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Lost Letters
Epistolary Communities, War, and Familial Ties in the Maritime Atlantic World of the Eighteenth Century
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 14 February 2025
Abstract
This article focuses on an exceptional primary source—nearly eighty letters addressed to the crew of a single French ship captured during the Seven Years’ War (1756-1763) but never read, as their still-sealed envelopes attest. Letters to sailors, which helped maintain relations endangered by distance and uncertainty over whether they would return, offer clues to the resilience of familial bonds in wartime. Rather than interpreting these documents as a sign of the emergence of the nuclear family and modern intimacy, they are here approached as an object of social history. This correspondence played a key role in the circulation of information and the survival of familial unity. Letters were not markers of personal, private, and intimate exchanges, but rather part of the very fabric of complex social relations structured by both family ties and neighborliness. Both their writing and their reading engaged multiple individuals well beyond their signatory and their addressee. Ultimately, the article highlights, in their very materiality, the social dynamics that formalized the expression of emotions.
Cet article porte sur une source exceptionnelle – près de 80 lettres jamais lues, comme en attestent les enveloppes toujours scellées, envoyées à l’équipage d’un seul bateau français capturé pendant la guerre de Sept Ans (1756-1763). Les lettres aux marins, qui aident à entretenir des relations mises en danger par la distance et l’incertitude du retour, offrent des clefs d’analyse pour comprendre la résilience des liens familiaux en temps de guerre. Contre une approche qui verrait dans ces documents une trace de l’émergence de la famille nucléaire ou de l’intimité moderne, c’est bien comme vecteur d’une histoire sociale qu’ils sont ici saisis. Ces correspondances jouent un rôle essentiel dans la circulation de l’information et la survie de l’unité familiale. Il ne s’agit pas d’envisager celles-ci en tant que marqueur d’échanges personnels, privés et intimes. Au contraire, ces lettres doivent être appréhendées comme le tissu de relations sociales multiples et complexes, à la fois familiales et de voisinage. Leur écriture comme leur lecture engagent de multiples individus, bien au-delà des simples signataire et destinataire. Il s’agit, fondamentalement, de traquer les dynamiques sociales, dans leur matérialité même, qui formalisent l’expression des émotions.
- Type
- Research Article
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Footnotes
This article was originally published in French as “Lettres perdues. Communautés épistolaires, guerres et liens familiaux dans le monde maritime atlantique du xviiie siècle,” in “Sociétés maritimes et mondes de la pêche,” special issue, Annales HSS 78, no. 2 (2023): 333–73, doi 10.1017/ahss.2023.75. It was translated by Tiéphaine Thomason and edited by Renaud Morieux and Chloe Morgan.
*
I wish to thank Alain Cabantous, Sara Caputo, David Garrioch, Antoine Lilti, and Alexandra Walsham for their attentive readings and suggestions. Thank you also to Hélène Woisson for the first transcription of the letters and to the archivists at the National Maritime Museum of Greenwich for photographing certain documents.
References
1. Alain Cabantous, Dix mille marins face à l’Océan. Les populations maritimes de Dunkerque au Havre aux XVII e et XVIII e siècles, vers 1660–1794 (Paris: Publisud, 1991), 258–64.
2. Alain Cabantous, Les citoyens du large. Les identités maritimes en France (XVII e–XIX e siècles) (Paris: Aubier, 1995), 51–160; Emmanuelle Charpentier and Benoît Grenier, eds., Femmes face à l’absence, Bretagne et Québec (XVII e–XVIII e siècles) (Québec: Centre interuniversitaire d’études québécoises, 2015), in particular Emmanuelle Charpentier, “Femmes de ‘partis en voyage sur mer’ en Bretagne au xviiie siècle,” 47–60.
3. Olwen Hufton, “Women without Men: Widows and Spinsters in Britain and France in the Eighteenth Century,” Journal of Family History 9, no. 4 (1984): 355–76; Heather Dalton, ed., Keeping Family in an Age of Long Distance Trade, Imperial Expansion, and Exile, 1550–1850 (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2020); Julie Hardwick, Sarah M. S. Pearsall, and Karin Wulf, “Introduction: Centering Families in Atlantic Histories,” William and Mary Quarterly 70, no. 2 (2013): 205–24; Manon van der Heijden, Ariadne Schmidt, and Richard Wall, “Broken Families: Economic Resources and Social Networks of Women Who Head Families,” The History of the Family 12, no. 4 (2007): 223–32.
4. Carol Acton, “Writing and Waiting: The First World War Correspondence between Vera Brittain and Roland Leighton,” Gender & History 11, no. 1 (1999): 54–83; Michael Roper, “Slipping Out of View: Subjectivity and Emotion in Gender History,” History Workshop Journal 59 (2005): 57–72.
5. André Magnan, ed., Expériences limites de l’épistolaire. Lettres d’exil, d’enfermement, de folie (Paris: Honoré Champion, 1993).
6. See, for instance, Michael Roper, The Secret Battle: Emotional Survival in the Great War (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2010); Clémentine Vidal-Naquet, Couples dans la Grande Guerre. Le tragique et l’ordinaire du lien conjugal (Paris: Les Belles Lettres, 2014). For a recent discussion of this historiography, see Anne Verjus, Caroline Muller, and Thomas Dodman, “Dear Reader,” in “Epistolary Gestures,” special issue, French Historical Studies 44, no. 2 (2021): 177–89.
