By Jean-Loup Kastler*

This article is part of a collaboration with the Commission internationale d’histoire de la Révolution française (CIHRF) following the August 2022 meeting of the International Committee of Historical Sciences at Poznań, Poland. The Commission convened a panel on “revolutionary nationalism in a global perspective” together with the Japanese and Korean National Committees and the Network of Global and World History Associations.

This article addresses the seemingly haphazard foreign policy of Etienne-François de Choiseul as First Minister of State of the French Kingdom between 1756 and 1770. On the one hand, France seemed to become increasingly involved in a Catholic “alliance of the South” thanks to its pact with Austria (1756) and Spain (1761) against a “northern league” made of England, Prussia and the Russian Empire. This new balance of power appeared quite clearly during the Polish rebellion and the Turkish war against Russia (1764-1774). On the other hand, Choiseul supported the colonial project of Versoix at the border of the small Republic of Geneva as an ideal city built on the principle of “freedom of conscience.” One could perceive these two strategies as contradictory. Yet, they are only contradictory if our gaze as historians remains firmly rooted in a European or Atlantic frame of reference. Both projects belonged to the same diplomatic “grand design.” Choiseul sought to find salvation for France in the aftermath of the Seven Years’ War by a “swing to the East,” turning the page on France’s imperial dream in the Americas. In this perspective, the colonial project of Versoix, the conquest of Corsica, and the weakening of Russia were each separate pearls of the same necklace in the building of a new Silk Road linking China with western Europe for economic purposes. This plan gave the mountain regions of France and Switzerland a new importance.

This article is part of a more general reflection on the relationship between revolution and nationalism, which was at the heart of the work of the International Commission for the History of the French Revolution in Poznan during the summer of 2022 at the meeting of the International Committee of Historical Sciences. Under discussion was the interaction between nationalism and revolution. Several of us argued that the dialectical relationship between these two notions inextricably refers to the concept of imperialism. Revolution would thus be a means of challenging an oppressive imperial nationalism in favor of a patriotic nationalism more in line with Enlightenment ideas, which could be defined by the Ciceronian Latin locution: “ubi bene ibi patria.”[1] From this point of view, the use of the terms imperialism or imperial nationalism is by no means anachronistic as far as the late eighteenth century is concerned. Admittedly, the steam engine had not yet led to the mechanization of production activities and the subsequent struggle between industrial nations to find new markets. However, the appearance of the figure of the capitalist in the form of the banker or merchant far preceded that of industrial capitalism.[2] Moreover, the mechanization of production activities took place even before the discovery of the “fire mill”, thanks to the “water mill” and hydraulic power, particularly in the textile and sugar sectors.[3] While it is possible to discuss the immediate consequences of this first mechanization from the 1740s onwards, the fact remains that the gains in competitiveness that made it possible necessarily influenced government foresight in the context of globalized economic competition that already prevailed at the end of the eighteenth century.[4]

Indeed, the question of economic competition between nations and its potential warlike consequences was not lost on Enlightenment thinkers. Gabriel Bonnot de Mably’s work bears witness to this in its critical use of the term “revolution.” In his view, the “revolution” of human history par excellence was the discovery of America, which led to the creation of empires based on luxury and the predation of natural resources. For the philosopher from the Dauphiné, England was the very embodiment of this historical process. Its political revolution in its Cromwellian moment merely confirmed the imperial pretensions of the English nation through the famous Acts of Navigation (1651, 1660). This overseas expansion of Western European powers mirrored the continental expansion of the Russian Empire, which at that time encountered no obstacles to its rise. Yet, for Mably, revolution was not a means to justify imperialism. Faced with the “imperial revolution” produced by the discovery of America, he imagined an anti-imperial revolution that would restore a balanced world order. He was followed a few years later by his compatriot Michel Antoine Servan who completed his thinking by proposing a new “critical ecology” of imperialism. In his Spinozist perspective, man must no longer see the relationship of human beings to nature as an “empire within an empire.”[5] The quest for universal harmony between man and nature was to replace the immoderate appetite for corrupting luxury engendered by trade.

