The War of Wars (22 page)

As early as January 1793, Kersaint, the Revolution’s foreign affairs spokesman, had declared to the Convention: ‘The credit of England rests upon fictitious wealth; the real riches of that people are scattered everywhere . . . Bounded in territory, the public future of England is found almost wholly in its Bank, and this edifice is entirely supported by the wonderful activity of their naval commerce. Asia, Portugal, and
Spain are the most advantageous markets for the productions of English industry; we should shut these markets to the English by opening them to the world.’

In October 1796, the French Republic declared that all ships of any nationality carrying British goods were subject to seizure and that only ships carrying a ‘certificate of origin’ to prove that the goods were not from Britain would be exempt. But the French had made a classic mistake: with the advent of an industrial and agricultural revolution in Britain, both domestic corn and textile output was increasing dramatically. Thus Britain was moving towards self-sufficiency in key areas of production. The industrial revolution permitted Britain to produce cotton, woollen and muslin goods, as well as hardwares of high value and small bulk which were ideal for smuggling past the French blockade into Europe. Steam was applied to spinning in Britain in the 1790s, taking advantage of copious supplies of coal; in France it was not used until 1812. The cost of weaving a piece of cloth in Britain while the war with France progressed fell dramatically from nearly 40 shillings in 1795 to just 15 shillings in 1810. The French underestimated this, and believed that all they had to do was cut off trade to bring the British economy juddering to a halt. In the event, however, they found Britain only too happy to fight back.

The principal theatres of naval and colonial conflict were to be the West Indies, source of the lucrative sugar trade; the East Indies, with their spices, merchandise and bullion; and the Mediterranean, not just a trading lake in its own right, but a key to communication with the East. This global war was also played out against the Cape of Good Hope, a key staging post for trade with the East Indies; and parts of Latin America, viewed by Britain and France as a potential source of great wealth as the Spanish empire crumbled. Eventually too, for somewhat different reasons, the young United States was to be dragged into the conflict.

The West Indies’ sugar trade was enormously lucrative; but the islands, with their dense foliage and high rainfall were soporifically hot, breeding grounds for disease, and increasingly prone to slave rebellions against the hugely wealthy owners of the giant and inhuman plantations. Pitt saw the war as an opportunity to take on France in the
colonies, always Britain’s chief interest. The British had some 6,000 troops stationed in the Caribbean; and French planters on the isles of St Domingue, Martinique and Guadeloupe, deeply hostile to the revolutionary regime in France, had already appealed to the British to take their islands over.

There followed a pyrrhic campaign of an ineptitude which mirrored Pitt’s disastrous conduct of the continental war against France. In February 1793 attacks were authorized on the French Windward Islands and on Tobago. In April the latter was taken in a small-scale attack, but the French garrison in Martinique drove off the British assailants in June. At the time it was learnt that the French were sending reinforcements to the West Indies but, thanks to cabinet indecision, it was not until November that a British squadron, under Sir John Jervis and Sir Charles Grey, got under way, largely because the former sensibly would wait no longer.

Meanwhile the British forces based in Jamaica had landed on Dominique, where the local planters had appealed to the British for help against a slave uprising. Mole St Nicholas promptly surrendered to the British, who now decided to block the capital, Port-au-Prince. But the British force – some 900 men at its largest – was small. Only in May 1794 was their precarious toehold on the island reinforced with the arrival of Jervis’s squadron.

Jervis and Grey had already performed superbly, raiding Barbados in January with 7,000 troops, seizing Martinique in March, St Lucia in April, the Saints and Guadeloupe by the end of the month. Port-au-Prince fell in June. It was a clean sweep: it seemed that the Caribbean had become a British lake. Pitt, who by now was facing increasingly bad news in Europe, was exultant.

The West Indies were of huge commercial importance, particularly to the French, accounting for fully a third of that country’s trade, mainly in sugar, cotton and coffee. Almost a fifth of the French population depended on the West Indies for their livelihoods, particularly the towns of Nantes, Bordeaux, Le Havre and Marseilles and it was no coincidence that these were some of the least enthusiastic supporters of the Revolution which imperilled that trade through war with Britain.

