Pronouncing certain surnames such as Surcouf, Duguay-Trouin, and Chateaubriand immediately brings to mind Saint-Malo, the name alone of which evokes the memory of an incredible “corsair city” essentially during the reign of Louis XIV. However, Surcouf was the greatest corsair of Saint-Malo from the Consulate and the Empire.
Through his mother, Surcouf (1773-1827) is a cousin of Duguay-Trouin (1673-1736), born exactly a century before him in this port. Chateaubriand (1768-1848), on the other hand, was only his contemporary, but the Surcouf family and François-René had, on different occasions, business interests (sales or purchases of ships or real estate, particularly ). Writing the biography of a man always requires taking an x-ray of his time.
Genealogy of a dynasty
The Surcoufs, in 1640, were poor people. Arriving from his native Lower Normandy, the first Surcouf arrived in Saint-Malo with his wife and child. It was the time of the Nu Pieds, poor wretches who collected salt on the Normandy beaches and had a gabelle regime (salt tax) different from the rest of the kingdom, the so-called “quart-bouillon” system. This couple, who boiled sea water to remove a little salt, died in 1690, very old, at the Saint-Malo hospice created by the charitable wife of the governor of the place.
Their threads are caulked: with tow, old hemp, and used fabrics, they push this textile mixture with their scissors (called "caulking") between the oak planks of the ships under construction, then cover them with a kind of tar from coniferous trees, often Swedish, the pines of the Pyrenees being deemed too brittle; hence the alliance of Richelieu’s France with Queen Christina’s Sweden (1).
A son of these caulkers progresses in the social hierarchy: pilot, pilot, master pilot, lieutenant on board merchant ships, and captain in commerce, this great-grandfather of Surcouf dies too young to “succeed”. But his widow begins to engage in racing, maritime trading with the sugar islands (Antilles, Martinique, Guadeloupe, Santo Domingo), and the slave trade; hence the fabulous success of his son, grandfather of Surcouf.
A shipowner, he alone owns 10% of the Saint-Malo shipping industry and buys Saint-Malo land and private mansions. He leaves an inheritance of 500,000 pounds to his children, which represents the pay of a lieutenant (1,000 pounds annually) for five hundred years. But out of his twenty children, ten survive and share his estate because the Surcoufs are commoners and practice “equal sharing” and not “noble sharing” which benefits the eldest, hence its name “right to primogeniture” from 1789.
Surcouf's father was therefore reduced to a modest inheritance of only 50,000 pounds and went to live with his wife and children extramural, in Cancale. The accommodation is larger, the countryside pleasant, the air better than in a port because of the smells (painting of hulls, caulking with hot tar, making glue from fish bones to bind books, smoke from chimneys of houses, etc…).
An ambitious childhood
Surcouf was therefore raised as a child with his maternal grandmother in Cancale. Born Porçon, of very old Breton nobility maintained in 1669 during Colbert's Great Reformation, undoubtedly quite contemptuous of her mediocre son-in-law – a commoner dragged into the ruin of his brothers in their common arms company "the Surcoufreres” – she instilled in her grandsons all the “values” reputed to be those of the nobility: the honor of the name, the necessity of combat, of military victory and glory alone capable of ensuring the sustainability of the name, status, and privileges greatly threatened since the disasters of the French Navy of 1759 (defeat of Lagos and defeat of the Cardinals), hence the loss of Canada at the Treaty of Paris of 1763. Her ancestors did not die in the hospice! They died for the king (Charles VIII, Louis XII, Francis I), far away, in the Mediterranean. Those of her late husband – a squire – reached Pondicherry (1674), the first French Indian trading post under Colbert, during the Dutch War. The history of the Indian Ocean and the Ile de France, where Surcouf distinguished himself under the Empire, was written by them.
Surcouf, child and adolescent, is therefore not an adventurer, a go-to-war: he is an heir. He wants to regain two things: the fortune of his paternal grandfather Surcouf and the glory of his maternal ancestors Porçon who are also the ancestors of Duguay-Trouin. Surcouf is the grandson of a Guillemette Porçon. Duguay-Trouin great-grandson of another Guillemette Porçon, great-aunt of the previous one.
Navigate to Success
Once his motivations are understood – which is always essential to understand the personality of a character, man, or woman (2), Surcouf fulfills this kind of mental contract tacitly made with his people. Embarking for the first time in 1787, at the age of fourteen, he sailed, became rich, and distinguished himself. He was sixteen years old in 1789, and missed all the revolutionary events in Saint-Malo contemporary with the storming of the Bastille, because he was at sea.
In 1792, the Republic was proclaimed. The Terror occurs. Here again, Surcouf is largely absent from the territory: the execution of Louis XVI, that of Marie-Antoinette, Madame Élisabeth, the Girondins, and then Robespierre himself. He saw nothing, neither the assassination of the Princess de Lamballe nor the imprisonment of Mgr the Dauphin (Louis XVII). He did not ignore the revolutionary violence: Mr. de Mac Nemara, a good officer of the king's ships, of Irish origin, was assassinated in 1790 in Port-Louis on the Ile de France, being then the commander of the naval base. But, during all these joys (the Republic) and these misfortunes (the scaffold, the drownings of Nantes), he is in the Indian Ocean with many of his cousins, mainly from Normans established in Saint-Malo in 1640 as well. , with the first Robert Surcouf.
