The French Navy and American Independence: A Study of Arms and Diplomacy, 1774-1787

by Jonathan R. Dull

Overview

Military history is an essential component of wartime diplomatic history, Jonathan R. Dull contends, and this belief shapes his account of the French navy as the means by which French diplomacy helped to win American independence. The author discusses the place of long-range naval requirements in the French decision to aid the American colonists, the part played by naval rivalry in the transition from limited aid to full-scale war, and the ways naval considerations affected French wartime diplomacy. His book focuses on military strategy and diplomatic requirements in a setting in which military officers themselves did not participate directly in decision-making, but in which diplomats had to take continual account of military needs.

Since military action is a means of accomplishing diplomatic goals, even military victory can prove hollow. The author examines the American war not as a successful exercise of French power, but rather as a tragic failure based on economic and political miscalculations. Among the questions he asks are: What relationship did the war bear to overall French diplomacy? What strains did the limited nature of the war impose on French diplomacy and war strategy? How did the results of the war relate to the objectives with which France entered the conflict?

Originally published in 1976.

The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780691617558
Publisher:	Princeton University Press
Publication date:	03/08/2015
Series:	Princeton Legacy Library , #1239
Pages:	460
Sales rank:	705,086
Product dimensions:	5.90(w) x 9.10(h) x 1.10(d)

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The French Navy and American Independence

A Study of Arms and Diplomacy, 1774-1787

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By Jonathan R. Dull

PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS

Copyright © 1975 Princeton University Press
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-691-06920-3

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CHAPTER 1

1774 — The Inheritance of Louis XVI

1. The Diplomatic Inheritance

Nine days after the death of Louis XV, the royal council of state heard a report prepared by a senior member of the ministry of foreign affairs. This report had been drafted to inform the new king, Louis XVI, of France's diplomatic position. It began:

Sire, I believe it is my duty to place under the eyes of Your Majesty the state of foreign affairs of your kingdom and its relations with foreign powers. It will be seen that they find themselves in a fortunate calm. No disagreement in fact menaces its [the kingdom's] tranquility and neither the dignity of its crown nor the interest of its people have any blow to carry or to fear.

Peace was always precarious in eighteenth century Europe, whose states were dominated by aristocracies justified by war, but in May 1774 no major crisis seemed near. The six-year-old war between Russia and France's ally, the Ottoman Empire (Turkey, but including the Balkans), had exhausted both combatants; the final campaign, already begun, ended in July 1774 with the Treaty of Kutchuk-Kainardji. The other Eastern powers, Prussia and Austria, were ruled by monarchs grown old and cautious. The situation in Western Europe was even more reassuring. France had fought four major wars in the past eighty-five years against Great Britain. Numerous sources of dispute still remained from the Peace of Paris of 1763: the presence of an English commissioner to prevent the fortification of Dunkirk, English harassment of French fishermen off Newfoundland, unresolved disputes in India. At the moment, however, English attention was concentrated on resolving a worsening series of crises in North America, which had culminated in the Boston Tea Party of 1773 and, at virtually this very moment, Parliament's responding Coercive Acts. Throughout 1774, French diplomatic reports stressed the current British desire for untroubled relations with France. Charles-Jean Gamier, the first secretary of legation (and acting French diplomatic representative) in Britain wrote in a dispatch of July 1774 about contested fishing rights off Newfoundland: "By principle the English ministers in general can hardly be favorable to our fishing which they regard with reason as the nursery of our best sailors and one of the most firm supports of our navy, but they love peace above all things and desire nothing so much as to live with us in the best harmony."

The following month Garnier wrote that England, far from desiring any new conquests, could only regard a foreign war as fatal to its existence. This was because of its current debts, its growing public expenses, and its declining credit, as well as because of the disproportion between the home island and its extended possessions with their universal spirit of revolt. Gamier believed that the only things that could currently determine England to war would be the necessity of repelling a violent insult or the certainty that she was to be attacked.

If no storm seemed likely to intrude on the new reign, neither did it seem likely that the nineteen-year-old king would set about attracting one. The last three years of Louis XV's reign were dominated by domestic affairs. His grandson immediately abandoned the attack on the Parlements upon which Louis XV's domestic policy had hinged, but it quickly appeared evident that Louis XVI would also concentrate on strengthening the domestic position of the monarchy. This likelihood was based not only on Louis' unmartial character and interests but upon the choices for his chief political appointments.

