Dr. Jonathan Abel: "The Invasions that Weren't: French Efforts to Invade England 1740-1805"

there's one of them that's very close it's it's up here right one of the two major French anchorages is on the map at the great dockyards at Brest anybody know where the other one is too long in the Mediterranean right because again France is both in Atlantic and a Mediterranean power there are no major roads that run from Brest to where the road Network stops which so this is not a major priority for France you might be familiar with the port of cherborg we'll talk about wind cherborg is built it does not exist yet it will not be finished as a working Shipyard until the mid 1780s we'll talk about why so there's there's one major port here for the French how then if you're the French do you overcome the challenge of the English well that's what this is all about the French realize they got to get across the channel or as they call it the sleeve the mosh definitely not the English Channel so there are five efforts to do that between 1740 when major 18th century Warfare resumes again there's that gap between 1715 1740 starts again 1740. and the last major attempt to do so in 1805 kind of Napoleon's last attempt to really get into England as I said at the beginning every one of them is a failure so we're talking about a lot of things that didn't happen but at each step the effort tells us a lot about what's going on in this relationship between France and England and within France itself because again this is this is a France focused talk so we have a major one during the war of the Austrian succession the great multinational war that takes place between 1740 and 1748 another one during the Seven Years War what a lot of people will call the first World War of course another one during the American war of independence arguably the most important of the five listed one during the French Revolutionary Wars which was as successful as most of the Revolutionary efforts and then finally Napoleon's effort to do so in 1805. which of course does not succeed and at each step we're going to see a sequence of events occur that look a whole lot like the previous or the succeeding ones basically the same thing happens in all five of these it's just the context that's different so let's go ahead and start with the first one the first one involves a couple of people who are very important in the mid-18th century the one of those who looks very Regal is Maurice de sax on the left bastard son of the king of the Polish Lithuanian Commonwealth the elector of Saxony hence the name he is a French General but not really an important French General at the beginning of the Austrian succession uh by right of his illegitimate birth he has a place at court but there's lots of generals in France the other half of the story has to do with some English politics it has to do with the stewards the former monarchs of England so here's the geopolitical situation France is Allied to Bavaria the bavarians the vittles box of Bavaria are the main Rivals to the habsburgs of Austria in Imperial politics another Challenger comes out of Prussia where there's a kind of a quasi-alliance between the prussians and the French so now you have an anti-habsburg coalition France Spain Bavaria Prussia and the habsburgs make common cause with the Russians and the British which is a recipe for a large multinational War that's exactly what happens they spend several years fighting each other a lot of detail we don't need to go into lots of people dying in the Italian Alps but the dynastic piece of where this Invasion plan comes from has to do with that Stewart family so James II was King of England until he was run off largely for being Catholic and what the English kind of self-aggrandizingly called the Glorious Revolution they're invaded by the Dutch the English decide well we can't stop the Dutch so we'll just offer them the crown that's where William comes from but the stewards don't James has a son that son also named James European royalty is not very creative he lives in France as does his son Charles and they're known in English History as the old Pretender and the young Pretender so by the time we get to the middle point of the war of austrian's succession we've reached kind of a we reached kind of an equilibrium on the continent and the French are very interested in destabilizing England because England is pumping money into the habsburgs so the way they do that is through the stewards and the supporters of the stewards in England are called the jacobites there they've raised this kind of rebellion in Scotland they've caused some trouble for the English Monarchy so the French are looking at this and they're saying this is not our main effort this is not our second effort this is even really our third effort but if we could throw some money in soldiers at this why not why wouldn't we to destabilize one of our rivals so that's the situation in 1744. Maurice is given command of a small army facing the low countries at this point the Austrian Netherlands what's now Belgium again notice how many blue armies there are Maurice's is the least important of them including Friedrich or Prussia who has decided to rejoin the war he's got the steward Pretender with him so the idea is Maurice is going to train this Army up he's going to take them to the coast the breast Fleet is going to sail the channel they're gonna pick him up somewhere around Calais and they're going to drop them off right across the coast it's what 12 miles across there you might notice that this looks suspiciously like the Spanish plan to invade England in the late 16th century as we'll talk about sometimes geography is Destiny uh the problem is I am a historian because I'm not very good at math but uh three against one doesn't seem like good odds the English understand the geographic situation they're in they understand that they do not have a native military force that can defend what we would call their their home nation their Homeland so they must keep enemy armies from their soil so basically what happens here is the English do enough at Sea to make it unviable for Maurice to Embark his army the breast Fleet never really gets there the English launched lots of spoiling attacks attacks on the dockyards they sink a lot of the transport ships because it's really obvious if you're building an army size transport Fleet it's kind of hard to hide all right so nothing ends up happening now this is important for two reasons one this is the