7. Susan E. Whyman, The Pen and the People: English Letter Writers, 1660–1800 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), 104.
8. Sarah M. S. Pearsall, Atlantic Families: Lives and Letters in the Later Eighteenth Century (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008); Emma Rothschild, The Inner Life of Empires: An Eighteenth-Century History (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2011).
9. Kew, The National Archives (hereafter “TNA”), ADM 97/131, “Letters to prisoners of war mostly addressed to the crew of the Galatea at Rochefort and forwarded to England 1757–1758.” This is one of 259 boxes containing the correspondence received by the office responsible for prisoners of war (the Office of the Commissioners of Sick and Wounded Seamen). The letters are neither numbered nor foliated.
10. Roger Chartier and Jean Hébrard, “Entre public et privé : la correspondance, une écriture ordinaire,” in La correspondance. Les usages de la lettre au XIX e siècle, ed. Roger Chartier (Paris: Fayard, 1991), 451–58, here p. 451.
11. On letter folds, see James Daybell, The Material Letter in Early Modern England: Manuscript Letters and the Culture and Practices of Letter-Writing, 1512–1635 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), 6 and 98.
12. See Alexandra Walsham, “The Social History of the Archive: Record-Keeping in Early Modern Europe,” Past & Present 230, supplement 11 (2016): 9–48, here p. 13.
13. Rebekah Ahrendt and David van der Linden, “The Postmasters’ Piggy Bank: Experiencing the Accidental Archive,” French Historical Studies 40, no. 2 (2017): 189–213. See, on the website of the National Archives, https://discovery.nationalarchives.gov.uk/details/r/C8630.
14. Philippe Cadieux, “La correspondance transatlantique des Prize Papers (1744–1763): familles, commerce et communications en temps de guerre” (MA diss., University of Montreal, 2015), 26 and 40. This reference was communicated to me by Donald Fyson.
15. The first results of this research saw the publication, by Dutch historians and archivists, of around 17,000 interrogations of the crews of captured ships. See Prize Papers Online, http://prize-papers-atlas-online.brillonline.com, published by the Dutch publisher Brill. On the study of migration based on the Prize Papers of Dutch ships, see the data compiled by Jelle van Lottum’s team, https://www.huygens.knaw.nl/en/projecten/dutchprize-papers-2/. Since 2018, a project hosted by the University of Oldenburg in Germany in collaboration with the National Archives in Kew has started to digitize the collection: https://www.prizepapers.de/the-project/the-prize-papers-collection. The project is set to take at least two decades. See also the remarkable critical edition of principally commercial correspondence between families of Irish merchants in Bordeaux and in Dublin, seized aboard an Irish ship in 1757: L. M. Cullen, John Shovlin, and Thomas M. Truxes, eds., The Bordeaux–Dublin Letters, 1757: Correspondence of an Irish Community Abroad (Oxford/ London: Oxford University Press/The British Academy, 2014). For a recent discussion of this source, see Margaret R. Hunt, How to Research Scandinavian Ships and Seamen in the Prize Papers of the British National Archives (Uppsala: Uppsala University, 2023).
16. Biographies of ships have become a subgenre of maritime history over the past two decades, especially in the English-language bibliography. See, for example, Greg Dening, Mr Bligh’s Bad Language: Passion, Power and Theater on the Bounty (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992); Marcus Rediker, The Amistad Rebellion: An Atlantic Odyssey of Slavery and Freedom (London: Verso, 2013).
17. For a perspective similar to that adopted in this article, see Margaret R. Hunt, “An English East India Company Ship’s Crew in a Connected Seventeenth-Century World,” Itinerario 46, no. 3 (2022): 333–44.
18. Daybell, The Material Letter, 12. See also Rebecca Earle, “Introduction: Letters, Writers and the Historian,” in Epistolary Selves: Letters and Letter-Writers, 1600 –1945, ed. Rebecca Earle (London: Routledge, 1999), 1–12, here pp. 3–4; Cécile Dauphin, Pierrette Lebrun-Pézerat, and Danièle Poublan, Ces bonnes lettres. Une correspondance familiale au XIX e siècle (Paris: Albin Michel, 1995). The letters of Iberian immigrants in America to their families, confiscated and used in prosecutions by the court of the Inquisition, show that the distinction between “private” sphere and “public” sphere is too simplistic for the analysis of this type of source. See, for instance, Enrique Otte, Cartas privadas de emigrantes a Indias, 1540–1616 (Seville/Cadix: Consejería de Cultura/Junta de Andalucía/Escuela de estudios hispanoamericanos, 1988). This reference was provided by Natalia Muchnik.
19. Susan M. Fitzmaurice, The Familiar Letter in Early Modern English: A Pragmatic Approach (Amsterdam: John Benjamin Publishing Company, 2002), 234.
20. See the preface by Roger Chartier in Dauphin, Lebrun-Pézerat, and Poublan, Ces bonnes lettres, 11–15, here p. 11.
21. Daniel A. Baugh, “The Atlantic of the Rival Navies, 1714–1783,” in English Atlantics Revisited: Essays Honouring Ian K. Steele, ed. Nancy L. Rhoden (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2007), 206–32, here p. 208.
22. John Entick, The General History of the Late War, Containing Its Rise, Progress, and Event, in Europe, Asia, Africa, and America, vol. 3 (London: printed for Edward Dilly and John Millan, 1763), 63.
