by Alan Schom
In the longest, the most elaborate military campaign of his entire career, he now strained every muscle of the French people and of their subjected allies — the Dutch, Belgians, Italians, West Bank Rhinelanders, and, soon, the Spaniards — in order to achieve his latest pipe-dream-become-idée fixe. The mass extortion of hundreds of millions of francs, the draining of the French national treasury, and the mobilization of an international corvee would have astonished the Sun King himself. Beginning in 1803 — with the country enjoying the first stable political period since the upheavals of the French Revolution, a revived, thriving national prosperity, real hope in the land, and a full treasury — Bonaparte was to jeopardize all, including a hard-earned general European peace, leaving the French treasury once again tottering on the verge of bankruptcy.
The idea for such “a descent upon the British Isles” had been slowly germinating since the early months of 1798, when Bonaparte had been tentatively assigned to take command of the small flotilla and expeditionary force forming along the Channel for a proposed invasion. He had rejected the idea out of hand after studying the situation. Such a land and sea assault as this, he felt, could be achieved only if greatly enlarged in scope and with full national support — but it could succeed. Nothing in his eyes was beyond feasibility, and as he was wont to say, “Only achieving the impossible is admired in France.”[529] Since Napoleon was a bit of a magician, and never one to dismiss illusions, this project was assured of success if approached correctly, intelligently, and with the full resources of the richest most populous land in Europe, as France was at this time. To cross fewer than twenty-five miles of sea between England and France was nothing. The Normans, in the most primitive of vessels, had achieved this very feat seven centuries earlier. He himself had launched a major expeditionary force from one end of the Mediterranean to the other. Clearly those opposing this invasion were being led by their emotions, politics, or simply limited outlook, but not by their intellect.
Yet the entire operation was certainly far more complex than any land operation he had ever conducted. It had been difficult enough back in 1796-97, when he had led a ragged, poorly armed and supplied French republican army across the Alps to conquer the plains of Lombardy. The preparations for Egypt, however, had provided him with the background for the other element required for a sea expedition. Despite errors, Egypt had proved that the French could launch an entire army across hundreds and hundreds of miles of enemy-infested waters. To be sure, the number of men involved had been relatively small, thirty-eight thousand, and, of course, initially luck had been on Napoleon’s side, but then it usually was.
General Bonaparte’s close, if brief, study of the Channel coast in January and February 1798 had revealed logistical problems he had not properly understood before, especially for the launching of a large invasion force. The shortest distance between England and France was between the coasts of Calais and Dover, but there were no real ports around Calais and Boulogne now, the closest one being farther south at Le Havre, and Napoleon did not like that position. And if one was considering an invasion right up the Thames to London, it was a matter of a minimum of seventy nautical miles just between Boulogne (where no port yet existed) and the mouth of the Thames, not a mere twenty-some miles between Boulogne and the Kentish coast. Moreover, whatever the distance agreed on, it had to be traversed again, if French troops were later to return home safely.
In 1797-98 the Directory had ordered the hasty construction of a flotilla of some 1,130 small coastal craft, for the sole purpose of defending the Channel ports, yet by the spring of 1801 only 167 of those vessels remained afloat.[530] But in that spring of his second year in office, First Consul Bonaparte was still intent only on protecting French ports and commerce from British guns and possible small landings. Accordingly, in a secret decree of March 10, 1801, he ordered the creation of what he referred to as a “light flotilla” of 450 small craft to continue coastal defense and nothing else (similar to England’s “sea fencibles”), to protect the coast from Morbi-han in France to Flushing in Holland.
Napoleon’s first naval minister, Pierre Forfait, no sailor but in fact a naval engineer and architect, was responsible for the new light flotilla. Although he made some important contributions during his stint in office, he was not liked by professional sailors. Not only had he never served at sea, but he had developed a flat-bottomed-boat design for river commerce that he wanted to see extended for coastal use. He thought like a river sailor, not like the men who had to traverse and live on the high seas for months and years at a time. By the spring of 1803 First Consul Bonaparte began looking for a sailor with a larger view of things, real sea experience, and greater talent and intelligence. The individual he settled on was Denis Decrès.
