by Willis, Sam
* In 1772 Austria, Russia and Prussia, working together rather than against each other as they had done for generations, dismembered Poland, taking a fifth of her population and a quarter of her territory. Dull, ‘Tragedy’, 81.
PART 3
WORLD WAR
1778–1780
1778
12
BOURBON ALLIANCE
From the relatively austere shores of both Britain and America it was easy to ridicule the French in the 1770s. Consider their clothes. The French certainly looked odd to anyone who wasn’t a Frenchman or in thrall to French fashion. When the French upper classes were viewed from an outsider’s perspective, their appearance alone was enough to cause some serious sniggering. Hairstyles, as we have heard, were ridiculous. Even men’s hair, which was relatively tame compared to women’s, was covered with pomade or powder, and their costume littered with fascinating absurdities. The men, for example, would carry a cocked hat, but never wear one; their coats were cut away to such an extent that they only met at chest level and severely restricted any movement. ‘I have no more use of my arms than an Egyptian mummy’ was a satirical comment in a play.1 Those coats were elaborately decorated with buttons or badges of enormous size and variety. Some were embroidered or enamelled with topographical, political or even theatrical scenes or ornamented with paintings under glass, insects, minerals, objects of natural history, comic riddles, the portraits of the twelve Caesars, the latest kings of France, Ovid’s Metamorphoses … the list goes on and on.
‘It is difficult to imagine’, wrote one Frenchman, ‘the idea Americans entertained about the French before the war. They considered them … as a kind of light, brittle, queer-shapen mechanisms, only busy frizzling their hair and painting their faces, without faith or morals.’2 Before he saw his first real live Frenchman, one American believed them to be ‘pale, ugly specimens who lived exclusively on frogs and snails’.3 A splendid cartoon of 1778, ‘Politeness’, encapsulates the differences between the austere, manly English and the bewigged, snuff-sniffing, dandyish, effeminate Frenchman.4 The excitement about a potential alliance with France, therefore, was tinged with some serious misgivings, the result of these and numerous other ‘ancient prejudices’5 – or, in the words of Abraham Whipple, ‘natural enmity’.6 The resulting violent cultural clash, in the form of a military alliance between a young liberal Protestant republic and an ancient despotic Catholic monarchy, is one of the most fascinating moments in the entire eighteenth century.
‘With porter roast beef & plumb pudding well cram’d, Jack English declares that Monsr may be D—d. The soup meagre Frenchman such language don’t suit. So he grins indignation & calls him a brute.’
The famous marquis de Lafayette is often taken as a shining example of brotherly love between the rebels and the French fighting for nothing more than elusive liberty, but in reality he was the exception and French motivation was complex. The French were universally distrusted in America; in fact the first French officers to arrive there were met with abhorrence. John Adams is a classic example of the most common American perspective: he distrusted all Frenchmen on sight and on principle.7 One American was simply astounded when he met his first group of French troops, simply because they appeared so normal: ‘A fine body of men, and appear to be well officered’, he wrote, a little disappointed. ‘Neither the officers nor men are the effeminate beings we were heretofore taught to believe them. They are as large and likely men as can be produced by any nation.’8
The British had far more first-hand experience of the French than the Americans and were consequently less hung up on caricature and prejudice. Nonetheless, they utterly loathed them. The Earl of Chesterfield, writing in the previous Seven Years’ War, had described them as ‘Our great and natural enemy’, and another army officer in the same war wrote how the British soldiers had ‘an implacable hatred against the French, who are the enemies of all mankind’.9
A major source of British hatred was fear, caused by the fact that the French had a massive navy. As an island nation the security of Britain was only vulnerable to a country that could wield sea power and the closest and most dangerous threat always came from France. In the 1770s that British fear was based on a realistic perception of French naval capability. An efficient system of spies regularly informed the Admiralty of developments in French naval dockyards.10 The French had rebuilt their fleet and reformed their naval infrastructure and administration since the end of the Seven Years’ War (1754–63), and the British knew all about it. The general consensus was that, by 1778, ‘the French Navy was never in so good order, nor the magazines of every kind so completed, nor the Sea Officers so disposed for action, to recover (as they acknowledged themselves) their lost honour’.11 An interesting by-product of this healthy wariness of French naval strength was that, once France entered the war, the opposition to naval impressment that had characterized the war so far completely vanished. Such opposition was now considered nothing less than unpatriotic.12 It was all very well campaigning for rights and liberty when the British and Americans were fighting a civil war, but when the French were involved … well, that was another matter entirely.