The most critical were not necessarily the secretaries of state who headed the great departments which administered executive policy — the army minister, navy minister, foreign minister, controller general of finances, and minister of the king's household. These positions despite their great importance did not guarantee entry into the body which advised the king twice weekly on the great questions of state, the royal council of state. During 1774 Louis XVI appointed seven men (called ministers of state) to the body; of those, two were holdovers from the preceding reign and two were secretaries of state of short duration. The last three were to contest domination over the young king and thus domination over French domestic and foreign policy, since Louis exercised his theoretically absolute powers through the council (which monitored the departments of state).

The king, inexperienced and insecure, depended for psychological support and political advice most heavily on Jean-Frédéric Phélypeaux, Count de Maurepas (1701–1781). Maurepas, having been French naval minister for twenty-five years, had been dismissed from public life by Louis XV in 1749. Although Louis XVI wished to be his own chief minister and gave Maurepas neither a department nor title of superiority over his fellow ministers of state, he became in fact equivalent to a prime minister. His political acumen, his intelligence, and his influence with the king gave him great power which he devoted solely to the maintenance of his own position. Lacking interest and experience in foreign affairs, indolent, basically solitary, he had little inclination for risking his own position to the chances of war.

The most active member of the council promised to be Anne-Robert-Jacques Turgot (1727–1781), naval minister for six weeks and then controller-general of finances. With the king's support Turgot soon undertook a program for the regeneration of the monarchy and state. By his character and fate Turgot resembled not a bureaucrat but a tragic hero: no royal servant since Colbert had equaled his genius, his vision, and his energy, but Turgot's arrogance and ambition aided his enemies in undercutting the king's trust and in preparing the destruction of his political life, his program, and finally his king. As a philosophe his personal philosophy was opposed to war; his political program was menaced by it; his last political act was to fight courageously and hopelessly against French involvement in Britain's war with her American colonies.

The last of Louis' influential advisors was Charles Gravier, Count de Vergennes (1717–1787), minister of state and the new foreign minister. He too seemed an unlikely advocate of war. During the 1760s French foreign policy had been aggressively anti-English. The French foreign minister, the Duke de Choiseul, had even sent a secret agent to report on dissatisfaction in British North America. Following Choiseul's fall in December 1770 and the diversion of Louis XVs attention to his domestic opponents, Anglo-French tensions had diminished. Although Louis XV's last foreign minister, the Duke d'Aiguillon, was dismissed by the new king, Choiseul, the archenemy of Louis XVI's deceased father, failed to recover his position. Instead, Louis XVI gave the department to Vergennes, who had served Choiseul as ambassador to the Ottoman Empire and Aiguillon as ambassador to Sweden. Vergennes was a markedly different sort of man than his bitter enemy, the flamboyant and aggressive Choiseul. In many ways Vergennes represented at its best the conservatism of the state servant of Old Regime France. Vergennes had been raised from childhood in the diplomatic corps and had spent his life in indefatigable service to it and its traditions. It is difficult in reading his correspondence not to acquire great respect for this man of deep kindness, urbanity, gravity, and dedication. What perhaps takes longest to fully comprehend is the cohesion and simplicity of the principles which underlay his conduct of diplomacy. For Vergennes the function of diplomacy was to maintain the security of his monarch's possessions, which in turn depended on the maintenance of peace in Europe. Peace in Europe depended on preserving the balance of power from whomever would disturb it — in the last analysis, upon maintaining the status quo. Vergennes' ideal was Cardinal Fleury, foreign minister during his childhood, who through cooperation with Britain had brought France her greatest security in the last century. By his ability Vergennes would gradually win from the king considerable independence to implement his system — a system grounded in a contradiction.

Vergennes was a man dedicated to peace who assumed office at a moment of calm and yet ironically he, more than anyone, was to be responsible for bringing France into the American war — a war which so weakened the financial base of the monarchy as to lead to the crisis that finally destroyed all he so faithfully served.

