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tance. England and France were competing above all for security and
prestige, whether calculated in quantifiable terms of relative economic
advantage or in terms of their constitutional systems, their religious and
cultural values, or (most directly) their military and diplomatic establish-
ments. Accordingly, both states saw the enormous and unparalleled wealth
available through trade and colonization as decisively suited for power-
political purposes. For the uniquely ambitious French, who coveted conti-
nental glory perhaps even more than maritime laurels, such largesse could
fuel campaigns of conquest. For the fundamentally more defensive British,
the danger was, as ever, that a power such as France, if dominant on the
Continent, could destroy them, not only by denying them European mar-
kets for their trade, but also by cutting them off from the naval stores
(timber, hemp, and so on) lacking which no more British ships could ply
the seas. Hence, mercantile wealth signified for London a precious means
whereby France’s continental foes might be subsidized in wartime, thus
contributing to the diffusion – and ultimate frustration – of the French
war effort.
In this “Second Hundred Years’ War” the British had over the French
two interrelated and (as it turned out) insuperable advantages. First, as we
have already noted, the islanders achieved an unparalleled harmonization
of state and elite interests, of political and economic objectives. And this
had crucial implications for government finances. The confirmation of the
constitutional limits set upon the crown in the wake of the Glorious Revo-
lution meant that state finance, previously considered royal in nature, came
to be thought of as parliamentary instead. The mediation of private interests
in Parliament engendered a sense of the public’s interest that stamped the
20 On these issues, see John Brewer,
The Sinews of Power: War, Money and the English State,
1688–1783
(Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1990), pp. 21–22; and Black,
Natural and Necessary Enemies
, pp. 134–35.
The ancien régime
23
revenue departments as out of bounds to private interests. Moreover, their
budgetary duties forced the parliamentarians to face debt and deficit year
after year.21 And with Parliament ensconced at the center of political life
in the kingdom, men with capital indirectly subsidized public policies by
investing in the Bank of England, founded (significantly) just six years after
James II fled British shores. The bank flourished, and by the mid-eighteenth
century had assumed management of long- and short-term state debt. That
interest rates declined throughout the century was ascribable to many fac-
tors, but surely one of them was confidence in a regime held consistently
to account for its policies and procedures. It would prove exceedingly dif-
ficult for any controller-general of finances in absolutist France to borrow
money on royal account at interest rates competitive with those across the
Channel. Representative governance, then, paid fiscal dividends that over
the long haul nonrepresentative governance, however “splendid,” could
not match.
The second great advantage possessed by the British derived from their
insular geography. Protected as they were from the threat of sudden inva-
sion by land that had long bedeviled their French opponents, they could
afford to draw down their military defenses between wars and, most perti-
nently, focus their armament efforts in wartime upon their navy. This factor
was pivotal. Whichever fleet could command the seas could control access
to naval stores in the Baltic, to markets for exports, to sources of imports
in Europe and the Levant, and to colonies and commercial entrep ôts in
the Americas, the Caribbean, Africa, and Asia. Moreover, such control of
the seas would feed on itself, for it would deny to the losing side in this
confrontation the long hours of experience on the high seas failing which
no navy could establish competitive standards of seamanship, gunnery, and
tactics. Hence the importance of the statistics Paul Kennedy has recently
cited suggesting the relative sizes of the British and French fleets of this era.
In 1689, Louis XIV’s government could still boast 120 ships of the line as
against the 100 of William and Mary. By 1739, however, the numbers were
running 124 to 50 in London’s favor; and in 1756, as yet another great war
was getting under way, the figures were 105 for Great Britain and 70 for
France.22 Whereas, in Colbert’s halcyon days, the French navy had gener-
ally overawed the combined fleets of England and the United Provinces, a
century later France’s fleet, even when augmented by that of Spain, could
not equal the naval forces marshaled by London.
For Versailles, the nub of the problem lay in the contradictions in-
hering in the historic attempt to dominate both the oceans and the land.
21 J. F. Bosher,
French Finances, 1770–1795: From Business to Bureaucracy
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970), pp. 22, 23–25.
22 Paul Kennedy,
The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers: Economic Change and Military
Conflict from 1500 to 2000
(New York: Random House, 1987), p. 99.
24
Reinterpreting the French Revolution
Colbert and his successors, for all their industry in building up and main-
taining this branch of the country’s military service, kept the land-based
naval administration (the
plume
) distinct from the seagoing officer corps
(the
épée
). In doing so, they created and institutionalized disruptive ten-
sions between administrators on the mainland, who had little knowledge
of or sympathy for seafaring, and officers of the marine, who had no
grasp of how overall naval strategy was to be synchronized with the king-
dom’s continental warfare. But the dilemma imposed upon the navy by the
“amphibious” nature of French foreign policy was most outstandingly
a financial dilemma. Research has revealed, with particular respect to the
1750s, that underfunding of the navy impeded organizational and adminis-
trative reforms, inhibited construction and repair of battleships and frigates,
sapped morale in the arsenals and among the sailors, restricted opportuni-
ties for training in seamanship upon the high seas, and, in general, “severely
limited long-term aspirations concerning naval power and effectively
denied France fulfilment of the dream that she might one day be mistress
of the seas.”23 Ultimately, however, such frustrations betokened an overex-
tended strategic posture – a French dilemma from which the British would
know how to profit.
