A French revolutionary political club and its global contexts: The Society of Lorient, 1790–94

Abstract

How can a political society established in one port city in Revolutionary France be a ‘global’ actor? This article examines the revolutionary Society of Lorient, an Atlantic port founded to be the seat of the French East India Company, as a case study of the viability of the ‘micro-spatial’ approach to global history outlined by Christian De Vito. It considers how the Lorient Society positioned itself as an intermediary between global concerns and the French national authorities, as well as the Society’s evolving perspective on global imperial rivalries in their relationship to revolution, the ‘rights of man’, trade, war, race, and slavery. In doing so, it shows how a seemingly local actor could help construct the global in the context of the ‘Age of Revolution(s)’ of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.