CHAPTER 3

The Sceptre of the World

However chimerical the aim of Universal Monarchy, that of universal influence through wealth would cease to be a chimera if one nation managed to take control of all the commerce of America.

MARSHAL DE NOAILLES, 1755 ¹

We must be merchants while we are soldiers . . . our trade depends on a proper exertion of our maritime strength; . . . trade and maritime force depend upon each other; and . . . the riches that are the true resources of this country depend upon its commerce.

LORD HOLDERNESS, secretary of state, 1757²

The discovery of the New World has transformed the political system of Europe. Once, land forces made the destiny of states, but since a century ago Neptune’s trident has become the sceptre of the world.

French foreign ministry report, 1779³

T he contest begun in 1688 spread from Europe into the Americas, Asia, Africa and the Pacific. The spur was commerce. France and Britain hugely expanded their foreign trade over the century, transforming their domestic economies. The most dynamic element of this trade was outside Europe. Is this then the simple answer: that the ‘second hundred years war’ was fought for profit? French commentators at the time, and many historians since – especially but not only French historians – have blamed the insatiable greed of the nation of shopkeepers, harnessing the power of the State to their grand ambition of pillaging the world. The hapless French, according to this view, wishing only to trade peaceably with non-European peoples, were constantly being savaged by the ravening British bulldog. This is a grave accusation, but it turns the story on its head: it was the conflict between the two states in Europe that transformed commercial competition into imperial war.

Everyone knew that trade was power. As early as 1714, a French report warned that ‘our industry and shipping will be eclipsed and England will become formidable by an increase of population, work and wealth’.⁴ Trade increased tax revenue and underpinned the ability to borrow. It built up the merchant fleet and the number of sailors to man the navy in time of war. The British merchant fleet increased from 340,000 tons in 1686 to nearly 2.5 million in 1815; the French, though much smaller, became the world’s second-largest. Half the ocean-going ships of both countries were employed in colonial trade.⁵ Both were always aware of the stakes, and of how unstable was the balance of power. George III noted at the height of the American War of Independence that ‘if we lose our Sugar Islands it will be impossible to raise money to continue the war’. At the end of the century, a British minister was stating the obvious when he recalled that ‘Great Britain can at no time propose to maintain an extensive and complicated war but by destroying the colonial resources of our enemies and adding proportionately to our own commercial resources, which are, and must ever be, the sole basis of our maritime strength.’⁶

Interests on both sides – financiers, the great seaports, some manufacturers, the chartered trading companies – supported ‘patriotic’ expansion. In Britain, imperial wars were more popular than Continental expeditions. But if easy victory was popular, long wars were politically perilous. For every interest served, another was harmed. Both the British and French East India Companies found that their military burdens could easily absorb all their profits. In any case, neither Versailles nor Whitehall was driven by commercial lobbies or public opinion: their priorities were security, prestige and power.

As Britain eventually emerged as the greatest imperial state, largely at France’s expense, it was natural to explain the process as premeditated despoliation. Yet it was France that regularly took the initiative – for example raiding New York in the 1690s – in order to divert British forces from Europe.⁷ It was France and Spain (France’s main ally, linked by a Bourbon ‘family compact’) that planned and prepared for war by naval building in the 1740s, 1750s, 1770s and 1780s. All Britain’s peacetime alliances were defensive. British statesmen saw their actions, however bellicose they might become, as motivated by fear of France. Jeremy Black concludes that ‘No British government sought unprovoked war for the sake of seizing new territories.’⁸ Imperial conquest leading to permanent occupation and government took place only when France and Britain were direct antagonists, and where each was desperate to restrain or exclude the other: in North America, the Caribbean and India. Neither side yet sized up neutral Asian states. Neither turned on the softer targets of the Portuguese, Dutch or Spanish empires. Some colonial expeditions did turn into huge looting sprees, such as the capture of Manila and Havana at the end of the Seven Years War. But these tempting prizes – Spanish, not French – only came after Spain had voluntarily entered the war on France’s side.

