During the French Wars (1793-1815), the cotton industry was one of the few sectors of the French economy that achieved growth. This appears counterintuitive since the British navy blockaded France during most of the period, raising the question of how France got raw cotton to feed its growing spinning industry. This article seeks to fill this gap by studying a business practically ignored by historians: the trade in Brazilian raw cotton with French ports. It is well known that, during the Industrial Revolution, Brazilian cotton played a key role in the European textile industry, but typically its importance is studied from the perspective of British demand. This paper will show the high dependence that the French spinning sector had on Brazilian cotton, and it will explain how trade took different forms during these turbulent years. I show that there was much more involved than smuggling. Traders used neutral vessels and ports, changed the ports of destination in France, traded by land via Spain, and made use of special licenses granted by the French and the British. Although the literature has identified one or another form of these modes of trade, no historian has offered a systematic account of how these forms of trade were during such a compressed period.