Reinterpreting the French Revolution: A global-historical perspective (6 page)

French foreign minister saw only one more year of peace remaining to

Louis XV and Britain’s George III.9 Whether or not this was true, the

French and British undeniably came close to war in the course of that

year over the Falkland question. For some time, Madrid and London had

been contesting control over the Falkland Islands, whose location in the

far South Atlantic made them a strategic gateway to the South Pacific and a

vast region hitherto monopolized commercially by the Spanish. Bourbon

Spain, not unreasonably, requested support on the issue from its Bourbon

French confederate. Although there is much about the resultant diplomatic

confrontation between London and Versailles – and the associated crisis

within the French government – that remains obscure, what is certain is

that a cabal of Choiseul’s domestic enemies was able at this juncture to

engineer his disgrace.10

However, Choiseul’s fall from power really changed nothing. In corre-

sponding with his Spanish cousin Charles III in the early 1770s, Louis XV

repeatedly stressed the need for the two Bourbon governments to continue

with naval rearmament as they looked forward eagerly to “making war

against England,” thereby retrieving the “honor” compromised in the most

recent war. That, at the same time, France could also argue at London

the case for intervening in eastern Europe against Russia underscored its

commitment to a grandiose – if ultimately contradictory – foreign policy.11

And this problematic commitment would continue to drive statesmen at

Versailles in the reign of Louis XV’s ill-starred successor.

That France’s daunting “international mission” was not to be shirked

was made retrospectively clear in a note that the new minister of foreign

affairs, the comte de Vergennes, submitted to Louis XVI several years

into his reign. “The deplorable Peace of 1763, the partition of Poland,

and many other equally unhappy causes had profoundly undermined the

9 Ramsey,
Anglo-French Relations
, p. 163.

10 The second volume of Rohan Butler’s projected three-volume study of Choiseul should throw valuable new light upon this minister’s role in the Falkland crisis. But, for now, see William Doyle, “The Parlements of France and the Breakdown of the Old Regime,

1771–1788,”
French Historical Studies
6 (1970): 415–58.

11 Jeremy Black,
Natural and Necessary Enemies: Anglo-French Relations in the Eighteenth
Century
(Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1987), esp. pp. 75–79.

The ancien régime

19

consideration due the crown of France, which in earlier days, had been the

object of terror and jealousy. . . . I confess, Sire, [that] all the arrogance and

insults against which my heart revolted made me . . . search for the means to

change a situation so little compatible with the elevation of your soul and

the grandeur of your power.”12 Not for nothing had Vergennes imbibed

the philosophy of Choiseul; and not for nothing, it is equally obvious,

had he been schooled in the remorseless ways of power politics through

diplomatic service in Germany and at Constantinople and Stockholm. For

if, on the one hand, the new foreign minister hotly resented the crushing

defeat inflicted on French colonial and mercantile interests by London in

the Seven Years’ War, on the other hand he brooded over the spoliation

of France’s traditional Polish ally by the three East European powers and

over the pressure exerted by Catherine the Great’s Russia on those other

redoubts of French influence to the east, Sweden and Ottoman Turkey.

How, then, to retain for France a secure and prestigious role in Europe’s

competitive affairs?

Recent scholarship suggests strongly that the paradoxical and problem-

atic key lay, for this statesman, in improved relations with the English. Such

a reconciliation would in time allow for the diversion of French resources

from the navy to the army. Even more important, cooperation between

Versailles and London would greatly limit the ability of the other major

continental countries to wage large-scale wars: having the armies but not

the funds to engage in such hostilities, they could only draw the needed

subsidies from France or England. The immediate problem Vergennes envi-

sioned, however, was that Pitt’s England was contemptuous of the French.

Hence, France had first to “reduce England to a position of equality, . . . to

take from her a share of her strength, her monopoly of American trade

and markets.”13 Vergennes, accordingly, came to project a two-stage re-

lationship with the British. First, Versailles would work at humbling the

“modern Carthage” by assisting the North American colonists in what

looked very much like becoming a full-scale revolt against London. Subse-

quently, Great Britain might somehow be enlisted in a campaign to coun-

terbalance the grasping, unscrupulous geopoliticians at Berlin, Vienna, and

St. Petersburg. In discharging the first task, Vergennes, his sovereign,14

and all their patriotic countrymen could indulge their prejudices against

12 Cited in Murphy,
Charles Gravier, Comte de Vergennes
, p. 217.

13 For this exposition of Vergennes’s views, see Dull,
The French Navy
, esp. pp. 8–15. But also see Murphy,
Charles Gravier, Comte de Vergennes
, esp. pp. 211–21; Singh,
French
Diplomacy in the Caribbean
, p. 148; and Jean-Franc¸ois Labourdette, “Vergennes ou la tentation du‘ministériat’,”
Revue historique
557 (1986): 89–90.

14 On Louis XVI’s diplomatic philosophy, see Pierrette Girault de Coursac,
L’Education
d’un roi. Louis XVI
(Paris: Gallimard, 1972), esp. 152, 168, 171–72; and Robert R. Crout,

“In Search of a ‘Just and Lasting Peace’: The Treaty of 1783, Louis XVI, Vergennes, and the Regeneration of the Realm,”
International History Review
5 (1983): 364–98.

20

Reinterpreting the French Revolution

and revenge themselves upon the haughty English; in carrying out the

second mission, they just might be able to restore that delicate equilib-

rium of European forces best calculated to maximize French security and

influence.

For reasons explored in depth elsewhere,15 Vergennes’s imposing but

complicated strategy – except insofar as it concerned the insurgency in

North America – miscarried. Still, the few years intervening between the

conclusion of that struggle and the final collapse of the ancien régime wit-

nessed a reappearance of the old assertiveness in French foreign policy.

