The Influence of Sea Power upon the French Revolution and Empire 1793-1812, Vol II

The strain, however, was too great to be endured by the great composite political system which the emperor had founded, and through which he hoped to exclude his enemy from every continental market. The privations of all classes, the sufferings of the poorer, turned men's hearts from the foreign ruler, who, in the pursuit of aims which they neither sympathized with nor understood, was causing them daily ills which they understood but too well. All were ready to fall away and rise in rebellion when once the colossus was shaken. The people of Spain, at one extremity of Europe, revolted in 1808; the Czar of Russia, at the other, threw down the gauntlet in 1810, by a proclamation which opened his harbors to all neutral ships bringing colonial produce, the object of Napoleon's bitterest reclamations. In the one case the people refused the ruler put over them to insure a more vigorous enforcement of the continental blockade; in the other the absolute monarch declined longer to burden his subjects with exactions which were ruining them for the same object. The Spanish outbreak gave England a foothold upon the Continent at a point most favorable for support by her maritime strength and most injurious to the emperor, not only from the character of the country and the people, but also because it compelled him to divide his forces between his most remote frontiers. The defection of the czar made a fatal breach in the line of the continental blockade, opening a certain though circuitous access for British goods to all parts of Europe. Incapable of anticipating defeat and of receding from a purpose once formed, Napoleon determined upon war with Russia. He, the great teacher of concentration, proceeded to divide his forces between the two extremes of Europe. The results are well known to all.

It was not by attempting great military operations on land, but by controlling the sea, and through the sea the world outside Europe, that both the first and the second Pitt ensured the triumph of their country in the two contests where either stood as the representative of the nation. Mistakes were made by both; it was the elder who offered to Spain to give Gibraltar for Minorca, which the younger recovered by force of arms. Mistakes many may be charged against the conduct of the war under the younger; but, with one possible exception, they are mistakes of detail in purely military direction, which cannot invalidate the fact that the general line of action chosen and followed was correct. To recur to the simile already borrowed from military art, the mistakes were tactical, not strategic; nor, it may be added, to any great degree administrative.

The possible exception occurred at the beginning of the war, in the spring and summer of 1793. It may be, as has been claimed by many, that a march direct upon Paris at that time by the forces of the Coalition would have crushed all opposition, and, by reducing the mob of the capital, have insured the submission of the country. It may be so; but in criticising the action of the British ministers, so far as it was theirs, it must be remembered that not only did men of the highest military reputation in Europe advise against the movement, but that the Duke of Brunswick, then second to none in distinction as a soldier, had tried it and failed a few months before. For unprofessional men to insist, against the best professional opinions at their command, is a course whose propriety or prudence can only be shown by the event,—a test to which the advance upon Paris, now so freely prescribed by the wisdom of after-sight, was not brought. One consideration, generally overlooked, may here be presented. To attempt so momentous and hazardous an enterprise, when the leaders to whom its conduct must be intrusted regard it as unwise, is to incur a great probability of disaster. Even Bonaparte would not force his plans upon Moreau, when the latter, in 1800, persisted in preferring his own. Yet this must statesmen have done, had they in 1793 ordered their generals to advance on Paris.

Once lost, the opportunity, if such it were, did not recur. It depended purely upon destroying the resistance of France before it had time to organize. Thenceforward there remained to encounter, not the policy of a court, playing its game upon the chess-board of war, with knights and pawns, castles and armies, but a nation in arms, breathing a fury and inspired by passions which only physical exhaustion could repress. Towards that exhaustion Great Britain could on the land side contribute effectually only by means of allies, and this she did. On the side of the sea, her own sphere of action, there were two things she needed to do. The first was to sustain her own strength, by fostering, widening, and guarding the workings of her commercial system; the second was to cut France off from the same sources of strength and life. Both were most effectually accomplished,—not, as Macaulay asserts, by the able administration of Earl Spencer (whose merit is not disputed), but by the general policy of the ministry in the extension of the colonial system, in the wise attention paid to the support of British commerce in all its details, and in the extraordinary augmentation of the navy. Between 1754 and 1760, the period embracing the most brilliant triumphs of the elder Pitt, the British navy increased by 33 per cent. Between 1792 and 1800, under his son, the increase was 82 per cent. How entirely the military management and direction of this mighty force depended upon the sea-officers, and not upon the statesman, when a civilian was at the head of the Admiralty, will be evident to any one studying closely the slackness of the Channel fleet immediately under the eye of Earl Spencer, or the paltry dispositions made in particular emergencies like the Irish invasion of 1796, and contrasting these with the vigor manifested at that very moment under Jervis in the Mediterranean, or later, in the admirable operations of the same officer in command of the Channel fleet.

