The Influence of sea Power upon the French Revolution and Empire 1793-1812, vol I

In the east and south conditions were far more threatening. The rising of the sections in Lyon had been followed by fighting in the streets on the 29th of May, and the triumphant party, after the events of June 2, refused to acknowledge the Convention. The latter sought to gain over the city peaceably; but its overtures were rejected, a departmental army was formed, and the leading member of the Jacobin party formally tried and executed. The Lyonnese also stopped supplies being carried to the Army of the Alps. On the 12th of July a decree was issued to reduce the place by force. The troops of the Convention appeared before it in the latter part of the month; but resistance was firm and well organized, and the siege dragged, while at the same time the departments of the south in general rejected the authority of the central government. The two seaboard cities, Marseille and Toulon, entered into correspondence with Lord Hood, commanding the British fleet, who arrived off the coast of Provence in the middle of August, 1793. The party of the Convention, favored by that want of vigor which characterized most of the measures of their opponents, got possession of Marseille before the treason was consummated; but in Toulon, which had long suffered from the violence of a Jacobin municipality, the reaction swung to the opposite extreme. A movement, beginning in honest disgust with the proceedings in Paris and with the conduct of the dominant party in their own city, insensibly carried its promoters further than they had intended; until a point was reached from which, before the savage spirit of the capital, it became dangerous to recede. Long identified with the royal navy, as one of the chief arsenals of the kingdom, there could not but exist among a large class a feeling of loyalty to the monarchy. Submissive to the course of events so long as France had a show of government, now, in the dissolution of civil order, it seemed allowable to choose their own path.

With such dispositions, a decree of the Convention declaring the city outlawed enabled the royalists to guide the movement in the direction they desired. The leading naval officers do not appear to have co-operated willingly with the advances made to the British admiral; but for years they had seen their authority undermined by the course of the national legislature, and had become accustomed to yield to the popular control of the moment. The news of the approach of the Conventional army, accompanied by the rush into the place of terror-stricken fugitives from Marseille, precipitated Toulon into the arms of Great Britain. The sections declared that the city adopted the monarchical government as organized by the Constituent Assembly of 1789; proclaimed Louis XVII. king; ordered the disarmament of the French fleet in the port, and placed in the hands of the British admiral the works commanding the harbor. Lord Hood undertook that the forts and ships should be restored unharmed to France, when peace was made. On the 27th, the British and Spanish fleets anchored in the outer harbor of Toulon, and the city ran up the white flag of the Bourbons. There were in the port at the time of its delivery to the British admiral thirty ships-of-the-line of seventy-four guns and upward, being rather more than one third the line-of-battle force of the French navy. Of these, seventeen were in the outer harbor ready for sea. There were, besides, twenty-odd frigates or smaller vessels.

While one of the principal naval arsenals of France, and the only one she possessed on the Mediterranean, was thus passing into the hands of the enemy, disasters were accumulating on her eastern borders. On the 12th of July, the fortified town of Condé, on the Belgian frontier, surrendered. This was followed on the 28th by the capitulation of the first-class fortress of Valenciennes in the same locality, after six weeks of open trenches. These two prizes fell to the allied Austrians, British and Dutch, and their submission was followed by an advance of the combined armies and retreat of the French. Shortly before, on the 22d of July, Mayence, a position of the utmost importance on the Rhine, had yielded to the Prussians; and here also the enemy advanced into the Vosges mountains and toward the upper Rhine, the French receding gradually before them. The great inland city of Lyon was at the same time holding out against the central government with a firmness which as yet needed not the support of despair. In its resistance, and in the scarce smothered discontent of the southern provinces, lay the chief significance and utility of the British hold on Toulon. As a point upon which insurrection could repose, by which it could be supported from without, Toulon was invaluable; but with rebellion put down, surrounded by a hostile army and shut up to itself, the city would become a useless burden, unbearable from the demands for men which its extended lines would make. Had La Vendée rested upon a Toulon, the task of the republic would have been well-nigh hopeless.