prototype for every one of these efforts that will happen after this they all work pretty much the same way you're going to see this map a lot just with arrows pointed in slightly different directions foreign two it illustrates the difficulty of even a a large with the Army today we call it Gap crossing right it's it's relatively easy to March an army across land but when you when you try to get an army across things that are not land you start getting into problems whether that's a relatively small River a large river or in this case a relatively small Channel when you start doing joint operations things get infinitely more complicated especially when your opponent is better at one of the joint aspects than you are third this is bad news for the habsburgs it turns out that Maurice is one of the best generals of the period and because he can't get across the channel he decides to go that way and over the next few years he will slice his way through the alliances armies he'll win three great battles a couple of sieges culminating with the siege of my streaked and the signing of the treaty that ends this war in France's favor so because Maurice couldn't get to England he went and won the war so that matters for the Continental War doesn't really help France with England right what a French politician says and this is uh no I who's in and out of the Army and the Marine which is the French navy and their colonies what he says about the expedition to England is revealing in this letter to Louis that he writes before the Expedition is canceled he tells us exactly what the problem is of projecting Force into England if we were in more fortunate times when war was declared with England we might have found ourselves in a situation to attempt such an adventure without having to fear the consequences that may result from it basically we could beat England if it's just us fighting them but if the state of your Majesty's Affairs is unfortunately excuse me but these state of your Majesty's Affairs is unfortunately very different if it fails your majesty must sense what the repercussions would be my advice would have been to commit as little as possible to chance our misfortunes having only come from projects that were too bold we cannot behave with too much wisdom prudence and precaution to arrive at drawing ourselves with honor and Surety from a situation where we find ourselves basically don't land an army across an ocean in unfriendly territory because you're liable to lose it it's not just about Landing the Army you have to be able to support and sustain it after you land it and what Noah has done here very saliently is put his finger on how difficult it is to get across that 12 Mile Stretch of water yes if it were land if it were 15 000 years ago and sea level were lower they could walk France would conquer England easily but that's not the problem they have and so nowai also tells us why France never put a whole lot of effort into these particular Expeditions because the cost outweighed the possible gain like I said this is the pattern for the ones that will follow the next effort is in the Seven Years War so France wins the war of Austrian succession they don't take anything from it because that's Louis XV policy peace without victory the people are mad by the Seven Years War things have changed France is now allied with the habsburgs a French Prince is married to an Austrian princess whose name you might know Marie Antoinette and there's some different policy makers and policy ideas there's still a continental party in France there's still a group of people who want France to be a continental power but increasingly there's a maritime party in France on top of that at the very beginning of the Seven Years War technically before it starts the French proved they can do maritime England had taken the island of Menorca in the Balearic Islands from Spain decades before this the French take it back Marshall risholu takes it in 1756 it's one of the events that precipitates the war not only do they take and hold Menorca a French Fleet defeats a British Fleet outside it so badly that the British Admiral is actually cashiered and executed it's an unfortunate guy named Bing his ancestors or descendants are still trying to get him exonerated so this proves that France is not just flagrantly incompetent Maritime Affairs they can actually do it they can get an army across an ocean and take stuff from the English and if you can get an army from too long to Menorca you can get an army from Calais to England so this rekindles some of the hope that the failed sacks Expedition and the defeat of the jacobites they were ultimately defeated it rekindled some of the hope that that raised the man who leads the effort to reorient French foreign policy against England is named schwasul ironically he's not French he's from Lorraine Lorraine is not part of France completely yet it's that little weird patch in eastern France but he's he's essentially French he is the French chief minister um you see there the the the the the shifts that have happened in diplomacy Prussia is now France's enemy the Protestant powers of Northern Europe have aligned I guess with the exception of Sweden if you want to build a war in a box this is how you do it super power France superpower Russia super power habsburgs against not superpower Prussia and not superpower England if you run that Sim a thousand times the alliance wins at 900 of those times so schwasul is looking at this and saying hey we have two Eastern European superpowers to deal with Prussia let's deal with England so that's exactly what he does uh I mentioned this map is going to start to look familiar same plan as the previous decade let's put an Army on the coast a big army in Normandy a smaller Army in the pot of Calais this is a little more complicated as you can tell from the different arrows pick up the armies land them in various places in Southern England also try to rekindle the Jacobite rebellion up in Scotland really going for it and you might notice he's also committed the too long Fleet that's a sign that schwasul is serious about this it's supposed to sail up link up grab the armies pull them across what so this plan is defeated by two different things one the English are terrified so they pull all their ships out they do all the spoiling attacks they prevent The Fleets from linking they win a couple significant Naval victories and particularly off the coast of Africa what is now Senegal also imagine the difficulty of