1 - The Evolution of French Naval Leadership: Defining the Admiralty of France from the Sixteenth to the Eighteenth Century

Summary

It is easy to conclude that over the course of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries France did not develop the naval leadership needed to compete effectively with Britain in the eighteenth, and this despite the many outstanding individual exceptions and successes that can be identified along the way. This relative weakness, it seems, was due to a series of deep contradictions within the French navy. Separate Mediterranean and Atlantic coasts, for example, presented practical problems of coordination and command, but also quite distinct cultures of leadership: one sea where traditions of noble, military command stretched back centuries and the other where any such traditions had to be invented. A gulf could also be said to have existed between the maritime periphery and the centre in Paris or Versailles, separated not just geographically but also by contrasting maritime and continental strategic outlooks. Similarly, it was difficult to integrate a typically jealous, privileged, and Catholic nobility with the body of active and able seamen in coastal communities, a great many of whom were Huguenots. Thus, the conflict within the naval hierarchy (traditionally said to be divided between the noble officiers rouges and the officiers bleus of the lower orders) was made all the more intractable by the wider confessional division in France. If some of these contradictions now seem less stark than they were once believed to be, they nevertheless still contribute to the perception that the navy suffered from a debilitating imbalance due to the separation of civil and military authority. The history of the navy was dominated by a succession of high-profile and powerful ministers of state which appears to have come at the cost of strong naval leadership and command. The admiralty of France seems irrelevant in comparison. That this was a larger political failure in France is reinforced by the popular image of an ineffective or uninterested monarchy acting as something of an emblem of this wider structural dysfunction. This civil-military division needs to be considered more carefully, however. Far from just the effect of serial mismanagement, it was the product of careful attempts to manage the balance between another, far more relevant, contradiction. Historically, the navy was shaped by its twin functions as an aspect of governance and as a military arm of royal power.