23. John-Francis Bosher, Négociants et navires du commerce avec le Canada de 1660 à 1760. Dictionnaire biographique (Ottawa: Environnement Canada, 1992), 158.
24. “Sailor” will hereafter be used as a synonym for “common sailor.” “Mariner” will be used synonymously with “seafarer” and “seaman.”—Trans.
25. TNA, HCA 32/196, Deposition before a notary and interrogation of Jacques Dubois, captain of the Galatée, Plymouth, April 20, 1758, fol. 4r–4v.
26. Paris, Archives nationales, fonds Marine (hereafter “AN, Mar.”), C6 269, Crew list of the “Galathée” (1758): between January and March 1758, fifty-nine seamen disembarked at the Île d’Aix, Rochefort, and Blaye; between January and April, seventy-six seamen embarked à Brest, Rochefort, Bordeaux, and Blaye.
27. TNA, HCA 32/196, Deposition before a notary and interrogation of Jacques Dubois, captain of the Galatée, Plymouth, April 20, 1758, fol. 3r–3v.
28. TNA, HCA 32/196, document no. 2, François Peyrenc de Moras to Jacques Dubois, Paris, March 7, 1758, translated and abstracted from the French in London by John Green, notary public. On the rapid deterioration of warships, see James Pritchard, Louis XV’s Navy, 1748–1762: A Study of Organization and Administration (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2009), 126–27.
29. Entick, The General History of the Late War, 3:61.
30. TNA, HCA 32/196, document no. 3, François Peyrenc de Moras to Jacques Dubois, Versailles, March 25, 1758, translated and abstracted from the French in London by John Green, notary public.
31. Greenwich, National Maritime Museum (hereafter “NMM”), ADM/L/E/140, Ship’s log of the second lieutenant of the Essex, James Cranston, April 8, 1758, not foliated; Aix-en-Provence, Archives nationales d’outre-mer, COL D2C 2, “Lettre donnant un congé absolu à Dominique Schlin, de Turin,” fol. 130r–130v.
32. NMM, ADM/L/E/140, Ship’s log of the first lieutenant of the Essex, James Allan, April 18, 1758, not foliated. It has not thus far been possible to find their trace, which would mean sifting through hundreds of boxes from prisoner of war depots in Great Britain for this period. On this topic, see Cabantous, Dix mille marins face à l’Océan, 190–206; Renaud Morieux, The Society of Prisoners: Anglo-French Wars and Incarceration in the Eighteenth Century (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019).
33. Based on the calculations of Timothy J. A. Le Goff, “L’impact des prises effectuées par les Anglais sur la capacité en hommes de la marine française au xviiie siècle,” in Les marines de guerre européennes, XVII e–XVIII e siècles, ed. Martine Acerra, José Merino, and Jean Meyer (Paris: Presses de l’université de Paris-Sorbonne, 1985), 103–22.
34. Cabantous, Dix mille marins face à l’Océan, 198–200.
35. Based on the database “Normandie-Esclavage” (https://www.normandie-esclavage.fr), which centers on 6,676 crew members between 1749 and 1793.
36. TNA, HCA 32/196, Deposition before a notary and interrogation of Jacques Dubois, captain of the Galatée, Plymouth, April 20, 1758, fol. 7r–7v.
37. NMM, ADM/B/160, Board of Admiralty to John Clevland, Navy Office, September 15, 1758, not foliated.
38. “For sale by the candle,” Public Advertiser, September 18, 1758.
39. See Renaud Morieux, The Channel: England, France and the Construction of a Maritime Border in the Eighteenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016), 284–96.
40. AN, Mar., C6 269, Crew list of the “Galathée” (1758), fol. 79v.
41. To Monsieur de Knosa de Rochereul, officer, from his father, Guérande, March 26, 1758.
42. See the two-part article Jean-Claude Farcy, “‘Je désire quitté la france pour quitté les prisons.’ Les requêtes de prisonniers pour obtenir leur exil (années 1870),” Champ pénal 2 (2005): https://doi.org/10.4000/champpenal.418 and https://doi.org/10.4000/champpenal.424.
43. The system of the parole of honor allowed officers to reside in certain localities if they took an oath not to escape. See Renaud Morieux, “French Prisoners of War, Conflicts of Honour, and Social Inversions in England, 1744–1783,” The Historical Journal 56, no. 1 (2013): 55–88.
44. On this prison, see Morieux, “Le dilemme de la sentinelle. Droit de la guerre et droits des prisonniers de guerre en Grande-Bretagne au xviiie siècle,” Revue d’histoire moderne et contemporaine 64, no. 2 (2017): 39–68.
45. TNA, ADM 97/122, document no. 27, Cranbrook, September 10, 1756.
46. Guillaume le Bourgeois to his son Jean le Bourgeois, Arromanches, January 21, 1758. Since the letters addressed to the crew of the Galatée and gathered in TNA, ADM 97/131 are neither numbered nor categorized, this article does not always reference them in the footnotes, except for when supplementary information is added in relation to the text.
47. Jean Garnier, an officier marinier (petty officer), wrote to his wife on February 13; she received the letter on February 16, and hurried to reply to him two days later: “Quenette” [Quenette Cherost] to her husband Jean Garnier, Saint-Vincent (a faubourg of Saint-Malo), February 18, 1758.