King Louis XVI’s first naval minister was Anne-Robert-Jacques Turgot, a brilliant man, so good that, within weeks, he was plucked away from the navy to take charge of the royal finances themselves. His replacement, however, was equally impressive. Antoine-Raymond-Gaulbert-Gabriel de Sartine, head of the Paris police and chief administrator of the city of Paris, became one of the ablest naval administrators his country had ever seen. Tactful, prudent, courageous, innovative and meticulous, his mind was exactly what the French navy required.13 Sartine did more than anyone else to turn the French navy into a force that could rival, and even defeat, the British. His was a crucial naval mind to balance the political wile of Vergennes.
Louis XVI had overseen all the changes. Though weak and easily manipulated, he had a natural interest in maritime affairs that had been encouraged since boyhood. Carefully schooled in naval matters by one of the most talented marine artists of the age, Nicolas-Marie Ozanne, he had spent many happy hours playing with toy sailing ships on the pond at Versailles. The king’s avid interest in all things naval translated into personal patronage of talented men in the naval administration. Louis firmly believed that a strong navy was exactly what France required to secure its future and regain its rightful position in the balance of European power.
The changing diplomatic situation in Europe in the 1770s was uniquely advantageous for this new focus on the French navy. An alliance between France and Austria – the Peace of Teschen of 1777 – had calmed long-standing tension between the two countries, and the French could also rely on the 1761 ‘family compact’ which tied Spain as an ally in case of a European hostile threat. In 1778, therefore, France was able to turn its back on its land borders with the Low Countries, Rhineland and Italy, and look to the sea.14
The chances of success against the British now even seemed, in numerical terms, promising. By no means were numbers of ships everything to sea power in this period, though the French had also invested significantly in everything else that went with them. All three of the major French naval dockyards had recently been remodelled,15 and they were now bursting with stores. The ships’ magazines were packed with the most potent gunpowder on the planet. Under Louis XVI French gunpowder-manufacturing had been utterly transformed under the hand of the gifted chemist, administrator and workaholic Antoine Lavoisier. In 1777 he was at the very peak of his powers and was hurtling towards his 1778 discovery – one of the most important of modern chemical discoveries – of how combustion works, and particularly the role played by oxygen. It is no coincidence that his discovery was central to the chemistry of explosions, and Lavoisier soon became the most influential man in the French scientific world. By 1777 the French were manufacturing two million pounds of powder per year.16 The sailors were ready to use this powder: from 1767 provision was made for systematic naval gunnery dri
ll once a week.17
The young officers would have been well educated and would have benefited from a relatively new initiative, the Marine Academy, which was founded in 1752 and designed to encourage scientific thinking within the navy. They would have studied mathematics, geometry, hydrography, drawing and shipbuilding, and were also given their practical skills by experienced boatswains who taught them ship-handling, gunnery, stowage and rigging. When ashore, they spent three afternoons a week visiting the dockyards’ workshops and building slips;18 when at sea the most senior midshipmen were required to keep their own logs, with their own daily reckoning, which was regularly shown to the captain. Most were sent on missions to various countries, including Great Britain, to study different aspects of building, administering, maintaining and operating navies. Most benefited from the new French ‘squadrons of evolution’ – training exercises conducted under the command of the comte de Guichen in 1775 and the comte du Chassault in 1776.19 Both commanders used highly original ideas developed in the 1760s by French theorists who led the world in thinking on naval tactics.20 These cruises taught the officers to judge speed and position in a fleet by eye; to keep station at night by following the wake of the ship ahead as it glowed in the moonlight; to anticipate the manoeuvres of their fellow captains; to squeeze the very best performance from their ships in a variety of conditions.