It was in this moment of philosophical doubt, which gripped French public opinion in the aftermath of the Seven Years’ War, that the project for the ideal city of Versoix was born.[6] From a simple geographical point of view, it was a project for the inland colonization of French territory.[7] It took place on the north shore of Lake Geneva, at the end of a small strip of land that separated Calvin’s city from the Helvetic Corps. This territory is commonly known as Pays de Gex and includes Voltaire’s famous château, located in Ferney since 1758.

Extract from a map by geographer Giovani Rizzi-Zanoni in 1766 [Source : Gallica]

Politically, Versoix’s ideal city project can only be understood in the context of the political turmoil of the 1760s, which accompanied the condemnation of Rousseau’s writings, namely Emile, or On Education and The Social Contract. These conflicts were scornfully referred to as the “watchmakers’ war” by the court in Versailles, and as a “civil war” by Voltaire who snidely dismissed the Genevans as sybarites squabbling over the folds of rose petals. The latter, on the other hand, saw these events as a revolutionary moment. Not only because the uprisings pitted different categories of the population against each other (the oligarchy, bourgeois representatives, and native Genevans), but also because it was a patriotic uprising against a French tutelage perceived as illegitimate during an economically unfavorable context (a watchmaking crisis). Faced with this situation, the French monarchy reacted with ambivalence, as evidenced by the Versoix project.

First Minister of State of the French Kingdom Etienne-François de Choiseul initially tried to take advantage of the situation by manipulating the small local population working in the watchmaking industry. He sent agents to Geneva to lure them to the new town of Versoix, promising this protestant community religious freedom.[8]This was achieved by means of so called “Acts of submission” issued by the local commander, not by an Edict. The ideal city of Versoix also had two parishes, whose churches were not oriented in the same way in the first plan drawn up by the Dauphin engineer Pierre Joseph de Bourcet in 1767. The aim of this project was to illustrate the mercantilist adage that it is the population that creates wealth. The presence of a hospital and a customs house on the plans for this first project shows, moreover, that the project did not represent a mercantilist framework. In a sense, Choiseul was diverting an anti-imperialist revolutionary process to his own advantage.

This project was also part of an economic and commercial war. The Versoix project was accompanied by plans for a new land and river route to make the Rhône navigable from Geneva to Marseilles. The aim was to encourage Geneva’s merchants to increase their collaboration with the city of Marseilles at the expense of Genoa and Piedmont by diverting trade flows from northern Europe. Choiseul granted Geneva advantages in terms of tax-free transit for certain goods such as cotton. But he also used threats to blockade Calvin’s city until the summer of 1769. Choiseul did not appreciate the proximity of Geneva’s banking circles to England, and it should be remembered that Piedmont was one of England’s Mediterranean allies at that time.

The Versoix project can only be understood in an international context where France sought to strengthen its position in the Mediterranean to compensate for the consequences of its military defeat in the Seven Years’ War (1756-1763). Some people did not understand, or pretended not to understand, this overall project. Such was the case of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, who saw it above all as persecution of his own person as a militant republican, which he believed explained not only the Versoix project but also the conquest of Corsica: 

I’m sure I’ll be criticized for giving myself a prodigious importance. Ah, if I didn’t have more importance in the eyes of others than I do in my own, what less to be pitied! I beg those who will reproach me for this to explain two things in a way that would satisfy a sensible man. One, the invasion of Corsica, the other, the Ville de Versoy venture.[9]

However, Choiseul’s main goal was to dominate the Mediterranean region, as evidenced in a memoir from 1770:  

I believe that Corsica can assure Your Majesty and Spain of this domination in the Mediterranean Sea, and that this island is more essential to the kingdom, the expense it costs and has cost less onerous than would have been an island in America, very difficult and very costly to defend in times of war, and which would only provide momentary trading advantages. I think I can even say that Corsica is more useful to France in every way than Canada was or would have been.[10]

This explains the French monarchy’s involvement in Poland against the Russian invasion of 1764. The Russo-Polish war wanted by Catherine II was in fact one facet of a much broader project aimed at guaranteeing Russia access to the Mediterranean Sea. The result was a Russo-Polonian-Turkish war in which Catherine II presented herself as the natural protector of oppressed Orthodox minorities in both Poland and the Ottoman Empire. 