Decrès, a nobleman, was born at Château-Villain in the Haute-Marne in 1761. After receiving a good education, he joined the navy at the rather late age of seventeen, serving first under Admiral de Grasse in the Antilles, and was promoted to the rank of lieutenant in 1786. From his first command (a schooner) he soon advanced to frigates and finally to the largest of warships. But in the antiaristocratic reaction that swept France between 1792 and 1795, most of the French officer corps had been arrested, cashiered from the navy and some executed, as a result of the prevailing Jacobin prejudice against their birth and class, although most of those officers had in fact been loyally serving, to protect their country. The result: The French navy was reduced to a mere forty-two post captains.
Decrès, too, despite an entirely honorable and most praiseworthy career, was duly arrested in 1794, though released and reintegrated again the next year following the fall of the Jacobins when he was assigned to Rear-Admiral Villeneuve’s squadron, first in the Mediterranean and then at Brest. Promoted to the rank of rear admiral in 1798, he was transferred to Admiral Brueys’s fleet escorting Bonaparte to Egypt. He was one of the few to escape the débâcle of Abukir Bay, and with Villeneuve he managed to reach Malta. There, commanding the Guillaume Tell, although he managed to break through the British blockade, he was soon surrounded by three British ships. Despite devastating and sustained fire, Decrès, by now wounded several times, held out until half his men were casualties and all three of his masts were reduced to shredded stumps. A prisoner of war for many months, after his release by the British from Port Mahon in 1800, Decrès was appointed naval prefect of Lorient in March 1801 and presented by Napoleon with a sword of honor, a rare thing for the first consul ever to do for any sailor.
This was precisely the sort of man Napoleon was looking for. Indeed, if he could find a few dozen Decrèses, the French navy would not be in the dolorous plight in which it now found itself. Here was a man who understood every kind of warship afloat, who could command the respect of men, prepare for major expeditions, organize ports, and fight like a madman, literally until he dropped. What is more, he was not only a gentleman born but an educated one. The forty-year-old Decrès was summoned to the Tuileries, where on October 1, 1801, he was handed the portfolio for the Ministry of the Navy and the Colonies. It was to be his for the next thirteen years.
The gruff, unsociable Decrès was surprisingly subservient to Napoleon, but to no one else. He could take orders, any orders, usually without protest. He had a reputation for loyalty (to Napoleon) as well as ironclad firmness. Napoleon liked that. In addition he was an indefatigable worker. Decrès was one of the few men who failed to achieve goal after goal yet avoided swift and final retaliation from the great man.
There were reasons for the admiral’s future failures. Decrès usually surrounded himself with yes-men instead of experts. He was petty and jealous. What is more, Rear-Admiral Decrès expected full compliance with his written orders and general ideas. If someone disagreed with him, he was removed and his career diverted. A really talented but contrary individual might find himself cashiered, a promising career ended. Unfortunately it usually happened only to superior, intelligent, well-qualified officers.
On the other hand, if Decr
ès felt indebted to someone, that person would be protected through thick and thin, regardless of his incompetence and of the disasters it wrought. One example was the hapless Ganteaume. The most egregious example, however, was Rear-Admiral Villeneuve, under whom a younger Decrès had served many years, including at Abukir Bay in 1798, when Villeneuve had declined the honor of exchanging fire with the British or to protect his hard-pressed colleagues and even his commanding officer. Rather than fight, Villeneuve had set all sail and fled the field of battle unscathed, as usual. Earlier, during the attempted invasion of Ireland, he had somehow failed to arrive in time to partake of that disaster. The fleet had left without him.
