Men of Honour: Trafalgar and the Making of the English Hero. Adam Nicolson
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as well learning and exercising in gunnery and fleet tactics. But, whatever its dress, the attitudes remained élitist, a step away from the antique Spanish grandeur, but at least as far removed from the British practice, which, from the very beginning, engaged the young midshipmen with the workings of the ship and its men.
The overall commander of the combined French and Spanish fleets at Trafalgar came from precisely such a tradition, as did his two deputy admirals. All three were aristocrats. Pierre-Charles-Jean-Baptiste-Silvestre Villeneuve was, until 1793, de Villeneuve, when he quietly dropped the incriminating preposition. He became what all selfpreservative aristocrats in revolutionary France became, a ‘ci-devant’, a Heretofore. But there was little he could do to disguise his patrician origins. He was a grandee from Provence, in all probability a pious Catholic, perceptibly well bred, reserved in manner, exquisite in dress and refined in demeanour. One ancestor had fought alongside Roland in the pass at Roncesvalles; others had been on the crusades. He was the 91st Villeneuve to be a Knight of Malta. He was an educated man, who would quote lines from the great French tragedians, with an alert and supple sense of irony at the predicament in which the revolutionary era had placed him, and with a devastating sense of honour and duty which would, in the end, be his downfall. Napoleon, comparing these qualities with his requirement for all-consuming ardour, called Villeneuve a poltron de tête, an intellectual coward, a man perhaps too refined for the brutalities which the moment required of him.
The navy of which Villeneuve was now a part was scarcely recognisable from the one he had joined as a boy. After 1789, it became an obvious target of revolutionary rage. It was a symbol of royal power in the French provinces, easily attacked by the populace when in harbour, and it was an organisation boiling over with the discontent and argumentativeness on which revolutionary movements feed. The Bourbon navy had never been able to pay the notoriously corrupt and self-confident dockyard workers and government authority soon broke down in the yards at Toulon and Brest. Throughout the 1790s, the British Admiralty had exactly the same problems with the skilled, articulate workforce in the British dockyards, the same economic and social energies bubbling up on both sides of the English Channel. In Britain, such stirrings were controlled by a careful imposition of state authority. Trouble-makers were excluded; many of them were imprisoned on charges framed according to new anti-collectivist legislation rapidly passed by a Pitt government in political panic. It was called, at the time, the ‘White Terror’: Habeas Corpus was suspended in 1794 and again in 1798; a Treason and Sedition Act was passed in 1795, an Unlawful Oaths Act in 1797, a Corresponding Societies Act in 1799. Public meetings were banned and spies recruited. In the Royal Navy itself, uncompromising punishments were dealt out to the 47 ringleaders of the naval mutinies in 1797. Those men were mostly hanged, according to explicit Admiralty orders, by men from their own ships: men forced, by the authority of the state, to hang their own friends. By such methods, dissent was effectively suppressed in Britain until after Waterloo.
In France, though, the revolutionary state itself could not, at least initially, impose such repressive order on the popular will. Instead it faced an ideological conundrum: how could it discipline the popular will on which its own legitimacy was said to be founded? In the revolutionary navy, all citizens were to be eligible for all ranks. The habits of deference were to be banished by the ideals of equality. Discipline based on authority was to be replaced by discipline based on voluntary compliance. As Napoleon later reflected from St Helena, ‘It was part of the political religion of the France of that day to make war in the name of principles.’ For the old officer class, it was a catastrophe and their response was to abscond. By November 1791, 403 of Brest’s 600 officers were absent, most without leave. The following February, one captain of a ship-of-the-line in Brest wrote anonymously to the Minister of Marine in Paris:
A terrible fate awaits those who will command ships in the future, because they will be disobeyed and scorned with impunity. What has happened aboard various ships proves that juries can excuse faults of any kind: the most complete revolt becomes a crime that is scarcely punishable. These offences are recent, and no order of things permits the hope of a happier future.
In 1792, only 2 out of 9 vice-admirals, 2 out of 18 rear-admirals, 42 out of 170 captains and 390 out of 750 lieutenants remained at their posts. Those who did found themselves with nowhere to turn. ‘The tone of the seamen is wholly ruined,’ Admiral Morard de Galles wrote on 2 March 1793. He had been at sea in his flagship when her headsails were carried away in a storm, and it became imperative to wear ship, taking her stern through the wind on to the other tack. ‘If I had a crew such as we formerly had,’ Morard wrote to the Minister,
I would have used means which would have succeeded; but despite exhortations and threats, I could not get thirty seamen on deck. The army gunners and greater part of the marine troops behaved better. They did what they were told; but the seamen, even the petty officers, did not show themselves.
Naval affairs reached their deepest crisis when in September 1793 a Jacobin mob murdered a naval officer in Toulon and washed their hands in his blood.
The sequence of revolution and mutiny, the punishment and emigration of officers, followed by the rolling waves of political chaos, gave fruit to the Reign of Terror, instituted by decree on September 5 1793. ‘It is no longer, as under the Old Regime, the man that you obey,’ the National Convention’s Committee of Public Safety told the people, ‘it is the law; it is la Patrie.’
The Convention appointed a ferocious revolutionary zealot, André Jeanbon Saint-André, as its representative responsible for rebuilding the Republic’s navy after the chaos of the early revolutionary years. ‘Because all here was gangrenous,’ he told the fleet in Brest in October 1793, ‘all needed the scalpel of patriotism, the billhook of Republicanism.’ Guillotines were set up on pontoons among the fleet so that the crews could see the punishments dealt out to the mutinous. A form of naval terror was instituted, during which the language of French naval administration reached new depths of Orwellian doublespeak: ‘Do not think that we usurp your rights,’ Jeanbon told the men who were to be executed
when we defend them; to assist you is not to oppress you; to break your chains like this is not to attack your liberty! They say we exercise arbitrary power; they accuse us of being despots: Despots! Us! Hah! Doubtless, if it is despotism which is necessary for the triumph of liberty, this despotism is political regeneration.
Politically-vetted instructors attached to each ship taught republican virtues to the fleet. French sailors in the 1790s had to learn a new Rousseauesque and totalitarian catechism:
Work, the principal good of the free man; virtue, the torch of revolution and the foundation of republican government; nature, the source of the virtuous man’s sweetest pleasures; la Patrie, to which our duty directs everything: force, talent, virtue, luck.
The French fleet was governed by an ideology of terror and virtue. Political commissars sailed with the admirals. All movements of the fleet were to be uniform, simultaneous, and executed with as much precision as speed. Captains who surrendered their ships would be guillotined, as would those who failed to execute an order signalled by the admiral or even those who failed to repeat signals made to them. Special signals were developed so that any French captain could be instantly dismissed and replaced at sea. And captains must attack without pause and without thought of the cost in lives:
The captain and officers of ships-of-the-line of the Republic who have struck the flag of the nation [surrendered] to enemy vessels, whatever their number, unless their ship has been damaged to the point where it runs the risk of sinking and there is no time left to save the crew, will be declared traitors to their country and punished with death.
With its traditional culture erased; with any hint of individualism suspect; with a poorly found, meanly fed, scantily provisioned and inadequately equipped force; and with a sense of failure somehow implicit in the strictness of such controls, the French fleet fell apart. Fleets do not work unless fed, clothed, equipped and encouraged. They require, in other words, both a sense of their own dignity and a conviction that they are the agents of freedom. The anarchic and impassioned qualities which fuelled the rampaging French armies sweeping all before them in Europe, living off the land, bringing spontaneity and shock to the level of high military art: none of these things can sustain a navy which