48. Dauphin, Lebrun-Pézerat, and Poublan, Ces bonnes lettres, 104.
49. To Jean Varin from his wife, [Le Havre], January 28, 1758.
50. Among these, nineteen were the intended recipients of multiple letters in the archival box. The first lieutenant Louis Joseph Chambrelan was sent, for instance, six letters, and the common sailor Nicolas Clément Quesnel, five.
51. AN, Mar., C6 269; TNA, HCA 32/196.
52. This number is higher than the number of letters, as some letters had multiple signatories.
53. To Jean Baptiste Côte from his uncle the priest, [near Liseux], March 6, 1758; from the abbé Gigot to his brother, an officer, Paris, April 13, 1758; to Charles Delay, frigate lieutenant, from his father, a merchant, Nantes, March 6, 1758, sending him letters of emancipation from the legal control of his parents; to Heroult, a pilot’s assistant, from his father and brother, traders, Rouen, February 17, 1758 (a common sailor named Antoine Louis Heroult, from Rouen, is mentioned on the crew list, but no “pilot’s assistant,” which is the term used in the letters); Augustin Drouet, a fisherman, to his son, at Saint-Martin-de-Varreville, November 8 and 13, 1757; to Jean Julien from his brother, Bordeaux, February 26, 1758.
54. Cabantous, Dix mille marins face à l’Océan, 290–92; Cabantous, Les citoyens du large, 155–60.
55. To Nicolas Godefroy from his wife, Rouen, March 26, 1758. See also the letter from Nicolas Le Coreux’s wife (“fille Bourbonnois”), Le Havre, March 17, 1758. Le Coreux’s function on board was not clear: the missive mentions his brother, an innkeeper at La Rochelle, as well as expenses engaged for work on their house, and debts to merchants.
56. Le Havre, Archives départementales de Seine-Maritime (hereafter “ADSM”), 4 E 02697, Marriage register entry for Louis Joseph Chambrelan, “officer in merchant ships,” aged twenty-three, and Marie Jeanne Françoise Duboc, aged twenty-four, April 7, 1750, parish of Notre-Dame, not foliated.
57. Within an abundant bibliography see, for instance, Barry Reay, “The Context and Meaning of Popular Literacy: Some Evidence from Nineteenth-Century Rural England,” Past & Present 131 (1991): 89–129; Dominique Julia, “Figures de l’illettré en France à l’époque moderne,” in Illettrismes. Variations historiques et anthropologiques, ed. Béatrice Fraenkel (Paris: BPI-Centre Georges Pompidou, 1993), 51–79.
58. See Elizabeth Foyster, “Prisoners Writing Home: The Functions of Their Letters c. 1680 – 1800,” Journal of Social History 47, no. 4 (2014): 943 – 67; Peter D. Jones, “‘I Cannot Keep My Place without Being Deascent’: Pauper Letters, Parish Clothing and Pragmatism in the South of England, 1750–1830,” Rural History 20, no. 1 (2009): 31–49; Steven King, Writing the Lives of the English Poor, 1750s–1830s (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2019).
59. See the introduction to Anne Hawkins and Helen Watt, eds., Letters of Seamen in the Wars with France, 1793–1815 (Woodbridge: Boydell & Brewer, 2016), 20–28, here p. 22.
60. Cabantous, Dix mille marins face à l’Océan, 461–65.
61. Mark Hailwood, “Rethinking Literacy in Rural England, 1550 – 1700,” Past & Present 260 (2023): 38–70.
62. Hawkins and Watt, Letters of Seamen in the Wars with France, 27– 28.
63. Abbé Gigot to his brother, an officer, Paris, April 3 and 13, 1758.
64. From Michelle Ba[h]ie to her husband Philibert Pallier, master cannoneer, Brest, March 3, 1758.
65. To [Jean Baptiste Emmanuel] Gilbert, master caulker, from his wife, Le Havre, March 17, 1758.
66. Daybell, The Material Letter, 91–95. On pilots, see Cabantous, Dix mille marins face à l’Océan, 241.
67. To François Maze, a pilot’s assistant, from his uncle, Fécamp, February 15 and March 5, 1758.
68. On advice as characteristic of parental letters, see Clare Monagle et al., eds., European Women’s Letter-Writing from the Eleventh to the Twentieth Centuries (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2023), 152. I am grateful to Clare Monagle, Carolyn James, David Garrioch, and Barbara Caine for letting me read the proofs of this book.
69. Jean Du Long to his brother Guillaume Du Long, Fécamp, March 5, 1758.
70. To Antoine Heroult, “pilot’s assistant,” from his father, Rouen, February 17, 1758.
71. See, for example, Delaunay to Antoine Heroult, Sables [d’Olonne], March 9, 1758, including a letter from Heroult’s father to the commissioner of the Navy at Rochefort.
72. See, for example, the letters of Françoise Hamelin to her husband Henry Artur, a common sailor, Saint-Malo, January 30 and March 4, 1758. On debts, see Cabantous, Dix mille marins face à l’Océan, 335–36.
73. Whyman, The Pen and the People, 76.
74. Marguerite Tarade to her husband Jean Villard, a common sailor, Bordeaux, April 27, 1758. See also Anne Fontaine to her husband Duval, a common sailor, Saint-Malo, March 7, 1758.
75. Louise Rozo to her husband Silvestre Lefranc, a “matelo” (matelot, i.e., common sailor), Vannes, March 24, 1758; Jean Lefranc to his cousin Silvestre Lefranc, Séné, January 12, 1758.
