Loire port that once ran half of France’s slave trade
Nantes sits on the Loire some 50 kilometres inland from the Atlantic and is France’s sixth-largest city. Historically Breton, it was the favourite home of the 15th-century dukes of Brittany, and from 1707 to 1793 its shipowners handled 42 percent of the French slave trade.
The city takes its name from the Namnetes, a Gaulish people who settled on the north bank of the Loire where the Erdre joins it, around the turn of the first century BC. Ptolemy called the place Kondēoúinkon, later Latinised as Condevincum, a word probably linked to the Gaulish term for a confluence. Under Rome it stayed modest because traders preferred inland roads, yet after a Germanic raid in 275 residents raised a wall around 16 hectares, among the largest enclosures in Gaul.
Clovis’s Franks seized Nantes around 490 after a sixty-day siege, and under Charlemagne it anchored the Breton March, first governed by the legendary Roland. Breton rulers took the city in the mid-ninth century, and Vikings killed its bishop in a raid of 843. The 15th century brought a golden age under Duke Francis II, who rebuilt the castle and cathedral and saw Brittany’s first university founded here in 1460. After the 1532 union with France, however, Rennes became the provincial capital.
Sugar from Martinique, Guadeloupe and Saint-Domingue reshaped the port from the 1640s, and by 1700 Nantes was France’s biggest harbour. Its merchants entered the African slave trade in 1706, sending ships from West Africa to the Caribbean and home with sugar and other goods; between 1707 and 1793 they accounted for 42 percent of the whole French trade in enslaved people. The Revolution brought decline, followed after 1850 by shipbuilding and food processing, then a turn to services.
Once nicknamed the Venice of the West for channels filled in during the 1920s and 1930s, Nantes won the European Green Capital Award in 2013, with 3,366 hectares of green space. Its exclusion from the modern Brittany region remains a live controversy.
Source: Nantes
