Extract

Marie-Françoise BERNERON-COUVENHES

Maritime postal services were first established in the first third of the 19th century. The national government’s concern with providing regular maritime connections for the routing of correspondence became greater during the 18th century, at a time when France was desirous of creating close connections with its colonies, a period that coincided with great strides in its commercial relations. With the advent of steamer navigation, it became possible technically to construe regular maritime postal connections from the 1830s onwards. The question of how to manage these new networks arose at that time. The State had the choice of either organizing regular departures to specific destinations by signing contracts with private ship-owners or else putting the service under State supervision. In reality both approaches were used alternately. In this paper we propose to study the manner in which the State managed, first directly and then indirectly, these postal maritime services during the 19th century.

In 1835, the State created a postal network in the Mediterranean. In 1851 and thereafter, however, concessions definitively overtook state-supervised operations that had become too costly. The model the French government decided upon was inspired by foreign examples, Austrian and in particular British, among others. Private navigation companies, especially the “Messageries Maritimes”1 (for the sea transport of goods) in 1851 and the “Compagnie Générale Transatlantique”2 in 1861, received the concession of postal maritime services in the Mediterranean, the Atlantic Ocean, and beyond Suez; more restricted services...