Neither Britain nor France had a clear world strategy, or even (at least before the revolution) the aim of destroying the other’s power. To do so would turn the rest of Europe against the victor. But each was convinced that the other did have such a strategy. Because France was ‘naturally’ the dominant European power, Britain was alarmed by any hint of ‘universal monarchy’. France was sensitive to the ‘arrogance’ and ‘pretension’ of Britain in undermining that established dominance, especially through overseas trade.

Their conflict had profound and long-term consequences all round the world because the eighteenth century was a period of global political instability in which for various reasons the authority and power of established European and non-European empires were weakening. In Mughal India, the French and British were partly drawn, and partly pushed themselves, into local power struggles, in which strategic, political and economic interests interacted.⁹ Britain’s final victory over France, in the context of this global crisis, brought it a predominance that would previously have been inconceivable. It is hard to exaggerate the importance of these years, which clear-sighted contemporaries were fully aware of. As one French historian points out, they decided the shape of the West and the world balance of power well into the twentieth century.¹⁰

Sugar and Slaves

The labours of the colonists settled in these long-scorned islands are the sole basis of the African trade, extend the fisheries and cultivation of North America, provide advantageous outlets for the manufactures of Asia, double and perhaps triple the activity of the whole of Europe. They can be regarded as the principal cause of the rapid movement that stirs the Universe.
ABBE RAYNAL, 1770¹¹

Sugar was the succulent sap of both empires. No commodity in history, except bullion and oil, can compare in geopolitical consequence. One of the first products of mass consumption to be brought from the tropics, it was the most valuable commodity imported into Europe in the eighteenth century. As Adam Smith noted, its profitability was ‘much greater than any cultivation that is known’. The sugar planters of the Caribbean were the richest group in the world. Demand kept rising: Britain imported 25,000 tons in 1715, and over 100,000 by 1780, as per capita consumption rose from 4lb per head to 20lb. Sugar went into tea, which became simultaneously the national drink, and into alcoholic drinks. Treacle sweetened bread and porridge. Jams and puddings became national symbols. This increased demand for neglected agricultural products, especially fruit and berries, and helped to nourish the expanding urban population.

Sugar was differently important for France. Because the French (being poorer and having wine) consumed less of it, most of their production, which outstripped that of the British colonies, was re-exported across Europe and the Middle East. The French possessed Saint-Domingue (now Haiti). It was the most valuable territory in the world. With ideal soil and geography, by 1743 it produced more and cheaper sugar than all the British islands combined, with coffee, cotton and indigo as bonuses. Its trade in the 1780s equalled that of the entire United States. In addition, France possessed Martinique, Guadeloupe and other islands. French maritime and economic dynamism before the revolution was fuelled by sugar. While domestic exports increased fourfold between 1716 and 1789, colonial trade increased tenfold, and by the 1780s Caribbean products accounted for 40 per cent of total French exports.¹²

Sugar was the hub of wider commerce. It buttressed other major trades such as rum and tea. It drew imports into the Caribbean: linen from Ireland, Scotland and Brittany, fish from Newfoundland, timber from New England, luxury goods from England and France (including 40 per cent of the wines of the Bordelais). Duties on sugar accounted for a large slice of state income – over one-eighth of the hugely expanded British revenue at the height of the Napoleonic wars.¹³