The explanation of Vergennes' tragedy is the perilous disequilibrium of Vergennes' diplomatic universe. The moment of calm at Louis' accession presented to Vergennes not stability, but a brief opportunity to right that universe before disaster struck. The French war for America was a preventive war, fought not to forestall immediate danger, but to reverse the gradual disintegration of the system upon which in the long run French security was based.

French diplomacy, like all Old Regime diplomacy, was based on the concept of the balance of power — the belief that international order was effected through the cooperation of the relatively weak against the threateningly strong. France had two particularly strong reasons for believing her security menaced should another of the great states of Europe threaten the balance of power by disturbing the status quo. First, the security of French borders was protected by a cordon of minor states, from the semiautonomous Austrian Netherlands to the Republic of Genoa, separating her from those who might invade her. No document was more vital to France than the Treaty of Westphalia, dividing Germany into two great states of Prussia and Austria to be played off against each other and hundreds of minor states to be protected. Second was the isolation of France among the great powers of the continent. In theory, Louis of France and Maria Theresa of Austria were allied much as were Frederick of Prussia and Catherine of Russia. In fact, the eighteen-year-old alliance with France's ancient enemy was now directed against Austria itself. It was used solely to gain leverage to restrain any Austrian expansion. The façade would be broken should England end her diplomatic isolation (and break her own nominal links with Prussia) or should the conservative Maria Theresa die. Her son Joseph was already her coregent; his ambition and his unstable character threatened crises the French-Hapsburg alliance could not absorb.

France's other major ally was Spain, linked with France not only by the Family Compact of 1761, but by ties of blood between their two kings, both members of the House of Bourbon. Spain was of great potential use against England, but of almost no weight in continental affairs. The Spanish navy could add enough support to the French to match England's fleet; Spanish trade was a powerful motive for England to keep peace; Spain held an English ally, Portugal, a perpetual hostage. To the powers of the continent, on the other hand, Spain was a poor country without a major army and of no importance. France's real alliance system was in fact an alliance with all the minor powers of Europe against the other great continental powers — Prussia, Austria, and Russia. French subsidies and support bolstered most of the minor courts of Europe — Stockholm, Genoa, Munich, Warsaw, Constantinople, and many more.

This alliance system was utterly dependent on the ability of France to intimidate those who would disturb it and to use the mutual jealousy of the other great powers to find support for any endangered member. In both respects the system had suffered tremendous shocks. By the Treaty of Paris England had not only defeated France, but humiliated her. Vergennes wrote: "The consideration and the influence of any power is measured and regulated by the opinion one has of its intrinsic forces." Could one respect the intrinsic force of France when an English commissioner sat in Dunkirk, when English warships interfered with French fishermen in the French fishing grounds of Newfoundland, when English ambassadors treated France contemptuously? The English blows to French prestige represented as real a loss to France's diplomatic weight as had the French expulsion from Canada. Even more dangerous for France was the despoiling of Poland in 1772 by Austria, Prussia, and Russia. Vergennes agonized, "If force is right, if convenience is a title, what will henceforth be the security of states?" Heretofore the major states had protected the minor lest a rival gain an advantage; now the major powers had proportioned the spoils of a helpless neighbor. Vergennes looked on this brave new world with horror and sought to restrain its forces.

As he realized, the solution to his problems lay in reconciliation with England. Such a reconciliation would permit diversion of French resources from the navy to the army. Of ever greater importance, Anglo-French cooperation could greatly limit the power of the other continental powers which had great armies but not the finances to engage in major wars. Only from France or England with their numerous colonies and enormous trade could come subsidies. A half-century before, the England and France of Walpole and Fleurv had cooperated as equals; France had been secure, but now England was the England of Pitt: arrogant, aloof, contemptuous of France. To reduce England to a position of equality, France had to take from her a share of her strength, her monopoly of American trade and markets. This book will tell how Vergennes sought and won a war which finally failed to weaken England, which failed to bring about the rapprochement he sought, and which raised dangers from within the monarchy far greater than those which threatened it from without.

