France and the Tyrant of the Sea
The History of Naval Warfare, Part 5
The 17th Century was a time of great suffering on a global scale. In the depths of a period of pronounced global cooling - the so-called “Little Ice Age” - poor harvests sparked various forms of social unrest ranging from peasant rebellions to all out civil war in places as far flung as China, Japan, Russia, Turkey, France, and England. In 1644, the last Ming Emperor of China - the Chongzhen Emperor - committed suicide, and his dynasty collapsed amid famine and the invasion of the Manchus. Four years later, the Ottoman Sultan was murdered during a revolt of the elite Janissary Corps. The following year (1649), King Charles I of England was executed against the backdrop of England’s bloody civil wars. The whole time, Central Europe was ravaged by the Thirty Years War, which left much of Germany and Bohemia in ruins. Poland found itself reduced to wreckage after its Ukrainian provinces flared into a cossack-led uprising, sparking years of war with neighboring Russia. Little wonder, then, that the Welsh historian James Howell lamented that “God almighty has a quarrel lately with all mankind.”
Within this broader calamitous context, the disastrous 17th Century gave rise to the embryonic form of the European great power system that would come to dominate the world for two centuries, until it destroyed itself in the great act of self-immolation that we call World War One. The social and geopolitical upheavals brought a close to the era of European politics in which the hegemony of the Habsburgs had been the dominant geopolitical pivot, and saw the arrival of new powers on the European periphery. Russia’s defeat of Poland in the midcentury wars set the stage for the country’s eventual eruption under Tsar Peter I: Peter the Great (born 1672). Meanwhile, the consolidation of the English state after years of Civil War, and the emergence of the powerful Royal Navy as a result of the Anglo-Dutch Wars, announced the arrival of the offshore power of Britain.
Thus, by the beginning of the 18th Century the signature condition of modern European geopolitics had begun to present itself, even if it was not fully formed. The basic “problem” of European power politics, as such, is the challenge of amassing hegemony on the European continent while contending with the latent power of Europe’s two “flanking powers” - Russia, with its tremendous land-logistical power on the eastern flank, and Britain, with its naval and economic strength loitering offshore in the west. The challenge facing any would-be European emperor was the triple-lift of not only subjugating his neighbors in the European core, but also being prepared to contend with the flanking powers.
The first would-be continental hegemon to attempt and fail this challenge was 18th century Europe’s most powerful state: France. Bourbon France emerged as a rival to the Habsburgs in the 17th Century and soon came to surpass them, with the French benefitting from their compact and defensible geographic position, its vast and growing population (which rapidly outstripped that of Spain and England), and a powerful centralized state. Between 1701 and 1815, the French would fight a long sequence of wars that promoted their push for continental hegemony - wars that can largely be contained in the lives of just two men: Louis XIV (the Sun King), and Napoleon Bonaparte.
France was undoubtedly the most powerful state in the world during this time, but it ultimately fell short of its leap for enduring hegemony - undone by its inability to cope with the flanking powers. Our purpose in this space is, mercifully, not to give an exhaustive accounting of the great rise and fall of the French superpower, but to focus on one particular aspect of its struggle on the flanks: the long naval struggle with the Royal Navy, whom the French pejoratively called “The Tyrant of the Sea.”
Throughout the French century, virtually all of France’s wars on the continent contained an important off-continent dimension of colonial and naval conflict with the British. A list of the great wars fought in this period - the War of the Spanish Succession, the Seven Years War, the War of American Independence, and the Napoleonic Wars - reveals in every instance a litany of crucial battles fought between the French and the British, either in the overseas colonial theaters or on the sea itself. It is this latter item that serves as an object of great interest for us.
This long sequence of frequently climactic sea battles between the French and British navies saw the maturation of the naval combat system which had emerged in the Anglo-Dutch Wars. That methodology of combat, which emphasized the firepower of heavily gunned capital ships arrayed in battle lines, had proven decisively superior to older forms of combat and swept away archaic concepts like converted merchant vessels, boarding actions, and free swirling melees. Henceforth, naval combat would center on the battle line, and tactical innovations were predicated on maximizing the effectiveness of one’s own battle lines while breaking the integrity of the enemy’s line.
The long saga of the Anglo-French wars at sea were the apogee of this system of battle: cinematic, deadly, and decisive to global affairs. From India, to the Americas, to the English Channel, the pivot of world power would increasingly be these titanic clashes between long, threadlike lines of broadside vessels, dealing out death and shot and smoke to each other amid the merciless waves.
The Apogee of De Ruyter
In his day, Louis XIV was the most powerful monarch in the world. He had all the various trappings and achievements to prove it, from his sprawling and opulent palace at Versailles, to the territorial expansion of France which occurred under his reign, to his pithy and implicitly confident commentary on his own power: “I am the state.” The longest reigning monarch in human history, his rule saw France advance to the apex of the European power structure. Nevertheless, it was under the Sun King that the perils of France’s strategic posture began to show. He was overly eager to make war against vast enemy coalitions, disdainful of conducting a prudent alliance policy, and frequently unable to fully embrace the expense and logic of war at sea, all to France’s detriment.
France’s age of expansion intersects cleanly with the European story as we left it in our last piece, with the Third Anglo-Dutch War. The second war between the Dutch and the English had ended in 1667 after the Dutch Navy’s shocking raid on the English shipyards in the Thames Estuary. Although the terms by which this conflict was ended were not particularly injurious to England, King Charles II felt a pair of acute humiliations, both in the embarrassment of the Dutch raid and his own financial dependence on Parliament. England’s subsequently revanchist stance was thus motivated both by the desire to repair the prestige of the navy and Charles’s own financial woes.
Charles found an opportunity to ameliorate both of his great discontents in the ambitions of Louis XIV, who had begun a steady and inexorable policy of French expansionism. Louis coveted the Spanish Netherlands - that peculiar stretch of the low countries centered on Flanders which we now call Belgium and Luxembourg. Then under the dominion of the fading Spanish Habsburgs, Louis made the attainment of the Spanish Netherlands the guiding animus of much of his foreign policy, and this inevitably brought him into conflict with the Dutch, who naturally preferred having the weakening and distant Spanish monarch for a southern neighbor, rather than the powerful and assertive Louis. It was this approaching collision between France and the Dutch that gave Charles his opportunity for English revenge. In 1670, Louis and Charles agreed to a secret treaty under which Charles agreed to provide military support to the French in exchange for a hefty financial subsidy from Louis; this gave France the support of the potentially decisive English Navy, while providing Charles with both a source of revenue independent of Parliament and the opportunity for revenge against the Dutch.