These realities came home to dog the French in an especially sinister way
during Vergennes’s years in the foreign ministry. He involved his country,
we have seen, in the American War (1778–83) in order, at least in part, to
reverse the stinging verdict of the Seven Years’ War. Yet, as the great naval
victory of Rodney and Hood over de Grasse in the Battle of the Saints in
April 1782 so dramatically revealed, the loss of its North American colonies
had done nothing to shake Britain’s fundamental superiority at sea. What
was more, British naval prowess drew upon an economy whose postwar
buoyancy not even optimistic French economic revisionism would attempt
to deny. During 1784–89, exports of the British to their former American
colonists (irony of ironies!) were already returning to 90 percent of the
average yearly exports for 1769–74. Soon they would be forging ahead to
unheard-of levels.24 British dominance in European trade with the young
American republic was especially crucial in light of its implications for the
islanders’ leap into industrialization. It has long been commonly accepted
that the Americans, with their relatively high per capita incomes, large
23 James Pritchard,
Louis XV’s Navy, 1748–1762: A Study of Organization and Administration
(Kingston, Ont.: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1987), pp. 207, 214. See also on this subject E. H. Jenkins,
A History of the French Navy
(Annapolis, Md.: Naval Institute Press, 1973), pp. 44, 108–9.
24 Dull,
The French Navy
, pp. 340–41. For some indications that the French economy in the eighteenth century was more competitive with that of Britain than has been thought, see John Shovlin, “The Cultural Politics of Luxury in Eighteenth-Century France,”
French Historical Studies
23 (2000): pp. 584–85.
The ancien régime
25
aggregate wealth, and “middle class” traits, provided an ideal market for
the cotton and wool textiles and ironware of everyday use fairly easily
produced by the emerging, steam-driven technologies.25 The British, fur-
thermore, were matching or besting their rivals in other regions of the
globe as well, including the Mediterranean, the Baltic – so crucial for its
provisioning of naval stores to the cross-Channel powers – and even the
Near East, hitherto dominated by the Franco-Turkish connection.26 In
addition, the British were apparently transporting around twice as many
African slaves to the New World in the late 1780s as were the French, were
penetrating the markets of Spain and its far-flung colonies, and were lead-
ing the way in exploiting the potentially rich markets of India and the Far
East.27 Indisputably, the French West Indies produced just about half of
the Western world’s sugar and coffee in the late 1780s, thereby securing for
the metropolitan power much needed foreign exchange. Still, there was no
demand in the French Caribbean islands for textiles and iron goods compa-
rable to the desire for such mass-produced wares in the British-dominated
markets of the United States. As a result, there was no colonial spur to
industrialization in France (even assuming – counterfactually – a conjunc-
ture of
domestic
forces favorable to the process there) comparable to the
American stimulus to industrialization in England.28
Already by 1783, the volume of British trade worldwide was possibly as
great as at any time before the American War. And over the years 1782–88
British merchant shipping seemingly more than doubled. The combined
value of the islanders’ exports and imports may have been increasing dur-
ing the 1780s at a phenomenal annual rate of 4 to 5 percent. And the British
share in overall global commerce must have been increasing – to the
disadvantage, presumably, of France.29 The uproar in France over the
Anglo-French trade pact (the “Eden Treaty”) of 1786 served to dramatize
25 H. J. Habakkuk, “Population, Commerce and Economic Ideas,” in
The New Cambridge
Modern History, Vol. 8: The American and French Revolutions, 1763–1793
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1968), pp. 40–45.
26 On these items, see Murphy,
Charles Gravier, Comte de Vergennes
, p. 430; Frank Fox,
“Negotiating with the Russians: Ambassador Ségur’s Mission to St. Petersbourg, 1784–
1789,”
French Historical Studies
7 (1971): 52, 62; and Franc¸ois Crouzet, “Angleterre et France auXVIIIe siècle: Essai d’analyse comparée de deux croissances économiques,”
Annales: E. S. C.
21 (1966), esp. pp. 263–64.
27 On these points, see Crouzet, pp. 263–64; and Habakkuk, “Population, Commerce and Economic Ideas,” pp. 40–45.
28 See Jean Tarrade,
Le Commerce colonial à la fin de l’ancien régime
(Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1972); and Robert Stein,
The French Sugar Business
(Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1988).
29 On these points, see Kennedy,
Rise and Fall of the Great Powers
, p. 120; Habakkuk,
“Population, Commerce and Economic Ideas,” pp. 40–45; Dull,
The French Navy
, pp. 340–44; and Roger Price,
The Economic Modernisation of France (1730–1880)
(London: C. Helm, 1975), pp. 132–33.
26
Reinterpreting the French Revolution
the competitive disadvantages under which French merchants and indus-
trialists had to labor. They prophesied sorrowfully that a reduction of
duties on English hardware and textile imports would only damage the
fledgling French industrial sector, and did not fail to berate their own
government over the agreement. Similar controversies arose during these
years over Franco-British commercial competition in the ports of the
French West Indies and the Russian Baltic coast, and they, too, underscored
the interrelated realities of the lagging commercial, agricultural, and indus-
trial sectors in France.30
Inevitably, Britain’s economic strength vis-à-vis France was translated
into military strength. Pitt was able to have thirty-three additional ships
of the line constructed between 1783 and 1790, thus raising the peacetime
power of the British navy to new heights. By 1790, in fact, the ships of the
line flying British colors would outnumber those of French provenance by
195 to 81.31 “To be truly vulnerable,” one specialist has written, “the Royal
Navy would have had to be crippled by an especially heavy desertion rate
or by a more protracted interruption of its supply of timber for hulls and