Sugar meant slaves. Here, France and Britain were accomplices and rivals. Some 6 million people, plus the huge number who died in the process, were shipped from Africa – the largest enforced movement of people in history. Though every European country was involved, the British became the largest shippers, carrying about 3.6 million people, and the French, because of Saint-Domingue, the largest buyers. African rulers provided slaves in return for vast quantities of cotton cloth from India and Lancashire, woollens from Normandy and Yorkshire, enough guns from Birmingham and Charleville to equip several armies, rum from North America, brandy from western France, and cowrie shells from the Pacific. The main slaving ports were Liverpool and Nantes, which over the century outdistanced London, Bordeaux, Bristol and Le Havre, though most ports shared in the trade. Liverpool’s advantage was that it was safely distant from privateers in the Channel. Liverpool and Nantes astounded contemporaries with their opulence. Nantes was ‘fuller of motion, life and activity than any place I have been at in France’. These ports drew on their hinterlands for goods to trade. Hence, western France was the centre of French manufacturing. Similarly, by 1780 one-third of Manchester’s cloth exports went to Africa.¹⁴ This was the notorious triangular trade: carrying manufactured goods to Africa to exchange for slaves, sold in the Caribbean to purchase sugar for Europe.

Criticism of the trade was muted. John Locke denounced slavery as vile and indefensible, but he owned shares in a slaving company. So did King’s College, Cambridge, philanthropic Dissenters, American Quakers and French religious orders. The Jesuits were major slave owners, and the failure of their Caribbean business ventures precipitated their expulsion from France. At the other end of the scale, Ursuline nuns owned ‘but three boiling pans in one shed and nineteen old negroes’.¹⁵ Naval heroes, French, British and American, were keen supporters and participants. Many arguments were used to soothe pricking consciences. Slavery had always existed; it was condoned by religion and history. Africans were ‘suited to live in servitude’, asserted the mayor of Nantes.¹⁶ The slaves themselves were generally captives in war or condemned criminals, who faced death or enslavement anyway: their lot in the Americas would be no worse, and it might save their lives and even, argued pious slavers, their souls. In any case, the trade was economically too important to risk. Not to engage in it would merely hand a dangerous advantage to the enemy. And of course in spite of risks it was profitable for the metropolises, the colonies and the African rulers. So it became routine, with slave ships calledCharming Sally and Aimable Cécile, Reformation (a Quaker ship) and, in the early years of the French revolution, Egalité. One Scottish-run slaving post off Sierra Leone had a golf course.¹⁷ Laws were passed in France and Britain to give slight protection to slaves, but there was little serious criticism of the trade until the 1760s. It reached its peak in the 1780s.

These sources of wealth and power were not left in peace for long. Even the golf course was ravaged by the French in 1779. In the Caribbean, war had been endemic since the fifteenth century. The Franco-British struggle, in parallel with their European conflict, began in earnest in the 1680s. The Caribbean was a focus of every subsequent war. Tens of thousands of troops were repeatedly sacrificed to tropical diseases: both British and French officers resigned and men deserted when ordered there. But the islands had to be kept at any cost. The French were prepared to sign away Canada to regain Guadeloupe and Martinique in 1763, and the British to abandon Philadelphia to defend Jamaica in 1778.

The Wealth of the Indies

India will some day be the biggest prize for the European powers.
French foreign ministry report, 1777¹⁸

Trade in the high-value products of Asia had long tempted Europeans. To silk and spices was now added a booming demand for light and colourful cotton, of which India was the unrivalled producer; also for Chinese and Indian tea, coffee, indigo and Indian saltpetre – vital for the mass production of gunpowder. The profits from these trades – several hundred per cent – had already helped the British to finance the early wars against Louis XIV. A few thousand Europeans from several nations were established in trading posts, especially Madras and Pondicherry on the Coromandel coast and Calcutta and Chandernagore in Bengal. By mid-century, the French and British were the largest traders, with the Dutch next. Their respective East India Companies were simultaneously rivals and partners, with a shared interest in ensuring that money-making was not disrupted by war. The French controller-general of finance, Silhouette, stated in 1752 that ‘we only want some outposts to protect our commerce; no victories, no conquests, only plenty of merchandise and some augmentation of dividends’.¹⁹ Future enemies traded energetically with each other and intermarried. Jean-François Dupleix, the governor-general of the French establishments, had many British friends and business partners, and Robert Clive made large loans to the French.²⁰ There were many enterprising and footloose adventurers untroubled by national allegiancies. One was the Frenchman Claude Martin, who eventually joined the British and commanded a force of French deserters. Among other exploits, he was tough enough to operate successfully on his own bladder stones with a long piece of steel wire, reflective enough to report on the procedure to the Medical Society of London, and financially successful enough to found a school, La Martinière, in Lucknow, which remains one of India’s most prestigious.²¹