76. Marie Chatterenne to her fiancé Jaque Nitre, Le Havre, March 6, 1758, and the same author to the same addressee with neither location nor date; to Pierre François Godebout, a common sailor, from his parents, Le Havre, January 31, and March 6, 1758.
77. Ariane Bruneton-Governatori and Bernard Moreux, “Un modèle épistolaire populaire. Les lettres d’émigrés béarnais,” in Par écrit. Ethnologie des écritures quotidiennes, ed. Daniel Fabre (Paris: Éd. de la MSH, 1997), 79–103; Dauphin, Lebrun-Pézerat, and Poublan, Ces bonnes lettres, 169; Earle, “Introduction: Letters, Writers and the Historian,” 7.
78. TNA, ADM 97/131, Marguerite Tarade to her husband Jean Villard, April 27, 1758, not foliated. Villard, originally from Rions in Gironde, appears in the crew list (1758) as a replacement for Jean Duval (AN, Mar., C6 269, fol. 77v).
79. Daybell, The Material Letter, 23–24, 27–28, and 86.
80. To Nicolas [Clément] Quesnel, a common sailor, from his mother, Le Havre, January 27, 1757 [sic]; to Jean Varin from his wife, Le Havre, February 27, 1758; Marie Tubeuf to her brother Pierre Bellenger, a common sailor, Le Havre, March 10, 1758; to “du boc pilotin” (Pierre Joseph Duboc, pilot) from his sister, January 31, 1758.
81. Whereas Pierre Emmanuel signed his name in the marriage register, Catherine signed with a cross: ADSM, 4 E 2722, April 11, 1752, registers of the parish of Saint-François, Le Havre, not foliated. See also the letter to Charles Carron from his father, Guilmercourt, February 27, 1758: “your writer pays you many compliments.”
82. On letters with multiple authors, see Dauphin, Lebrun-Pézerat, and Poublan, Ces bonnes lettres, 161–64.
83. Gary Schneider, The Culture of Epistolarity: Vernacular Letters and Letter Writing in Early Modern England, 1500–1700 (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2005), 22.
84. Daybell, The Material Letter; Mark Greengrass, “An ‘Epistolary Reformation’: The Role and Significance of Letters in the First Century of the Protestant Reformation,” in The Oxford Handbook of the Protestant Reformations, ed. Ulinka Rublack (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016), 431–56.
85. Daybell, The Material Letter, 9.
86. See, for example, Susan Broomhall, “Letters Make the Family: Nassau Family Correspondence at the Turn of the Seventeenth Century,” in Early Modern Women and Transnational Communities of Letters, ed. Julie D. Campbell and Anne R. Larsen (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2009), 25–44; Ruth Ahnert and Sebastian E. Ahnert, “Protestant Letter Networks in the Reign of Mary I: A Quantitative Approach,” English Literary History 82, no. 1 (2015): 1–33; David S. Lux and Harold J. Cook, “Closed Circles or Open Networks? Communicating at a Distance during the Scientific Revolution,” History of Science 36, no. 2 (1998): 179–211; Nieves Romero-Díaz, “On Female Political Alliances: Sor María de Ágreda’s Communities of Letters,” Hispanic Review 86, no. 1 (2018): 91–111.
87. His letters make multiple references to the sending of money, maritime traffic, and the loading of wheat and beer: see Guillaume le Bourgeois to his son Jean le Bourgeois, a common sailor, Arromanches, January 27, 1758.
88. Guillaume le Bourgeois to his son Jean le Bourgeois, a common sailor, Arromanches, March 11, 1758.
89. On compliments, see Dauphin, Lebrun-Pézerat, and Poublan, Ces bonnes lettres, 174.
90. “Your faithful wife fille Bourbonnois” to Nicolas Le Coreux, Le Havre, March 17, 1758.
91. It is also possible that “Gilbert” refers to the barrel-maker Pierre Gilbert.
92. Guillaume le Bourgeois to his son Jean le Bourgeois, a common sailor, Arromanches, January 21, 1758.
93. Anne Le Cerf to her husband Jean Topsent, a “capitaine matelot” (literally, “sailor captain”), Quillebeuf, February 28, 1758. “Quillebois” refers to people from Quillebeuf.
94. “États ou professions des habitants du Havre, d’après le dénombrement de 1723,” cited in Jean-Baptiste Gastinne, Le Havre 1517–1789. Histoire d’une identité urbaine (Mont-Saint-Aignan: PURH, 2016), 460.
95. Cabantous, Dix mille marins face à l’Océan, 225–26.
96. Ibid., 325–28. Social homogamy among common sailors must not, however, be exaggerated, as Cabantous notes in the same work, 370–76.
97. To Julien Hequet from his mother, at Granville, March 1, 1758. I could not find Hequet in the crew list, but he was likely a common sailor.
98. See Sara Caputo, “Countable ‘Foreigners’: Birthplace and Demographic Profiles,” chapter 1 of Foreign Jack Tars: The British Navy and Transnational Seafarers during the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2022), 25–53. On the classes system, see Cabantous, Dix mille marins face à l’Océan, 183–90.