linking forces across a joint or multinational force today multiply that by doing it with flags it's hard to get two fleets to link up when they can see each other much less sailing around Spain picking armies up picking the supplies up for armies so schwasul did everything right it's just that this is a really difficult plan to pull off and because the English are so skilled at these kind of spoiling attacks there's there's really no chance this is ever going to happen and so despite all the careful planning despite schwasul's attention to this it just can't happen and of course France goes on to lose the war because this is the universe where they lose the war okay so that puts us in a problem if we're France now not only can we get to England we've lost a war to England now it looks like England is on the ascent and France is on the decline and of course we know over the long term that was that was true they didn't know that at the time England was still England still thought they were the little kid at the table but it also means that France is not going to fight a war for the next couple decades so when the seven years war ends in 1763 France has been humiliated along with Austria and Russia so they're going to sit out for the next couple decades schwasul leaves office he's actually fired in 1770 for trying to start a war with England he's replaced but his program continues and so the French will spend lots of money over the next couple decades on their Navy and not just on ships but on training Crews on getting those fishing captains to become Navy captains which is kind of hard because you've got to be a noble on building dockyards on buying the kind of supplies you need for navies at the time sale costs ship Timber rope so they're really investing money in their Navy in a way that they haven't really ever up to this point the opportunity comes in the American war of independence which we must always remember and europeanists don't call it the American Revolution for lots of reasons but one of the reasons is that it's a global war when in 1778 when France enters the war and then the the Spanish and Dutch will as well later this becomes a global war the largest battles of this war are not fought in the Americas largest land battle was fought in Spain great Sieger Gibraltar I guess it was technically a Siege uh of course there are large Naval battles that happen nowhere near the Americas for France this is the opportunity they've been waiting for they now know England is their Chief enemy the habsburgs are on the back end of their Ascent yeah prussia's there but Friedrich II of Prussia has been desperately trying to win a French Alliance he's terrified of France and Russia so they don't have to worry about Prussia Prussia wants nothing from France it will later but not at this point so they're they're allowed to focus on England they don't have to worry about being invaded if nothing else Lew the 14th gave them a secure border by the time he died so this is when they can really put into practice all of the stuff they've been working on um and to his credit Louis Louis XVI is one of the worst kings in French history for lots of reasons but he understood Naval affairs and he continued the programs that schwasul put into place along with schwasul's successor the statue that you see there on the right man named sartine so he is he is interested in building the Navy in building as we mentioned earlier the port town of cherborg cherborg comes from this Navy spending program although again it's not open for service until after the war in 1783. now there is an irony here of course France didn't choose this war they joined it after the Americans proved that they wouldn't just be smashed by the British there are lots of historians who have convincingly argued that if this war happened a decade later France might have won it going away that the naval building program the officer training program the French have the Brady to put their officers through a school it's a relatively new idea at that point that if those had been given another decade the French might have been able to fight the English to a standstill on an even footing that's not the case in the 1770s in the actual war that happened but it's an indication of how far the French have come now of course with that comes another Invasion effort the Americans are desperate for support lots of French are desperate to support it as well they just don't want to spend the money but they eventually will As We Know Great American Hero Benjamin Franklin manages to secure the Treaty of alliance in early 1778 the French send an army to America you of course have Washington this is the French version of Yorktown that's roshinbo commander of the largest army at Yorktown Hiroshima was very careful to keep himself out of the spotlight so the Americans would seem to be the ones who are doing the heavy lifting which in hindsight was the right approach to take but that's why we don't think much of the French in this war now for our purposes what matters is what's happening in Normandy there's another issue happening in the French army which is they're very concerned about what's happened in Prussia Prussia has a very modern very professionalized disciplined Army and lots of people in France are fighting over what that means and how it can be exported to France including the two men who wrote those two books who are officers in the French army and hate each other two guys named giber Manila Duhon the leading commander of the French army is Marshall Broly he's the commander of the Mets Garrison which is the senior peacetime slot in the French army so it's Broly's job to bring an army together in Normandy around the little village of vauciu so that's that's where this gets its name Broly has two tasks really three tasks if we want to divide out one of them uh map look familiar notes that there are no echelons on the red boxes that's because the British forces are largely committed by this point so the British have to mobilize all kinds of militia back home and you can imagine what use militia would be against trained professional French soldiers the British are terrified of what might happen if this Army gets across the channel it's an army of about 40 000 in that blue box under Broly so his first task is to prepare this Army for The Invasion his second task is to figure out what the french Army's tactics should be so they spend about a month marching around doing things like this this is a colorized version of