2. The Naval Inheritance

In Old Regime France, naval affairs passed through cycles. A period of concentration on naval construction, repairs, and operations was generally followed by a diplomatic crisis or war, which in turn was often followed by a period of inattention to the navy. The last fifteen years of Louis XVs reign were those of such a cycle. The French navy was almost completely destroyed by the British navy in a series of battles in 1759. In October 1761, Choiseul, the foreign minister, became naval minister as well. For nine years he and his cousin, the Duke de Choiseul-Praslin (naval minister from August 1766 to December 1770) rebuilt the French navy. They added new ships, filled the dockyards with materiel, and reformed naval administration. When the crisis with England for which they had prepared finally occurred (over the possession of the Falkland Islands), Louis XV and his Spanish allies backed down and Choiseul fell from power. During Louis XV's last three years naval affairs were downgraded. Not even enough ships of the line were built to replace those scrapped because of age or lost by accident and repairs were not undertaken to offset the aging of the fleet. Garnier reported in 1774 that England had 142 ships of the line, of which 72 were in service or ready to be immediately armed; the French naval ministry could report only 64 ships of the line, of which 34 could be readied if needed. In fact the French navy was even less prepared for hostilities than its numbers suggested. To save expenses the French navy had consumed the reserves of masts, wood, hemp and other naval supplies that the Choiseuls had accumulated. Until the dockyards were refilled, the French navy was barely capable of fitting a fleet for the most limited operations.

An even more immediate crisis almost prohibited even the routine movement of ships. Louis XV's last minister, Bourgeois de Boynes, had attempted extensive reforms of naval administration. Although many were excellent in theory, their implemention produced such chaos that the navy could barely send ships from one port of France to another. Four sets of measures were chiefly responsible. First, Boynes attempted to organize France's naval forces like the French army. He divided its ships and officers into eight brigades. The brigades were so autonomous that officers could be promoted only within their own brigade and ships equipped only from the brigades' stores. In practice the system had to be ignored even to outfit a small training squadron.

Members of the naval officer corps were outraged not only by interference with their chances of promotion but also with the insult of seeing naval traditions violated. A second set of measures also increased the navy's similarity to the army. The navy was given increased responsibility for providing its own infantry and artillery support and regiments of naval troops were assigned to the brigades and naval "colonels" named to command them.

Another set of measures produced still further resentment. The majority of French naval officers had been trained as naval cadets aboard ship. Boynes threatened their status by establishing a competing naval academy at Le Havre with a fixed curriculum supplemented by training cruises.

(Continues...)

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Excerpted from The French Navy and American Independence by Jonathan R. Dull. Copyright © 1975 Princeton University Press. Excerpted by permission of PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS.
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Table of Contents

• Frontmatter, pg. i
• Contents, pg. vii
• Preface, pg. xi
• Glossary, pg. xiii
• Maps, pg. xvii
• CHAPTER ONE. 1774—The Inheritance of Louis XVI, pg. 3
• CHAPTER TWO. /77 J — A n Empire at Peace, An Empire at War, pg. 16
• CHAPTER THREE. 1776—The Beginning of Limited Intervention, pg. 30
• CHAPTER FOUR. 7777—The Failure of Limited Intervention, pg. 66
• CHAPTER FIVE. 1778— War without Spain, pg. 95
• CHAPTER Six. 1779—War at the Center, pg. 136
• CHAPTER SEVEN. 1780—War at the Periphery, pg. 173
• CHAPTER EIGHT. 1781—The uAnnus Mirabilis", pg. 211
• CHAPTER NINE. 1782—Disintegration and Reprieve, pg. 262
• CHAPTER TEN. 1783-1787—Epilogue, pg. 336
• APPENDIX A. The Naval and Colonial Budget, 1776-1783, pg. 345
• APPENDIX B. Ships of the Line, August 1774, pg. 351
• APPENDIX C. Ships of the Line, Changes, 1775- February 1783, pg. 352
• APPENDIX D. Frigates, pg. 356
• APPENDIX E. Order of Battle, 1 July 1778, pg. 359
• APPENDIX F. Order of Battle, 1 July 1779, pg. 361
• APPENDIX G. Order of Battle, 1 July 1780, pg. 365
• Appendix H. Order of Battle, 1 April 1781, pg. 369
• APPENDIX I. Order of Battle, 1 April 1782, pg. 373
• APPENDIX J. French Troops Sent to the Western Hemisphere, 1774-1782, pg. 377
• APPENDIX K. Ships of the Line, 1 January 1181, pg. 378
• BIBLIOGRAPHY, pg. 379
• INDEX, pg. 425