1643 to 1793 · Pre-Revolutionaryspan
La Rochelle was France's second slaving port and quit before abolition
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La Rochelle stood second among French slaving ports, behind Nantes, and used its position on the Atlantic coast to run efficient triangular voyages: manufactures out to Africa, captives across to the Caribbean, sugar and coffee home. Its captains loaded mainly at Ouidah on the Bight of Benin and at Malembo north of the Congo. The difficulty lay at the far corner of the triangle. Le Havre competed hard for the Saint-Domingue market and La Rochelle lost ground there. Its slave traffic began falling away after 1788, at a moment when French slaving as a whole was still expanding, so the decline belonged to the port rather than to the country. When French merchants returned to the traffic illegally in the nineteenth century, after abolition, La Rochelle took almost no part in it. The port was out of the business before the law required it, and the ships that carried on sailed from Nantes and Bordeaux.
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