99. Charles Gilbert to his brother Pierre Gilbert, barrel-maker, Le Havre, March 3, 1758.
100. For Quesnel’s position on board, see AN, Mar., C6 242, Crew list of the Galatée (1757), fol. 160v.
101. ADSM, 3 E 113/32, Marriage of Nicolas Quesnel, twenty-six years old, and Marguerite Lemoyne, twenty-two years old, September 25, 1719, registers of the parish of Saint-Sauveur, Montivilliers, not foliated.
102. On this way of “performing motherhood,” see Monagle et al., European Women’s Letter-Writing, 143–56.
103. Schneider, The Culture of Epistolarity, 56–58; I am borrowing the expression “epistolary pact” from Dauphin, Lebrun-Pézerat, and Poublan, Ces bonnes lettres, 131–60.
104. She signed this letter “wife of pierre frebourg,” who was her second husband and not the biological father (also called Nicolas Quesnel) of Nicolas Clément: Marguerite Lemoyne to her son Nicolas Clément Quesnel, a common sailor, Le Havre, March 7, 1758.
105. Marguerite Lemoyne to her son Nicolas Clément Quesnel, a common sailor, Le Havre, March 7, 1758.
106. To Jean Varin from his wife, Le Havre, February 27, 1758.
107. Marguerite Lemoyne, the mother of Nicolas Clément Quesnel, was certainly unable to write a letter. She signed the register entry for her first marriage, to Nicolas Quesnel, with a cross: ADSM, 3 E 113/32, September 25, 1719, registers of the parish of Saint-Sauveur, Montivilliers, not foliated.
108. Mark Granovetter, “The Strength of Weak Ties,” American Journal of Sociology 78, no. 6 (1973): 1360–80.
109. From the widow Crevel to her brother, Nicolas Godefroy, pilot, Rouen, February 4, 1758.
110. To Jean le Bourgeois from his mother, Arromanches, March 11, 1758. See AN, Mar., C6 242, Crew list of the Galatée (1757), fol. 162v.
111. AN, Mar., C6 269, Crew list of the “Galathée” (1758), fol. 74v.
112. Daybell, “Copying, Letter-Books and Scribal Circulation of Letters,” chapter 7 of Daybell, The Material Letter, 175–216.
113. Daybell, The Material Letter, 148.
114. “Janine” [Anne] Le Cerf to her husband Jean Topsent, “naval officer,” Quillebeuf, March 22, 1758.
115. To “master Brosaud” from his sister, “done [written] at saintes mary,” February 21, 1758.
116. Schneider, The Culture of Epistolarity, 27.
117. Ibid., 55.
118. “Janine” [Anne] Le Cerf to her husband Jean Topsent, “naval officer,” Quillebeuf, March 22, 1758. Jacques Avril devoted the first third of his letter to his brother Jean, a munitions officer, to elements that enabled the letter to be placed in its rightful sequence of correspondence: “at Saint germain jacques avril Today The Fifth Day of February 1758 My brother jean avril I take the liberty of replying to the letter that we received at the Start of February 1758 my brother you have indeed Written of it And It is the first that we have received of Those that You address you Letter do not Worry of not receiving them but when you reply I pray you to Send them [the letters] to me at mine Jacques avril at Saint Germain de montivillers I will be happy” (Saint-Germain, February 5, 1758).
119. Monagle et al., European Women’s Letter-Writing, 160.
120. Dauphin, Lebrun-Pézerat, and Poublan, Ces bonnes lettres, 156; Fitzmaurice, The Familiar Letter, 234–35; Schneider, The Culture of Epistolarity, 84–90.
121. For instance, the way in which the parents of the common sailor Pierre François Godebout acknowledged receipt of his letter, after he had already been embarked for three months: “we were worried to see all the others receive news and not us” (Le Havre, January 31, 1758).
122. On the concept of prise de parole, see Michel de Certeau, The Capture of Speech and Other Political Writings [1994], trans. Tom Conley (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997).
123. For references to Goffman by specialists of epistolary studies, see, for instance, Dauphin, Lebrun-Pézerat, and Poublan, Ces bonnes lettres, 146; Fitzmaurice, The Familiar Letter, 26–27; Schneider, The Culture of Epistolarity, 87–88.
124. Pierre Butel to his son André Butel, a common sailor, with neither location nor date. According to the crew list, André came from La Hougue and was promoted to cannoneer’s assistant in March 1758.
125. Barbe Yvon to her husband François Foulon, a common sailor, Granville, February 1, 1758. Barbe Yvon had relayed her husband’s remarks in a previous letter.
126. Louise Rozo to her husband Silvestre Lefranc, a common sailor, Vannes, March 24, 1758. “Une Consolation inexplicable” might be read as an “unimaginable” or even “invaluable” consolation.—Trans.
127. Marie Tubeuf to her brother Pierre Bellenger, a common sailor, Le Havre, March 10, 1758.
128. Armande and Elisabeth Gigot to their brother, an officer, Le Havre, January 15, 1758.
129. See also the letter to the master carpenter Jean Nicolas Carel from his wife, Le Havre, March 3, 1758, on the (false) news that his ship would not be going to Louisbourg: “It is what caused me great sadness in the Fear that some Misfortune would have happened to you given that your frigate is very old.”
130. Kenneth J. Banks, Chasing Empire across the Sea: Communications and the State in the French Atlantic, 1713–1763 (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2002), 69–72.
