The authorities for the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars are numerous. An English writer will naturally give the first place in the list to The Naval History of Great Britain, by William James, a trustworthy, laborious, and indispensable, but dry and too often unintelligent chronicle, which covers the whole story from 1793 to 1815. The Naval Chronology of Isaac Schomberg ends at the Peace of 1801. Captain Mahan’s Influence of Sea Power upon the French Revolution and Empire is a survey of the principles rather than the mere events of the whole war. On the French side we have Troude, Batailles navales de la France, the chronology quoted for earlier chapters; Chevalier, Histoire de la Marine française sous la première République, a history up to 1799; Rouvier, Marins français sous la République; Moulin, Les Marins de la République; Lecène, Marins de la République et de l’Empire. The Naval Chronicle (1799-1818) did not begin with the war, but it looks back on events antecedent to its own beginning. Brenton’s Naval History of Great Britain from 1783 to 1836, first published in 1823 and recast in 1837, professes to be a general history, but is chiefly valuable for the writer’s personal reminiscences and the traditions of the service which he repeats. An excellent study of one of the most important episodes of the early years of the war is Cottin, Toulon et les Anglais en 1793. For the battle of the 1st of June the main authority now is Rear-Admiral Sturges Jackson’s Logs of the Great Sea Fights 1794-1805, edited for the Navy Record Society. Sir N. H. Nicholas’ Letters and Despatches of Lord Nelson is a mine of information from the operations at Toulon till 1805. Biographies of officers first become abundant at this period. Those which are of most value for the opening stage of the war are:—Burrows’ Howe, Ross’s Saumarez, Osler’s Exmouth, Tucker’s St. Vincent, Lady Bourchier’s Codrington; and for the operations in the West Indies, Collier Willyams’ special work on the subject, which is the basis of the account given by Bryan Edwards in his History of the West Indies.
When England was dragged into the war already raging between France and the German powers, against the wish of her rulers, and by the deliberate action of the revolutionary authorities in Paris on the 1st February 1793, she came in as the ally of all Central and Western Europe. By the spring of 1795 she was left to fight single-handed on the sea. The French armies had overrun Holland in January of that year. Prussia, hampered by an empty treasury and distracted by her anxiety to secure a share in the third partition of Poland, made peace at Bâle on the 5th April. Spain, weak, exhausted, and ill governed, was eager for peace. France, which had no cause to fear her and was anxious to withdraw the troops serving on the Pyrenean frontier, to reinforce the armies in Italy, on the Rhine, and in the Low Countries, gave her favourable terms. A treaty of peace, which was the preliminary to a treaty of alliance, was signed, also at Bâle, on the 22nd July. From the 1st February 1793 to the Franco-Spanish treaty of Bâle, 22nd July 1795, makes the first period of a war which was destined to last, with two brief intervals, for another twenty years. It was on both sides a struggle for existence. Revolutionary France fought to secure her new social order. To protect the gains of the Revolution, she strove to secure her “natural limits”—the Pyrenees, the Alps, the line of the Rhine. To guard herself against the hostility which this increase of power was sure to arouse in her neighbours, she had to gain possession of advanced guards and outlying fortresses to cover her new frontier, to subjugate Holland, and keep Spain in a dependence which must also include Portugal. But with the coast of Europe and its resources, from the Texel to the Maritime Alps, in the possession of France, the position of England would have been one of extreme danger. Therefore, in order that she herself might be safe, she had to endeavour to force France back into her old limits, and since France was resolved to secure her “natural limits” for her own security, she was committed to an endeavour to subjugate England. The fight could not end till one side was fairly beaten, and France was not vanquished, and shut once more within her frontier of 1790, till the Peace of Paris of the 20th November 1815 was signed. All Europe had to combine to bind her; for the causes which drove her to dominate Holland and Spain, as a defence against England, operated to compel her to seek other outworks and subdue other possible assailants beyond the Rhine and the Maritime Alps. In this mighty struggle of forces and principles it was the part of England to dominate the sea. Her strength on the sea made her the one power whom the French armies could not strike to the heart. Therefore she was the permanent enemy of France, the constant ally of her foes, and in the end the controlling member of the European Coalition which dictated the Treaty of Paris.
