Men of Honour: Trafalgar and the Making of the English Hero. Adam Nicolson

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СКАЧАТЬ ‘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 depends, in its deeper levels, on the far more rationalist, organisational virtues of steadiness of supply and practice, on orderly coherence and a sense of unquestioned mutual reliance. Only when that foundation is set can the famous spontaneities of Nelsonian battle find a role. Nelson could act with Napoleonic aggression and violence in battle only because the Royal Navy had preserved systems which were completely immune to those modern subversive methods.

      The direction of French naval affairs under the Directoire and the Consulate made no improvement: chaotic inflation, a lack of consistency and intermittent supply crippled the French navy. Bonaparte systematised much of the chaos, creating maritime prefectures and appointing at the head of the Department of the Marine an energetic and dynamic engineer, M. Forfait, and to his Council of State, Charles Claret, Comte de Fleurieu, France’s foremost geographer, who had been tutor to the Dauphin and a powerful voice in the naval administration before the Revolution. At his imperial coronation in 1804, he had awarded to each ship of the navy an eagle and a flag on which the ship’s name was inscribed in gold. Three officers, three petty officers and four sailors had been invited to the coronation to receive their honours.

      For all that, so much long-term damage had been done to the body of the French navy and its morale that it would take as long to repair the damage as it had taken to wreak it. When Britain declared war again on France in May 1803, Bonaparte recognised it as a deathblow for the French navy. ‘Peace,’ he said, ‘is necessary to restore a navy,—peace to fill our arsenals empty of materials, and peace because only then is the one exercise-ground for the fleets—the sea itself—open to them.’ The French fleet at Trafalgar was limping on to the battlefield.

      On this light and gentle morning off the southwest coast of Spain, the three fleets were moving slowly towards their meeting, each a barometer of the almost diagrammatically opposed societies which had created them. Pre-revolutionary Spain was still stuck in the immobilities of the pre-modern world, its population having risen from 8 million in 1700 to no more than 11.5 million a century later, an increase of forty-four per cent; revolutionary France, deeply unsettled by the radical transformations and retransformations of the previous 15 years, was still the central power block of Europe, with a population of 29 million. But that figure concealed a lack of drive and vigour at the most basic biological and social level. France was growing even more slowly than Spain. Over the previous century, the number of French had risen by only 7 million, a growth rate of just over thirty per cent. The failure of the ancien regime in 1789 was the result not of any great demographic pressure coming up from the expanding classes below it, but of the stiffness and incompetence of the ruling class itself. The French Revolution was a failure of government, and the state of Villeneuve’s fleet was a reflection of that.

      England was different. It had just emerged from a century of unprecedentedly dynamic acceleration and change. Between 1680 and 1820, the growth rate of the English population had been twice the rate of Europe as a whole. England had boomed. Men and women earning wages from businesses did not have to wait, as the poor peasants in Spain and France did, for the old man to die and leave the farm. People could marry younger, have more children, and then continue to live as long as they ever had. Disease was coming under control. Plague never entered 18th-century England (as it did both France and Spain) and by the 1760s smallpox in England had been virtually eradicated by inoculation.

      As the population doubled, the value of the work done in England tripled. After 1780, it accelerated again, to an annual growth rate of two per cent, the underlying trend rate ever since. In the century after 1700, there was a sixty per cent increase in agricultural output, more than double the increase over the previous two centuries. It was the burgeoning time. People had plenty of food, children survived the first killing years of life and old men lived on.

      England, by 1805, was in this way post-revolutionary. By almost any social or economic measure you might want to choose, England was leaving Europe behind: in the growth of its middle class; in the number of people living in towns and cities; in the size of its government and the level and amount of tax raised; in the ability of both government and individuals to borrow. England in 1805 looked far more like the modern than the pre-modern world. By 1800, well over a third of all people were working in commerce or industry, equalling the number working on the land. Barely one in ten Europeans lived in towns; in 1800, a quarter of the English did. By 1815, that proportion would have risen to a third. There were a million Londoners by 1811, an unprecedentedly vast agglomeration of human beings, a mass of humanity which amazed and appalled its inhabitants, as though it were some sublime effusion of the earth itself; towns in northern England were already black from the smoke of their ‘manufactories’. There were no internal trade barriers and Britain was the largest free-trade area in Europe.

      The 18th-century English were acknowledged throughout Europe for their violence, shooting highwaymen and seducing 17-year-olds, swearing and farting in public, congratulating themselves on their lack of the effeminate refinements which the French affected. One young English nobleman returned from Paris wearing a wig made of very finely spun iron wire. He became famous for it, a measure of what the English were СКАЧАТЬ