Thus, France’s first major naval war of the modern era began, oddly enough, with England as an ally against the Dutch. Unlike the previous Anglo-Dutch Wars, this war was to have a decisive theater on land, with French forces pressing the Dutch to the limits. An ambitious French offensive in 1672 outflanked the primary Dutch defensive lines, and brought the Dutch to such a level of desperation that they were forced to open levees and use strategic flooding to maintain their defense.
French success on the ground made the naval theater all the more critical, in that it brought the Dutch government to a condition of financial desperation, which made oceanic merchant traffic absolutely essential for continuing the war. It was particularly important to ensure that the Dutch spice fleet could safely return home; the interdiction, destruction, or capture of the spice fleet (either on the open seas or via an Anglo-French blockade) threatened to financially cripple the Dutch and lead to total defeat. There was also the consideration of preventing the allied navy from supporting the French Army by landing forces on the Dutch coast.
The Dutch therefore originally had intentions of engaging and defeating the English fleet before it could join up with the French, but the awkward design of Dutch institutions (which gave each of the five major Dutch provinces its own Admiralty with responsibility for raising ships) prevented the Dutch from constituting a fleet in time, and the English and French navies were able to rendezvous in the mouth of the Thames, placing the Dutch at a decided numerical disadvantage.
Facing a superior Anglo-French fleet, but pressed by the absolute necessity of preventing the enemy from blockading the Dutch coast, the Dutch commanding Admiral, Michiel de Ruyter, put on a virtuoso performance. He put to sea and came within sight of the allied fleet, but - although he had every intention of seeking battle - made a great show of retreating before their superior numbers and withdrew to the safety of the Dutch coast, where the shoals and islets made it dangerous for the enemy to pursue. The English and French (under the overall command of the English Prince Rupert), believing that their superior numbers had scared de Ruyter off, decided to retire back to the English coast to rest, refit, and take on additional provisions.
De Ruyter, however, was not scared. The run back to the Dutch coast had been only a feint, and he was in fact following the enemy back towards England in hot pursuit. His ships came over the horizon as the Anglo-French were anchored against the coast near Soleby. From the outset, the allies were in an extremely precarious position. The wind was blowing towards the coast, which was at their back, and they had made their anchorage with the English and French divisions of the fleet at a distance from each other. They were thus unable to maneuver freely with their forces already divided; a situation that was exacerbated by de Ruyter’s handling of the battle.
De Ruyter tasked an undersized division under Adriaen Banckert with engaging the French (under Count Jean d'Estrées) at the southernmost end of the allied line; its task was not so much to engage and destroy the French fleet as to ensure that it could not participate in the battle, either by pinning it or driving it away. The French, as it turned out, would help with this by choosing to get underway towards the south, which carried them further away from the English and ensured that they exerted no influence on the rest of the battle. Meanwhile, de Ruyter led the bulk of the Dutch fleet in an aggressive run on the English, who were (like the French) cutting anchor and getting underway, in this case by tacking northward.
De Ruyter’s tactical schema allowed him to entirely neutralize the enemy’s overall advantage in ships. Exploiting the gap in the enemy fleet and taking them by surprise, he managed to chase the French fleet to the south using only a small squadron; thus, although the enemy had more ships in total, De Ruyter achieved a local superiority against the English, and kept the French from participating in the battle at all. Four English ships were destroyed, and the casualties in the English fleet were sufficient to render it incapable of any immediate further combat.
The Battle of Solebay traditionally draws extremely high marks for de Ruyter, who demonstrated a deadly nexus of seamanship, tactical guile, and aggression. The entire engagement was, to be sure, brilliantly conducted on the Dutch part: de Ruyter’s feigned retreat to the Dutch coast convinced the enemy coalition that he had been scared off by their superior numbers, allowing him to ambush their fleet in a compromised downwind position against the English coast. Once the battle was joined, de Ruyter cleverly wedged the enemy fleet apart and ensured that he could engage the English center with local superiority, with the French more or less removed from the battle entirely through maneuver, without any serious fighting by the French fleet.
Like many of history’s great commanders, de Ruyter faced a seemingly insuperable strategic problem: he could outwit and maul the enemy, but the Dutch resource base was dwarfed by the force generation potential of a powerful Anglo-French coalition. For the rest of the year, then, the Dutch navy had to adopt a defensive posture, aiming to preserve its strength for the defense of the Dutch coast, seeking battle only when favorable conditions presented themselves, or when absolutely necessary, but otherwise keeping their fleet intact to ward off enemy attempts to either blockade or land troops on the coast.
The naval war reached a climax in the summer of 1673 with a renewed Anglo-French effort to force de Ruyter to battle. The ensuing action would, instead, be the crowning jewel of de Ruyter’s distinguished career. A previous series of indecisive engagements had whittled down Dutch strength, leaving de Ruyter with just 54 ships of the line against some 81 in the coalition fleet (54 English and 27 French). Although substantially outnumbered, de Ruyter could not afford to remain passive and hide in the shelter of the Dutch coast. The Dutch spice fleet was returning home, and ceding the seas to the enemy risked the capture of the spice fleet, and by extension the bankruptcy and defeat of the Dutch Republic. The navy would have to fight to keep the sea lanes open.
The fleets met each other off the Dutch coast on August 12, near the island of Texel. What stands out immediately is the reversal from the situation at Solebay, where de Ruyter had attacked the allied fleet when its back was to the coast. In this case, the Dutch had the coastal position, with the wind blowing steadily out towards the sea.
De Ruyter’s plan would hinge, once again, on separating the enemy coalition and removing the French from the battle through an artful maneuver. At Texel, the French contingent was in the vanguard, sailing at the front of the allied line on a southerly course. The forward Dutch squadron, under Banckert, paced the French as they sailed down the coast, steadily pulling further and further away from the center and rear divisions of the fleets. The emergence of this gap in the line was owed to a lack of communication between Prince Rupert and the French admiral, dEstrees. Rupert was aiming to pull the Dutch away from the shelter of the coastline by steadily falling out to sea. The French, however, missed this memo and continued to sail straight down the coast.