Then, in June, the French squadron that had escaped the British Naval blockade of Rochefort in April arrived. This landed 1,500 troops on Guadeloupe, which after fierce fighting the British had to give up, while retaining the eastern half of the island; they evacuated altogether in December. Fighting also broke out in western St Domingue. Meanwhile ferocious black uprisings occurred there and the Windward Isles, while the British forces were ravaged by tropical diseases.

The British tried to assemble a relief expedition from England and Ireland, but many of the troops were required elsewhere. By the end of the year only three regiments and a single ship from Plymouth had arrived. By then another French contingent of 1,500 French troops had reached Guadeloupe, having dodged the British blockade outside Brest. The British debated earnestly whether to counter this by raising troops from the black and mulatto populations, Pitt eventually deciding not to do so, for fear of offending local white interests.

In March, however, the black populations rose up against the British in a concerted revolt in Grenada, St Vincent and St Lucia, forcing the soldiers to retreat into their garrisons. Toussaint L’Ouverture, the legendary black leader of St Domingue, also continued to fight, and there was even an uprising in Jamaica. Reinforcements at last arrived and helped the British regain some control of Grenada and St Vincent. But thousands were lost to disease and fighting – some 2,000 in St Domingue alone.

In June 1795, a further 2,000 men were sent to the Caribbean. The following month the British took a much more serious step: a senior British commander, Sir Ralph Abercromby, was placed in charge of an army of 15,000 men with a naval squadron to retake Guadeloupe and St Lucia, to seize the Dutch settlements of Surinam, Demerara and San Eustatius (the Dutch in Europe having now made their peace with the victorious French) and completely to subdue not just Grenada and St Vincent but St Domingue and San Domingo.

The expedition was seriously delayed, and squabbles broke out as to its objectives. It was soon scaled down. Abercromby, who arrived in April 1796, retook St Lucia and then occupied St Vincent and Grenada in June. Demerara was also taken. San Domingue was reinforced, but not subdued, while Guadeloupe was left alone. These successes were
modest but they were virtually all the British government had to show as reverse followed reverse across continental Europe.

Abercromby was ordered to take Trinidad, and even Puerto Rico. For Pitt the West Indies were now the main theatre of military operations. His judgement has seriously to be questioned, perhaps even more so than over the disastrously half-hearted and ineffectual effort on the continent: for the fighting did little serious damage to French trade and did little to increase the volume of British trade. The two most important objectives of St Domingue and Guadeloupe had not been secured, with only a toehold on the one and expulsion from the other: and ultimately this costly war was to take the lives of a staggering 50,000 British soldiers and seamen, mostly through disease – nearly 40 per cent of those sent over to fight. In Pitt’s defence, had he not acted, the French might have gone on the offensive against the British. But he had delivered the first blow and prioritized the campaign. He had appallingly little to show for it.

The view from London by mid-1795 was one of almost unrelieved gloom: the British had been thrown off the continent; the Dutch were now occupied and hostile; the Prussians and the Spanish had dropped out of the war, and the latter were turning hostile. Tuscany and Sardinia were already so. The Danes were potential enemies. The Russians, while now sympathetic to Britain, were too remote to offer much assistance. Britain was achieving modest successes in the West Indies, at a considerable cost of men lost through illness, for dubious long-term gains. Moreover, for more than a year there had been no spectacular fleet action, apart from several superb frigate encounters which, however, had no decisive effect on the war.

Pitt and Grenville pinned their hopes on two will-o’-the-wisps: that revolutionary France might yet collapse, of which there was little sign – they had missed their opportunity when it really was disintegrating – and that the Austrians could be tempted again to stage a major offensive against France, which seemed an unlikely course of action for the weak, serious-minded young Emperor.

An emissary was despatched to Vienna: Francis Jackson, a diplomat, left in mid-October and arrived to find the Austrian court highly
optimistic. They had launched a counter-attack and defeated the French at Mainz, then moved into the Palatinate, raising the sieges of Mannheim and Frankfurt. The Austrian chief minister, Baron Johann Thugut, was warmly welcoming, promising 200,000 men in exchange for the suggested £3 million loan, although seeking better rates of interest.

