Though our school blends with today’s modern era and is preparing the students for the 21st century, it can also turn back to history.
Left North Brittany to find a better future... Eyes facing the great ocean...
Voltaire, described Mahé de La Bourdonnais as being, like the Duquesnes, the Barts, the Duguay-Trouins, capable of doing a lot with a little, and being as intelligent in commerce as he was in the navy... This man who was both a merchant and a warrior, avenged the honour of the French flag in Asia.
Bertrand-François Mahé de La Bourdonnais was born in Saint-Malo (a city twinned with Port Louis) on February 11, 1699. He died in Paris on November 10, 1753. This French naval officer was an admiral of France. Appointed as Governor General of the Mascarene Islands for the East India Company in 1733, he took up his post in 1735.
In a few years, this captain undertook numerous transformations. He moved the seat of government from Isle Bourbon to Isle de France and established his residence in Port Louis.
Recognising its naval value, he made Port Louis a centre of naval construction while the Port-Bourbon in the south of the island lost its significance. He intended to make Port Louis an attractive model city and comfortable – a mini-Paris with its Champ de Mars, its four-lane, rational streets, and its roadways, bridges and canals to control human flow and bad weather.
He opened the first sugar mill near Pamplemousses. He had new roads paved, founded hospitals, introduced new plants and raw materials essential for the economy of the island.
To attract settlers from Isle Bourbon, he generously offered them land plots. He sought to settle visiting officers by offering them 90 hectares of good land if they married a young girl from the island. Some 2,500 colonists settled there within a decade.
Mahé de La Bourdonnais would wake up at four o'clock in the morning to take care of this task, while he himself would follow the work during the day, and then continue to work at night in his office and regulate, among other things, the unfortunate "road traffic". In his own words: "the wealth of the inhabitants of any country depends on the ease of transport".
The development of the island was due as much to the hard work of the colonists and slaves* as to the ingenuity of this captain from Saint-Malo:
"As soon as La Bourdonnais arrived in the islands of his government, he studied them thoroughly. His excellent insights, his relentless efforts simplified the work. He established discipline and subordination everywhere, handling with as much skill as severity fiery spirits, which had never before been held within the bounds of duty and obedience. After having regulated the moral interests, as a legislator would have done, he took good care of the material interests of the settlers. He was the first to provide Isle de France and Bourbon Island with sugar cane plantations, and he established refineries that produced considerable income for the the East India Company almost instantly. He also founded cotton and indigo factories, cultivated rice and wheat to provide food for the Europeans, and introduced manioc, which he had brought from Brazil to the eastern islands of Africa to provide food for the slaves. Due to the lack of engineers and architects, La Bourdonnais did both jobs and soon built houses, hospitals, stores and even arsenals, replacing huts with good supporting structures; connections were established, canals dug, bridges, aqueducts, a harbor and docks built as if by miracle.
Before the arrival of La Bourdonnais, no one in Isle de France knew what it was to fix or repair a vessel. The inhabitants, who had small boats to go fishing, were unable to make the slightest repair by themselves, and expected nothing but the help of workmen who, by chance, relaxed on their coasts. The intelligent governor, who had seen in Isle de France a possible emulator of the Dutch colony of Batavia, a convenient and safe warehouse for the French East India Company, encouraged the colonists to support him with all his might. He looked for, transported and shaped all the wood suitable for the navy, and in less than two years he had all the materials he wanted at his disposal... Soon the workers of Isle de France were able to double and repair not only the ships on their shores, but also those coming from Europe. They did not stop there. A beautiful brigantine, a low-banked ship with a main mast, a foremast and a bowsprit, more used for trade than for war, although very suitable for racing, was undertaken with great success by La Bourdonnais, who immediately had a five-hundred-ton ship built in its place. The port of Isle de France was not long in becoming as well known for the construction of ships as that of the East... Thus, Isle de France and Bourbon Island, yesterday still almost disdained as useless rocks, became in a few days the pride of the Indian Ocean, the target and desire of the English and the Dutch."
Léon Guérin, in his Maritime History of France (1844)
*IMPORTANT NOTE:
Lycée La Bourdonnais, a member of the AEFE, an international network of French high schools located around the world, reiterates its commitment to the values of the French Republic as well as the provisions of Article 1 of the law of May 21, 2001:
"The French Republic recognises that the transatlantic slave trade as well as the trade in the Indian Ocean on the one hand, and slavery on the other hand, perpetrated from the 15th century onwards, in America and the Caribbean, in the Indian Ocean and in Europe, against the African, Native Americans, Malagasy and Indian populations, constitute a crime against humanity."