Repeated attempts were made to preserve local neutrality, and hence trading profits, but from the 1740s this became ever more difficult. Contemporaries and subsequent historians have identified culprits, not usually the same ones; but given the widening global conflict between France and Britain, conflict in India would become inevitable. Furthermore, the weakening of the Mughal empire by Persian and Afghan invasions led to struggles among local rulers, which tempted the French and British to join in. Serious battles were fought on Indian soil and in Indian waters during the 1740s as part of the War of Austrian Succession. The poorly fortified British post at Madras was taken by the French, who bloodily repulsed Admiral Boscawen’s attempt to seize Pondicherry. The 1748 Treaty of Aix-la-Chapelle restored the status quo ante. However, the French soldier Charles Bussy thought that ‘neutrality between the two nations [in India] is a pipe-dream’.²² Dupleix, who had recruited several thousand Indian troops, entered into local political struggles to extend French power, make money, and halt the British. ‘That nation, which is said to be the one in Europe that thinks best’ – a clear jab at Voltaire – ‘does not think that making its neighbours jealous should halt its plans. It goes ahead regardless. Why should we not do the same?’²³ The governor of Madras, Thomas Saunders, feared that the French ‘aim at nothing else than to exclude us from the trade of the coast and by degrees from that of India’.²⁴ The East India Company followed Dupleix into Indian politics, raising troops and seeking allies. In the unlikely figure of Robert Clive, clerk turned soldier, it found an audacious and effective commander. With a few hundred men he caused serious embarrassment to Dupleix and his allies. Dupleix’s political ambitions cost the Compagnie des Indes too much money, and in 1754 he was recalled to France. Perhaps he derived some consolation from the fact that (in the words of his recent biographer) ‘for ten years his exploits made arrogant England bend the knee’.²⁵ What he had done was to change the rules of the game: from peaceful trade to armed force, territorial expansion and tax collection. Clive and the British followed suit.

‘A few acres of snow’

The two countries are at war over a few acres of snow in Canada, and they’re spending more on this war than the whole of Canada is worth.
VOLTAIRE, Candide, 1759

Compared with the fortunes of the islands, and the easy money that could be made in India, North America – especially the further north one went – was a less dazzling prospect. Though there had been a French presence since the 1500s, and British settlements since the early 1600s, even basic facts were little known in Europe. Frederick the Great confused North and South America, George III mistook the Mississippi for the Ganges, and a British secretary of state regarded the interior of the Continent as ‘a complete desert and useless’.²⁶ The cod fishery off Terre Neuve (Newfoundland) was important both economically and for employing several thousand seamen – an essential reserve for the national navies. Otherwise, the far north generated a modestly profitable fur trade, which largely passed via the Protestant merchants of La Rochelle, preferred by Versailles so that heretics should bear the risks of a trade threatened by other heretics. The colony of Nouvelle France, spread along the River St Lawrence, never broke even. It was subsidized because of its strategic importance: it menaced the British colonies further south. For the best part of a century, since the Comte de Frontenac had brought the European war to America by trying to sack New York and Boston in the 1690s, settlers and their native allies had been involved in sporadic and vicious warfare. There was a scalp market in Quebec. Indians friendly with the British risked being ‘boiled and eaten’.²⁷ The British colonies, whose inhabitants multiplied from 265,000 in 1700 to 2.3 million in 1770, were hugely more valuable than New France. The southern colonies exported plantation crops, especially tobacco. Those in the north supplied the Caribbean islands, exported strategically important timber for shipbuilding, and built ships themselves. Above all, as a prosperous and expanding economy largely confined to the primary sector, they constituted a buoyant market for British manufactured goods.