That in spite of everything Naval Minister Decrès permitted Villeneuve to continue to fly his drooping pennant was shocking, unprofessional, and clearly not the action of a competent, self-respecting sailor. And it was to prove gravely detrimental to the service, ultimately leading to the worst naval catastrophe ever suffered by the French at the hands of the Royal Navy. On the other hand, it was largely due to Decrès’s superb knowledge of the working navy and his administrative abilities that the navy’s fleets, organization, and ports were thoroughly reorganized. In addition Decrès instituted a badly needed crash building program, requiring the launching of twelve new ships and sixteen frigates, annually — a feat Great Britain could not even begin to match.
At best Decrès, because of his weaknesses of character and sense of insecurity, should have been kept at a secondary level under a more mature and competent naval minister. But Napoleon was somehow blinded by the man and stood by him.
Perhaps the most obvious general defect in the French Navy at this time was its form of administration and lack of proper authoritative channels. The British, although having no naval minister per se, did have a First Lord of the Admiralty, who sat in on cabinet meetings at Downing Street. The First Lord oversaw the Admiralty Board, which, made up chiefly of admirals, was alone responsible for the actions of the Royal Navy. Political direction naturally came from the prime minister, but how those naval objectives were to be best achieved lay entirely in the hands of the Admiralty Board’s sea lords, the commissioners. The Admiralty Board and its First Lord alone were responsible for issuing all orders to the fleets. The navy’s shipyards, supplies, hospitals, and treasury were in turn administered by an entirely separate institution, the Naval Board. Although the French did create a Naval Commission in an attempt to imitate the British, it was given no real power, could not draw up and issue orders to fleets and commanders, and therefore could not initiate action. It had no real, independent authority.
Instead Decrès held dictatorial powers over the naval commissioners, who simply gave their views when asked, clicked their heels, and obeyed all orders and decisions handed down to them by the naval minister. Decrès could and did bypass those gentlemen whenever the spirit moved him, sometimes later calling for their signature, ex post facto, to reinforce or legalize a particular action. All naval appointments, promotions, and dismissals of officers, which in London were handled by the Admiralty Board, in Paris fell to one man alone, Denis Decrès. Too many of the naval minister’s appointments and decisions were to prove disastrous. And if this were not bad enough, Napoleon frequently interfered with naval operations, often bypassing Decrès and communicating directly with captains and fleet commanders, sometimes without even informing the admiral. It was this lamentable “system” that was responsible for what was now about to transpire.
“If, as I speak here at this moment, you were to be informed that the English had carried out a major landing on our shores, who among you would not have been greatly disturbed?” Pierre-Antoine Daru, Napoleon’s spokesman, addressed the Tribunate on May 23, 1803. “Imagine then how alarmed they in turn will be in England upon learning of the arrival of a French army there...We are already masters enough to be able to conquer the King of England’s [German] states on the Continent, and once we land on his own island, we will have broken all English power once and for all.”[531] Thus it was that Napoleon officially announced to France and the world his decision of May 17 (with the official ending of the Peace of Amiens between France and England) to invade Great Britain.
Within forty-eight hours the British fleet off the coast of Brittany had been notified of the resumption of hostilities:
The Right Honourable Lord Hobart...having signified his Majesty’s pleasure that all ships and vessels belonging to the French Republic should be seized or destroyed by any of his Majesty’s ships that may fall in with them; you are, in consequence therefore hereby required and directed to seize or destroy all ships and vessels belonging to the French Republic.[532]
Thus were the orders issued by the Hon. Sir William Cornwallis, admiral of the blue and commander of England’s largest fleet, the Channel Fleet off the French coast, to his captains. France and England were at war again, after scarcely a year’s respite.
Napoleon now resuscitated Forfait’s implausible plan to build an entire “national flotilla” comprised of flat-bottomed riverboats for a major sea invasion, an idea that a staggered Decrès denounced as “monstrous.” For perhaps the first time, he contradicted Napoleon, explaining that the notion that these small craft could vanquish frigates and ships of the line was ludicrous. The whole thing, he concluded, was based on “conceptions that are as false as they will prove to be disastrous.” These craft were “bad sailers, too frail to withstand the elements, while carrying artillery far too heavy for their feeble design.”[533] And Adm. Laurent Jean François fully concurred.