a map from the period it's kind of hard to pick out but this is the first instance I have seen of the non-war time use of Divisions in the French army which is something they've adopted from the prussians so they figure that stuff out they figure out the gibe was right Mandel Duhon was wrong they get the Army trained France does not have a field Army in peace time they're building their field Army here the problem is once again the British Navy is just too good now the the French will defeat the British Navy at the Battle of Chesapeake but they can't do it in the channel what matters here though is that the British had to keep those resources back home this is the single most important of the five because it had a real effect on the War the British have to keep resources back home Naval land money and so this exercise with his 40 000 dudes marching around in squares for a month actually has a material impact on the outcome of the war you can make a convincing argument that the Americans do not win the war if that Army is not sitting there in late 1778. even though it never got across the channel so this is the one of the five that actually did something even though they didn't manage to do what they intended to do the Army disperses most of them go back to their peacetime garrisons some of them go to America including a young staff officer whose name you might recognize Bertier but that means we're not going to have another chance for another 20 years and like so many things that happened in the 1790s this one is both a mess and kind of funny so we're in the heart of the French Revolution the French Revolution is not just the French Revolution it's a revolution in lots of places including in Ireland and there's an Irish revolutionary who spent a lot of his time bumming around Europe kind of wolf tone it's the guy on the right he wants to export the revolution to Ireland he wants to throw off the Yoke of the evil English and allow Ireland to become free again well if you're the revolutionaries why not by the late 1790s the French Revolution has secured itself it's gained lots of territory as you can see it's a much larger France than we've seen previously of course by this point Bonaparte has emerged as one of the great generals and so we kind of have the union of of two things happening here in this fourth Invasion effort one of them is that for the first time since the jacobites and I would argue at all there's actually a native resistance movement the French can link up with in Ireland and two you have ambitious generals like hosh who are looking to make a name for themselves one of those other ambitious generals decides it's a good idea to invade Egypt in 1798. so a lot of French resources are going there as well bonaparte's Egyptian expedition was no more feasible than the Ireland expedition of hosh the difference was the English cared less about that one but of course this is a problem for the English the Irish have always been kind of restive when the English aren't slaughtering them so they have to pay a lot of attention to what's Happening Here so as you could guess from the number of arrows this is the most complicated of the invasion efforts the idea is to pick up hosh's Army from Brittany and landed at various places along the Irish and English Coast I guess that's technically the Welsh Coast along with some Irish Exiles Irish have a long tradition of serving in the French army so there's there's a lot of them in Europe who are skilled at fighting this is the only one of the four that actually lands forces in what is now the United Kingdom there's a small group of them that land in Wales they're basically harried by the local militias until they give up somewhere in Wales wolf tone does not end up Landing this is this is a catastrophe for everybody a bunch of the French ships run into each other when they're trying to get out of port because it turns out when you get rid of your Noble officers nobody knows how to drive a ship the best part about this though is too the same thing happens to the British they pull their Fleet out of storage they set the great Royal Navy to deal with this Invasion and they run their ships into each other so imagine the the sin in the Clowns music playing with British warships running into each other trying to stop French warships running into each other also and then they all sank in The Invasion Force dies so this is both a comedy of errors and not helpful to anybody the revolution fails this is really important in English History this is what leads the English to abolish Great Britain and establish the United Kingdom a couple years later by formally bringing Ireland into the personal Union of the English crown which part of it still is but for our purposes this is another Hail Mary the French are throwing again it's it's no less feasible than bonaparte's Egyptian Expedition it doesn't do much for hosh who dies not long after this um but why not why not try it it cost you almost nothing it cost you some Irish exiles so that brings us to our final effort kind of the culminating Maritime efforts by the French by this point it's a lot more stable in France because Napoleon has come to power by seizing power in a kind of uh laughably affected coup in 1799 and then eventually crowning himself emperor in 1804 Napoleon faces the same problem his predecessors faced whether that was the Revolutionary governments or the monarchs or the bourbon Dynasty our great enemy is across the channel how do we get there so what Napoleon does in the only period of peace where everybody is at peace between 1792 and 1814 basically 1803 1804. is he looks at his map and says all right I'm pretty secure where I am I don't like those habsburgs and that Austrian Empire but look how much territory France is added it is not possible to make an argument that France's land borders are not secure there's nobody threatening France so who's our problem England let's deal with them so like his predecessors he's going to assemble an army he's going to assemble a peacetime Army at the camp of Bologna for a long time this isn't that this isn't the month that Broly had at valsu this Army is going to be here essentially for 18 months they're going to do all the standard things that armies do they're going to start with their low-level company exercises they're going to work their way all the way up to the brand new core formation so again of course size formations exercising of course if you're England what does this look like it looks like