by the Navy Department, just as if they were distant ships permanently at anchor. In America the French had established a sort of protectorate the whole length of the Mississippi basin, from Acadia and Canada in the north to Louisiana in the south, thus setting up a barrier to the westward expansion of the British colonies along the Atlantic Coast. But even with a colonial population in North America ten times that of the French, the British perhaps would not have conquered Canada so quickly if the French Navy, which provided the sole link with the home country, had not been completely crushed by the end of the Seven Years’ War, in 1763. For in Europe the French Army, which had absorbed the lion’s share of the national manpower and the national budget, had fought its way to the heart of Europe—without ever realizing, perhaps, that at that very time France was losing an empire overseas.
A defeat, when correctly analyzed, is always productive of reform. Courageously the French Navy reformed, rebuilt, and refitted—and waited for a chance to retaliate. The opportunity came in 1775, when Britain’s North American colonies revolted and asked for French aid. Without the help of the French squadrons which were sent across, the colonies would have experienced a great deal more difficulty in winning their independence; in fact, as the American historian Samuel E. Morison wrote recently, it would not have been Lord Cornwallis but General George Washington who would have had to surrender at Yorktown.11
Samuel E. Morison, “The Battle That Set Us Free,” in the Saturday Evening Post, July 7, 1956.
In the War of American Independence, French diplomats for once avoided the pitfalls of European politics, and through fifty months of war the French fleets, though outnumbered everywhere, held the British at bay. Their single setback was at the Battle of Saints Passage in 1782, where the French with 2,300 guns faced the British fleet with 3,000 cannon.
In 1789, on the eve of the French Revolution, the seaborne commerce of France nearly equaled that of England, and her Navy was at its peak. Not until 1939 would the French Navy again be so closely knit, so confident, and so comparable in strength to its opponents.
But the French Revolution began the downfall of the naval establishment. Confusion led to disorder, and disorder to mutinies. Many of its officers—le grand corps—were summarily dismissed; others went to the guillotine. Antirevolutionary political groups even assisted the English enemy to “peacefully” occupy the port and naval arsenal of Toulon, thereby confronting the French naval officers with the same problems of conscience that were to torment their counterparts in World War II.
True, Napoleon Bonaparte did try to rebuild the Navy to its former power, but he failed for lack of time. With what remained of ships and former commanders he attempted to gain control of the English Channel—“were it only for twenty-four hours,” in his words—in order to land his Boulogne army on the English coast. Such an amphibious landing, in the miscellaneous assortment of lighters and barges he had assembled, would have been as ambitious an undertaking for that day as the Anglo-American landings in Normandy in June 1944. But Napoleon tried to maneuver his squadrons as he would so many troops of cavalry, without ever taking into account the ocean spaces, the contrary winds, the lack of properly trained crews, and all the other factors which enter into naval tactics and strategy.
Against the brave but untrained crews of the French fleets the British threw superbly manned ships of overwhelming firepower, and crushed the French, first at Aboukir and then at Trafalgar.
At Trafalgar, furthermore, the French and Spanish combined fleet fought more to satisfy honor than with any sound tactical plan in mind. Having had his courage questioned by Napoleon, the French commander in chief, Admiral Pierre de Villeneuve, was resolved to prove that the officers of the Navy could fight, even against a Nelson. And when he failed in his effort to die in battle, he later committed suicide to wipe out what he felt was the shame of defeat.
The course of the French Navy, as has been aptly said, has often been more dolorous than glorious.
After Trafalgar the Napoleonic hegemony eventually crumbled—not because of the failure of Marshal Emmanuel de Grouchy to arrive on the field of Waterloo, as claimed by some, but because seapower little by little strangled “Fortress Europe,” as Hitler’s similar creation was to be called some hundred years later.
Unfortunately the mass of the French people, dazzled with the victories won by their armies on the continent, failed to appreciate the significance of the operations at sea. This difference in the nation’s impressions of the contributions of the two services is one of the reasons why, in France, the Navy has a different outlook from the rest of the country.
In addition to marking the end of the Napoleonic empire, 1815 marked the end of Franco-British naval competition as well—and to the advantage of England. Because the sea makes one a realist, however, and because its past exploits were sufficiently glorious to inspire its corps of officers, the French Navy harbored no feeling of bitterness. Instead, it devoted itself during the 19th century to winning for France a new colonial empire overseas—an accomplishment of which the public, however, was at times completely unaware. Rivaling in élan the officers of the British Navy, the French often cooperated with them in maintaining world peace in a spirit already “European.” In such manner French and British squadrons fought side by side against the Egyptian Fleet at Navarino, against the Russians in the Crimea, and against the Boxers, the Chinese Nationalists of the 19th Century. Notwithstanding several political crises stemming from colonial disagreements—at Tahiti, at Fashoda, and elsewhere—the two navies came to appreciate each other in a way that prepared them for the Grand Alliance of 1914.
Before that time, however, the French Navy had to undergo the frustrating experiences of the Franco-Prussian War of 1870. The drama of that period strikingly forecast the events of 1940. In both cases all-out hostilities between the two regular armies lasted only a few weeks. In each case the French homeland was deeply invaded. If in 1870 the seaports such as Cherbourg and Brest were not taken by the enemy, it was because the armies of those days still marched on foot and not by mechanized transport. Finally, in both cases the fighting was followed by a prolonged occupation of a part of France by the German enemy.
At sea, the French Navy of 1870 was actually the second most powerful fleet in the world, not far behind the British, while the German Navy was almost insignificant. But except for blockading the enemy’s coast—a blockade too short to have any effect—the French Navy had no opportunity to exploit its supremacy once the frontier defenses had been breached and the Germans were besieging Paris. A number of ships were demobilized in order to rush 10,000 sailors to help man the defenses of the capital, but this could not alter the course of events. With striking similarity, in 1940 the French Navy was again obliged to look on almost helplessly as the fate of the nation was settled by the battling of the armies ashore.
And in 1871, after the return of peace, the French people remembered only that their Navy had been of no help to them in the disastrous conflict. With habitual shortsightedness they believed the Navy had functioned poorly. Consequently, after the war naval budgets were reduced by the politicians. And since the Navy had to use much of its funds for meeting the colonial responsibilities with which it was entrusted, construction of new combatant ships was sadly neglected. Relegated to a little world all its own, the Navy vegetated. It required the extraordinary growth of the German Navy at the beginning of the 20th century, with its threat of a new conflict, to restore the French Navy to a point where the Entente Cordiale (France and Great Britain) could equal the seapower of the Triple Alliance (Germany, Austro-Hungary, and Italy.)
The First World War found the French Navy ready and eager to fulfill its obligations in the Entente by engaging the combined Austrian and Italian Mediterranean squadrons in a classical fleet action. But Italy declared her neutrality, and later became an ally, and the Austrian Fleet never came out of its harbors at all. All the French Fleet could do was to maintain a tedious watch at the entrance of the Adriatic for an Austrian sortie that never took place, and join the British in the