131. Also writing from Le Havre, the parents of the common sailor Pierre François Godebout likewise engaged in wishful thinking: “some say here that you will not go to louissebour and that you are still going to escort the boats as usual” (Le Havre, March 6, 1758). Jean Du Long wrote to his brother Guillaume Du Long, first pilot: “I received this day with great pleasure yours by which I see that your trip to Louis Bour has been broken off well and good” (Fécamp, March 5, 1758).
132. Cabantous, Dix mille marins face à l’Océan, 274–75; John R. McNeill, Mosquito Empires: Ecology and War in the Greater Caribbean, 1620–1914 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010).
133. To Antoine Heroult, “pilot’s assistant,” from his brother, Rouen, February 17, 1758.
134. See, in particular, Dominique Margairaz and Philippe Minard, eds., L’information économique, XVI e–XIX e siècles (Paris: Institut de la gestion publique et du développement économique, 2008).
135. To Charles Carron from his father, Guilmercourt, February 27, 1758. Privateering from Le Havre was in crisis during the Seven Years’ War, thousands of common sailors having been captured by the Royal Navy as early as 1755, while work in shipyards was interrupted. On this situation, see Pierre Dardel, Commerce, industrie et navigation à Rouen et au Havre au XVIII e siècle (Rouen: Société libre d’émulation de la Seine-Maritime, 1966), 38–47.
136. To Jean Nicolas Carel, a master carpenter, from his wife, Le Havre, March 3, 1758; to Jean Varin from his wife, Le Havre, February 27, 1758; from Augustin Drouet to his son, Saint-Martin, November 8, 1757; to Heroult, a “pilot’s assistant,” from his father, Rouen, February 17, 1758.
137. On the British case, see Patricia Y. C. E. Lin, “Citizenship, Military Families, and the Creation of a New Definition of ‘Deserving Poor’ in Britain, 1793–1815,” Social Politics: International Studies in Gender, State & Society 7, no. 1 (2000): 5–46.
138. Cabantous, Dix mille marins face à l’Océan, 269–77.
139. Jean-Pierre Goubert, “Environnement et épidémies : Brest au xviiie siècle,” Annales de Bretagne et des Pays de l’Ouest (hereafter “ABPO”) 81, no. 4 (1974): 733–43; Isabelle Guégan, “Une épidémie de typhus à Brest en 1757–1758. Combattre la maladie et la mort,” Bulletin de la société archéologique du Finistère 140 (2012): 329–58; Guégan, “Typhus à bord ! L’escadre du comte Du Bois de La Motte confrontée à une épidémie (1757),” ABPO 128, no. 3 (2021): 123–55.
140. Guégan, “Une épidémie de typhus à Brest.”
141. Goubert, “Environnement et épidémies,” 736.
142. AN, Mar., C6 269, Crew list of the “Galathée” (1758), fol. 66v.
143. Such as Antoine Des Etables, from Caen, who had disembarked at the Île d’Aix on February 10 and died there on April 8, 1758 (AN, Mar., C6 269, Crew list of the “Galathée” [1758], fol. 72v).
144. To Knosa de Rocherole, from his mother, Guérande, March 26, 1758. See also the letter to Jean Varin from his wife, [Le Havre], January 28, 1758.
145. Cabantous, Dix mille marins face à l’Océan, 268, 279, and 282–85.
146. Cabantous, Les citoyens du large, 153. See also Cabantous, Le ciel dans la mer. Christianisme et civilisation maritime, XVI e–XIX e siècle (Paris: Fayard, 1990).
147. “Janine” [Anne] Le Cerf to her husband Jean Topsent, “naval officer,” Quillebeuf, March 22, 1758. See also, between the same interlocutors, the missive dated February 28, 1758.
148. Cabantous, Dix mille marins face à l’Océan, 445–47 and 454–55.
149. Françoise Hamelin to her husband Henry Artur, a common sailor, Saint-Malo, January 30, 1758. See also Marianne Gerar to her fiancé Nicolas Clément Quesnel, Le Havre, February 7, 1758: “The only [thing] left to me is to wish you a good journey, in which if God wills it and hears my feeble prayers for your preservation, I do not doubt that I will see you again in good health”; to Droumard from his wife, La Rochelle, April 11, 1758: “may God keep you and preserve you from all harm and accidents it is all the mercy that I ask from God evening and morning in my prayers.”
150. The canonical phrase was “nothing is more certain than death nor less certain than its hour.” See Philippe Ariès, The Hour of Our Death: The Classic History of Western Attiudes to Death over the Last One Thousand Years [1977], trans. Helen Weaver (London: Allen Lane, 1981), 189.
151. Julie Hardwick, Sex in an Old Regime City: Young Workers and Intimacy in France, 1660–1789 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020), 38–51.
152. Guillaume le Bourgeois to his son Jean le Bourgeois, a common sailor, Arromanches, March 11, 1758.
153. To Jean Baptiste Emmanuel Gilbert, a master caulker, from his wife, Le Havre, February 5, 1758. On this process, see Bruneton-Governatori and Moreux, “Un modèle épistolaire populaire.”
154. Marguerite Tarade to her husband Jean Villard, a common sailor, Bordeaux, April 27, 1758.
155. Marie-Claire Grassi, “La correspondance comme discours du privé au xviiie siècle,” in L’épistolarité à travers les siècles. Geste de communication et/ou d’écriture, ed. Mireille Bossis (Stuttgart: Franz Steiner Verlag, 1990), 180–93, here p. 180.