an invasion because that's exactly what it's intended to be so all through this all through the camp of Bologna the English are harassing they're sending little groups of boats little squadrons to wreck French warships to sink the transport ships because again it's hard to hide a transport Fleet to actually shell the exercises that happens a few times this is a this is a note from one of the French commanders complaining about the problem that they're being attacked by the English and this is very smart on the part of the English they understand minimum output right we got to send our ships out on exercises so the crews can train anyway let's have them do Gunnery pointed at the French now technically that means England started the war again but nobody cares and and it works just like happened with Maurice just like happened with Broly just like happened with schwasul's grand plan the harassment is enough that Napoleon realizes this is not going to get him anywhere it doesn't help that the combined franco-spanish Fleet is essentially destroyed at Trafalgar not long after the camp breaks so this is it's not happening now just like Maurice de sacks this has a very important historical outcome because the Army what Napoleon now calls the Grand Army cannot get across the channel to fight France's major enemy it goes to fight France's other enemies first the austrians which it will defeat without a whole lot of heavy fighting at ohm and then later into the late fall early winter of 1805 destroy the Allied Army at Australis which is probably Napoleon's greatest Battlefield Triumph and the producer of the largest battle painting probably ever made Napoleon Alexander of Russia Francis Holy Roman Emperor so just like Maurice de sax the failure to get across the channel Unleashed Napoleon on Europe and and pit the English prime minister famously said well roll the map of Europe up for the next 10 years I don't think he was too far off actually so this is the last effort of course the French navy never really recovers it actually is it's not a bad Navy by about 1810 it's it's enough to contest the English as a huge downturn in the English economy after 1810 but an invasion is never feasible again there's never any real threat that that's going to happen and I would argue that there's not a threat of that happening again in any even minor way until World War II so what do we take away from this what do we take away from the series of events that that didn't happen uh the first of them is that the second Hundred Years War turned on the outcome of these invasions I think historians are Universal which they rarely are in saying that if France could have gotten a large army across the channel and supported it which is an important asterisk England would have surrendered because they just didn't have an army at home why would you it's an island so the fact that the British kept them away from England meant that the British could go on and win the second Hundred Years War which they did another important thing that that we face in anglophone history Reading Writing speaking English is that the English themselves write a lot of the histories and in those histories they are centered it's their ideas it's their policies it's their strategies that matter and they don't really care what anybody else thinks or says so it's important for us to look at these major world events from other perspectives try to understand what both sides are thinking even when that might be distasteful so today in the major land War happening in Europe yes we should absolutely try to understand what the ukrainians are thinking and doing but we should also try to understand what the Russians are thinking and doing another important point that this makes is that we often see history as kind of a fate accompli that history had to happen the way it did in some cases that's true I don't think there's many universes in which the Nazis defeat the Soviets in World War II but that's not true in a lot of cases history could have gone very differently radically differently in lots of cases if Jean dark dies before orleon the French probably lose the first Hundred Years War you know if somehow the Germans got across the channel in World War II perhaps a different outcome to that war Friedrich II dies during the Seven Years War but Prussia loses the war we don't have a pressure if we don't have pressure we don't have a Germany certainly at least not a German German you might have an Austrian Germany so what this shows us is again if the French had managed to get an army across and sustain it history could have gone very differently the the second Hundred Years War could have turned out the way the first Hundred Years War did now the flip side of that you might notice these small uh Cameo portrait of Mahan there because this is the point he makes often geography is often destiny if history is not a Theta complete geography often is and if you read mahan's major work on Maritime strategy his thesis is be England be a small island with a large Coast a population that lives on the coast is protected from your neighbors and lets you do things that you don't have to worry about Continental enemies he's not wrong it's kind of a specious thesis but he's not wrong and that's that's true here again if doggerland still exists and the French can walk across land to England there's probably New England might argue the opposite in about 1360 but we'll leave that there so muhan is right about that he often is Destiny the United States is not the United States if it doesn't have two giant oceans separating it from the superpowers of the 19th century beating up on its Southern neighbor didn't didn't hurt that process but the oceans help what this also shows us is that the English are very good at adapting the circumstance so are the French the French tried the same thing over and over again but you notice they didn't try it in the same ways they adapted their plan each time they didn't just try the same thing over and over again and even though they failed we can learn from that failure we can see how people how institutions how countries try to adapt to overcome a problem a problem that turned out to be intractable but that doesn't mean we can't learn from it and then finally this is one I am as guilty of as anybody when I say the French military I mean the French army but it's important for us to not do that my colleague John Kuhn is not here who'd probably be cheering loudly at me saying this but Maritime Affairs