Among these multiplied disasters, with the Sardinians also operating on the Alpine frontier and the Spaniards entering their country by the eastern Pyrenees, France was confronted in every quarter by disciplined armies to which she could as yet oppose only raw and ragged levies. She found her safety in the stern energy of a legislature which silenced faction by terror, in her central position, which of itself separated from one another many of the centres of disturbance, and in the military policy of the allies, which increased instead of seeking to diminish the dissemination of force which was to some extent unavoidable. The Spaniards could not combine with the Sardinians, Toulon could not help Lyon, La Vendée had to stand apart from all the others; but in the east it was possible for the Austrians, Prussians and British to direct against the forces standing between them and Paris a combination of effort which, in the then condition of the French army, might have been irresistible. Instead of so doing, the Austrians and British on the northeastern frontier decided, early in August, to cease their advance and to separate; the Austrians sitting down before Le Quesnoy, and the British undertaking to besiege the seaport of Dunkirk. On the Rhine, the mutual jealousies of Austria and Prussia, and the sluggish movements of routine generals, caused a similar failure to support each other, and a similar dilatory action.

The opportunities thus lost by the allies, and the time conceded to the French, were improved to the full by the Committee of Public Safety and by the commissioners sent from the Convention to the headquarters of every army. Men, for the most part, without pity as without fear, their administration, stained as it was with blood, was effectual to the salvation of France. From the minister in the cabinet to the general in the field, and down to the raw recruit forced from his home, each man felt his life to depend upon his submission and his activity. In the imminent danger of the country and the hot haste of men who worked not only under urgent pressure, but often with a zeal as blindly ignorant as it was patriotic, many blunders and injustices were committed; but they attained the desired end of impressing the resistless energy of the Convention upon each unit of the masses it was wielding. If ever, for good or ill, men had the single eye, it was to be found in the French soldiers of 1793, as they starved and bled and died that the country might live. Given time,—and the allies gave it,—units animated by such a spirit, and driven forward by such an impetus as the Committee knew how to impart, were soon knit into an overpowering organism, as superior in temper as they were in numbers to the trained machines before them.

Where there was conscious life to feel enthusiasm or fear, the contagion of the rulers' temper caught; but the fiery spirit of the Convention could not possess the stately ships of war that floated in the ports of the republic, nor make them yield, to the yet unskilled hands of the new officers, the docile obedience which their old masters had commanded from those beautiful, delicately poised machines. It was a vain hope to conjure victory at sea by harsh decrees, 69 pitched in unison to the passions of the times, but addressed to men whose abilities did not respond to their own courage nor to the calls thus made upon them. To the inexperience of the officers was added the further difficulty of the indiscipline of the crews, that had increased to a ruinous extent during the four years' paralysis of the executive government. With the triumph of the Jacobin party had now come a unity which, however terrible, was efficient. In September, 1793, in the mutiny of the Brest fleet in Quiberon Bay, the seamen again prevailed over their officers, and even over the commissioner of the Convention; but it was the last flagrant outburst. The past weakness of other authorities had played into the hands of the Mountain; now that the latter was supreme, it resolutely enjoined and soon obtained submission. Years of insubordination and license had, however, sapped the organization and drill of the crews; and the new officers were not the men to restore them. The Convention and its commissioners therefore lacked the proper instruments through which they could impart direction as well as energy to the movement of the fleet. Ships were there and guns, men also to handle the one and fight the other; but between these and the government was needed an adequate official staff, which no longer existed. The same administrative weakness that had allowed discipline to perish, had also entailed upon the naval arsenals the penury of resources that was felt everywhere in the land. From all these circumstances arose an impotence which caused the year 1793 to be barren of serious naval effort on the part of France.

