Archipelagic Imperatives. Shipwreck and Lifesaving in European Societies since 1800

Life-saving as a humanitarian cause was only one part of a larger project of building a better society made up of better men in 19th century France. The focal point of this project was the tension between the initial general humanitarian goal of saving lives and the construction of a specific cause towards which it worked in practice, the lifeboat movement. Only by studying the networks of actors who took part in it and determining who were the donors and who were the lifeboatmen and what distinguishes one group from the other is it possible to understand how discourses pertaining to both humanitarian generality and the specific cause of lifesaving at sea, as well as the tensions between them, are articulated.

Drawing on the rich sources of information provided by the Annales of the French lifeboat society, the Société Centrale de Sauvetage des Naufragés (SCSN), founded in 1865, the study identified different groups of donors and examines the lifeboat society’s links to the French state as well as its inclusion in networks of maritime commerce on both a local and a global scale. Since sources relating to lifeboatmen are hard to find, a microhistorical approach was used to analyze the role that humanitarian generality played in their volunteering life.

The rapid technological developments that entered humanitarian practice during the first half of the 20th century—motorization, radio, radar, and airborne rescue craft—fundamentally altered the rescue activities in place at the time. They facilitated entirely new procedures, having a profound impact on the possible scope of rescue operations. In addition to the practical correlates of these technologies, they also bore on the framework of values and norms, as well as on the constitution of lifesaving from shipwreck as a specific type of situation. The normative order of the humanitarian saving of lives from shipwreck intersected with political and military normativities in unprecedented ways and caused open or latent frictions and symbolic, discursive, and practical adaptations. This project therefore explored the shifting dynamics that play out in the relationship between moral normativity and technical innovations, as well as between generalizing principles and situational factors.

Lifesaving is one of many activities regulated by sovereign states. Historically, sovereignty has seen multiple different definitions. However, since the 19th century, sovereignty has often meant the control of borders and the passing of laws within them. This subproject investigated the multifaceted links of the concept of sovereignty with shipwreck and lifesaving in the 19th century in two ways: First, the project explored the practice of sovereignty as a form of legal, (bio)-political, diplomatic, territorial, or in this case rather, maritime control, which became increasingly interlinked with humanitarian, commercial, and security issues. Secondly, it focussed on the figure of the sovereign who acted as supporter and patron of humanitarian initiatives, including lifesaving societies, and was vital to the creation and self-perception of these societies.

We are no strangers today to images of human suffering. Those affected by war, famine, disease, natural disaster, and other humanitarian emergencies fill the screens of our televisions, computers, and phones. Such images invite us to respond, as responsible citizen-subjects, in a register which is at once ethical and emotional—they elicit feelings of pity, compassion, empathy. The appropriateness of such a mode of engagement with the representation of suffering seems almost a given. Yet what are the historical origins of this topos? To what extent can we trace the discursive tropes which govern our moral and affective encounters with the humanitarian image—‘compassion fatigue’; the compulsion to look—through the iconography of suffering’s history?

The shipwreck at sea presents perhaps the most persistent subject matter in the secular iconography of suffering; from Dutch Golden Age painting of the 1600s; through the works of the 18th century French painter Claude-Joseph Vernet; to the proto-modernism of J.M.W. Turner. These images were produced concurrently with the rise of bourgeois social and cultural hegemony and the emergence of the ‘modern’ subject, in the terms of liberalism, the private individual. Increasingly, this was a figure whose constitution of their sense of self hinged upon a set of assumptions regarding their moral outlook on the world. Shipwreck images thus have much to tell us about the emergence of this modern subject, the history of emotions, and its relationship to morality.