matter Naval Affairs matter much more so than are often given Credit in military history in popular imaginations of the past you can make an argument that World War One Was Won by the onsant powers largely through Maritime Affairs by being able to strangle the German economy and starve the German people into submission that doesn't get talked about all that often in accounts of World War One so I think it's incumbent on us to understand that Maritime issues matter perhaps not as much as Mahan said but they do matter and this hopefully is a lesson on why they matter all right so before we get to questions next month's talk will be by Dr Cameron zinsu also coincidentally a French historian Dr zinsu will be talking about operation Dragoon the kind of Forgotten front and the Forgotten Commander of the western front in World War II Jacob Devers sixth Army group and Dragoon the attack into area and then eventually linking with the Allied Forces on that flank so please make sure you come for that on the 1st of June all right so I've given you here a list of kind of General books about all of these different events kind of tried to hit each one of them I would highly recommend Kenny Johnson's comprehensive look at the French navy during the Napoleonic period revolutionary Napoleonic period unfortunately there's not really a good anglophone study of the French navy before that that I'm aware of their pieces of it there's a lot of British if you read French of course that's that's wider open um but uh we'll now take questions yeah and if we'll wait for the mic so on the topic of adaptation particularly in relation to that uh build up by the French of their Naval power leading up to the 1778. um it didn't seem like they developed either the naval Technologies or the naval training and and recruitment to provide um a screen or a shield to those Naval bases that would have held the British spoiling attacks at Bay I just was that ever part of their strategy or was it just something they never thought of yeah that's a very good question a very good observation one of the things I left out of this story is the English are also trying to land in France throughout this period and they actually do the the islands that kind of oblong island off the western coast of France is called Belial they actually take that over at one point but this is French Focus so we didn't talk about that that much they're very aware of that they're very aware of the need to defend the uh the the ports that exist in building the New Ports the infrastructure the transport fleets and all that some of it is just practical if you need the boats to transport an army let's say 50 000 men plus Supplies Plus animals plus artillery that's a huge number of boats you cannot hide that and and I would I would argue this is the single most modern element of all of this because we are now in an age where where lots of people say there is no such thing as surprise because we have satellites because we have drones because all we have all these sensors that are everywhere you cannot hide Major Force buildups anymore so that's the problem they're facing they'd love to but you can't do the uh the Boeing plant thing where you just drag the fake trees over at night right uh the other problem is one that again I wish Dr Kuhn would hear was here because he could talk more about it um but the the the intractable and unsolvable problem the French have is the English have a leap on them right and and experience in the age of sale is not just knowing how to use a sexton or an astrolabe or tie a knot it's something that's that's that's ineffable and Mahan talks about this very well to be a good sailor at the time meant that you had probably spent not your life but generations of your family's lives at Sea and you had a feel for it uh bear in mind on average during the age of sale you could go where you wanted about half the time because the weather would mean you couldn't go where you wanted the other half the time right you have to be able to feel that and yeah those fishermen on the Norman Coast can feel it but a fisherman is not necessarily a captain and again we have the problem of nobility it doesn't matter how good he is who's his father or if you're French who's his great grandfather because unlike the English you don't get to be a noble because the queen says you're a noble your great-grandson gets to be a noble so when you put those two problems together they're very well aware of it they write lots of Staff planning memos about it but they just can't do it the English have too much of a lead on them and barring an English revolution of the kind that the French Revolution you know cut the heads off all the Nobles you just it's just not going to happen and you know credit to the to the uh the English system of representation I won't call it a democracy but they are former Democratic so even if you did cut the heads off all their Admirals they have capable captains who could do that the French just don't it's one of the disadvantages of hereditary monarchy it's a good question though um the British safe 1756 shows their amphibious Doctrine and in practice uh they're advancing more and more what about the French amphibious Doctrine or methodology yeah so at the time I I'm kind of hesitating because doctrine of course is an anachronistic term although I use it to describe people at the time the French show in 1756 that they can do it at Menorca and it just kind of dovetails with the previous answer it's not so much a problem of understanding or of technology or of what we would now recognize as Doctrine you know all of the Arcane details like when you hand off the the command from The Landing Force Commander to the Ground Force Commander all that stuff they can figure that out that's actually really easy who's the nearest Prince he's commanding that what what what the problem is is linking all these things together and and again the English kind of have an advantage here because the The Ground Force Commander for the English is usually one of the king's Sons right so if if whatever Duke is commanding the Army okay he's going to be commanding the Army but a lot of the a lot of the officers in both the English and uh Navy and army are are at the edges of what we might recognize as professional they're not Prussian or Austrian but they're they're not terribly far behind and the French system they're very professional but they're also still Noble and a lot of times what happens is you get somebody like