Since Louis XIII and Richelieu, these Normans of Bas-Cotentin have all married among themselves and formed a real Norman colony established in Saint-Malo, all allied to each other by marriage. Surcouf therefore has most of his relatives in Port-Louis: great uncles by blood or widowers of his great-aunts; therefore his father's first cousins and their wives, that is to say, his first cousins. This immense Surcouf clan constitutes in Port-Louis a sort of real district of Saint-Malo in permanent contact with the corsair city (sending goods, receiving cargo, sending sons from Port-Louis to marry in Saint-Malo to attractive dots).
This is essential for Surcouf, aged around twenty. His father's brother is venerable of his Masonic lodge in Saint-Malo where the new philosophy has been very well established since the 1730s as in most ports, whether Naples – where Pascal Paoli grew up (3 ) –, Lisbon, or Toulon (where shines the lodge “La Marine” whose venerable, Mercier, is the grandson of Madame Mercier, nurse of Louis XV, ennobled for her milk which saved the child-King). The Mason “brothers” of this first or second-generation campaign ardently for Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity. Their “sister” Olympe de Gouges participated in the creation of the Societies of Friends of Blacks. But at forty-five, she went to the scaffold.
The end of the world
The Convention wants to abolish slavery; she wants to abolish the slave trade; she wants to eliminate racing, seen as the last archaism of barbarism still practiced: men who throw themselves like legal pirates onto poor merchant ships that pass near them. Legal because they have a “letter of marque” by which their sovereign allows them to practice racing which is none other than piracy covered and encouraged by the State which, for lack of means, is in some way helped by the private (the privateers). Laws, measures, and decrees of the Convention follow one another, contradict each other, and sometimes cancel each other. They arrive on the Ile de France – we must not forget this – one hundred to one hundred and ten days after having been voted in Paris. A good quarter.
Surcouf, with permission to sail for commerce, quickly found himself an outlaw, because he practiced racing and not commerce. The Council of Five Hundred then seized its prizes for the benefit of the Republic. The shipowners of Surcouf, all Malouins from the Ile de France, protested with force and vigor, feeling dispossessed. The ships are theirs. They paid the crews and fed them three times a day during campaigns! Everyone wants to recover for their benefit the captures made by Surcouf for them, not for the Republic. The Council of Five Hundred then summoned Surcouf to Paris (1797). Here is a young man, twenty-four years old, in total illegality. The Masonic lodge immediately admitted him as an initiate and he was shipped to Paris with the speaker of the lodge of the Ile de France, brother of Admiral de Villaret-Joyeuse.
In Paris, he defended him very well and found him an excellent lawyer, Master Pérignon, also a Freemason, brother of the future Marshal of the Empire. Condorcet, among many others, fought the race but the Council of Five Hundred made an extraordinary decision, concluding: “Laws are ephemeral and the magnificence of the State [must prevail]. » The catches are therefore returned to the Saint-Malo shipowners who incurred large costs to enable the young Surcouf to make them. The latter, twenty-four years old, triumphs. He triumphs over the Law. The press is talking about him. Le Courrier de Madras was the first newspaper to praise him the very day after his captures before he arrived in Paris. You have to put yourself in the head of this young man: his surname emerges from anonymity! A Parisian, overjoyed, he even got his mistress pregnant in a moment of abandonment – she gave birth to a son nine months and fifteen days after the trial. He will never recognize him any more than he will marry the young lady.
The glory of another fighter
Thus encouraged by the State which allows him to violate the law without constraint (which is not very formative or very educational, it must be admitted), Surcouf distinguishes himself with the capture of Kent, a large British commercial vessel (an Indian man). Everything goes as planned: the English captain (a brave man) is killed and the English press mourns him. The women on board were spared, one in her seventies. For public opinion, this is an achievement. For the enemies of the race, the praise is absent. But Napoleon is a fighter. An immense soldier who has today become the second best-known character in the world because the most cited after Christ.
Napoleon therefore received him in Paris. The king's naval officers emigrated en masse in 1792: more than 1,200 out of the 1,657 who were in service on January 1, 1789 (in fact 1,656, but La Pérouse's death was still unknown). They left, neither by taste nor by choice. But in Toulon, Brest, and Paris, the situation is not tenable for them. The Revolution began in Toulon on March 1, 1789. Then, throughout the riots and the rapid and succinct judgments of the Revolutionary Tribunal, Count d'Estaing, a hero of American independence, rose to the scaffold. like his “brother” the Duke of Orléans, a general officer of the Navy whose head was not spared despite his titles as a mason and Philippe Egalité.
Vice-Admiral de Rohan-Montbazon was himself guillotined “not for having done evil, but because he was likely to do evil”… Napoleon would like to entrust the Boulogne flotilla to Surcouf to land troops across the Channel: c It is the old dream of Choiseul under Louis XV that only William the Conqueror succeeded for the misfortune of Harald and the anguish of Queen Mathilde.