Few indeed are the statesmen who are not thus dependent upon professional subordinates. Pitt was no exception. He was not a general or an admiral, nor does he appear so to have considered himself; but he realized perfectly where Great Britain's strength lay, and where the sphere of her efforts. By that understanding he guided her movements; and in the final triumph wrought by the spirit of the British nation over the spirit of the French Revolution, the greatest share cannot justly be denied to the chief who, in the long struggle against wind and tide, forced often to swerve from the direct course he would have followed by unforeseen dangers that rose around the ship in her passage through unknown seas, never forgot the goal "Security," upon which from the first his will was set. Fit indeed it was that he should drop at his post just when Trafalgar had been won and Austerlitz lost. That striking contrast of substantial and, in fact, decisive success with bewildering but evanescent disaster, symbolized well his troubled career, as it superficially appears. As the helm escaped his dying hands, all seemed lost, but in truth the worst was passed. "The pilot had weathered the storm."

The death of Pitt was followed by the formation of a ministry of somewhat composite character, centring round his relative and former colleague, Lord Grenville, and his life-long rival, Fox. This held office but for fourteen months; a period long enough for it to afford Napoleon the pretext for his Berlin decree, but not sufficient to impress any radical change upon the main lines of policy laid down by Pitt. Upon its fall in March, 1807, his devoted personal friends and political followers succeeded to power. Confronted almost immediately by the threatening union between the empires of the East and West, of which the known, if concealed, purpose was to divide between France and Russia the control of the Continent, and to subdue Great Britain also by commercial exhaustion, the ministry, both necessarily and by tradition, opposed to this combination the policy transmitted to them by their great leader. Colonial enterprises were multiplied, until it could be said of colonies, as the French Directory had before sorrowfully confessed concerning shipping, that not one was left under a flag hostile to Great Britain. The navy, expanding to its greatest numerical force in 1808, was maintained in equal strength, if in somewhat diminished numbers, up to the termination of the struggle. While unable to prevent the material growth of the French navy by ship-building carried on in its ports, Great Britain continued to impede its progress and cut off its supplies by the close watch maintained over the French coast, by confining its fleets to their harbors,—and so shutting them off from the one drill ground, the sea,—and finally by frustrating Napoleon's project of increasing his own power by violently seizing the vessels of smaller continental states.

The secure tenure of the great common and highway of commerce—the sea—was thus provided for. The enemy's navy was neutralized, his bases abroad cut off, his possessions became the markets as well as the sources of British trade. It was not enough, however, for commerce, that its transit should be comparatively safe. Its operations of exchange needed both materials and markets, both producers and consumers. From these, as is known, Napoleon sought to exclude it by the Continental System, which through the co-operation of Russia he thought could be rendered effective. To this again the ministry of Perceval and Canning opposed the Orders in Council, tempered by the license system, with the double object of prolonging the resistance of Great Britain and sapping that of her enemy; measures which but reproduced, on a vaster scale, the Rule of 1756, with the modifications introduced by Pitt, in 1798, for the same ends.

The question thus resolved itself, as has before been perhaps too often said, into a conflict of endurance,—which nation could live the longest in this deadly grapple. This brings us back again face to face with the great consideration: Was the struggle which began in 1793 one to be solved by a brilliant display of generalship, shattering the organized forces of an ordinary enemy, and with it crushing the powers of resistance in the state? Or had it not rather its origin in the fury of a nation, against which all coercion except that of exhaustion is fruitless? The aims, the tendencies, the excitement of the French people had risen to a pitch, and had made demands, which defied repression by any mere machinery or organization, however skilfully framed or directed. When the movement of a nation depends upon—nay, is the simple evidence of—a profound emotion permeating each individual of the mass, the mighty impulse, from its very diffusion, has not those vital centres of power, the destruction of which paralyzes the whole. Not till the period of passion—necessarily brief, but for the time resistless—has given place to the organization to which all social movement tends, is a people found to have, as the tyrant of antiquity wished, a single neck to be severed by a blow.

The frenzy of the French nation had spent itself, the period of organization had set in, when Bonaparte appeared upon the scene; but, as the tension of popular emotion slackened, there had not been found, in the imperfect organization which sought to replace it, the power to bear the burden of the state. No longer able to depend upon a homogeneous movement of the millions, but only upon the efficient working of the ordinary machinery of civil government and armies, in her case most imperfectly developed, France now offered to the attacks of her enemies those vital points, with which, when crushed, resistance ceases. Military reverses and exhaustion by bad government brought her in 1795, and again in 1799, to her last gasp. At both epochs Bonaparte saved her.

The great captain and organizer not only brought victory with him and restored the machinery of government; he supplied also a centre around which popular enthusiasm and confidence might once more rally. He became not only the exponent of national unity, but in a very real sense the embodiment of those aspirations and aggressive tendencies, which in the first days of the Revolution had bound Frenchmen together as one man, but had afterwards evaporated and frittered away for want of that definiteness of aim and sagacious direction which only a great leader can impart. Under his skilful manipulation the lofty sentiments of the early revolutionists became catchwords, which assured his hold upon the imaginations and enthusiasm of the people, again swayed as one man to follow him in his career of aggression. Metternich well said that Bonaparte was to him simply the incarnation of the Revolution. ⁴⁹⁰

It was with these two phases of one and the same condition that Europe had to deal between 1793 and 1814. In the one instance a people unified by a common passion and common aims, in the other the same people concentrated into a common action by submission to the will of a sovereign, apparently resistless in the council as in the field. It is true that the affections of his subjects soon ceased to follow him, except in the armies by whose power he ruled, but the result is the same. All the energies of the nation are summed up in a single overpowering impulse,—at first spontaneous, afterwards artificial,—to which during the first half of Napoleon's career was given a guidance of matchless energy and wisdom.