Map created by the author of the article for the ICHFR Conference in Poznan (2022)

Voltaire, under a pseudonym, was behind intense Russian propaganda in France. Choiseul understood the importance of having the opinion of the philosphes on his side and commissioned certain writers to present Polish demands in a good light. Ruhlière, who coordinated the mission, turned to Mably, who had no problem supporting the cause if it served a revolution for independence.[11] He also contacted Rousseau who gave the Polish resistance fighters of the Bar Confederation advice which they may not have appreciated : 

The first reform you would need would be that of your extent. Your vast provinces will never have the strict administration of small republics. Start by tightening your boundaries if you want to reform your government. Perhaps your neighbors are thinking of doing you this service. It would undoubtedly be a great evil for the dismembered parts; but it would be a great good for the body of the nation.[12]

In fact, for Rousseau, independence was not enough to justify a revolution: the democratic emancipation of the people had to be included.

In the case of Poland, as in that of Versoix, Choiseul was in fact pursuing the same dream: to turn the Mediterranean Sea into a French lake. This summary map, which I have produced from the available data on this subject, bears witness to the coherence of the project. 

The reorientation of north-south trade flows, thanks to the Rhine-Rhone canal, would have made Marseilles the leading Mediterranean port. The conquest of Corsica served as an outpost, extended by the famous Levantine ladders. Finally, Choiseul resurrected the Suez Canal project, relying on the development of French influence in Egypt and the expertise of certain Marseilles merchants on the subject (Jacques Seimandi and Meynard).[13] This Mediterranean string of pearls was intended to reach much wider, including to open a new route to “the Orient,” especially China.

While waiting for such a project to see the light of day, Choiseul maintained trade relations with the so-called East Indies from Lorient, headquarters of the Compagnie des Indes, whose privileges were finally suspended in 1769. As John Shovlin points out, this suspension was due not only to the company’s indebtedness, but also to geostrategic considerations linked to the company’s dependence on English financial power.[14] To develop trade with “the Orient”, Choiseul preferred to turn to Jacobite investors, with whom he had forged ties during his planned landing in England in 1759 to install Bonnie Prince Charlie on the throne. For Choiseul, it seems that Irish independence was a more important goal than the independence of the United States, which he thought would re-establish a balance between France and England. 

However, Choiseul understood all these geopolitical and economic maneuvers would not be enough. The loss of Indian comptoirs and their production potential called for effective palliatives. This is how I interpret the growing interest of the French monarchy in general, and Choiseul in particular, in mountain regions. These regions boasted considerable hydrological potential, which, when combined with the automation of certain production processes, represented a significant competitive advantage. However, whether we are talking about Indian fabrics in Switzerland or silk muslin production in the French mountains, this raises the question of the supply of raw material. While cotton could be supplied by France’s five Indian comptoirs, silk from China seemed all the more interesting as its production in France was limited. China thus became a new economic frontier for the French monarchy in its competition with England. It was not just a question of extracting raw materials, but also of seeing this territory with a population of 250 million as a market to be conquered by cutting-edge European products. In fact, the Chinese of the eighteenth century, and more particularly their emperor Qianlong, were fascinated by automata and Western clocks. Thus, the clocks produced in Versoix would find a “natural” outlet in China in exchange for silk or any other raw material corresponding to the needs of French markets.

On the eve of the French Revolution, France and its mountains turned towards Asia and the Pacific. It was a sort of swing to the east, well known to Anglo-Saxon historiography.[15] This was accompanied by a new centrality of the Mediterranean as a place of exchange. Does this mean that the pattern of Atlantic revolutions should be called into question? In any case, it demonstrates that the history of international trade in the Age of Revolutions cannot be reduced to the Atlantic arena. This contribution is intended to open a dialogue on what could be a truly global history of the Age of Revolutions that is less focused on the West. It also seeks to give mountain areas their rightful place in the great overturning of the world at the end of the eighteenth century, which in many places took the form of what I have called “mountain revolutions.”[16] Is it completely coincidental that the French Revolution began in Grenoble, a small city in the French Alps, in 1788?

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Jean-Loup Kastler is a PhD student at Paris I Panthéon Sorbonne under the supervision of Pierre Serna and a member of the board of the International Commission for the History of the French Revolution. He is currently working on a possible alternative model to the Atlantic revolutions based on his observation of revolutionary processes in the alpine region between Genève and Grenoble. These Révolutions montagnardes are deeply rooted in the protection of the commons rather than in the rise of Atlantic trade.