Great Britain herself was in this first year of war unprepared to take a vigorous initiative. In 1792 she had in commission at home but twelve ships-of-the-line, and but sixteen thousand seamen were allowed for the fleet. Not till December 20, six weeks only before the declaration of war, did Parliament increase these to twenty-five thousand, a number less than one fourth that employed in the last year of the American war. In the Mediterranean and in the colonies there was not then present a single ship-of-the-line, properly so called. Fortunately, of the one hundred and thirteen actually borne on the roll of the line-of-battle as cruising ships, at the beginning of 1793, between eighty and ninety were reported in good condition, owing to the two alarms of war in 1790 and 1791; and provident administration had kept on hand in the British dockyards the necessary equipments, which had disappeared from those of France. More difficulty was experienced in manning than in equipping; but at the end of 1793, there were eighty-five of the line actually in commission. From twenty to twenty-five were allotted to the Channel fleet, cruising from thence to Cape Finisterre, under the command of Lord Howe; a like number to the Mediterranean under Lord Hood; and from ten to twelve to the West Indies. A reserve of twenty-five ships remained in the Channel ports, Portsmouth and Plymouth, ready for sea, and employed, as occasion demanded, for convoys, to fill vacancies of disabled ships in the cruising fleets, or to strengthen the latter in case of special need.

The mobilization of the fleet, though energetic when once begun, was nevertheless tardy, and Great Britain had reason to be thankful that years of civil commotion and executive impotence had so greatly deteriorated the enemy's navy, and also, at a critical moment, had thrown so large a portion of it into her hands at Toulon. With a widely scattered empire, with numerous exposed and isolated points, with a smaller population and an army comparatively insignificant in numbers, war with France threw her—and must inevitably always throw her—at first upon the defensive, unless she could at once lay her grasp firmly upon some vital chord of the enemy's communications, and so force him to fight there. She could not assume the offensive by landing on French soil. No force she could send would be capable of resisting the numbers brought against it, much less of injuring the enemy; nor should the flattering hopes of such a force serving as a nucleus, round which to crystallize French rebellion, have been suffered to delude her, after the bitter deceptions of the recent American struggle. What hopes had not Great Britain then based upon old loyalty, and upon discontent with the new order of things! Yet, though such discontent undoubtedly existed—and that among men of her own race recently her subjects—the expeditions sent among them rallied no decisive following, kindled no fire of resistance. The natives of the soil, among whom such a force appears, either view it with jealous suspicion or expect it to do all the work; not unfrequently are both jealous and inactive. It is well, then, to give malcontents all the assistance they evidently require in material of war, to keep alive as a diversion every such focus of trouble, to secure wherever possible, as at Toulon, a fortified port by which to maintain free entrance for supplies to the country of the insurgents; but it is not safe to reckon on the hatred of the latter for their own countrymen outweighing their dislike for the foreigner. It is not good policy to send a force that, from its own numbers, is incapable of successful independent action, relying upon the support of the natives in a civil war. Such support can never relieve such expeditions from the necessity, common to all military advances, of guarding their communications while operating on their front; which is only another way of saying again that such expeditions, to be successful, must be capable of independent action adequate to the end proposed. Risings, such as occurred in many quarters of France in 1793, are useful diversions; but a diversion is only a subordinate part in the drama of war. It is either a deceit, whose success depends rather upon the incapacity of the opponent than upon its own merits; or it is an indirect use of forces which, from their character or position, cannot be made to conduce directly to the main effort of the enterprise in hand. To enlarge such diversions by bodies of troops which might be strengthening the armies on the central theatre of war is a mistake, which increases in ever greater proportion as the forces so diverted grow more numerous. 70

