Set against the Spanish pieties, the names of the French ships proclaimed a different culture: the great inheritance of Greek and Roman heroes, the beauties of France herself, the burning ardour of revolutionary zeal, the glories of empires which France had conquered and, like the masterpieces Napoleon was gathering in the Louvre, could adopt as her own. There was not a Christian idea or reference among them.
In October 1805, though, there was some mismatch between the trumpeting of these glories and the actual condition of the fleet. The flagship, the Bucentaure, was named after the great gilded barge of the Doge of Venice, the ancient republic finally humiliated by Napoleon in 1797. But the Bucentaure had been struck by lightning and all her masts were in a fragile condition. Nor were there any timbers in Cadiz with which to replace them. She wasn’t alone in her fragility. Most of the ships of the French fleet had been sent to sea, as Villeneuve wrote to the Ministry, with ‘bad masts, bad sails and bad rigging’, and, overall, his account of the force under his command was full of unintended irony:
The Formidable, the Mont Blanc, the Fougueux, [meaning the Ardent], and the Swiftsure [a ship captured from the British, and left with its earlier name as a taunt to the enemy] all need docking. The Scipion [the name of the two greatest and most aggressive of Roman generals] and the Aigle [the symbol of imperial dominance] want rerigging. The Pluton [the King of Hell] and the Héros can scarcely sail. The Indomptable, the Achille and the Berwick [another British capture] all have weak and incompetent crews.
It was a depressing audit, the rhetoric floating free of the vessels it adorned. ‘There is not a ship,’ the admiral wrote, ‘with less than sixty sick on board.’
These were not temporary aberrations. There were deep and systematic failures in French naval administration of which all this was the outward sign. There had been French successes in the past: they had been defeated by the British Royal Navy during the Seven Years War between 1757 and 1763, but after radical reorganisation and major investment had out-fought and out-manoeuvred the British during the American War of Independence. In the revolutionary and Napoleonic wars, which had begun in 1793, they, like the other Europeans, had been consistently defeated by the Royal Navy, and at an extraordinary cost in human lives. It has been calculated that in the six major battles between British fleets and their French, Spanish, Dutch and Danish enemies (First of June 1794, Cape St Vincent 1797, Camperdown 1797, The Nile 1798, Copenhagen 1801 and Trafalgar 1805) the British lost a total of 5,749 men killed and wounded, of whom 1,483 were killed in battle. In the same engagements, their enemies lost 38,970 killed, wounded and taken prisoner, of whom 9,068 were killed in battle itself, a figure over six times greater than the number of British dead.
At Trafalgar that disproportion rose to an unprecedentedly high ratio of very nearly ten times the number of French and Spanish dead to English, but that Everest of slaughter was only the culmination of a consistent pattern. Over more than twelve years, in a wide variety of conditions and theatres of naval war, the British had savagely outkilled their opponents.
Much of what follows will attempt to explain that imbalance, but there can be no doubt that the travails and evolutions of France herself were at least partly to blame. Before the Revolution, the French navy had been in far from perfect condition, without an effective central board of control—nothing to match the British Admiralty—and consistently struggling to source the large number of complex materials needed to equip a fleet. French shipbuilders had, throughout the 18th century, designed light, fast and efficient ships, the envy of their British enemies and widely copied by them. But the sourcing of the necessary materials had consistently imposed strains which were not met. The 74-gun ship had by the end of the century become the workhorse of all navies—heavy enough to confront anything, fast enough to pursue any other ship-of-the-line. But to create a 74-gun ship required 100,000 cubic feet of timber for the hull, 168,000 pounds of hemp for the rigging, 33,750 pounds of copper to sheathe that hull, keeping it clean and fast, and 4,800 pounds of nails to fix the entire elaborate assemblage together. About 3,400 trees, from about 75 acres of woodland, were needed for each ship. Ninety per cent of that was oak, half of it straight, for the keel, stempost and the heavy planking; half of it curved, for the knees and breasthooks on which the integral strength of a ship-of-the-line relied.
The supply system was the foundation of any navy and throughout the 1790s the British had applied the screw. Ship timber was being imported into Britain from the Adriatic, masts and hemp from North America, and large quantities of materials were carried from the Baltic. Decks were made of ‘good Prussia deals’ and the British Admiralty always specified that ‘all the Iron-work shall be wrought of the best Swedish iron’. By the end of the century, the number of British merchantmen sailing south from the Baltic to British ports had reached the astonishing total of 4,500 every year, the majority of them laden with naval stores: corn, tallow, hides, hemp and iron. Commerce was not only the purpose and prize of the long war against France; it was its method.
The cost of the fleet to the British Treasury was enormous: in 1805 alone, £2.9 million was spent on the pay of the 107,000 seamen and marines in the Royal Navy; another £2.96 million on their food; but fully £4.68 million was spent on repairing the wear and tear of vessels which were maintaining the blockades around the European shores. By comparison, only £400,000 was spent on ordnance, on the guns and their shot which would do the damage at Trafalgar. It was the very bodies of the ships themselves, and the materials of which the ships were made, which imposed the financial strain, demanding from the British government more than a third of its total annual expenditure.
The French struggled and failed to keep up. Even by the measure of looking after their own men, they failed. In 1801, Admiral Ganteaume in command of the premier fleet in France, the Brest squadron, wrote imploringly to the minister:
I once more call your attention to the terrible state in which the sea men are left, unpaid for fifteen months, naked or covered with rags, badly fed, down in the mouth; in a word sunk under the weight of the deepest and most humiliating wretchedness.
Since the late 17th century, the French state had reserved large slices of their native oak forest for those hulls, but it was not enough and they ransacked Italian oakwoods and Corsican pinewoods for their needs. The catastrophes of the 1790s had exacerbated the problem. When the British Admiral Lord Hood burnt nine French ships of the line and removed three more from Toulon in December 1793 (he had already taken one 74, an earlier Scipion, which soon sank) he also burned untold quantities of slowly maturing French oak from those government forests, stacked in the Toulon yards, and even larger quantities of mast—and spar-timber from the Baltic. The total destruction in 1798 of the French Mediterranean fleet at the Battle of the Nile, and in a series of individual ship actions after it, were both key elements in a form of attritional warfare which left the French naval establishment bruised, bleeding and diminished. The figures make it clear enough. In 1793, Britain had 135 ships-of-the-line and 133 frigates, the French well behind with 80 ships-of-the-line and 66 frigates. By 1801, at the peace of Amiens, the number of British warships had risen to 202 ships-of-the-line and 277 frigates. France at the same moment had 39 ships of the line and 35 frigates. Attrition had exacted its price.
In many ways, Trafalgar had been won at Toulon and the Nile. More, though, than technological and material failure, the long unrolling political crisis in France during the last years of the 18th century meant that the navy did not have the necessary depth and consistency of support it needed. The failing monarchy, the Revolution, the Terror, the string of half-competent administrations in the late 1790s and the coming to power of Napoleon—the ‘land animal’ as he was called—all, in their different ways, failed the French navy.
In the 19th century, it was often said by French conservative historians that the triumphant French navy of the American War of Independence was destroyed by the Revolution and the chaos that followed. That is not true. The endemic weaknesses stretched back into the management and structures of the pre-revolutionary navy itself. The French officer