Spanish and Portuguese Women in French Cities, 1500–1650

THE PRICE OF ASSIMILATION: SPANISH AND PORTUGUESE WOMEN IN FRENCH CITIES, 1500–1650 Gayle Brunelle Introduction Between 1480 and 1575 several waves of Spanish immigrants, most of them merchants and many of them of converso (converted Jewish) heritage, settled in France, especially in cities engaged in Atlantic trade such as Rouen and Nantes. Many of these Spanish merchants began their careers in France as factors of the great wool trading families of Castile. Within a generation or two, these merchants branched out to many other areas of commerce, including trade with the Low Countries, Africa, and the New World.1 Scholars of the Spanish immigrants in France during the sixteenth century such as Michel Mollat and Henri Lapeyre tend to assert that the Spaniards crossed the boundaries of community with ease and were absorbed into Northern French society relatively quickly, within a generation or two.2 Between 1560 and 1660, meanwhile, a new wave of Iberian migrants began to arrive in France in significant numbers. These too were mostly merchants, the great majority from converso families. They were known as “Portuguese” in France even though only a minority of these merchants were actually of Portuguese ancestry, the rest being descendants of Sephardic Jews forcibly converted in Portugal between 1495 and 1530, or Spanish Jews who fled to Portugal for refuge after the 1492 expulsion 1 Gayle K. Brunelle, “Immigration, Assimilation and Success: Three Families of Spanish Origin in Sixteenth-Century Rouen,” Sixteenth Century Journal 20, no. 2 (Summer, 1989): 203–19; Connie Mathers, “Family Partnerships and International Trade in Early Modern Europe: Merchants from Burgos in England and France, 1470–1570,” Business History Review 62, no. 3 (Autumn 1988): 367–97. 2 Michel Mollat, Le commerce maritime normand à la fin du moyen age (Paris: Librai- rie Plon, 1952), 509–22; Henri Lapeyre, Une famille de marchands les Ruiz (Paris: Librairie Armand Colin, 1955), esp. 46, 93, 103. Only Jules Mathorez has made an effort to link or compare the experiences of the Spanish and Portuguese in France: Jules Mathorez, “Notes sur les espagnols en France,” Bulletin Historique 16 (1914): 337–41; Mathorez, “Notes sur les espagnols et les portugais à Nantes,” Extrait du Bulletin Hispanique 14 (1912): 3, 14 (1912): 4, 15 (1913): 1, 2 and 3 (Bordeaux: Feret et Fils, s.d.); Mathorez, “Notes sur l’histoire de la colonie portugaise de Nantes,” (Bordeaux: Feret et Fils, 1922). 156 gayle brunelle from Spain. (In fact the term “Portuguese” became, and still is, synony- mous with “Jewish” for many people in France.) Because many of them were crypto-Jews—and in the eyes of the French, the religious orthodoxy of the entire community was suspect—most of the Portuguese remained on the margins of French society and culture. After 1650, historians have claimed, they gradually deserted most of France except for the southwest, seeking greener, or at least safer, pastures in Bordeaux if they remained in France, or in Amsterdam, Hamburg, or London. French scholars have tended to focus on the religion of the Portuguese rather than on their commercial activities and contributions to the French economy.3 The suspicion of crypto-Judaism did not, by contrast, dog the Spaniards in France in the same way. From the beginning, therefore, these two immi- grant communities in France, while having much in common in terms of culture and heritage, followed different trajectories in their relationship with their French host society. Both groups of Iberians in France played a central role in catalyzing French access to early modern Atlantic world trade networks. Indeed, despite private- and crown-sponsored French efforts to establish a colo- nial presence or a foothold in Atlantic trade in the Americas during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, they were the least connected to the more lucrative Atlantic trade networks and opportunities.4 Spanish and Portuguese merchants in France, by contrast, retained the right to par- ticipate in the Iberian Atlantic trade networks, and even if they became French citizens, were able, via their kin and business connections within the Iberian world, to funnel French products into the Iberian colonies, and the goods, and silver, from those colonies back to France. As a result, they became prominent “players” in the commerce of the cities in which they 3 Most of the scholars who have studied the “Portuguese” communities in France have tended to be Jewish, and the extent of the “judaizing” of the Portuguese has, not surpris- ingly, been their main focus. See, for example, Frances Malino, The Sephardic Jews of Bor- deaux: Assimilation and Emancipation in Revolutionary and Napoleonic France (Tuscaloosa, AL: The University of Alabama Press, 1978). 4 There are numerous studies on French efforts to break into the Atlantic world. See inter alia the essays in Frank Lestringant, ed., La France-Amérique (XVIe–XVIIIe siècles): Actes du XXXVe colloque international d’études humanistes réunis par Frank Lestringant (Paris: Honoré Champion, 1998); Philippe Bonnichon, Des cannibals aux castors: Les décou- vertes françaises de l’Amérique (1503–1788) (Paris: Éditions France-Empire, 1994); Philip P. Boucher, France and the American Tropics to 1700: Tropics of Discontent? (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2008); Pierre Chaunu, Conquête et exploitation des nou- veaux mondes, XVIe siècle (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1969); Gilles Havard and Cécile Vidal, Histoire de l’Amérque française (Paris: Flammarion, 2003)..

Load more