Seeing the gap emerge between the centers and the vanguard divisions, Banckert made his move. He suddenly wheeled his division to the right, sailing his 12 ships straight through the French division and out the other side; having passed through, he wheeled back to join the developing battle in the center. Remarkably, dEstrees opted not to follow him: the result was that the French simply dropped out of the battle, sailing idly towards the south, while Banckert raced back to join de Ruyter in his battle against Rupert in the center.
Meanwhile, the rearmost divisions also separated from the center, but in this case they were motivated not by lethargy but by personal hatreds. The commanders in the rear were Edward Spragge for the English and Cornelius Tromp for the Dutch. These two had tangled numerous times in previous battles, and Spragge had vowed to King Charles that he would not return until he had either taken Tromp dead or alive, or else given his own life in battle. The two rival admirals locked together, aiming to adjudicate the oath. The battle here was exceptionally fierce, with Spragge obliged on multiple occasions to transfer his flag to a new ship amid horrific damage. On one such occasion, the admiral boarded a boat to change ships, but en-route to his new flagship a cannon struck his little boat and tore it to splinters. Spragge drowned, and so fulfilled his oath to the king - not for lack of trying, but certainly not in the manner he had hoped. Tromp would survive the war and die in 1691 after a long bout with alcoholism.
The Battle of Texel thus took on a unique shape. The two fleets first made contact in conventional tripart battle lines, but the integrity of the lines was soon broken, with the rear divisions drifting away as Tromp and Spragge sought desperately to kill each other, and the leading French squadron being carried out of the battle and left behind by Banckert’s maneuver. As a result, Rupert found himself fighting de Ruyter in the center, but while the Dutch vanguard (Banckert) was wheeling back to join this central battle, Rupert’s own vanguard (the French) was simply sailing away. For obvious reasons, then, the battle of the centers went in favor of the Dutch, and raged intensely for the rest of the day, until the French at long last wandered back in. Seeing the French fleet returning for action (after many hours of absence), de Ruyter broke off the battle.
The Battle of the Texel interests for many reasons. In terms of material, it was indecisive. Both fleets suffered serious damage and casualties; Dutch losses were lighter on the whole, but their fleet was also smaller, so in relative terms the two sides both left the day with serious damage. It probably represented a draw, but in this case a draw was (paradoxically) a victory for the Dutch. The Dutch goal was to drive the enemy fleet off so that the Dutch coast could remain open for the spice fleet to return home: therefore, since both the Dutch and Anglo-French fleets were so badly damaged that they had to return home for refitting, a mutual mauling served to fulfill de Ruyter’s strategic goals. The enemy coalition did, in fact, pull back to the English coast for refit, leaving the path clear for Dutch shipping to get home safely.
On a tactical level, Texel again represents a remarkable performance by de Ruyter. Although badly outnumbered (the enemy having 50% more ships), he managed to create favorable conditions for himself, drawing the French out of position and removing them from the battle, much as he had done at Solebay. In both cases, the French showed poor seamanship and a low willingness to fight, and allowed themselves to be pulled away from the battle by relatively small Dutch squadrons. At both Solebay and Texel, the Anglo-French fleets came to battle with the numbers, but de Ruyter managed to gain superiority in the center by pulling the enemy lines apart. In both cases, the French made this chore easier by voluntarily sailing themselves away from the English.
After Texel, the English war effort began to dissipate, and they would drop out of the war in February, 1674 after signing the Treaty of Westminster with the Dutch. This left the French alone in the fight; for this reason, the “Third Anglo-Dutch War” and the “Franco-Dutch War” are often regarded as separate conflicts.
The emerging dynamics of the conflict were predictive of France’s larger strategic problems which explain why Louis XIV’s France was simultaneously the most powerful nation in the world and yet doomed to fail in its leap for hegemony. France began the war with a remarkably successful land offensive that put the Dutch on the ropes, and they had reasons to be optimistic about the naval campaign thanks to their English ally. They were, however, unable to convert this into a decisive strategic victory. After the English dropped out, the naval dimension of the war became dramatically less important; meanwhile, the Dutch were amenable to making peace, but Louis’ demands were so severe that the Dutch opted to fight on. Furthermore, France’s gains had startled the rest of Europe, so that the Spanish and the Holy Roman Emperor, Leopold I, entered the war on behalf of the Dutch. Alarmed by the emergence of this new enemy coalition, Louis softened his demands, but the Dutch were now in no mood to negotiate. The war dragged on for several years and became very costly for the French, and in the end Louis made only modest territorial gains.
This was France’s problem. It was an extremely powerful state, with a vast population and highly defensible borders, but its overtly expansionistic stance and poorly conducted alliance policy frequently left it fighting protracted and costly land wars against formidable enemy coalitions. Meanwhile, the French navy failed to impress, and Louis let the two preeminent sea powers (England and the Dutch Republic) slip out of his orbit and into the hostile camp: after the brief moment of Anglo-French alliance, the English would move firmly into the anti-French coalition and remain there for over a century.
In the latter years of the Franco-Dutch War, the naval dimension naturally became substantially less important, as the French navy lacked the strength to contest the Dutch coast without its erstwhile English allies. In the Mediterranean theater (activated in the conflict by the entry of Spain into the war as a Dutch ally), naval operations did remain important late into the war. Despite their remoteness from the Mediterranean, the Dutch remained the heavy lifters, as the declining Spanish crown found it more convenient to simply pay the Dutch to provide a fleet rather than try to raise one of their own.
After decades of venerable service defending Dutch access to the North Sea, it would be the Mediterranean that provided the locale for de Ruyter’s swan song. By 1675, the Dutch Republic was increasingly exhausted, and even with the Spanish footing the bill it proved impossible to outfit a large fleet of comparable size to the war’s earlier actions. De Ruyter, now well into his 60s, was dispatched to the Mediterranean with a mere 18 ships of the line. As a testament to the old man’s stoicism and steadiness, he remarked to the Dutch admiralty that the fleet was far too small to contest the growing French Mediterranean fleet, and then set sail anyway.
The Dutch intention was to rendezvous with a Spanish squadron for joint operations, but the French were able to force de Ruyter to fight before he could link up with his Spanish allies. De Ruyter’s fleet encountered the French in January near the volcanic island of Stromboli, off the northern coast of Sicily. Although the count of ships was roughly even, with 20 French line ships against de Ruyter’s 18 Dutch ships, plus a single Spanish vessel that had joined his fleet, the fighting power of the French was much greater. The French fleet consisted of larger and better armed vessels, such that they had some 1,500 guns against 1,200 in the Dutch batteries. Though old, tired, and outgunned, de Ruyter still had one more good fight in him.