arishalu who led them an orca Expedition the next year he's the commander of the major Army in Germany and he decides to go home because his Army's not getting enough supplies because his family honor matters more than the war he's not wrong after all his name is rishalu but you don't have some of those same problems with the English and I don't think it has to do with their society or government or anything like that I think it has to do with the simple fact that the English know if they get it wrong once that's the end the French can afford to lose armies you can you can Hammer the French armies and they'll come back the English can't afford to do that so I think it's a necessity driven thing for the English to understand we got to get this right and they do a good job of it it's you you can you can do worse for studying institutional growth and positive outcomes than the English Army and Navy there's lots of bad things in them but they do their job effectively so it's it's again it's just some of the same practical problems it's a good question yeah thank you uh you treat Trafalgar is an afterthought you mentioned the Nile not at all and you don't even discuss Denmark and Copenhagen um do you think that the uh the work of Nelson and his captains was important may be important in consequential how do you feel about that yeah and I I will preface my answer by saying I'm not at all an English Naval historian there are plenty of them out there um yeah it's very important however I think in this context for the French I would argue the individuals involved probably saw these events as being almost World historically important but if we look at it kind of over the span right you might have noticed I mentioned only two Marine ministers because the Marine is always going to be an afterthought to the French government even under Napoleon um not not not important but it's less important than many other things but also because I I think the French kind of develop an inferiority complex about Naval Affairs and it doesn't start here as Oz as as odd as it is to consider despite straddling the Atlantic and the Mediterranean like Spain France is not a maritime power for most of the early modern period they essentially don't have a fleet for a good chunk of the 15th 16th 17th centuries in fact Colbert basically has to build one from scratch when he becomes the Marine minister in the late 17th century so it's very important what happens at the big battles you mentioned the abacar bay Trafalgar I might throw in what again with the English self-aggrandizingly called The Glorious first of June or kiburon Bay I mentioned the Battle of Lagos yeah those are all very important but I think for the French after after seeing your Fleet get hammered a few times I think they just it's you know it's what happens so it's more important for the English and the English do those things very well they're good at Big Fleet battles although Nelson himself ends up getting himself killed so make of that what you will um they're good at the the kind of the geared of course the rating although the French are very good at smuggling I didn't talk about that but they're good at smuggling um but that matters more for the English than it does for the French if that makes sense if we were telling the story from the English perspective then yeah the title slide has uh Nelson and the other the other commanders on it but I think for the French it's just it's it's it's a condition if you will it's like fighting in the tropics you know everybody's going to get malaria you know your neighbors are going to get hammered by the British so how do you how do you deal with that knowing it's going to happen if that makes sense and this has been a great presentation I have a question about the invasion of Ireland in 1798. at the at the time there's a lot of Ireland that is basically ungoverned space and there's a an epidemic of brigandage as well as organized Insurgency against the crown Authority is the French Landing there I mean how much planning goes into that and is this an attempt to ignite an early form of like hybrid War or is this simply opportunism on the part of the the French Revolutionary government it's a very good question and like all very good questions the answer is yes um but it's it's very much opportunism uh as much as as I as I said as much as bonaparte's Egyptian Expedition is uh we we credit that a lot because they brought back the Rosetta Stone um it worked for a while until it didn't yeah we forget Napoleon left and then the whole thing turned into a disaster um but yeah consider the position of the French right again there's a long tradition of Irish people being in France so you get people like wolf tone who show up just like his predecessor Charles Stewart and they're they're chattering in the ears of the French you know imagine the the Iraq people in 2002 in the bush White House at first when they say go to Iraq you say no no we're in Afghanistan but the more they say it the more you think okay maybe we can do this and I think with I think with hosh I think with that expedition they don't know a ton about what's going on in Ireland they don't know the chapter and verse of the detail um they don't know what the conditions are like you mentioned kind of in the center in the west of Ireland which is I You could argue it's it's self-governed space whatever that might mean but they're they're not looking at it and saying this is an opportunity for us to ignite a kind of a proxy war they think like so many revolutionaries they think they can roll in the revolution will rise up to meet them and then they'll have a place that's free of England which looks suspiciously like a French colony which is what happened in Germany it's what happened in the low countries right um I don't think there's anybody who's not Irish in France and understand what I mean by Irish I mean from Ireland not great-grandfather was from Ireland and fought for Louis XIV I don't think there's anybody in our in France who actually understands Ireland there's a few Travelers but they're I mean they're wolf tone they're opportunists and of course wolf tone does not want a free Ireland wolf tone once a wolf tone Ireland right as as tends to be the case with with those kinds of people so yeah I would look at this kind of like like the Tet Offensive right the people are with us we just have to show them the way and then the people don't show up right well good question Tom uh you describe all of the uh all of the