To understand this martial spirit, it must be remembered that the first Admiral of France, Florent de Varenne, was appointed to command the Crusader’s Fleet by Saint Louis, the king, in 1270 to stem the tide of Moslem conquest which threatened to sweep over the entire Mediterranean. The spirit of the Crusade—that is to say, the disinterested devotion to an ideal for which one is willing to give his life—thus became an attribute of the mariners of France. The fleet of Saint Louis contained few ships that were really French. It was only at the beginning of the 17th century, after the Middle Ages and the wars of religion, that the French Navy truly began to exist as a national organization.
In France, at that period, only the nobility were granted the honor of wearing the sword, either on the land or on the sea. And the nobles of the day were distinguished more for their fighting qualities than for any administrative or organizational talents. On the other hand, the higher ranks of the clergy—men of peace rather than of war, though there were notable exceptions—possessed family connections and a general culture that fitted them well for administrative, political, or diplomatic positions. Thus it is understandable that Louis XIII had as prime minister a bishop of the Roman Catholic Church—the Cardinal de Richelieu.
To Richelieu the Navy seemed such an important factor in the destiny of the nation that he undertook its administration personally, and kept it under his immediate supervision from 1628 until his death in 1643. Richelieu breathed into the nascent naval establishment much of the realism and energy and solid commonsense that led him to write: “To command ships, I prefer the substantial seamen, brought up on the sea and the bottle, to the curled and perfumed cavaliers of the court.”
Richelieu had on his staff an intelligent and hard-working assistant named Jean Baptiste Colbert, who succeeded the great cardinal as Minister of the Navy. Colbert and his son, the Marquis de Seignelay, between them administered the powerful Navy of Louis XIV for twenty-nine years. (The Ministers, it can be seen, did not change as often then as they do today!) The first organic regulations of the French Navy—analogous to the King’s Regulations of Great Britain—date from Colbert. And certain expressions, certain customs on board ship, even certain installations still in existence in the dockyards of Brest and Toulon, are attributable to this great successor of Richelieu.
Thus the French Navy is inevitably an institution steeped in tradition—something which constitutes both a weakness and a strength. It is a weakness in that tradition has fostered in it a tendency to be conservative in technical progress; a strength in that it has inspired both officers and men to follow the precepts of an honorable past. Fidelity to traditional moral values is one of the characteristics of the French naval establishment—a fact which must never be forgotten in any study of the Navy of France during the Second World War.
Another characteristic of that navy is that, differently from many others, it was not created for mercenary gain or for the protection of private commercial interests. Genoa and Venice, for instance, were essentially merchant maritime republics. The northern powers, like the Dutch and the Hanseatic League, had as commanders men who were ship owners even before they were admirals. And the Royal Navy of Great Britain was built primarily to insure safe passage throughout the world of its merchant fleet as indispensable to the economic life of the nation.
Such was not the case—at least in the beginning—with the French Navy. In France, in the days of the monarchy, any nobleman who engaged in commerce acted beneath his station and forfeited his rank in the nobility. In the social framework of that period, the nobles were the heirs to the chivalry of the Middle Ages, with no function other than to bear arms for the defense of the nation. Therein lay their honor—and, in principle, their only occupation. No matter how often even Richelieu decreed that colonial commerce was an exception, the French nobles never quite acceded to his viewpoint.
Hence, in its inception the Navy of France was solely a political instrument, a disinterested weapon under the orders of the chief of state. Far from coming from commercial circles, many officers in the early days of the French Navy were Knights of Malta—that is, they belonged to an international order, semireligious, semimilitary, which since the days of the Crusades had had as its mission the checking of the Moslem corsairs in the Mediterranean. In an era when there were no naval schools, this order constituted an excellent training medium for the future officers of the Navy, who, from the age of thirteen or fourteen, fought on board the galleys of the order in the Mediterranean.
Throughout nearly all of its long history the French Navy had had one principal opponent—England. To conclude from this, however, that its present day officers are Anglophobes would be as erroneous as crediting them with still wearing the wigs and knee breeches of their forebears of the 18th century.
Excluding the so-called Hundred Years’ War, which France fought partly to eliminate English colonial enclaves in her home territory, Franco-British naval competition lasted just about two centuries. The rivalry began when the expansionist ideologies of Louis XIV collided with the equally imperialistic ideas of William III of England. Faced with the problem of fighting the armed forces of practically all Europe on land at the same time that she fought the combined British and Dutch navies on the sea, France lost the opening round in 1713 despite such outstanding victories as Beachy Head, Barfleur, and Vélez-Málaga. Moreover the conflict quickly spread to the distant possessions of both major powers, particularly the East and West Indies and the North American colonies.
The French colonies in those days were administered by the Navy Department, just as if they were distant ships permanently at anchor. In America the French had established a sort of protectorate the whole length of the Mississippi basin, from Acadia and Canada in the north to Louisiana in the south, thus setting up a barrier to the westward expansion of the British colonies along the Atlantic Coast. But even with a colonial population in North America ten times that of the French, the British perhaps would not have conquered Canada so quickly if the French Navy, which provided the sole link with the home country, had not been completely crushed by the end of the Seven Years’ War, in 1763. For in Europe the French Army, which had absorbed the lion’s share of the national manpower and the national budget, had fought its way to the heart of Europe—without ever realizing, perhaps, that at that very time France was losing an empire overseas.
A defeat, when correctly analyzed, is always productive of reform. Courageously the French Navy reformed, rebuilt, and refitted—and waited for a chance to retaliate. The opportunity came in 1775, when Britain’s North American colonies revolted and asked for French aid. Without the help of the French squadrons which were sent across, the colonies would have experienced a great deal more difficulty in winning their independence; in fact, as the American historian Samuel E. Morison wrote recently, it would not have been Lord Cornwallis but General George Washington who would have had to surrender at Yorktown.11
Samuel E. Morison, “The Battle That Set Us Free,” in the Saturday Evening Post, July 7, 1956.
In the War of American Independence, French diplomats for once avoided the pitfalls of European politics, and through fifty months of war the French fleets, though outnumbered everywhere, held the British at bay. Their single setback was at the Battle of Saints Passage in 1782, where the French with 2,300 guns faced the British fleet with 3,000 cannon.
In 1789, on the eve of the French Revolution, the seaborne commerce of France nearly equaled that of England, and her Navy was at its peak. Not until 1939 would the French Navy again be so closely knit, so confident, and so comparable in strength to its opponents.
But the French Revolution began the downfall of the naval establishment. Confusion led to disorder, and disorder to mutinies. Many of its officers—le grand corps—were summarily dismissed; others went to the guillotine. Antirevolutionary political groups even assisted the English