In contrast to his previous maneuvers as Solebay and Texel, he began the Battle of Stromboli rather passively, forming a battle line in the downwind position and apparently ceding all the important advantages to the French, who could now count on both more gunnery and the weather gauge. De Ruyter’s exact motives and thought processes are not well documented, but we can make some guesses. It is likely that, having inferior firepower, he prioritized keeping his line well formed to maximize his broadside potential, and left it to the French to disorder themselves by attacking.
The French obliged. Their admiral, Abraham Duquesne, sensing that he held all the cards, began an immediate attack, hauling his fleet in at an oblique angle to come alongside the Dutch. In doing so, however, he temporarily gave the Dutch an advantage in effective firepower. A ship approaching obliquely - that is, at an angle to the enemy - is unable to fire all of its cannon during the approach, while being fully exposed to the enemy broadside. The Dutch, who were holding steady in a well formed line, used the opportunity to unleash heavy fire on the approaching French, and successfully disabled two ships in the French vanguard.
The oblique approach proved to be a difficult maneuver to control, with the French ships making contact one at a time, rather than altogether (that is, the French vanguard engaged first, with the rear ships lagging behind on the approach). The result was that the French fleet became disordered and had a difficult time reforming a coherent line under Dutch fire.
Thus, despite the significant advantage in French gunnery, de Ruyter was able to exchange fire on favorable terms, and the battle broke off at the end of the day with the French nursing significant wounds. Stromboli stands apart from de Ruyter’s other notable battles, in that he opted to forgo the opportunity to maneuver in favor of keeping his line on station, awaiting a French attack. It speaks to the old admiral’s versatility that he was able, time and time again, to battle larger and more powerful fleets than his own, in a variety of different tactical circumstances. De Ruyter would die soon after the Battle of Stromboli. Now a venerable 69 years of age, he would take a cannonball to the leg off the coast of Sicily in April, 1676, and died a week later of his festering wound.
Michiel de Ruyter was one of the greatest admirals in history, and undoubtedly the best of his era. He almost always fought with a numerical disadvantage, but proved able time and time again to force the enemy fleet into unfavorable positions, allowing him to batter and maul larger enemy armadas. His career is full of fascinating tactical maneuvers, such as we have elucidated here, but on a strategic level his life is testament to the crucial role of sea power and the way that it functions.
Sea power saved the Dutch Republic from an overwhelming French ground assault in the earlier courses of the war, allowing it to survive in a state of pseudo-siege with the French army on its territory. The sea lanes provided the crucial flow of commerce that brought supplies and wealth into Dutch ports, forming a literal lifeline for the battered and overmatched republic.
De Ruyter was repeatedly able to keep this lifeline open by battering, but not destroying enemy fleets. Most of his great battles in the latter years of his life, like Texel and Solebay, ended with indecisive material exchanges - that is to say, both the Dutch and Anglo-French fleets took significant and mostly proportional damage. These indecisive exchanges were, however, strategic victories for the Dutch. The Dutch were fighting a defensive naval campaign aimed at preventing the enemy from blockading their coast and severing their access to the ocean. To succeed in this campaign, de Ruyter did not need to destroy the enemy fleet entirely, but only cause enough damage to force it to return home to refit. In other words, the Dutch needed only to deny the enemy total control over the sea lanes to keep the path clear for their merchant marine. The Anglo-French, on the other hand, needed to win overwhelming victories so that they could begin a blockade of the Dutch coast. Despite routinely possessing a preponderance of force, they were unable to do so in the face of Dutch tenacity, seamanship, and de Ruyter’s own magisterial command.
As a result, the Dutch Republic emerged from the Franco-Dutch War both battered and exhausted, but they were not forced to give up any territory. All of Louis’ gains came at the expense of the Spanish, who ceded lands in the Spanish Netherlands which extended France’s borders to the northeast. The Dutch Republic survived the French onslaught because their strength and life came from the sea, and de Ruyter kept the sea open to them, eventually losing his life amid the rocking caress of the waves.
For the French, the war had been a disappointment at sea. Despite the benefit of the English alliance in the first years of the war, victory over the Dutch navy had escaped Louis, and the French fleet performed poorly in critical engagements. France, however, always had latent naval power potential, which many of her statesmen were eager to exploit. France is blessed with three major seaboards, having access to the English Channel, the Atlantic Ocean, and the Mediterranean Sea. Her trivially easy access to the ocean always inferred the potential for robust oceangoing trade, while her vast population and robust domestic economy (much larger than England’s) provided an adequate resource base. Most importantly, France’s large and proficient army (at this time the best in Europe) and her project of fortress building on her borders had created a powerful indigenous industry in cannon manufacture and considerable expertise in gunnery.
France’s Chance
The first French statesman to work systematically to develop French naval power was Jean-Baptiste Colbert. The scion of a merchant family in Reims, Colbert worked his way up the French administration and rapidly gained the confidence of the king, and by the 1760’s he held portfolios in a variety of ministries, being simultaneously the Secretary of State of the Navy and the Controller-General of Finances, Minister of Commerce and Minister of Colonies, all while holding a palace appointment. He thus became the de-facto second most powerful man in France beneath Louis XIV, empowered to enact a broad economic policy. His system, known colloquially as “Colbertism”, was a fairly standard spin on the mercantilist policies of the day, which emphasized protectionism and tariffs to incubate French manufacturing, an efficient and tightly regulated fiscal regime, and the development of a robust merchant marine and navy to ensure the linkages to France’s growing colonial holdings.
Under Colbert, France’s naval strength rapidly accumulated strength precisely as English and Dutch naval power was waning due to mounting financial strains. Therefore, when France once again found itself at war with Europe in 1688 due to Louis’ inexorable drive to expand French borders to the east, the French Navy was in significantly better condition than it had been at the outbreak of the last war in 1672.