Versailles and London agreed on the growing importance of North America in the general scheme of power politics. The War of Austrian Succession had made France stronger. The Duke of Newcastle, the long-serving secretary of state, aimed to contain French power both by a ‘system’ of alliances on the Continent and by strengthening the defences of the colonies, building a fortified naval base at Halifax, and sending cannon to Virginia.²⁸ The French resumed a strategy they had followed sporadically for more than half a century: trying to link New France with their colony Louisiana via the Ohio valley. Their plan was to place a military barrier to British westward encroachment. If they failed to hem in the British colonists, they feared that it would only be a matter of time before they dominated all of North America, and then the whole of the Americas.²⁹ In 1749, only a year after peace was signed at Aix-la-Chapelle, the governor of Nouvelle France, the Marquis de La Galissonnière, began sending detachments, mobilizing native allies, massacring the allies of the British, raiding settlements near the disputed frontiers, arresting or killing British traders, and building forts. French troops rather optimistically left lead plaques at various prominent spots engraved with their claims to ‘the River Oyo [sic] and all its tributaries and all the lands on both sides up to the sources of the said rivers as previous kings of France have enjoyed or ought to have enjoyed and are upheld by force of arms and by the treaties of Ryswick, Utrecht and Aix la Chapelle’.³⁰

In short, both sides believed that a confrontation was unavoidable in America as part of the global rivalry of the two empires. The French believed that the British were preparing for ‘the execution of their vast plans for the whole of America’.³¹ The British believed, in the words of a meeting of colonial representatives in 1754, that the French intended an attack to bring ‘the whole continent to [its] rule [in] a unified French plan [for] universal monarchy’.³² So both made pre-emptive and incompatible territorial claims, and the French and the Spanish expanded their navies.

The Seven Years War, 1756–63

The English, Sire, are the oldest, most dangerous and most formidable enemies of France, a haughty nation, jealous of Your Majesty’s greatness and power, pretending to dispute with you the first rank in Europe, to equal your power on land, and dominate entirely at sea . . . They desire peace only as a means of augmenting their power and their commerce . . . but there is no war so dangerous and damaging as such a peace . . . which will soon enable them to lay down the law to all of Europe.

MARSHAL DE NOAILLES, February 1755³³

It is a question of remaining the first Power or becoming the second.

DUC DE CHOISEUL, 1760³⁴

It has become a commonplace, following Winston Churchill, to call the Seven Years War the true ‘first world war’. In a sense it is the only world war – the only global conflict involving all the great European powers that began outside Europe, was fought primarily for extra-European aims, and whose consequences were greatest beyond Europe.

The first direct clash took place in the disputed Ohio valley in May 1754, when George Washington murdered a party of peaceful French emissaries. So at least it was reported in France. French attempts to secure the valley by force seem in retrospect reckless, even suicidal. Britain normally had command of the seas, making French reinforcement of their colonies difficult in case of hostilities. The thirteen British colonies had over 1,000,000 inhabitants, against 75,000 in Canada and 6,000 in Louisiana. Yet French soldiers and colonial administrators were confident they could nip British expansion in the bud. New France, governed by the Navy Ministry, was, unlike the British colonies, tightly controlled and militarized. All able-bodied men from sixteen to sixty were incorporated into a militia 16,000 strong. The French had more native allies – a key advantage – for although the various nations tried to play off the Europeans against each other, many were accustomed to, or had been cowed by, the French, who also posed less of a territorial threat than the land-hungry British. Hurons, Abenaki and Algonquins were under the influence of French missionaries, who accompanied their expeditions. So the French were rightly confident of their superior striking ability. Once they had penned the British into the coastal strip, the large population would become a burden rather than a benefit to Britain, while the need to defend a vulnerable land border would distract the British from meddling in Europe.³⁵