Offensive action of this character was therefore forbidden to Great Britain. To use small bodies for it was impolitic; and large bodies she had not to send. To strike a direct blow at France, it was necessary to force her to come out of her ports and fight, and this was to be accomplished only by threatening some external interests of vital importance to her. Such interests of her own, however, France had not. Her merchant shipping, in peace, carried less than one third of her trade, and was at once hurried into her ports when war began. Her West India colonies had indeed been valuable, that of Haïti very much so; but the anarchy of the past four years had annihilated its prosperity. There remained only to strike at her communications, through neutrals, with the outside world, and this was to be accomplished by the same means as most surely conduced to the defence of all parts of the British empire,—by taking up positions off the French coast, and drawing the lines as closely as the exigencies of the sea and the law of nations would permit. If possible, in order to stop commerce by neutral vessels, a blockade of the French coast, similar to that of the Southern Confederacy by the United States, would have been the most suitable measure to adopt; but the conditions were very different. The weather on the coast of the Southern States is much more moderate; the heaviest gales blow along shore, whereas, in the Bay of Biscay, they blow dead on shore; and there was almost everywhere good, sometimes even sheltered, anchorage, which was not generally to be had on the coast of France. Finally, while steam certainly helps both parties, the inside and the out, the latter profits the more by it, for he can keep in with the shore to a degree, and for a length of time, impossible to the sailing ship; the necessity of gaining an offing before a gale comes on, and the helpless drifting during its continuance, not existing for the steamer.

Despite, therefore, the decisions of the courts, that a blockade was not technically removed when the ships maintaining it were driven off by weather; a blockade of the whole French coast does not seem to have been contemplated by the British ministry. Its offensive measures against French commerce were consequently limited to the capture of property belonging to French subjects, wherever found afloat, even under neutral flags; and to the seizure of all contraband goods destined to France, to whomsoever they belonged. Both these were conceded to be within the rights of a belligerent by the United States and Great Britain; but the latter now endeavored to stretch the definition of contraband to a degree that would enable her to increase the pressure upon France. She claimed that naval stores were included in the category,—a position the more plausible at that time because, the French merchant ships being unable to go to sea, the stores must be for the navy,—and further, that provisions were so. Though these arguments were hotly contested by neutrals, the British navy was strong enough to override all remonstrances; and the dearth of provisions did force the Brest fleet out in 1794, and so led directly to the first great naval battle of the war.

It cannot be considered a satisfactory result, nor one evincing adequate preparation, that the Channel fleet, to which belonged the protection of the approaches to the Channel,—the great focus of British trade,—to which also was assigned the duty of watching Brest, the chief French arsenál on the Atlantic, did not get to sea till July 14, and then only to the number of fifteen ships-of-the-line. A French fleet of similar size had sailed from Brest six weeks before, on the 4th of June, and taken a position in Quiberon Bay, off the coast of La Vendée, to intercept assistance to the insurgents of that province. The command of the Channel fleet was given to Lord Howe, an officer of very high character for activity and enterprise in previous wars, but now in his sixty-eighth year. Age had in no sense dulled his courage, which was as steadfast and well-nigh as impassive as a rock, nor impaired his mental efficiency; but it may be permitted to think that time had exaggerated and hardened a certain formal, unbending precision of action which distinguished him, and that rigid uniformity of manœuvre had become exalted in his eyes from a means to an end. This quality, however, joined to an intimate knowledge of naval tactics, eminently fitted him for the hard and thankless task of forming into a well-drilled whole the scattered units of the fleet, which came to him unaccustomed, for the most part, to combined action.

Lord Howe brought also to his command a strong predisposition, closely allied with the methodical tendency just noted, to economize his fleet, by keeping it sparingly at sea and then chiefly for purposes of drill and manœuvre. Its preservation in good condition was in his eyes a consideration superior to taking up the best strategic position; and he steadily resisted the policy of continuous cruising before the ports whence the enemy must sail, alleging that the injury received in heavy winter weather, while the French lay at anchor inside, would keep the British force constantly inferior. The argument, though plausible and based on undoubted facts, does not justify the choice of a position clearly disadvantageous with reference to intercepting the enemy. War presents constantly a choice of difficulties, and when questions of material come in conflict with correct strategic disposition they must give way. The place for the British fleet, as reflection shows and experience proved, was before the hostile arsenals; or, allowably, if such a position could be found, in a port flanking the route along which the enemy must pass. For the Channel fleet no such port offered; and in keeping it at Spithead, far in rear of the French point of departure, Howe exposed himself to the embarrassment of their getting away while he remained in ignorance of the fact until too late to intercept, and with imperfect knowledge in what direction to follow. The only solution of the difficulty that the British government should have adopted was to maintain a reserve of ships, large enough to keep the necessary numbers of efficient vessels cruising in the proper station. The experience gained by such constant practice, moreover, improved the quality of the men more than it injured the ships. Historically, good men with poor ships are better than poor men with good ships; over and over again the French Revolution taught this lesson, which our own age, with its rage for the last new thing in material improvement, has largely dropped out of memory.