Unlike in the first Franco-Dutch War, the so-called Nine Years War saw France go to war without a single ally, and in fact the two preeminent naval powers - the Dutch and the English - were now tightly bound in alliance thanks to the Glorious Revolution of 1688, which overthrew yet another Catholic English Monarch (James II) in favor of William of Orange and his wife Mary. William thus became, after Louis XIV, the second most powerful and prominent man in European politics, being both the King of England, the hereditary prince of Orange, and the Stadholder of the Dutch Republic. France therefore faced the prospect of naval operations against joint Anglo-Dutch fleets, with the two naval powers now tightly bound together in personal union under William.
The weak point in the anti-French alliance was the shaky position of William on the English throne. The deposed James II fled to Ireland and led it into a state of rebellion against William’s kingship, while in England proper there were increasingly disruptive demonstrations against William in favor of restoring the the Catholic monarchy (the so-called Jacobite movement). While Louis was certainly focused, as ever, on expanding his frontiers in the east through campaigns on land, the naval dimension of the war was potentially decisive, with the French fleet in a position to strongly influence the growing conflict between William and James in Ireland.
It was against this broader strategic backdrop that the French would clash with a combined Anglo-Dutch fleet in the channel in 1690. The stakes were extremely high: if the French could shatter the allied fleet, it would be possible to sever English communications with Ireland and render direct assistance to James. Conversely, if the French were defeated at sea, William would have secure access to Ireland and slowly but surely choke out the Catholic cause there.
The fight that ensued is known as the Battle of Beachy Head, named for the nearest spit of land on the southern coast of England. The French fleet, under Anne-Hilarion de Costentin, Comte de Tourville (usually called simply Tourville) had 70 ships in the line, against perhaps 60 in the Anglo-Dutch contingent. The allies had the wind at their backs, and perhaps thought to use the weather gauge to compensate for their inferior numbers.
The battle was shaped by two important factors: first, the fact that the French had more ships and were thus able to form a longer battle line, and secondly the attempt of the allied fleet to seize the initiative and attack while attempting to match the length of the French line. As the French fleet sailed in line towards the northwest, the allies approached obliquely and began to wheel in alongside them. Allied command, under the overall leadership of the Earl of Torrington, was fearful that the longer French line would overlap them in the front and envelop them, and made the fateful decision to stretch out their line to match the French. Having fewer ships, of course, the act of stretching the line out compelled the allies to create gaps between their divisions.
The battle began to go wrong for the allies almost immediately after the lines engaged. Their central division, comprised of English vessels under Torrington, intended to engage and fight the French center, but found the French ships to be strangely out of range. This was because Tourville had cleverly bowed his line, sagging into the wind to carry his line in a curved shape away from the English, so that they kept out of range. Furthermore, the allied attempt to stretch their line out had created a dangerous gap between their center and forward divisions. It was into this gap that Tourville’s central division, which had remained unengaged by bowing into the wind, now shot at top speed, slipping through the allied line and running up on the right of the forward allied division (under the Dutch admiral Cornelis Evertsen).
From here, it was all a disaster for the Anglo-Dutch fleet. Tourville had evaded the English center by cleverly sagging into the wind, then shot perfectly through the gap in the enemy line to take the Dutch division in between two fires. As the Dutch were already hotly engaged with the forward French division, under the Marquis de Château Renault, they had little power to maneuver or escape the trap that was now springing shut on them. The Dutch got much the worst of the fight from that point on, and the French gunnery was deadly.
The allied fleet was only saved by a sudden shift in the wind, which allowed them to break off the engagement and haul out. Tourville ought to have unleashed his fleet in pursuit, but he incorrectly chose to maintain his battle line during the chase, which greatly reduced his speed and allowed the English and the Dutch to escape. It is probable that Tourville did not understand just how badly he had battered the enemy, and thus did not realize that he was chasing a thoroughly beaten foe. In this situation, it would have been correct to allow the formation to break so that the pursuit could be conducted at top speed. Instead, Tourville maintained his line and so failed to catch the enemy.
Though the pursuit came to nothing, Beachy Head was a decisive and clear French victory. Losing no ships of his own, Tourville had managed to destroy 8 enemy ships of the line (including those that the Dutch chose to scuttle due to catastrophic damage), with almost 20% of the enemy’s personnel becoming casualties.
Unfortunately for France, their victory at Beachy Head could not be converted into a strategic success. James was defeated by William in Ireland and was forced to flee to Paris, so that instead of being a useful asset against Louis’ enemies, he simply became an obnoxious guest, endlessly begging the King of the French to give him another army and send him back across the channel. It was too late for James, however - William was now firmly ensconced as the King of England, and this time the settlement of England’s endless religious vacillations was permanent. There has not been another Catholic monarch in England since James, and Louis had lost his chance to bring England back into his orbit.
With the Williamite War in Ireland settled, the importance of the naval theater again receded for the French, and resources were funneled ever more intensively into the exhausting and costly land campaign on France’s eastern border. The great expense of the land war, and a lack of vision by the French government as to how the naval theater could be leveraged for victory, led the French navy to languish and decay as it was starved of funds and attention. French naval action was reduced to small scale privateering and interdiction of English and Dutch trade, which failed to make a strong dent in the economies of those nations.
The great curse of France in this era was that she was far too assured of her own strength. This strength was, to be sure, prodigious, but under the Sun King she went to war repeatedly against more or less the whole of Europe, and her aggressions cost her the opportunity to bring either of the great sea powers - the Dutch or the English - into a stable alliance. Meanwhile, the great expense and burden of France’s sprawling land wars gnawed away at her navy, which suffered increasing neglect. The Battle of Beachy Head demonstrated that French seamanship was up the task of fighting and winning on the water. Unfortunately, the government of Louis XIV never fully adopted the logic of naval power projection and the merchant marine, despite the best efforts of men like Colbert. France was thus left bereft of allies, forced to make war on her own resources, increasingly cut off from commerce by the navies of the Dutch and English sea powers and by the ring of enemies around her.
Histories will often somewhat reductively say that France was doomed to lose the long naval conflict with England because she was burdened with the cost of maintaining expensive land armies and defenses. There is an element of truth in this, but it does not tell the full story. France had every opportunity to be the great maritime nation of Europe, with three accommodating seaboards and a vast population to provide sailors and gunners. France was burdened with the expense of long and costly land wars, but these were not imposed on her from the outside - rather, they sprang from the antagonistic and expansive ambitions of her monarch, the Sun King, who was far too eager to make war against vast coalitions, and eschewed effective alliance policies.