The part which England played was to herself glorious and profitable, and to Europe advantageous. It was also arduous. But the student of the history of the time, if he approaches the subject with a just determination to see it in a dry light and to judge by the evidence, must soon be convinced that if the nation was called upon to make great efforts and endure much, the burden was not imposed on it by the naval forces of its enemy. If we are to realise the real character of the task and estimate the true merit of the performance, we must first come to a sound understanding of the condition of the French fleet, which was our one serious opponent. The other navies thrown or dragged into the conflict served to do little more—if we put aside the gallant fight of the Dutch at Camperdown—than to multiply the number of posts which required to be watched, and so to add further severity to the already cruel strain of blockade.
When our squadrons began to get to sea in the summer of 1793, they found in front of them an enemy disorganised by four years of administrative destruction and attempted reconstruction, and morally ruined by four years of progressive anarchy.[1] The ordonnance of Louis XIV. had never been honestly carried out. The classes had been cruelly worked. The compensations promised to the seafaring population had never been given. Bad food, no pay, and nakedness were the lot of the sailors in the king’s ships. Therefore they hated the king’s service, and fled from it when they could. The State punished them by billeting soldiers on their families, and the outrages perpetrated by these men on the women and girls were notorious. It has been already said that the French officers of the regular, or grand, corps were nobles. Being nobles, they insisted on equality among themselves to the injury of discipline, and were perfectly insolent to all men who were not of their own class. None of the many ignorant things said of the French Revolution is more ignorant than the assertion that it gave Frenchmen their love of equality. What it did was to declare that all Frenchmen should be equal, and that there should be an end of the division of the people into nobles above, who were equal among themselves, and the roture, or non-noble, below, who also were equal among themselves. As the grand corps had never been sufficiently numerous to officer the fleet on a war footing, it had been found necessary to employ supplementary officers drawn from the merchant service. These men, who were known as the “blue officers,” because their uniform had not the red facings and knee-breeches of the grand corps, were not allowed to reach the higher ranks. They had to endure much impertinence.
It follows that no part of the French nation was better prepared to join the revolt against class privilege and in the demand for universal social equality than the sailors. A memory of long suffering and of bitter wrong rankled among the crews. Ulcerated pride, and the vanity which is peculiarly sensitive in the Frenchman and is easily driven to ferocity by wounds, exasperated the non-noble officers, and made them the natural leaders of revolt. In front of these elements of rebellion were the officers of the grand corps, very good sort of gentlemen individually in most cases, but even at their best quite unable to help showing their inbred hereditary conviction that they were of a finer clay than their comrades who were not of their class. It is a belief which can be shown with the most irritating insolence by an assumption of exact politeness.
In 1786 the Government had acknowledged the necessity for a change. The Marquis de Castries, then Minister of Marine, simplified the old ranks, and abolished the Gardes de la marine. He proposed to recruit the corps of officers in future by élèves de la marine, who might be of non-noble birth. But while breaking down the old exclusive rule, he still made a distinction. Élèves who came from the schools of Vannes and Alais, which were confined to the nobles, could become lieutenants at once. All other élèves had to pass through a rank of sub-lieutenant, and were therefore put at a disadvantage from the beginning. It was an excellent example of the kind of concession which provokes, and does not satisfy. When, in 1789, the king summoned the States General, he made a tacit confession that the absolute monarchy had brought France to financial ruin and administrative collapse, and could itself find no remedy. In fact, the monarchy abdicated, and the spontaneous anarchy of the Revolution broke out. It raged with extreme violence in the dockyards and the fleet. As early as March 1789 an outbreak, immediately provoked by the sufferings of the workmen and the sailors from the scarcity of that severe winter and bad harvest of 1788, took place at Toulon. Count d’Albert de Rions, commandant de la marine, was attacked, and nearly murdered. After the fall of the Bastille on the 14th July 1789, disorders broke out at Brest, and spread