The embarrassment arising from the British fleet being in a Channel port received singular, perhaps even exceptional, illustration in the French expedition against Ireland in 1796. It has been said that that expedition would have succeeded in landing its force had it had steam; it would be more just to say that it would never have come so near succeeding had the British fleet been cruising in the station which strategic considerations would prescribe. 71 There is also a certain indefinable, but real, deterioration in the morale of a fleet habitually in port, compared with one habitually at sea; the habit of being on the alert and the habit of being at rest color the whole conduct of a military force. This was keenly realized by that great commander, Lord St. Vincent, and concurred with his correct strategic insight to fix his policy of close-watching the enemy's ports. "I will not lie here," he wrote from Lisbon in December, 1796, "a moment longer than is necessary to put us to rights; for you well know that inaction in the Tagus must make us all cowards." 72 Doubtless this practice of lying at anchor in the home ports contributed to the impunity with which French cruisers swept the approaches to the Channel during much of 1793 and 1794.

The policy of Lord Howe combined with the crippled state of the French navy to render the year 1793 barren of striking maritime events in the Atlantic. In the interior of France and on her frontiers, amid many disasters and bloody tyranny, the saving energy of the fierce revolutionary government was making steady headway against the unparalleled difficulties surrounding it. After the ill-judged separation of the British and Austrians in August, the latter had succeeded in reducing Le Quesnoy, which capitulated on the 11th of September; but there their successes ended. Carnot, recently made a member of the Committee of Public Safety and specially charged with the direction of the war, concerted an overwhelming attack upon the British before Dunkirk, and raised the siege on the 9th of September; then, by a similar concentration upon the Austrians, now engaged in besieging Maubeuge, he caused their defeat at the battle of Wattignies, October 16, and forced them to retreat from before the place. In the north-east, both the allies and the French went into winter quarters early in November; but the prestige of a resistance that grew every day more efficient remained with the latter. On the eastern frontier also, after protracted fighting, the year closed with substantial success for them. The Prussians of the allied forces in that quarter retreated from all their advanced positions into Mayence; the Austrians retired to the east bank of the Rhine. Each of the allies blamed the other for the unfortunate issue of the campaign; and the veteran Duke of Brunswick, commanding the Prussians, sent in his resignation accompanied with predictions of continued disaster. At the same time the king of Prussia began to manifest the vacillating and shameless policy which made his country the byword of Europe during the next twelve years, and betrayed clearly his purpose of forsaking the coalition he had been so forward in forming. On the Spanish frontiers, the fortune of war was rather against the French, who were embarrassed by the necessity of concentrating all the force possible upon the siege of Toulon; the recovery of that port being urgently required for the national honor, as well as for the maritime interests of the republic in the Mediterranean.

It was, however, in restoring internal submission and asserting the authority of the central government that the most substantial results of 1793 were attained. The resistance of the Vendeans, long successfully protracted through the blunders and lack of unity among the republican leaders, began to yield, as more concentrated effort was imparted by the reconstituted Committee of Public Safety. After the battle of Cholet, October 16, the insurgents, routed and in despair, determined to leave their own country, cross the Loire, and march into Brittany. They traversed the latter province slowly, fighting as they went, and on the 12th of November reached Granville on the Channel coast, where they hoped to open communications with England. Their assault on the town failed, and as the hoped-for ships did not arrive, they started back for La Vendée; but as a coherent body they never recrossed the Loire, and a pitched battle, fought December 22, at Savenay, on the north bank, completed their dispersion. The embers of the civil war continued to burn in La Vendée and north of the Loire during the following year; but as a general insurrection, wielding large bodies of fighting men, it had ceased to be formidable to the nation and wrought its chief harm to the province which supported it.