The Nine Years War ended in French defeat. Fiscally exhausted, Louis was forced to cede many of his hard won border territories back to the Hapsburgs. Undeterred, he would wage yet another war on Europe in the great War of the Spanish Succession, which again saw the French attempting push their eastern and northern borders outward. Although that war was almost exclusively a land conflict, fought primarily in Germany and the Spanish Netherlands, it had critical knock-on effects in the naval dimension.
The peace terms which ended the War of the Spanish Succession are the convoluted sort of swaps that are difficult for modern readers to wrap their heads around, filled as they are with mutual concessions that make it hard to declare a “winner.” France, for example, achieved one of its primary war aims by putting a French prince on the Spanish throne, but was forced to give up a variety of fortresses and holdings on its eastern border. The Principality of Orange - the ancestral seat of King William - was given to France, but the Dutch did gain possession of a chain of barrier fortresses defending their southwestern border. On and on the list goes.
If there was one nation that unequivocally emerged victorious, however, it was England. The English gained trading rights in Spanish America and secured possession of critical naval bases like Gibraltar and Minorca in the Mediterranean. Even more importantly, England emerged from the war as the undisputed naval superpower of the world, with the French and Dutch navies wasting away as their owners struggled under the strain of a long and costly land war.
It is easy to attribute England’s power simply to the battle fleet of the Royal Navy. The fighting navy was obviously essential, but it does not tell the whole story. After all, in 1688 France had a powerful navy as well, and they smashed the English at Beachy Head. The navy was the fighting instrument which defended the sinews and linkages of English power: namely, a vast and growing merchant marine which increasingly dominated global shipping, a web of colonies that fed valuable materials and goods into England, and a sprawling network of naval bases and outposts which allowed the navy to operate at vast distances. These things all fed into each other: for example, the Dutch had a similarly prodigious shipping industry, but the decay of the Dutch fighting navy relative to the English made English shipping much safer, which in turn allowed the English to swallow up more and more of the market.
The sea made England rich, and that wealth allowed the English to maintain a large and powerful navy. This was a self-supporting feedback loop of fighting power and wealth that France’s chosen vector of expansion overland could never hope to match. France was instead thrown back into herself, increasingly cut off from the world. This is why France, with a population of some 20 million, ended the wars of Louis bankrupted, while England, with its 8 million souls, was not only rich enough to wage war under her own financial powers, but even able to raise and finance the anti-French coalition with subsidies. France was vast and fertile, but nowhere near so vast as the sea - and the sea belonged to England.
The First World War
The reign of the Sun King set a sharp contrast between the imperial strategies of England and France. Both nations possessed natural access to the sea and at various times possessed preponderant naval power, but whereas England fully committed to the logic of the feedback loop between naval combat power and shipping, which in turn brought financial power which enabled it to raise powerful alliances, France fell back on its own indigenous resource base and allowed its navy to rot in favor of expensive land wars which brought minimal gain. Louis XIV was an immensely powerful and feared king, but his reign was in many ways a waste. Louis died in 1715, but as the sun set on the Sun King, the British increasingly lorded over North America and India: the bones of the empire on which the sun never set.
The great irony of the French imperial arc is that, while the reign of Louis XIV is generally thought of as the apogee of French power in this era, it was in fact his successors that tried to forge a better path forward by rebuilding France’s naval strength and adopting a more sensible colonial-maritime strategy targeted at Britain (as we may start calling it after the 1707 Acts of Union). Ultimately, however, they would fail due to France’s increasingly dismal fiscal situation and the burden of more futile ground wars.
When Louis XIV died, it is a testament to his long life and reign that he was succeeded not by his son, or even his grandson, as these had predeceased the old king, but by his great-grandson, who became Louis XV. The younger Louis would face many of the same strategic problems which had plagued his great grandfather, but they were in many ways much worse given the fact that the Sun King had badly drained the French treasury even as the British had become wealthier and more powerful. France was in the same strategic trap, but with less money, fewer ships, and less flexibility than a century prior.
The seminal war of the 18th Century is the famous Seven Years War (1756-1763) - the coming out party of the powerful Prussian Army and the Prussian King, Frederick the Great. The most popular imagery of the Seven Years War is that of Frederick leading his army on a high speed walking tour of Central Europe, beating back French, Austrian, and Russian armies in a rapid sequence of battles. This was all true and all too real, but the war also had a global-maritime dimension, with Frederick’s British backers not only bankrolling Prussia’s war effort but also chipping away at French colonial footholds in North America and India.
The Seven Years War also brought forth a powerful demonstration of the Royal Navy’s latest trick: the hermetic blockade. Blockading enemy ports had always been an element of naval operations, but in the 18th Century the British demonstrated an evolved form, which differed from previous practices in two important ways. Firstly, the British showed off a new capability in imposing a continuous blockade of major French ports. Previously, blockades had been intermittent, seasonal affairs, with blockading ships compelled to return to port for refitting and resupply in the winter. By 1756, however, the British had built up a powerful logistical structure of naval bases and supply ships which allowed them to maintain their blockade on a permanent basis, as well as a much larger battle fleet which allowed for rotations of the blockading force. Secondly, blockades had traditionally followed after winning control of the sea by defeating the enemy fleet - the blockade was in other words the prize for winning. In 1756, however, the Royal Navy reacted to the outbreak of war by preemptively beginning a blockade of France’s Atlantic and Channel ports, declaring “all vessels bound to those ports liable to seizure as lawful prize.”
The implementation of a blockade at the outset of war, without first defeating the enemy navy, was a significant development which spoke to Britain’s mounting naval advantage. In 1756, France had 63 ships of the line, of which perhaps 45 were in ready condition. France’s only ally of nautical consequence, Spain, had 46 ships of the line, which were widely considered to be of grossly inferior quality. England, on the other hand, boasted of 130 ships of the line, and thus outmuscled both her adversaries by a wide margin. By implementing a preemptive blockade, particularly of critical French ports like Brest (where much of their battle fleet was stationed), the British threatened to win the naval war without even fighting it, by preventing the French fleet from ever leaving harbor.
The British blockade had a profound effect on both the French economy and morale, with France cut off from its trade and colonies, and the French navy languishing in port. By 1758, the French were becoming increasingly weary of both the effects of the blockade and their repeated setbacks in the ground war against Fredrick (who mauled the French Army at the Battle of Rossbach), and decided to solve both of their problems by striking directly at Britain. A plan was hatched to ferry a landing army across the English Channel to force Britain out of the war, causing them to both stand down their blockade and withdraw their financial support for Prussia with one blow.
