzerain-vassal system’ for the commercial advantages which it afforded them.²³ The first French settlement was at Surat in 1666, but significant French gains in Indian territory did not occur until 1673, when Bellanger d’Espinay obtained from Chircam-Loudy, governor of the province, the right to establish a settlement at Pondichéry on the Coromandel coast. This was followed by the creation of comptoirs at Chandernagor in Bengal (1688), Mahé on the Malabar coast (1721), and Yanaon (1731) and Karikal (1739), both on the Coromandel coast. Following the Treaty of Ryswick (1697), which saw Pondichéry returned to the French following its capture by the Dutch fleet in 1693, the Compagnie decided to make Pondichéry the chef-lieu of all French territory in India. Work began on the construction of a fortress in 1702 and under François Martin’s supervision Pondichéry developed ‘an air of prosperity which it was impossible to mistake’.²⁴

The intention of the Compagnie in acquiring concessions and founding French establishments was exclusively commercial: to make a profit. Territorial expansion for its own sake was avoided, a policy which was consistently espoused by the representatives of the Compagnie.²⁵ As Jacques-François Law de Lauriston wrote to the Minister for the Marine in 1777:

je conseillerai de faire entendre qu’on veut s’en tenir là; que l’intention des Français, en armant pour l’Inde, n’a jamais été que de se procurer les moyens de faire leur commerce sur un pied égal avec la nation européenne la plus favorisée par les puissances à qui les Indes appartiennent.

(I would advise that it be made understood that we want to leave it there; that the intention of the French, in arming for India, has only ever been to procure the means by which to carry out trade on an equal footing with the European nation most favoured by the powers to whom India belongs.)²⁶

The recall of Dupleix in 1754 demonstrates the lengths to which the Compagnie was willing to go in order to abide by this policy. Under Dupleix’s governorship of Pondichéry (1742–54), the town had increased dramatically in size and, thanks to Dupleix’s politicking, so had its influence. In addition to territorial gains, whereby land was given personally to either Dupleix or Charles-Joseph Patissier, marquis de Bussy and then ceded immediately to the Compagnie, Dupleix had accrued considerable political rights. The patent of nabob was granted to his predecessor, Pierre-Benoît Dumas, in 1741, in exchange for protection offered to the mother of the nabob of Trichinopoly; Dupleix became the first European to hold this title in May 1742. After his and Bussy’s role in installing and maintaining Salabet Jang as the subahdar (governor) of the Deccan, a fait accompli which the Grand Mogul endorsed in mid-July 1751, Dupleix began to establish a nascent French protectorate over the vast subah (province) and its annexes.²⁷ The Compagnie’s decision to recall Dupleix to France was couched in the language of commercial stability: Dupleix’s expansionist actions had forced the Compagnie into ‘une guerre onéreuse depuis longtemps et toujours fatale à la prospérité du commerce’ (an onerous war for some time, which is always fatal to commercial prosperity).²⁸ Discontent among shareholders about the costs entailed by Dupleix’s manoeuvres was a major factor behind the decision, as was the Court’s concern that his actions would bring about another war with Britain.²⁹ In December 1754 his successor, Godeheu, c...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Note on Translations
• Introduction
• 1 The French Presence in India between 1754 and 1815: From the ‘beaux jours du gouvernement de Dupleix’ to Annihilation?
• 2 Constructing India as Other: Fiction, Travelogues and Ambassadors
• 3 Emasculating India: The Indienne, Feminization and Female Writers
• 4 Mythical India
• 5 Historical India: Narratives of the Past
• 6 The Philosophes, ‘Anticolonialism’ and the Rule of the British East India Company
• Conclusion
• Notes
• Works Cited
• Index