Under the sign of the Raft

To every story there belongs another.

What happened after the survivors from the raft of the Medusa were rescued is another story.

The Raft's voyage had lasted thirteen days and cost one hundred and thirty seven lives at least. Reports of the disaster were slow to reach France. While the government did not entirely suppress the news, it sought to hide or soften its most atrocious aspects, and the Ministry of the Navy took particular pains to keep the public from learning of the incompetence and treachery of the Medusa's captain. The first despatches arrived in Brest on 2nd September 1816.

Eight day later, their substance was published in Paris by means of an extremely terse note, inconspicuously inserted in the official Moniteur Universel:

"On 2nd July, at three o'clock in the afternoon, the frigate Medusa was lost, in good weather, on the shoals of the Arguin twenty leagues distant from Cap Blanc (in Africa, between the Canaries and Cap Verde). The Medusa's six launches and lifeboats were able to save a large part of the crew and passengers, but 150 men who attempted to save themselves on a raft, 135 have perished."

Her matters might have rested, if the government could have had its way. But some of the survivors of the raft were about to make their way back to France. One of them, the surgeon Henri Savigny, had spent the days of his return voyage in composing a detailed account of the shipwreck and of the horrors of the raft. On his arrival in France, he submitted his report to an official of the Ministry of the Navy. The Ministry would have been glad to bury it in the files; by mischance, however, a second copy of it fell into the hands of agents of the powerful Prefect of the Police, Elie Decazes, a man of vast ambition, who as the King's intimate favourite, had designs on the government of France. Since it suited Decazes' strategy of the moment to discredit the Minister of the Navy, Debouchage, he allowed Savigny's account to be leaked to the editor of the widely read Journal des Debats, who published it, without official authorisation, on 13th September 1816.

This first full disclosure of the circumstances of the shipwreck of the Medusa burst like a bombshell upon the public. It was immediately taken up by the foreign press, and brought on a resounding scandal, which was only aggravated by the Ministry's clumsy attempts to silence or discredit Savigny.

The political opponents of the monarchy were quick to seize the opportunity for a broad attack on the government. They represented the loss of the Medusa as a political crime, rather than a natural disaster, and put the blame for it on the minister who had appointed the incompetent captain.

It was not difficult for them to turn the shipwreck into an illustration of the danger to which France was exposed by a regime which put dynastic over national interest, gave the command of ships to political favourites and allowed aristocratic officers to abandon their men in times of crisis. To the veterans of the Napoleonic reign, many of them idle, reduced to half-pay and furious at having been displaced by courtiers such as the lamentable de Chaumareys, the catastrophe of the Medusa summed up the plight of France under the Bourbons.

In February and March of 1817, a naval court was quietly convened a warship in the harbour at Rochefort, to try the Medusa's captain. It sentenced de Chaumareys to be degraded and to serve three years in prison - a lenient penalty for a crime which, according to the letter of the military code could have been punished by death. Neither the trial nor the sentence was reported in the press.

Savigny in the meantime had been joined by another survivor of the raft, the naval engineer and geographer, Alexandre Correard. Together the two men continued to petition the government to compensate the victims of the shipwreck and to punish the guilty officers. The government responded with harassment, fines, and imprisonment. more serious still, both Savigny and Correard were dismissed from government service. Destitute and despairing of ministerial justice, they decided to put their case before the nation, this time deliberately and with the intention of achieving the fullest publicity.

Together they wrote an expanded version of Savigny's original report, adding many further details, and had it printed in the form of a substantial book, first offered for sale in November of 1817.The venture was a success from the start. After only a few months, a second enlarged edition was required. Early in in 1818, a full English translation of this second edition appeared in London.

Encouraged, Correard decided to turn his misfortune into a profit. he established himself as a publisher at the Palais royal and began to issue political pamphlets. His shop, under the irresistible sign Au naufrage de la Meduse, remained for years a rallying point for political malcontents and a thorn in the side of the government.

And what happens under the sign of the raft is another story.