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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

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