Such a combination is for the time irresistible, as the continent of Europe proved during long and weary years. Absolute power, concentrated force, central position, extraordinary sagacity and energy, all united to assure to Napoleon the dazzling successes which are matters of history. The duration and the permanent results of this startling career depended, however, upon the staying power of the French nation and upon the steadfastness of the resistance. Upon the Continent, the latter in its actuality ceased. Potentially it remained,—men's hearts swelled to bursting under the tyranny they endured; but before the power and the genius of the great conqueror outward rebellion shrank away. States dared not trust each other,—they could not act together; and so men went silently in the bitterness of their spirits.

There remained one small group of islands, close on the flank of the would-be ruler of the world, with a population numbering little more than half that of his immediate dominions, whose inhabitants deeply sympathized with sufferings and oppression they were powerless directly to relieve. The resistance they had offered to the aggressive fury of the Revolution they continued to oppose to its successor and representative; but it was not by direct action in the field, but only by operations aimed to abridge the resources and endurance of France, that they could look forward to a possibility of success. For seven years went on this final silent strife, whose outlines have been traced in the preceding chapter of this work. During its continuance Great Britain herself, while escaping the political oppression and national humiliation undergone by the continental peoples, drank deep of the cup of suffering. Her strength wasted visibly; but the mere fact of her endurance and persistence compelled her enemy to efforts more exhausting, to measures more fatal, than those forced upon herself. And, while thus subjected to a greater strain, Napoleon was by Great Britain cut off from that greatest of all sources of renewing vitality—the Sea.

The true function of Great Britain in this long struggle can scarcely be recognized unless there be a clear appreciation of the fact that a really great national movement, like the French Revolution, or a really great military power under an incomparable general, like the French empire under Napoleon, is not to be brought to terms by ordinary military successes, which simply destroy the organized force opposed.

Of the latter, the protracted and not wholly hopeless resistance, which in 1813 and 1814 succeeded even the great Russian catastrophe, is a signal instance; while to subvert such a power, wielded by such a man, by any reverse less tremendous than it then underwent, is hopeless. Two Napoleons do not co-exist. In the former case, on the other hand, the tangible something, the decisive point against which military effort can be directed, is wanting. Of this the struggle between the North and South in the American Civil War affords a conspicuous example. Few, probably, would now maintain that the capture of Richmond in the first year of the war, when the enthusiasm of the Southern people was at its height, their fighting force undiminished, their hopes undimmed by the bitter disappointments of a four years' struggle, would have had any decisive effect upon the high-spirited race. Positions far more important fell without a sign of such result. No man could then have put his finger here, or there, and said, "This is the key-stone of resistance;" for in the high and stern feeling of the moment resistance was not here nor there, but everywhere.

So was it in the early flush of the French Revolution. The "On to Paris" of 1793 would probably have had no more decisive results than the "On to Richmond" of 1861, had it been successful. Not till enthusiasm has waned before sorrow, and strength failed under exhaustion, does popular impulse, when deep and universal, acquiesce in the logic of war. To such exhaustion France was brought when Bonaparte took the helm. By his organizing genius he restored her military strength, the material of which still remained, economized such resources as the wastefulness of preceding governments had left, and above all secured for her a further power of endurance by drawing upon the life-blood of surrounding nations. So exhaustion was for the time postponed; but, if the course of aggression which Bonaparte had inherited from the Revolution was to continue, there were needed, not the resources of the Continent only, but of the world. There was needed also a diminution of ultimate resistance below the stored-up aggressive strength of France; otherwise, however procrastinated, the time must come when the latter should fail.

On both these points Great Britain withstood Napoleon. She shut him off from the world, and by the same act prolonged her own powers of endurance beyond his power of aggression. This in the retrospect of history was the function of Great Britain in the Revolutionary and Napoleonic period; and that the successive ministries of Pitt and his followers pursued the course best fitted, upon the whole, to discharge that function, is their justification to posterity. It is the glory of Pitt's genius that as he discovered the object, "Security," so likewise he foresaw the means, Exhaustion, by which alone the French propaganda of aggression would be brought to pause. The eloquent derision poured upon his predictions of failure from financial exhaustion, from expenditure of resources, from slackening of enthusiasm, recoils from the apprehension of the truth. He saw clearly the line of Great Britain's action, he foresaw the direction of events, he foretold the issue. How long the line would be, how the course of events would be retarded, how protracted the issue, he could not foretell, because no man could foresee the supreme genius of Napoleon Bonaparte.