Vice Admiral Bruix was even more outraged by the folly of attempting to invade England with “this swarm of pretty little boats.” Napoleon, unaccustomed to being so adamantly rebuffed, was losing his patience, as his best admirals rejected out of hand this brilliant concept for invading the world’s greatest sea power with modified flat-bottomed riverboats. Even if half of them did somehow manage to reach the Thames Estuary, some seventy miles from Boulogne, all agreed on the inevitable failure of the enterprise. Such fragile, unseaworthy boats, even if armed with one or two pieces of small artillery, would not stand a chance against real warships such as Admiral Lord Keith was keeping permanently on guard off the English coast. It was absurd, all the experts agreed.
A defiant Napoleon nevertheless dismissed his critics. He had been told it was impossible to bring huge cannon over the snow-covered Alps, but he had succeeded in doing just that. He had been told it was impossible to transport an entire French army across the Mediterranean to invade Egypt, but he had again succeeded. A by now frustrated but determined First Consul Bonaparte finally put the question to the one obsequious sailor who never let him down, Honoré Ganteaume: “Do you think it [the flotilla] will land on Albion’s shores?” After considerable hesitation the embarrassed rear admiral replied, “I consider the flotilla expedition, if not impossible, then at least extremely chancy...This attempted crossing would be extremely tough, extremely dangerous, but I do not think sailors would consider it altogether impractical.”[534] (It is amusing to recall Bonaparte’s own earlier rejection of the 1798 invasion plan as “extremely chancy.”)
“Not altogether impractical” was all Napoleon needed to hear. He pressed Ganteaume for details. These boats “might be able to cross,” Ganteaume went on, perhaps unnoticed by the enemy during a long winter’s night, during a period of “utter calm” following a major storm, if — and this was his only contingency — all two or three thousand of them were launched “on a single tide.” “But what I consider to be extraordinarily difficult, is being able to keep a prodigious number of small craft that would be encumbering all our ports, without considerable damage to them during storms fierce enough to drive away the enemy.”[535]
Despite all difficulties involved, some of which Napoleon recognized, he was set on continuing. He decided to visit the Channel in midwinter to study the few fishing boats still putting to sea, to investigate for himself the problems of navigation in howling seas. This was precisely
the time of year both Forfait and Ganteaume recommended for launching the expedition “under cover of one long winter’s night,” in the calm following the usual storm. Alas, although the winter solstice did indeed provide very long nights, they were accompanied by an unrelenting series of ferocious storms, leaving even stout fishing smacks too battered to sail. If the Channel did this to sturdy, seaworthy vessels, frail flat-bottomed craft would not stand a chance. What perhaps was even more dismaying as Napoleon, lashed by wind and rain, stood on the cliffs of Boulogne, telescope in hand, was that although the English warships remained farther out to sea to weather the storm, most of them did not abandon their stations, as Napoleon had predicted they would. Drenched and windblown, he got back into his coach and returned to the warmth and calm of the Tuileries, admitting that his invasion flotilla would have to sail in the summer, during the shortest nights of the year. So be it. It could and would have to be done, although his idea that such a cumbersome crossing could be effected in “six hours,” or even twelve or eighteen, was utter nonsense.
It quickly became apparent to every sailor in the French navy that Rear Admiral Ganteaume’s other requirement for a successful crossing — launching an entire flotilla of more than two thousand boats “on the same tide,” even in the most favorable weather — was equally impossible. It would take at least two or three tides to achieve this from even the best and most spacious of harbors. This in turn meant that Napoleon would have to rework his suppositions, for the element of surprise would be lost. In any event one could hardly conceal two to three thousand vessels from the English warships continually hugging French shores, their telescopes scanning all activity. Indeed, even a few dozen very small craft could be easily spotted by telescope all the way from Dover!