frustrations and semi successes and failures that the French have trying to invade the English coach 17 40 of 1815. uh during these same years though the the French put uh regular forces in Canada during the Seven Years War and then again in New York under roshambo uh during our our Revolution so I wondered if you could say a few words about the differences between those two uh exercises yeah that's a good question I'll speak to the Canada one first um so what's true of both of them but it's especially true if Canada is when you when we talk about the colonies for France and this is true for most of the colonial Powers but it's especially true for France you have to scale everything down significantly so the French the New France Colony what we call Canada it had lots of problems with First Nations lots of fights particularly with the First Nations around Lake Erie the the the the Iroquois the Mohawk the Mohican other groups like that and and the force there is largely militia it's Colonial militia and the French have a malicious system that looks like the Roman militia system all the young men come out they literally draw straws and the short straws in the militia there's not that many people in New France so the militia is always small they always get kicked up and down New France by the uh by the the First Nations people who are not only capable Fighters they they actually field effective armies uh but then every now and then the French will send uh they'll send a battalion of regulars not the best Battalion basically the worst Battalion in the French army and when that Battalion shows up that area is immediately secure because those people know how to fight and it doesn't matter how good the for example the Mohawk are at hit and run tactics a battalion is just too big to do that against and they have artillery so when the battalions show up it secures The Colony at one point I forget the author's name there's a priest who wrote a comprehensive history of New France and he talks about when these two regular battalions show up it basically ends the First Nations problem for a generation that's only two battalions right the difference I think with New France and this is true kind of across the colonies but specifically talking about France versus New France um two battalions is not even a scouting Force for an army the size of brolies or certainly the the Grand Army over a hundred thousand men in 1805. so it's one thing to sneak a ship or a flotilla of let's say four Capital ships plus supporting ships it's really hard to find that if you're the British sometimes you run into them sometimes you get tipped off the British are very good at Maritime intelligence but sometimes they get through and that's a lot of what happened when France Got forces outside France they slipped past a British blockade or the British went and the winds went the other way and wrecked a ship so the the Admiral had to go sail into a port and spend six months refitting there that happens all the time that happens a lot with the army that gets uh to the new worlds in uh in in pretty much any time in the American war of independence bigger armies but it's still a tiny Army I think roshambo's Army was never more than ten thousand men that are rich if you can correct me on that but it's it's tiny compared to a European Army ten thousand men is not even a European division that's a that's a collection of regiments that would do absolutely nothing for you in a European war of course that's a huge Army for that war in that place um so it's simply a matter of scale and a lot of times it's good Planning by the French again the French Navy in the 18th century is never better than it is between 1778 and 1783. so that's that's part of that too but a lot of time it's just a matter of scale it's one thing to sneak a battalion across it's another thing to move an army of 50 or 100 000 men any other questions yep how did the Romans have such better luck than the French so that's a that's a fascinating question there are lots of answers my classicist colleague is uh smirking um there there are lots of arguments for why the Romans did what they did as well as they did um and I think kind of to summarize the kind of very very generally to summarize it again prefacing I'm not a classicist um one they had no major competition by the time the Pax Romana becomes the Pax Romana there is no pure state that can threaten it the only pure state that exists at the time is Han China they know about each other but they're they're too far apart to really interact um so the Romans have the great advantage of not really having to worry about a lot of competition now if we go back into the time you're talking about when when they're first invading England um Caesar gets across and and I don't know if we call his expedition a failure but he he just doesn't stay there and it does take a while it takes about a century for the Romans to really bring what is now England uh to uh not actively killing Romans um but that's part that's the major thing there's no major competition Rome Can field it can leverage so many more resources into a war than any other power and it's not till the till the the Persians reconstitute themselves in the uh in the third Century A.D that they have a pure power that then really shows that Rome's not as strong as it as it might look um the other thing is the realm the Romans are effective Engineers you know the Romans don't really innovate they adapt you know if they if if they're bad at Navy things and Rome was very bad at Navy things in the Republic period and uh carthaginian Queen Rex they send all their Engineers all of a sudden Rome has multiple fleets of quinkeremes right uh so you know the Romans are not the Savvy uh Rocky Underdog that somehow manages to pull out a win they are the massively over resourced hegemon that will lose seven fleets and still beat you with the eighth and I think that's the other part of why the Romans are so good they just have so many more resources they can leverage into a fight until they don't and then things get kind of hairy but that's uh that's for another talk all right so thank you for coming out again we'll see you next month for Dr zinsu when we will somehow still be in France there's certainly that yeah right foreign

Channel: The Dole Institute of Politics

Views: 1,775

Keywords: Dole Institute, Dole Institute of Politics, Politics, University of Kansas

Id: 9iaN1n33FlI

Length: 70min 1sec (4201 seconds)

Published: Fri May 05 2023