5 - Defining French Eighteenth-Century Naval Strategy

Summary

If the word ‘strategy’ is now essential for us, it was however absent from French vocabulary of the eighteenth century. At that time no theorist of naval war considered anything than ‘tactics’, that is to say ‘the art to arrange the Navies in the order which is appropriate for the object that one proposes & to regulate their movements’. It meant a science of naval evolutions, or, in other words, operations, which a squadron could carry out. This science is the general officer's one, but, reading the French theorists, from the P. Hoste to the vicomte de Grenier via Bigot de Morogues, it is clear that its subject was not yet a ‘universal science of the war’ including the art of preparing a plan of campaign. That was the task, not of the seaman, but was the monopoly of the king and some of his ministers. On the other hand, the vocabulary then of use in France strained to catch a reality of this. Although the neologism ‘la stratégique’ appears in 1771 from the quill of the Lieutenant-Colonel Joly de Maizeroy, the erudite translator of Byzantine military writings, and it was useful to name such a science which forms and prepares the projects before directing them, the word, nonetheless, remained rare and was not yet applied to the sea.

To this first linguistic difficulty is added a second, related to the frequent absence of sources in archives on the discussions and the methods of decision making by the king in his council. Generally, the design of a plan of operation remains opaque to us. Only the orders given as a result are directly known; all the former stages remaining a state secret. At most we can guess that the development of a plan of campaign was conditioned by political objectives of the Bourbon monarch, by the theoretical structure of the naval forces, fixed on different occasions during the century, and by the concrete constraints amongst units available or likely to be so a few months later. Everyone always expected a short war, such as only one campaign at sea, of a few months, would be enough to confirm the decision.