However, the rally proved to be cruelly shortlived: a combined Austro-Sardinian force was defeated at Loano, which made them pull out of the coastline west of Genoa. The Austrian commander on the Rhine, Field Marshal Francis Clairfait, sought an armistice to give rest to his exhausted men. Pitt offered peace feelers to what was seen to be a new and more moderate government in France, that of the Directory, which had just taken control. The response was a blunt rebuff. The French returned a flat no until all British conquests were returned and France was recognized as having natural frontiers extending to the Rhine, the Alps and Pyrenees. Pitt had failed to realize that the Directory, just as much as the Jacobins, required perpetual war to maintain its control, mobilizing French patriotism to distract the people from the shambles and privations at home.

The dismal year of 1795 was also marked by an event that went almost unnoticed in Britain. Napoleon Bonaparte, when ordered to command the artillery in the Vendée, which he regarded as tantamount to exile, under his more successful young rival Lazare Hoche, simply turned the post down. Given the importance of the revolt in the Vendée and the possibility he would make his name there, it was an extraordinary thing for him to do, and aroused suspicions that he was not really devoted to the revolutionary cause. It seems likely that he was still hoping to be sent to Italy as a theatre of operations.

Napoleon was put on leave and spent a few miserable months in Paris, where he found himself impoverished and something of a social outcast, most of his half-pay going on supporting his dispossessed family in Toulon: Napoleon was never more attractive than in his dogged support of his family in difficult times. A female contemporary remarked of him in Paris: ‘I can still picture him, entering the courtyard of the Hôtel de la Tranquillité, and crossing it with an awkward, uncertain step. He wore a nasty round hat pulled down over his eyes, from which his hair, like a spaniel’s ears, flopped over his frock-coat . . . an overall sickly effect was created by his thinness and his yellow complexion.’

Napoleon remarked in a letter to his older brother Joseph: ‘There is only one thing to do in this world and that is to keep acquiring money and more money, power and more power. All the rest is meaningless.’ Always prone to self-pity, he contemplated suicide: ‘If this continues I shall end by not stepping aside when a carriage rushes past.’ He
considered serving in the Russian army as a mercenary, but the Russians would not give him the rank of major, then that of Turkey, which approached him to modernize its small artillery. He agreed and prepared to leave.

Napoleon had not entirely wasted his time in Paris. He made important connections and also pursued romantic liaisons – which however his poverty and shabby and uncouth appearance did nothing to further. The truth was that after Toulon, believing himself to be the hero of the hour and free to turn down major postings at his whim, he discovered that in worldly Paris he was almost a nobody, a minor military figure, a gauche provincial whose social pretensions were sneered at.

Back in Toulon he had been attracted to the younger sister of his brother Joseph’s bride, Julie Clary. The girl was only sixteen when he met her, and was known as Désirée, although Napoleon preferred her middle name, Eugénie. She was pretty, vivacious and natural, although a little plump. Napoleon treated her as a younger sister. ‘Your unfailing sweetness and the gay openness which is yours alone inspire me with affection, dear Eugénie, but I am so occupied by work I don’t think this affection ought to cut into my soul and leave a deeper scar.’

In April 1795 he became engaged to her. She was rich – possessed of a dowry of 100,000 francs: they became lovers. Soon afterwards Napoleon revealed his feelings in a short story, in which he called himself Clissold:

Eugénie . . . without being plain, was not a beauty, but she was good, sweet, lively and tender . . . she never looked boldly at a man. She smiled sweetly, revealing the most beautiful teeth imaginable. If you gave her your hand, she gave her’s shyly, and only for a moment, almost teasingly showing the prettiest hand in the world, where the whiteness of the skin contrasted with blue veins. Amélie [the elder sister] was like a piece of French music, the chords and harmony of which everyone enjoys. Eugénie was like the nightingale’s song, or a piece by Paesiello, which only sensitive people enjoy; it appears mediocre to the average listener, but its melody transports and excites to passion those who possess intense feelings.