The time of honors
Napoleon made Surcouf a knight of the Legion of Honor at the first promotion of the order (from 1804). But the latter wants to restore his grandfather's fortune. He refuses to join the Imperial Navy. He entered neither that of Louis XVI nor that of the Revolution. He has not been to Aboukir (1798), and will not be to Trafalgar (1805). By fighting in the Indian Ocean against British trade, Surcouf enriched himself considerably and married the daughter of the mayor of Saint-Malo, ennobled by Louis XVI in 1786. His family was happy, his old mother in particular who died shortly before him, widowed only since 1813. His brother became a baron (1823). And Surcouf bequeathed to his children an immense fortune equal to four times the price of the Château de Combourg: Breton manors almost everywhere and Norman manors in the very village of Bas-Cotentin from where the first Robert had left with the other Nus Pieds in 1640; a real social revenge.
To his children, he bequeathed 800 ha; its immense tobacco plantations, the largest in Brittany. Under the Empire, then under Louis XVIII and Charles X, Surcouf was no longer a privateer, a tall and muscular adventurer of twenty-five years old. He retired at thirty-five like Duguay-Trouin. Fourteen people embarked, with a total of nearly twenty-five years of navigation in the harsh conditions of the time which “ruined” health.
Surcouf becomes an obese fifty-year-old. We see him in Paris, at his pharmacist, buying belly belts to support an incredible waistline; he frequents caterers and delicatessens and buys good wines and andouillettes, pâtés, and good chocolates. He furnishes his manors and castles: beautiful silverware, small teaspoons, cutlery sets and table knives, and alabaster clocks with their fireplace candelabra. He has his son at college in Paris and gives piano lessons to his daughter Eléonore.
The privateer transformed himself into a rich Balzacian notable and well-established shipowner from Saint-Malo. The fiber is Bonapartist. He gave the name Napoleon to one of his ships and Pérignon to another. Unlike his wife's brother (the son of an ennobled man in 1786), he rather shunned the Restoration as a discreet devotee of the Emperor. He regretted the Empire in 1814 and then in 1815, when the cessation of fighting on land put an end, with peace, to fighting at sea even though he would like his privateer captains to go out and continue to go out (despite the peace) to "make prizes (his obsession), which they refuse, wanting to be corsairs (in time of war) but not wanting to become pirates (in time of peace) and be "hung high and low" on the highest yard of their ship. Only corsairs were made prisoners of war; the pirates were hanged.
The origins of its wealth
Surcouf's fortune comes from trade with the Antilles (Saint-Domingue) but also from the slave trade. Europe after 1750 consumed coffee. A lot. He is bitter. Sugar is added to it. Café au lait was born under Louis XV and this breakfast replaces morning cabbage soup, mixed with milk north of the Loire, or red wine in the south; Madame Palatine, in Versailles, had a good sauerkraut with beer around 5 or 6 a.m.!
Coffee, sugar, tobacco, and light cotton clothing appealed to all of Europe, like the pedestal table or hot water bottle, which had become necessary for placing hot objects in the middle of the living room that could not be held in the hand: coffee maker, a silver chocolatier with ebony wood handle, cups, and saucers in earthenware or porcelain. Cabinetmakers put two casters under the front legs of light armchairs (convertibles) to approach these pedestal tables and “middle tables”, our future living room coffee tables. The goldsmiths, porcelain makers, earthenware makers, cabinetmakers, the tobacco makers of the tobacco factories in Le Havre who roll the tobacco in very thin paper, the cabinetmakers of the Faubourg Saint-Antoine in Paris, all make a living from the trade, and Pascal Paoli himself, at the center of his island, offers hot chocolate to the Scotsman Boswell received in Corsica and not Muscat wine.
Saint-Malo square
When Surcouf was born, Brittany had been French since 1532. His ancestors set sail from the port in 1534 with Cartier who wrote there: “[In Canada] I saw a bear so old that it was all white. » Listed in the 16th century in the Great Discoveries, the port became a privateer city in the 17th century with a cousin of Surcouf: Duguay-Trouin. Brest was then, according to Colbert, only “a mess” of 2,000 inhabitants. In the 1760s, Surcouf's cousins sailed with Bougainville to the Falklands. Sailor like Cartier, privateer like Duguay-Trouin, enlightened mind like Bougainville, this compatriot of Chateaubriand is the synthesis of three centuries of Saint-Malo and French history. He saw eight regimes: Louis XV, Louis XVI, the Revolution, the Directory, the Consulate, the Empire, Louis XVIII, and Charles X and appreciated only one: the Empire (A).
Collective responsibility
Unbolting the statue of Colbert because of the Code Noir or Surcouf, decapitating that of Joséphine makes no sense. Slavery was a long tragedy. It was not a man, nor a woman, Joséphine or Surcouf's great-grandmother, who were individually responsible. It was a civilization, collectively. A bit like us who use cell phones made by Asian children for poverty wages. How will we be “judged” three hundred years from now? Hence the interest in rereading Cato the Elder: “It is painful to have to give an account of one's life to men from another century than the one in which one lived. »
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