The Seven Years War

Early in 1755 Versailles and London began to square up. For the first time, both sent large regular forces to North America. The French sent a squadron of warships and troopships to reinforce Nouvelle France. Admiral Boscawen sailed to the mouth of the St Lawrence to intercept it, and although most of the French ships slipped through in the June fog, two were captured. France broke off diplomatic relations. Meanwhile, a force of British regular troops under General Braddock had been sent to the Ohio to take Fort Duquesne, and on 9 July 1755 it was ambushed and slaughtered by an Indian and French force. The following month, the British began to seize all French shipping. The two countries were still formally at peace. Neither side was yet ready for war.

PERFIDIOUS ALBION

The English lie at mid-point between men and beasts. All the difference I can see between the English and the Savages of Africa is that the latter spare the fair sex.
ROBERT-MARTIN LESUIRE, Les sauvages de l’Europe (1760)³⁶

The idea that perfidiousness – at first meaning religious waywardness and later duplicity and hypocrisy – is a characteristic trait of the English remains part of the popular French stereotype, though now semi-jocular. The phrase was coined by Louis XIV’s apologist Bishop Bossuet. The beginnings of the Seven Years War gave it new force. Several events marked opinion deeply.

The incident that made the 22-year-old George Washington briefly notorious took place in the no-man’s-land of the Ohio forests on 28 May 1754. His force of about 100 Virginian militiamen and native allies met a French patrol of some 35 men. The French were killed or captured, and their commander, Ensign de Jumonville, was brained by a Seneca chief. The inexperienced Washington stood helplessly by; but when he was captured shortly after, he signed a paper admitting responsibility for the murder. When the news reached France, Jumonville was hailed as a martyr to English savagery:

The bloodthirsty Englishman yells to the skies
And barbarous joy gleams out from his eyes.³⁷

The incident reappeared in propaganda as late as the 1930s.

Altogether more serious were attacks on French ships in peacetime. Even today this is recorded indignantly by French textbooks as ‘piracy’, while it has entirely disappeared from British memories. According to French accounts, Admiral Boscawen’s ships hailed the French with shouts of ‘Peace’ before opening fire – ‘an ignominious way for Britain to begin the war’, accuses a recent American historian.³⁸ The French emphasized their indignation:

The insult just made by the English to the King’s flag, and the attack on His Majesty’s ships, are acts of the utmost violence and most odious bad faith . . . There can be no compensation in affairs of honour as there might be for affairs of interest.³⁹

They were not unsuspecting innocents, however. Versailles knew that sending reinforcements to Canada might provoke naval interception; but they were willing to take a calculated risk, with the intention of using any British attack for propaganda purposes in Europe. They largely succeeded, as most of their forces arrived, and the British indeed felt they had suffered a propaganda defeat. The subsequent round-up by Admiral Hawke of some 300 French merchant ships and 7,000 crewmen proved far more effective. Recent French historians suggest that this ‘extreme example of blatant defiance of international law’ made naval defeat inevitable by imprisoning a quarter of France’s experienced seamen.⁴⁰ British history chooses to forget this inglorious master-stroke. At the time, French fury – the historian Gibbon, forced to cross France in disguise, found ‘it had rendered that polite nation somewhat peevish and difficult’⁴¹ – made it a turning-point in attitudes towards Britain.

The third perfidious act – again, not prominent in British histories – was le grand dérangement, the wholesale deportation of the population of the strategically important Acadia, renamed Nova Scotia. The 7–8,000 Acadians were removed from their homes, which were either burned or handed over to British settlers. They were then allowed to make their way back to France or dispersed to other colonies: the ‘Cajuns’ of Louisiana are their best-known descendants. A British view is that ‘this ulcer needed to be excised’, as the Acadians, although British subjects, refused to take an oath of allegiance, and, stirred up by La Galissonnière and a politicized and bigoted clergy, formed a ‘fifth column’.⁴² But francophone histories regard it as comparable with twentieth-century ‘genocide’ and ‘ethnic cleansing’.⁴³ In 2003, a Canadian royal proclamation ‘acknowledged’ Acadian sufferings.