Title Image: The Colossus of Rhodes, a well-known allegory of trade in the eighteenth century. Source: Wikimedia Commons.

Endnotes:

* “This essay is a shortened version of a larger feature article published in Chinese in The World History Review Vol. 10, No. 2, 2023, under the title “Choiseul’s ‘swing to the East’: the colonial project of Versoix, Poland and the Mediterranean Sea (1756-1770)”. The term “swing to the East” was translated into Chinese as 东方转向 (Dongfang Zhuanxiang) by Professor Li Weiyi. I am grateful for the inspiring work of Gao Yi, who first posed the question of the Chinese origins of the Enlightenment and French Revolutionary ideals. See “Les origines chinoises des Lumières et de la Révolution française,” Annales historiques de la Révolution française, n. 387, 2017, pp. 103-122.”

[1] Jean-Loup Kastler, “Les étrangers et la révolution entre Genève et Grenoble : Peut-on faire la révolution sans se sentir étranger ?”, La Révolution française. Cahiers de l’Institut d’histoire de la Révolution française,  2, 2022.

[2] Fernand Braudel, La dynamique du capitalisme, Paris, Flammarion, 1988.

[3] Paul Burton Cheney, Cul-de-sac : Une plantation coloniale à Saint-Domingue au XVIIIe siècle, Paris, France, Fayard, 2022.

[4] Suzanne Desan, Lynn Avery Hunt, William Max Nelson, The French Revolution in global perspective, Ithaca (N.Y.), Etats-Unis d’Amérique, Royaume-Uni de Grande-Bretagne et d’Irlande du Nord, 2013.

[5] Jean-Loup Kastler, “L’écologie des Lumières de Michel-Antoine Servan et l’image de la montagne : une déclinaison originale du concept mesmérien d’harmonie universelle ?”, La Révolution française. Cahiers de l’Institut d’histoire de la Révolution française, 24, 2023

[6] Jean-Pierre Ferrier, Le Duc de Choiseul, Voltaire et la création de Versoix-la-Ville 1766-1777, Genève, 1922.

[7] Christopher Hodson, “Colonizing the Patrie: An Experiment Gone Wrong in Old Regime France”, French Historical Studies, 32, 2009, p. 193‑222 ; Jean-François Mouhot, Les réfugiés acadiens en France : 1758-1785. L’impossible réintégration, Rennes, Presses universitaires de Rennes, 2019.

[8] Jean-Loup Kastler, “Les étrangers et la révolution entre Genève et Grenoble : Peut-on faire la révolution sans se sentir étranger ?”, La Révolution française. Cahiers de l’Institut d’histoire de la Révolution française, 22, 2022. 

[9] Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Oeuvres complètes, III, Edition du tricentenaire, p. 375. Translated by the author.

[10] Archives du Ministère des Affaires Étrangères, Mémoires et documents, cart. 53, p. 318, Mémoire lu au conseil du Roi le 16 mars 1770. I have produced my own transcription here, as the one published to date differs from the original manuscript.

[11] Maciej Forycki, “Les confédérés et le citoyen. Le contexte politique de la collaboration des polonais avec Mably”, in Annie Barthélémy, Rousseau entre Savoie et Pologne, University of Savoy, 2014.

[12] Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Considérations sur le gouvernement de Pologne et sur sa réformation, London, 1782, p. 40.

[13] Fabien Bartolotti, Les milieux d’affaires marseillais et la route de Suez de la fin du XVIIIe siècle à 1858. Acteurs, enjeux et représentations, mémoire de Master I, edited by Xavier Daumalin, Université d’Aix-Marseille, 2012

[14] John Shovlin, Trading with the Ennemy Britain and France and the 18^th quest for a peaceful world order, Yale University Press, 2021, p. 249.

[15] Vincent T. Harlow, The Founding of the Second British Empire, 1763–93, 2 volumes, London, Longmans, 1952–64. I would like to thank Mike Rapport for providing me with this reference.

[16] Jean-Loup Kastler, “De la révolution de Genève à la révolution en Dauphiné : existe-t-il des « révolutions montagnardes » ?”, in Ripensare la geopolitica delle rivoluzioni, edited by Pierre Serna and Paolo Conte, M.O.D.O., 2021.