The crews were raised by a system of naval conscription, designed to ensure that large numbers of men would have knowledge and experience of the maritime environment. To maintain their health, schools of naval medicine had been established at the main naval dockyards of Brest, Rochefort and Toulon.
These developments now made the French a particularly dangerous enemy. In practice, however, so much could still go wrong because of the many problems inherent in wielding such sea power. Operations could misfire because of basic navigational errors; thousands of sailors would die if the ships were not kept clean; the chaos of fleet battle in deep oceans endangered almost all attempts at command and control; manning systems and dockyard efficiency could collapse under the pressure of war. The Americans, with no naval history behind them and no naval administrators or career naval officers to advise them, did not realize this, and they heaped expectation upon the French navy. They may have loathed the ‘Frenchman’ but they loved his ships. The French – purely because of their navy – were seen as the saviours of the revolution. Thus the alliance, made in February 1778,* was associated in America with a fascinating and paradoxical mixture of distrust and exceptionally high levels of expectation. ‘Wine, meats, and liquors abounded, and happiness and contentment were impressed on every countenance’, wrote the Hessian General Johann de Kalb.21
The key question of 1778, therefore, was how would the French navy live up to those American expectations? It started very well indeed.
* * *
As in all British wars, the first naval action was highly significant and the public waited with baited breath for news that could herald so much. They knew it was coming: French naval officers were spreading rumours that the two countries were at war weeks before the actual declaration.22 The ‘first shot’ of any war was always burdened with the weight of international politics. Britain and France both had defensive treaties with other European countries, which required assistance to be given, in the shape of arms and money, to their partner country if attacked. Britain held a defensive treaty with the Netherlands, and France with Austria. The key question surrounding this first naval engagement, therefore, was who fired the first shot. In reality, of course, the answer to that question was always unclear. Either it actually was unclear who had in fact fired the first shot, or the subsequent reports twisted the truth. The British had already come off very badly from just such an engagement, at Lexington in April 1775, when both sides had been desperate to paint the other as the aggressor – a fight within a fight that was plainly won by the Americans, who had rushed their version of events across the Atlantic first. How would the opposing sides now fare at sea?
On 17 June 1778 a small French squadron was sent out from Brest to ascertain the strength and location of British forces in the Channel. Two frigates, the Pallas and Belle Poule, were spotted, chased and brought to heel. According to custom, the British captains then demanded that their French counterparts travel with them to see the British commanding officer, Admiral Augustus Keppel, on his flagship. The Pallas’s captain agreed; the Belle Poule’s refused, simply saying: ‘that cannot be, Sir’.23 The British frigate Arethusa fired a warning shot across her bows, whereupon the French unleashed their entire broadside into the hull of the British ship. There followed a terrific battle in which both ships found it very difficult to manoeuvre in the fluky winds. The British frigate, 200 tons smaller than the French, lost her mainmast just ten feet above the deck and was even less able to manoeuvre than her adversary. Drifting with the tide towards the French coast, the ships slugged at each other like prizefighters unable to land the knockout blow, the canvas at their feet spattered with blood and littered with teeth. Eventually it became clear that the Arethusa was unable to continue the fight and the Belle Poule escaped. News of the action, meanwhile, had reached Keppel, who immediately detained the Pallas. Keppel also mopped up two smaller ships from the French squadron.24
With such visible and dramatic evidence of the first clash between the two nations, journalists and politicians on both sides of the Channel feverishly set to work, spinning the story to make even more telling blows. A report appeared in the London Gazette on 27 June, which emphasized that the British had fired a shot across the French bows for not complying with their desire to escort them to Admiral Keppel. The French, apparently with no warning, then fired a full broadside into the Arethusa, which was within very close range. From the British perspective, it was also, and rightly, feted as a battle fought on the very lap of the Frenchman, against the odds, and it generated a very well-known song, simply titled ‘The Arethusa’, which emphasized these salient points:
On deck five hundred men did dance
The stoutest they could find in France
We with two hundred did advance
On board the Arethusa …
The fight was off the Frenchman’s land
We forc’d them back upon the strand,
Of the gallant Arethusa
And now we’ve driven the foe ashore
Never to fight with Britons More …
In France, however, the battle found an even more enthusiastic audience, one willing to embrace the battle in a way that few could have foreseen. The key point was that the French had sent an insignificant force of two frigates and two smaller ships to sea, which had, apparently, blundered into the entire British Channel Fleet and been driven back to find safety under the protective rocks of their own coastline. In doing so they had fought with great success, disabling their British opponent.*
No one in his or her right mind would believe that the captain of the Belle Poule had deliberately chosen to place his ship in the path of such a force, still less to start a fight within sight of it. In France, therefore, the battle was described as an affront to the French king, as an affront to his flag, to his seas, to his pride, to his nation, to his subjects. Louis explained his decision to declare war on Britain in exactly these terms in a letter to naval minister Sartine that was subsequently published. A similar letter, also with direct reference to the Belle Poule action, was sent to the French West Indies.25 Frenchmen now had reason of their own to feel aggrieved, to feel bullied; they could legitimately paint the American cause as their cause, as a fight for liberty against the dastardly British, seen through the lens of the Belle Poule action as an insatiable imperial monster unfairly dominating the seas.
The real story, however, is more complicated. The timing was perfect. The French navy was now fully mobilized and the French were now prepared to show their hand and fight. It was essential, however, that the British were painted as the aggressors. Keppel found evidence on board the captured
ships that the battle was the result of a carefully planned trap by the French. The ships’ captains had explicit orders to provoke the British into ‘what they may pretend to construe into an insult or act of hostility’.26 The French, therefore, carefully manipulated the theatre of naval war to generate new enthusiasm and reinforce existing support, both within France and on an international stage, for their alliance with America.
A well-organized publicity coup maybe, but no one was prepared for the extraordinary fame that this battle would subsequently achieve. Since the arrival of Benjamin Franklin it had become fashionable to be interested in America, and chic women now took on the challenge of celebrating the Belle Poule action, of linking themselves with the resurrected French navy and with the American cause, by creating that hairstyle – à la Belle Poule – which began, and inspired, this book.
In France war against Britain was on every tongue. Lieutenant Clocheterie, commander of the Belle Poule, was personally decorated by the king, and there was every hope that the French navy was once more, as it had been a century before under the great Louis XIV, equal to the British. The Belle Poule action seemed to suggest so; the French hoped so; and the Americans expected so.
For exactly this reason, the impact of the alliance in Britain was also severe and became the key element in a significant change of perception by the British of the Americans. The war had changed from a civil war to a more easily understood foreign war, with a resulting hardening of stance towards the rebels who suddenly now seemed more foreign, hostile and dangerous than they ever had before. ‘America willingly became the dagger of France, and lent herself to be the instrument of the assassination of her parent’, wrote Lord Lyttelton.27 ‘Are rebels and traitors our brethren, and fellow-subjects?’ asked a letter in one British newspaper, ‘are they not now aliens, and enemies? And what hope have we they will be our friends again, who are joined with Frenchmen, and Papists?’28 This change of gear is more commonly associated with the battle of Lexington or the Declaration of Independence, but in reality it was the alliance with France, and particularly the entry of the French navy into the war, which changed everything.29 Renouncing their allegiance to the king was nothing compared with the Americans jumping into bed with the French to embrace their sea power.