The problem, however, was how to invade England with the French battle fleet bottled up in port by the Royal Navy’s blockade. Remarkably, the French Foreign Minister, the Duke of Choiseul, insisted that the invasion could and should be conducted without the support of the navy. The army could be ferried across the channel in flat bottomed boats, he argued, using speed and surprise to dash across the channel before the Royal Navy could intercept it. Thankfully, Choiseul’s skeletal plan was never put into action - instead, plans were made to slip the French fleet out of the blockade and concentrate it to support the invasion of England.
The French fleet was concentrated primarily in two ports: Brest, on the Atlantic coast, and Toulon, in the Mediterranean. The French planned to run these two fleets past the British blockade, evade the British pursuit through maneuvers on the open sea, and rendezvous them near the city of Vannes, in the Quiberon Bay, where they would link up with the ground force and its transports. A cozy, if difficult plan.
Unfortunately, the wheels (or sails, if you will) came off almost immediately after they sprang into action. The Toulon Fleet, under Commodore De La Clue, was to move out first, and it did successfully slip out of harbor and make for the open sea. It seemed that his path was clear, and the British blockaders were nowhere in sight. Unfortunately for De La Clue, the British blockade had left Toulon because it had withdrawn temporarily to Gibraltar to refit. As any casual student of geography knows, there is but one natural way from the Mediterranean to the Atlantic, and that is through Gibraltar. Rather than evading the British blockade, as he had initially hoped, De La Clue bumped into a frigate of the royal navy on patrol in the strait, which quickly began firing its guns in alarm, and the entire British Mediterranean Fleet was soon hot on his heels. The Toulon Fleet was soon overtaken by the British, roughly halfway between Gibraltar and Lagos, Portugal, and swiftly taken apart by the superior British fleet.
This left only France’s Atlantic Fleet, stationed at Brest, available to support the planned invasion. The Brest fleet had the potential for a breakout, owing to a peculiar idiosyncrasy with the British blockade there. This was perhaps the one place where the British blockade was not continuous. The Atlantic Coast near Brest is episodically buffeted by a very strong westerly wind (that is, blowing west to east), which made it dangerous for the British to remain anchored at the mouth of the harbor. When these winds began to pick up, the British blockading fleet made it a practice to temporarily withdraw back to the English coast. Because the strength of the wind, blowing into Brest, made it nearly impossible for ships to come out of the harbor, this temporary gap in the blockade usually did not allow the French to leave: in effect, the British would temporarily pull back and allow the wind to do the blockading for them.
It was possible, however, for the French to slip out if they were prepared to leave at a moment’s notice once the wind shifted. This is what they attempted in November, 1759, under the command of Hubert de Brienne, Comte de Conflans. Having waited out the westerly wind, they slipped out of Brest on November 14, which was precisely the same day that the British fleet, under Sir Edward Hawk, was departing the English coast to resume the blockade.
Events now took the form of a strange chase on the high seas. Conflans made a series of maneuvers out to sea and congratulated himself, imagining that he had successfully evaded British eyes and escaped cleanly. He then hauled back to the southeast towards Quiberon Bay, where he intended to rendezvous with the invasion fleet near Vannes. Hawke, however, had passed Brest by this point and learned that the French had flown the coop. He guessed almost immediately where Conflans was headed, and set off at maximum speed, like the French, for Quiberon Bay. As a result of Hawke’s decisiveness and speed (and Conflans wasteful maneuvers aiming to shake off imagined pursuers), the two fleets arrived at the entrance to the bay almost simultaneously on November 20.
The appearance of the British fleet right on his tail seems to have deeply shaken Conflans, who wrote in his official report that he had considered it impossible for the enemy to intercept him with such force. He then attempted to lead his fleet into the shelter of the bay itself, believing that the English would not dare follow him into such a tight space, notorious for its shoals, in French home waters. He was wrong - Hawke thought about it for a moment, and decided that he could simply follow the French tightly and trust that the French ships would show him the safe path into the bay. Hawke’s fleet dashed directly into the mouth of the bay alongside the French, and the battle devolved into a violent melee. In this circumstance, with so many ships arriving in a tight space all at once (in a choppy winter sea, no less), orderly management of the battle proved nearly impossible. One French ship sank when it tried to open its lowest gunports and was flooded by the heavy waves; others were lost to British gunnery, and the remainder scattered in multiple directions. Conflans grounded his own flagship to prevent its capture, and with that the Brest fleet was annihilated: hunted and killed by the aptly named Hawke.
With the defeat and scattering of the Brest fleet at Quiberon Bay, all French ambitions of invading England faded permanently. Both of France’s battle fleets which might have been of consequence in a channel fight had been caught during their breakout attempts and run down, with the Toulon fleet being cornered and smashed at Lagos in August, and Conflans and the Brest Fleet intercepted by Hawke at Quiberon Bay in November.
After the neutralization of France’s battle fleets in the European theater, the remainder of the Seven Years War transformed into an awesome demonstration of Britain’s naval power projection. The ability of the British, now essentially unchallenged on the waves, to act decisively at great distance was truly astonishing, and enabled London to fight what was, in truth, the first truly global war.
A brief recounting of British operations in these latter years of the war reveals the global scale of their reach. In the summer of 1762, they captured Havana from the Spanish after besieging it from the sea and landing an army unopposed in Cuba. A few months later, in October, a similar amphibious operation captured Manila in the Philippines. A French-Spanish invasion of Portugal (a British ally) was defeated when the British landed a force in Portugal and proceeded to supply it entirely by sea. Meanwhile, the French suffered defeats in New France (Canada) and India, while the Royal Navy chipped away at their holdings in the Caribbean - all of which were made possible by the British ability to operate essentially unimpeded at sea relative to the French, who were almost always at a numerical disadvantage in the colonial theaters.
The heavy lift performed by the Royal Navy in this war was astonishing and unprecedented. Fighting and winning against the French on two remote continents, sniping at the key bases and linkages in the enemy’s shipping, and safeguarding Britain’s own lines of shipping and communication, all the while keeping a watchful eye on France’s own blockaded coastline: never before had a European power demonstrated the systematic ability to operate across the globe at this scale. What is most remarkable, however, is that this tremendous war effort did not bankrupt or even strain Britain’s finances. On the contrary, Britain continued to grow richer, not only through its own growing trade (with a merchant marine that now numbered in excess of 8,000 ships) but also by bringing in substantial loot, taken primarily from the Spanish. The contemporary Scottish historian John Campbell (writing in the 1780’s) put it this way:
The trade of England increased gradually every year, and such a scene of national prosperity while waging a long, costly, and bloody war, was never before shown by any people in the world.