to Rochefort and L’Orient. The details need not be given here. The essential in all of them was that the workmen and sailors understood liberty and equality to mean that they were not to be ordered about by their old masters; that the stronger had the right to command, and that the nation was now the stronger; that the privileged corps were the natural enemies of the nation. The French Navy was well represented in the States General, or National Assembly, and many debates on it took place. In April 1790 a scheme of reorganisation was drawn up. It was in the main a sound one, and did in fact lay the foundation of the modern French Navy. But its details may be omitted, since years were to pass before it could even begin to be applied. The essential of the case here is that the General Assembly had to begin by reorganising the existing corps of officers; that it was in fear of a reaction and counter-revolution; that it distrusted the civisme, or loyalty to the Revolution, of the noble officers; that it dared not check the zeal of the workmen of the dockyards and the sailors; and when that zeal took, as it did from the first, the form of mutinous attacks on the Grand Corps, the Assembly did not venture to punish offenders who were its eager partisans. After each explosion of violence, it ordered an inquiry, and then decided that everybody concerned had acted from a good motive, including the unhappy officers who had been threatened with “the lantern,”—that is to say, the halter,—mobbed, kicked, and thrown into prison. The position of these officers became intolerable. The majority fled abroad, where they formed a regiment, in the emigrant army of Condé. It has been calculated that three-fourths of the old corps were lost to France. Those who remained included a few who were convinced partisans of the Revolution; others remained because their poverty gave them no means of escape. Admiral Trogoff de Kerlessi, the Breton noble who surrendered the ships at Toulon to Lord Hood in 1793, was one of these. But loyal or not loyal to the Revolution, they were alike oppressed and distrusted. The place of the emigrants was taken by men whose chief merit came to be their civisme, which was manifested by blatant pot-house oratory, self-assertion, and intrigue. The evil which the anarchy of 1789-93 did to the French fleet was not made good till the fall of the Empire. The inward and spiritual forces of discipline were killed. Even under the emperor, orders on such vital things as the gunnery drill of the crews were constantly met with outward and visible signs of neglect and disobedience. Perhaps because the best of the French nation does not naturally tend to the sea, it is also an undeniable fact that the French Navy produced no equivalent for the multitude of capable men from the ranks, and the non-commissioned officers, who replaced the emigrant aristocratic officers in the army. They had as good an opportunity on the water as on the land, but they did not come.
The old monarchy had left the Revolution the materials of a noble fleet. The calculation of James in his Naval History is allowed to be sound. He puts the relative strength of the French and English navies in line-of-battle ships at
| Number of Ships. | Number of Guns | Aggregate Broadsides. | |
| English | 115 | 8718 | 88,957 |
| French | 75 | 6002 | 23,057 |
The proportion in frigates was nearly two to one in our favour.
The Royal Navy was suffering from internal evils which broke out in 1797, but none of them were fatal, or beyond comparatively easy cure. In the interval between the Peace of 1783 and February 1793 three powerful fleets had been commissioned—in 1786, in consequence of the disturbed state of Holland; in 1790, on the prospect of a war with Spain—the Spanish armament; and in 1791, when intervention in the East appeared to be likely to become necessary. No fighting had ensued, but the efficiency of the dockyards had been tested. There was nothing to delay the vigorous use of the fleet in February 1793 except the old-standing difficulty always found in passing suddenly from a reduced peace establishment to a war footing, when the crews had to be collected by the press. It was, however, so serious that though Lord Howe, who was appointed to command the Channel fleet, “kissed hands” at court on his appointment on the 6th February, he did not leave London till the 27th May, and did not sail from St. Helens till the 14th July. An interval of six months, therefore, passed between the declaration of war and the appearance in home waters of the fleet which was to protect our shores. Lord Howe’s command was indeed not the first to be ready for service. France was to be attacked at three points—in the Channel, in the Mediterranean, and in the West Indies. The squadron appointed for the West Indies, and commanded by Sir John Jervis, was not able to sail till the very close of the year; but the Mediterranean fleet, under Lord Hood, sailed in detachments during April and May.