This emerged most clearly in connection with the preparations for renewed

maritime warfare coordinated by Naval Minister Charles-Eugène-Gabriel

de La Croix, maréchal de Castries.16 Castries, who had unavailingly called

for transformation of the American War into a worldwide campaign against

British colonial interests, acted after 1783 to build the navy back up to at

least eighty ships of the line and to train it in offensive tactics on the high

seas. He also expended enormous funds on stocking French arsenals with

masts, hemp, and other war matériel. Most revealingly, perhaps, he tried to

upgrade the seaworthiness of French naval forces – and probe for British

weaknesses in the Far East – by sending one expedition after another around

Africa into the Indian Ocean. British and French naval forces in fact clashed

in waters off India during 1785. Also, Versailles acted the following year to

shore up the finances of a local Indian prince, Tippoo Sahib, lately antago-

nistic to the British in the Mysore War.17 But, if Castries’s bellicosity was

especially on display, contemporaries were just as quick to note the efforts

of his counterparts in the war ministry to modernize that most venerable

instrument of French geopolitics, the army. Those efforts would culmi-

nate on the very eve of revolution in a special council of war convened by

Louis XVI.18

There seemed to be yet other harbingers of renewed French aggression

in those years. Rumor had it that the French were planning facilities for

no fewer than one hundred ships of the line at the artificial harbor under

construction at Cherbourg. Did this augur an eventual strike across the

Channel? Certainly Louis XVI, ordinarily untraveled, was willing to make

a highly publicized inspection of the naval works at Cherbourg two years

later. Then there was the formal alliance concluded between the French and

the Dutch in November 1785. Since yet another French ally, Austria, held

15 See Stone,
The Genesis of the French Revolution
, pp. 119–29.

16 On Castries, see Murphy,
Charles Gravier, Comte de Vergennes
, p. 325; Labourdette,

“Vergennes,” pp. 91–92; and Dull,
The French Navy
, pp. 336–38.

17 On French activities in the Far East, see especially Blanning,
Origins
, pp. 47–51.

18 On this subject, refer to Bien, “La Réaction aristocratique avant 1789,” pp. 23–48 and 505–34; and Samuel F. Scott,
The Response of the Royal Army to the French Revolution
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1978).

The ancien régime

21

the intermediate Netherlands, did this presage a French strategic grip on

both the Channel and North Sea coasts? Furthermore, there were the nu-

merous indications, some of them already noted, of Versailles’s scheming in

the Far East. Since (as additional points in this connection) the French pos-

sessed the islands of Bourbon and Mauritius in the Indian Ocean, and since

their Dutch allies held the even more crucial Cape of Good Hope at the

southern tip of Africa and the superb harbor at Trincomalee on the north-

eastern side of Ceylon, just off India, were the British not justified in feeling

their sea links with India to be vulnerable and perhaps imperiled? Under the

circumstances, Prime Minister Pitt’s gloss upon British–French trade talks

was understandable: “Though in the commercial business I think there are

reasons for believing the French may be sincere, I cannot listen without sus-

picion to their professions of political friendship.”19 In the twilight of his

life, the comte de Vergennes found the entire thrust of a century of French

hostility toward British overseas interests – hostility, ironically, given new

life by his own North American policy! – to be militating against his dream

of a future Anglo-French rapprochement.

Vergennes’s death early in 1787 was symbolically appropriate, coming

as it did at the start of an epochal political crisis to which his own foreign

policy had so powerfully contributed. But there is a larger point to make

here. Vergennes’s policies – and, for that matter, those of all his eighteenth-

century predecessors – were above all problematic because of their consis-

tent failure to reckon adequately with the major changes in the European

state system. That system had been transformed by the emergence on its

outer flanks of Great Britain, Russia, and Prussia as major powers.

Britain’s ability in the eighteenth century to carry out an international

mission drawing general support from its affluent and articulate elites was

rooted in the political revolutions of the preceding century. Those revolu-

tions had beheaded one absolute Stuart monarch and chased another out

of the land. It was particularly the second, or “Glorious,” revolution of

1688 that proved decisive. It placed the profit-oriented agriculturalists of

the peerage and gentry in a newly secure position of power. The English

landlords, who wished to produce cereals and other crops for domestic

and foreign markets and to purchase various colonial and domestically

processed goods, plainly had much in common with English merchants

whose livelihood consisted in the domestic and international exchange of

such raw and finished commodities. Both groups perceived a compelling

need for a diplomatic policy that ranked the acquisition and/or defense of

colonies, trading posts, and commerce alongside dynastic and other purely

19 Blanning,
Origins
, p. 46. The foreign secretary, Carmarthen, “suspected that Vergennes was plotting a sinister plan to ruin England.” Murphy,
Charles Gravier, Comte de Vergennes
, p. 436.

22

Reinterpreting the French Revolution

“political” considerations. Beginning in 1689, these interests were ideally

situated, through their influence in the central and local organs of govern-

ment, to urge such a policy on successive monarchs. William III may in

his own mind have accorded a higher priority to humbling his detested foe

Louis XIV than to fostering English commerce, and the Georgian kings

seemed at times to be obsessed with the need to protect their Hanoverian

homeland from predators one and all on the Continent. Nonetheless, the

logic of British politics guaranteed that the country’s foreign policy became

almost as much a vehicle for upper- and middle-class economic interests

as an expression of the general “patriotic” desire for British prominence in

the world’s affairs.20

Almost . . . bu t not qu ite. The bitter Anglo-French contest over colonies

and commerce had for both powers a transcending geostrategic impor-