In Service to Six Monarchs

Despite Ukraine and France being situated on the opposite sides of the European continent, their histories are deeply interwoven. It would be erroneous to say that this refers only to separate insignificant episodes. One can find most interesting evidences of the broad scale of Ukrainian-French relations in virtually every century or millennium. Recall Anna Yaroslavna’s marriage to King Henry I of France or, more accurately, Paris. One of the consequences of this marriage was that for many centuries French kings would swear their oath in Reims on the Evangelistary, an old Slavonic Bible. In the seventeenth century one of the most complete sources on Ukraine’s history was a scrupulous work by French engineer and cartographer Guillaume Le Vasseur de Beauplan titled A Description of Ukraine. Pierre Chevalier’s History of the War of the Cossacks against Poland and Discourse of the Origin, Country, Manners, Government, and Religion of the Cossacks (1663) also deserves special mention. In their turn, the Zaporozhzhian Cossacks took part in the Thirty Years War (1618-1648), during which as allies of the French king they took impregnable Dunkirk from Spanish (October 1646). In the eighteenth century all Europe knew the name of Ukrainian politician Hryhor Orlyk (Orly), Hetman Pylyp Orlyk’s son, who was also an outstanding diplomat, military leader, count, and Marshal of France.

In the history of Russia in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries (and, certainly, of Ukraine, with which these persons’ lives are connected in many ways) three French natives occupy an honorable place. Two of them are more popular: Armand-Emmanuel Richelieu du Plessis, Odesa mayor in 1803-1805 and General Governor of the Territory of New Russia in 1805-1814, and Alexandre Andrault de Langeron, also Odesa Mayor and from 1815 Military Governor of Kharkiv. However, next to nothing is known about marquis Jean Baptiste de Traversay (1754-1831), who was born in Martinique and rose to Russian naval minister. Ivan Ivanovich Traversay occupied this high post for almost nineteen years. His great-great-grandniece Madeleine du Chatenet succeeded in filling this gap, caused by both objective and subjective reasons. Her book Jean Baptiste de Traversay: Minister of the Russian Navy, published in the Moscow-based Nauka Publishing House this May, is a valuable source on world history, primarily the history of Russia, France, the United States, and Ukraine. Marquis was “commander-in-chief of the Black Sea Navy and seaports” as well as military governor of Mykolayiv and Sevastopol. In fact, he was a pioneer in Ukraine’s shipbuilding and actively took part in strengthening the naval base in Sevastopol. Napoleon closely followed Traversay’s successes in these years and offered him the post of French naval minister.

The veteran and hero of the American War of Independence, Knight of the Cross of St. Louis (France) and of the Order of Cincinnati (USA) emigrated after the Jacobin terror began in France. The Russian Empire became the marquis’s second motherland. He served faithfully two French kings, Louis XV and Louis XVI, and later Russia’s Catherine II, Paul I, Alexander I, and Nicholas I. Due to Marquis de Traversay’s personal qualities, his name almost always remained in the shadows, though the golden age of the imperial navy in the early nineteenth century would have been impossible but for his guidance: the first circumnavigation under the command of Ivan Krusenstern and Nizhyn-born Yury Lysuyansky, Faddei Bellinhausen’s expedition to the Antarctic (incidentally, there is an archipelago named after him there), and the Pacific Ocean, Ferdinand Wrangel’s expedition to research the north coast of Siberia and North America, Otto Kozebu’s expedition to seek a southern way from the Pacific to the Atlantic (with an archipelago of 32 atolls also named after de Traversay).

Interestingly, de Traversay was the first to implement the practice of publishing expedition reports (he headed thirteen of the twenty expeditions in the nineteenth century) in civil and military journals. It is necessary to bring admiral’s name back to light, for otherwise the history of the late eighteenth-early nineteenth century in global context would incomplete, to say the least.