New Deep Territories: A Story of France’s Exploration of the Seafloor, Beatriz Martinez-Rius, University of Chicago Press, £24.00

Spring 1967 was a significant season in the life of the sea. On 18 March, the US-owned supertanker Torrey Canyon  ran aground off Seven Stones Reef near Land’s End, spilling 100,000 tons of crude oil; the disaster, still one of the largest in history, fouled the beaches of Brittany with a marée noire. Weeks later, on 1 April, President Charles de Gaulle published a decree inaugurating the Centre National pour l’Exploitation des Océans (CNEXO), a pioneering oceanographic centre and the latest frontier in the Gaullist pursuit of sovereign technological prowess.

The Torrey Canyon incident showed that the oceans were fragile and finite, intensifying an environmental consciousness that had been building since the publication of Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring (1962), a bestselling rallying cry against the dangers of pesticides. The foundation of CNEXO, in contrast, was the culmination of an underwater arms race. France had previously looked to Algeria for the pétrole franc. Now, with the former colony’s independence in 1962, France needed a new ‘playground’ for its energy supply. For a wounded colonial power, the sea was a source of hidden riches – and a way of recovering its lost grandeur, consistent with de Gaulle’s project of rebuilding the nation’s international prestige. There was also, crucially, a lot of it. According to the IHEDN (Institut des hautes études de défense nationale), its prestigious defence training college, France has the second-largest maritime area in the world: 10,186,624 km², after the United States’ 11,351,000 km². Its overseas departments, or ‘les DOM-TOM’ (‘départements d’outre-mer et territoires d’outre-mer’), encompass the South Pacific, the Caribbean, the Indian Ocean and the North and South Atlantic. It is no wonder, then, that politicians, diplomats and industrialists were intoxicated by its infinite potential. As the titular Nostromo  says – quoted as a pre-chapter epigraph in Beatriz Martinez-Rius’ engaging study – ‘There is something in a treasure that fastens upon a man’s mind.’

Martinez-Rius, a postdoctoral researcher at JAMSTEC (the Japan Agency for Marine-Earth Science and Technology), has a Conradian love for the nautical. Forging a distinctive path between the natural sciences, social sciences and history, she has dedicated her career to documenting the recent history of the deep sea – a body that she maintains is neglected, even though it is the source of a third of the world’s hydrocarbon supplies and ninety-nine per cent of its telecommunications (via submarine cables). ‘In the popular imaginary’, she writes, ‘we possess a fuller image of the surface of the moon or Mars than we have for the seafloor’. Tellingly, the ‘sub-seafloor’ or underground – the vast depths from which we extract oil and gas – lacks an agreed name.

The sea, says the author, is a territory – and, like any territory, it has been charted, tamed and controlled. Martinez-Rius takes us on a whirlwind tour of our attempts to establish jurisdiction over the oceans: how the Romans’ res communis  (belonging to everyone) gave way, with the growth of the Spanish and Portuguese empires, to res nullius  (belonging to no-one, and therefore open to claims); then how the growing pursuit of dominion was arrested in the early 17th century by Grotius’ doctrine of mare liberum  (the free sea). This principle, that the seas should be free from national control, endured for over three hundred years; for most nations, the mare clausum  (the closed sea) was restricted to a narrow band of territorial waters three miles from the coast – the distance a cannon could shoot.

Three letters changed this: oil. Between 1936 and 1950, global oil production doubled from barely 5 million barrels a day to more than 10 million; the emerging offshore oil industry had discovered the sea’s potential for hydrocarbon and mineral deposits. The Truman Proclamation of 1945, which asserted the United States’ dominion over the resources of its surrounding continental shelf, was a departure from centuries of custom. In the five years after, thirty nations followed the US’ lead, staking claims over the potential deposits of their coastal waters, even if they lacked the wherewithal to extract it. It also brought a reimagining of the ocean. Grotius and his peers were preoccupied with fishing and navigation. Now the spotlight was on the deep sea: pitch-black and mysterious.

