Maison de l’Armateur — Wealth, Trade and Slavery
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Transcript
This late-eighteenth-century merchant house survived the destruction that erased much of old Le Havre. Its elegant interior represents the wealth of Atlantic commerce—but that wealth cannot be separated from slavery.
Merchant Martin-Pierre Foäche, who acquired the house in 1800, belonged to a family deeply involved in colonial trade and slaveholding in Saint-Domingue. Le Havre was one of the French ports participating in the Atlantic slave trade.
The house is therefore valuable precisely because it complicates beautiful interiors. Furniture, maps and commercial offices can be read alongside the coercive labour systems that made some fortunes possible. Heritage should preserve discomfort as carefully as decoration.