156. Marie-Claire Grassi, “Un révélateur de l’éducation au xviiie siècle : expressions de la vie affective et correspondances intimes,” Revue d’histoire moderne et contemporaine 28, no. 1 (1981): 174–84, here p. 177.
157. Susan M. Fitzmaurice speaks of the “fiction of the affective presence of an absent individual”: Fitzmaurice, The Familiar Letter, 35.
158. Schneider, The Culture of Epistolarity, 109 and 112.
159. Marie Jeanne Françoise Dubosc to her husband, “Monsieur Chambrelan officer on the frigate of the King la galattee,” with neither location nor date.
160. Dauphin, Lebrun-Pézerat, and Poublan, Ces bonnes lettres, 111.
161. ADSM, 4E2701, Parish register of Notre-Dame, Le Havre, November 28, 1761, not foliated: the entry for the marriage of Louis Joseph Chambrelan and Thérèse Macquerel specified that he was the “widower of Marie Jeanne Françoise Dubosc buried in the parish of fontaine the twenty-eight of August seventeen fifty-nine according to the record of her death given to us.”
162. Dauphin, Lebrun-Pézerat, and Poublan, Ces bonnes lettres, 144.
163. To Droumard from his wife, La Rochelle, April 11, 1758. I have been unable to identify Droumard in the crew lists of the Galatée.
164. Schneider, The Culture of Epistolarity, 120.
165. To [Jean Baptiste Emmanuel] Gilbert, a master caulker, from his wife, Le Havre, March 17, 1758.
166. Anne Le Cerf to her husband Jean Topsent, a “capitaine matelot” (literally, “sailor captain”), Quillebeuf, February 28, 1758 (my emphasis).
167. This practice is attested well before the eighteenth century; see Daybell, The Material Letter, 165ff.
168. At her marriage, unlike her husband, Anne did not know how to sign her name: Évreux, Archives départementales de l’Eure, BMS (1750–1772), 8 Mi 3325, December 2, 1752, parish registers of Quillebeuf-sur-Seine, not foliated. The register mentions the union of Anne Le Cerf and of Jean Baptiste Topsent, “mattelot.”
169. “Janine” [Anne] Le Cerf to her husband Jean Topsent, “naval officer,” Quillebeuf, March 22, 1758. The two letters do not demonstrate the same levels of literacy.
170. Schneider, The Culture of Epistolarity, 115.
171. Roland Barthes, A Lover’s Discourse: Fragments [1977], trans. Richard Howard (New York: Hill and Wang, 2001), 15, discussed in Dauphin, Lebrun-Pézerat, and Poublan, Ces bonnes lettres, 131–40.
172. Gillette Garnier to her husband Jean Garnier, Saint-Brieuc, March 5, 1758.
173. Schneider, The Culture of Epistolarity, 123–24; Hardwick, Sex in an Old Regime City, 58.
174. Françoise Hamelin to her husband Henry Artur, a common sailor, January 30, 1758.
175. Dauphin, Lebrun-Pézerat, and Poublan, Ces bonnes lettres, 171–72.
176. For examples, see Hawkins and Watt, Letters of Seamen in the Wars with France, 13, 16, 19, and 27.
177. Monagle et al., European Women’s Letter-Writing, 198. See also Cécile Dauphin, “Écriture de l’intime dans une correspondance familiale du xixe siècle,” Le divan familial 11, no. 2 (2003): 63–73.
178. See, in particular, William M. Reddy, The Navigation of Feeling: A Framework for the History of Emotions (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 141–72.
179. Janet L. Nelson, “The Problematic in the Private,” review of Paul Veyne, ed., A History of Private Life from Pagan Rome to Byzantium, trans. Arthur Goldhammer (Cambridge: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1987), Social History 15, no. 3 (1990): 355–64, here p. 355.
180. On violence during war, see especially Sharon Block, Rape and Sexual Power in Early America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006). Only a few French-language studies have focused on the early modern period, let alone on the eighteenth century. See, for example, Philippe Nivet and Marion Trévisi, eds., Les femmes et la guerre de l’Antiquité à 1918 (Paris: Economica, 2010). My thanks to Sylvie Steinberg for exchanges on this point.
181. See, for example, Marisa J. Fuentes, Dispossessed Lives: Enslaved Women, Violence, and the Archive (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016); Durba Ghosh, Sex and the Family in Colonial India: The Making of Empire (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 133–69.
182. These survival strategies have been studied in detail for the British world: see, in particular, Jennine Hurl-Eamon, “The Fiction of Female Dependence and the Makeshift Economy of Soldiers, Sailors, and their Wives in Eighteenth-Century London,” Labor History 49, no. 4 (2008): 481–501; Kit Candlin and Cassandra Pybus, Enterprising Women: Gender, Race, and Power in the Revolutionary Atlantic (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2015).
183. The sister and mother of the pilot Nicolas Godefroy refused to write “a letter of Lies” to the classes administration to help him obtain his leave, because “that would maybe cause you to stay there longer” (Rouen, March 26, 1758). For an example of an intercession by a mother to obtain the liberation of her son, see Morieux, The Society of Prisoners, 69; on the strategies used by women to receive the pay of their husbands, see Margaret R. Hunt, “Women and the Fiscal-Imperial State in the Late Seventeenth and early Eighteenth Centuries,” in A New Imperial History: Culture, Identity, and Modernity in Britain and the Empire, 1660–1840, ed. Kathleen Wilson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 29–47.
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This is a translation of: Lettres perdues