Martinez-Rius charts how the ‘valorisation des océans’ – that is to say, making the best of the ocean’s value – became a political motto during France’s Trente Glorieuses. The nation’s oceanographers, geographers, geologists, geophysicists, seismologists, engineers, government officials and oil interests engaged in a series of parallel strategies: international collaborations such as the US-led Deep Sea Drilling Project (1968-83), which surveyed underwater salt deposits, and the Franco-American Mid-Ocean Undersea Study (FAMOUS), which used manned submersibles to study plate tectonics in the Mid-Atlantic Ridge; the establishment of the Centre Océanologique de Bretagne (COB), a landmark research institute in Brest, western Brittany, unapologetically modelled on California’s Scripps Institution of Oceanography; and investment – by both the oil industry and the French state – in technological innovation, including the Flexotir, a seismic reconnaissance device, and the electrocorer, which could retrieve sediment from the seabed in strong underwater currents.

But the dream was not to last. The Torrey Canyon  was only the beginning; further oil spills, the Olympic Bravery  (1976) and Amoco Cadiz  (1978), brought yet more misery to Brittany. As anger rose over the authorities’ inadequate response to the clean-up, the French people came to reject the exploitation of the seafloor. At the same time, the environmental movement entered the political stage. In 1974, the agronomist René Dumont became the first ecological candidate in a French presidential election. The newly founded Greenpeace campaigned against French nuclear testing in the South Pacific, another stain on the country’s marine legacy. In 1982, thanks in no small part to campaigners’ pressure, the UN adopted the Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS), ushering in a new regime for ocean governance and protection. That same year, Le Monde  declared the death of France’s deep-sea dream, saying that ‘realism has replaced lyrical illusion’.

No man better illustrates this shift than the Sea King himself, Jacques Cousteau. Since the 1950s, Cousteau’s expeditions on the Calypso had captured the French imagination. As director of the Oceanographic Museum of Monaco, he pioneered new technologies and partnered with industry: the CONSHELF project, his audacious underwater habitat, was subsidised by oil firms. At the time, Cousteau was enamoured by the mineral promise of the ocean floor. By the 1980s, his view had soured. His feature films had a renewed emphasis on the vulnerability of the seas; CNEXO, he said, was a rapacious organisation set on expansionist ‘conquest’. In 1981, he attacked the French government in the co-authored booklet French People, We Stole Your Sea (Français, on a volé ta mer):

Marine spaces triggered the imagination of journalists as well as the appetite of accountants. The unit of reference was the million tons: million tons of oil, of animal protein, and of metals were to fulfill our hunger for energy, food, and raw materials. The nourishing sea became a large department store, the cave of Ali Baba, where a prodigious inventory paraded before our amazed eyes. [. . .] The images evoked create a sensation of fairy tale. These riches ‘sleep’ under the sea. Only the kiss of a charming prince would awake them.

The waves had crashed against reality. In 1984, President Mitterrand folded CNEXO into Ifremer (Institut Français de Recherche pour l’Exploitation de la Mer), with a focus on pollution and research over industrial exploitation. Ifremer today is based at the COB in Brest, built as a swaggering symbol of France’s promised marine dominion.

The story has a modern-day codicil. We live in a new era of power competition, a scramble for resource frontiers. In this age of advantage, France’s maritime ambitions have returned. In June 2022, President Macron put the oceans back on the political agenda; the French Senate announced a five-year, €3 billion programme to develop the country’s technoscientific capabilities. The hope, writes Martinez-Rius, is that this ‘will enable France to explore (and eventually exploit) the deep ocean floor beyond the threshold of a thousand meters’ depth’. Once again, the dual legacies will be at war: the pragmatism of CNEXO, with its doctrine of naked extraction, and the romantic curiosity of Jacques Cousteau. Whether for exploration or exploitation, the ocean continues its imaginative hold. As Cousteau’s credo went: il faut aller voir.