Thankfully, pirates do not go out of style, and adding some stylish (if somewhat less so than Johnny Depp) French ones to the roster of high seas infamy can only prolong their amazing run. Loaded with mini-biographies and breathless exclamation marks, Jean-Pierre Moreau’s Pirates more than does the job of filling in the who’s who blanks for France. Though primarily an examination of seventeenth-century francophone Caribbean privateers turned buccaneers or flibustiers, Pirates ranges widely, examining sixteenth-century Huguenot corsairs and colonists, early eighteenth-century nobleman-adventurers, and even a few rogue Basque fishermen. In the age of sail, few of France’s west coast inhabitants with ships and arms to hand could resist a taste of Spanish treasure. Some were licensed mercenaries, but in the end Moreau’s flibustiers were almost all driven by the standard early modern male desire for wealth and honor, but with, the author exclaims, “a slight preference for wealth!”...
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