The 1763 Treaty of Paris ratified Britain’s global victory. While much of the historiography focuses on Prussia, which doggedly fought and survived the land war against an overwhelming enemy coalition, the true victor was London, which added vast new territories to its sprawling overseas dominions. France ceded all of its North American territories, with the exception of the Louisiana Territory west of the Mississippi river - Britain thus took possession of Canada and all French lands west of the Mississippi, in addition to taking Florida from Spain. Adding to these enormous territories, the British kept a bevy of formerly French islands in the Caribbean, including Dominica, Grenada, Saint Vincent and the Grenadines, and Tobago.
The British did return many of their captures to their original owners, including the restoration of Havana and Manila to Spain. France was allowed to keep their trading posts and outposts on the coast of India, but they acknowledged the British right to select client rules for the Indian states and pledged not to send French troops to Bengal - in effect, conceding that France’s position in India existed at London’s discretion, and confirming Britain’s sea power, and the financial wealth that it accured, as the emerging arbiter of global affairs.
Bourbon Twilight
Louis XVI is perhaps the second most famous member of France’s Bourbon Dynasty, surpassed only by his great-great-grandfather, Louis XIV. But while the Sun King is most famous for his long and mighty reign, ruling for 72 years and fighting a series of wars practically against the whole of Europe, Louis XVI is most famous for being deposed and executed in the violent social cataclysm of the French Revolution.
The tragic irony of Louis XVI is that, while the most famous vignette of his unfortunate reign is his own death at the guillotine, the early years of his rule teased the potential for a great French naval revival which might have put France back on its path to global power and, in time, European hegemony. Under his auspices, the French Navy was restored to its most powerful condition in a century, and it proved again to be a powerful instrument in global affairs. The revival of French sea power was decisive in prying Britain away from her rebellious colonies on the Atlantic seaboard of North America, and came tantalizingly close to capturing the single most profitable British colony of all: Jamaica, with its money-printing sugar plantations. The Bourbons, in their final act, came very close to reversing much of their previous decline at sea, but they came up just short when they were smashed in decisive battle in the Caribbean.
The revival of the French Navy was seeded in the disastrous year, 1759, when the Toulon and Brest fleets were hunted down and shattered at Lagos and Quiberon Bay, respectively. The loss of the fleets caused a patriotic outcry in France which clamored for the restoration of the navy’s strength and pride. The reconstruction of the battle fleet was thus facilitated by a decentralized and popularly motivated fundraising campaign, with various French cities, merchant agglomerations, and wealthy private citizens organizing funds and donations to restart shipbuilding. France’s natural opportunities for sea power, with its accommodating seaboards and vast population, proved their value again, and the French Navy reconstituted itself rapidly - a development watched with trepidation by Britain.
By 1761, the French had rebuilt the nucleus of their fleet, with 40 ships of the line in fighting condition. These came too late to alter the course of the Seven Years War, which ended in a British victory of global dimensions, but the shipbuilding project put the French on the path to reverse their losses at later opportunities. By 1770, the French counted 64 premiere line ships and 50 frigates. In total, this was not an adequate fleet to challenge the Royal Navy, but British strength was denuded simply by virtue of their vast empire, which compelled them to distribute squadrons across the world. With British naval commitments in the Atlantic, the Mediterranean, the Caribbean, and the Indian Ocean, it was perhaps possible for the French to attain equitable fights in a single theater.
Under Louis XVI, France - at long last, and perhaps too late - had come to realize that the sea power of Britain was the most dangerous enemy, after centuries of fruitless and expensive continental wars. A directive from the new king (who ascended the throne in 1774), showed an intelligent evolution in French grand strategy. The document states, in part, that France must:
Meddle adroitly in the affairs of the British colonies; to give the insurgent colonists the means of obtaining supplies of war, while maintaining the strictest neutrality; to develop actively, but noiseless, the navy; to repair our ships of war; to fill our storehouses and to keep on hand the means for rapidly equipping a fleet at Brest and Toulon; finally, at the first serious fear of rupture, to assemble numerous troops upon the shores of Brittany and Normandy, to get everything ready for an invasion of England, so as to force her to concentrate her forces, and thus restrict her means of resistance at the extremities of empire.”
All in all, this presents a cogent and sensible strategic direction, which emphasized the continuing expansion of the French Navy and the opportunity to separate Britain from her colonies. France had entertained notions of a cross-channel invasion of Britain for centuries, but here for the first time it is presented explicitly in connection to the broader maritime strategy. Merely the threat of an invasion, it was hoped, would compel the British to recall fleets to defend British home waters, creating the opportunity for decisive action in the colonial sphere. Previous schemes to invade Britain smacked of desperation - a sort of last ditch effort to reverse failing war efforts. Here, however, the cross channel threat is presented as a ploy to divert British naval assets to their home waters to facilitate French actions against their colonies.
The opportunity to put such a strategy in motion was accelerated by the deterioration of British relations with her American colonies, which had begun in the 1760’s with the Stamp Act and continued apace right up to famous 1776. The full context of the rebellion in the American colonies is far beyond our scope here, as is the military progression of the campaigns on the American continent. The War of American Independence is, however, a crucial dimension of our larger topic here, in that France again found herself at war with Britain beginning in 1778, when Paris informed London that she would recognize the independence of the American colonies.
The ensuing Anglo-French War, which ran from 1778 to 1783, differed greatly from France’s previous wars in a variety of important ways, which we enumerate as follows:
Hostility between Britain and her North American colonies
Far greater readiness for war in the French Navy
Spain’s entry into the war as a French ally early in the conflict (Spain had entered far too late to make a difference in the Seven Years War)
Neutrality by the other continental powers in Europe, which left France free of meaningful land commitments and expenses
In other words, everything about this war was far more favorable for the French than in previous conflicts. In this case, England was on the strategic defensive and without allies, aiming to preserve what she had, while the French could leverage both the rebellious American colonies and their own Spanish ally.
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