These incidents helped to make the Seven Years War a struggle not simply of monarchs but of nations. Official anglophobia rejected the favourable view of England expressed by intellectuals for a generation. Now England, dominated by ‘common people’, was labelled ‘Carthage’, the faithless merchant state of ‘pirates’, ‘assassins’, ‘usurpers’, ‘perjurers’, ‘vultures’, ‘brigands’ and ‘homicidal monsters’.⁴⁴ It would have to be destroyed by the ‘Rome’ of France, representing European civilization. These themes were revived during the revolution, and as late as the Second World War, the collaborationist Radio Paris was promising that ‘England, like Carthage, will be razed’.⁴⁵

Meanwhile, negotations in Europe produced the ‘diplomatic revolution’ or ‘renversement des alliances’ of 1756. Austria and France agreed that as their arch rivals were now respectively Prussia and Britain, they had better be allies rather than enemies. With Louis XV’s mistress Madame de Pompadour an enthusiastic go-between, a first Treaty of Versailles was signed between Bourbons and Habsburgs on 1 May 1756, and a second on 1 May 1757. Meanwhile, Britain and Prussia had signed a Convention of Westminster in January 1756. Thus, the struggle that began on the Ohio became another great European war, simultaneously of Britain against France and of Prussia versus the Rest – France, Austria, Sweden and eventually Russia. France’s aims were clear: ‘to play the leading role in Europe that is appropriate to her seniority, dignity and grandeur, and to bring down any power that attempted to raise itself above her.’⁴⁶

France was in an excellent position as leader of the stronger alliance, and the war began well. The French mustered troops for an invasion – a feint that forced most British troops and ships to stay at home, making them vulnerable elsewhere. In April 1756, the Toulon fleet under La Galissonnière (back from Canada) and 15,000 troops under Marshal de Richelieu attacked the vulnerable British naval base of Minorca. A weak British squadron under Admiral Byng did little to stop them and withdrew to Gibraltar. The British garrison at Port Mahon surrendered in June. The French reported being greeted as liberators. The victory caused rejoicing in France, marked by the creation of a new egg sauce, la mahonnaise. Byng – ‘a scandal to the navy’, said Boscawen – was court-martialled and shot.

In India, where the French had reinforced their troops, the British East India Company had vainly tried to negotiate a neutrality agreement. The first dramatic event was in June 1756, when France’s ally the Nawab of Bengal captured the British post at Calcutta. A number of British prisoners were locked in a small cell – the notorious ‘Black Hole of Calcutta’ – where many died. In south India, the Jacobite General Lally promised to ‘exterminate all the English in India’.⁴⁷ As in other eighteenth-century colonial wars, French Protestants fought for Britain against Irish Catholics fighting for France.

In America, the French captured Fort Oswego in New York colony in August 1756. The French commander, the Marquis de Montcalm, was horrified when his native auxiliaries scalped several dozen wounded soldiers and civilians. France’s Delaware allies were raiding deep into Pennsylvania. The bulwark of the northern frontier, Fort William Henry (named after the two royal princes), surrendered in August 1757 to a French and Indian force drawn from thirty nations. Montcalm gave the garrison honourable terms, but his allies, who fought for plunder, trophies, and captives (for adoption, ritual torture, or occasionally cannibalism), felt cheated of their reward, and seized or scalped several hundred, mainly provincial, militia and camp followers. This further poisoned relations between the British and French in America, and was immortalized in James Fenimore Cooper’s The Last of the Mohicans (1826). Though too ambivalent or even sympathetic about its characters to count as a work of propaganda, the novel did create a memorable story of frontier savagery and French treachery that matched French condemnation of la perfide Albion. Fenimore Cooper depicts a suave but ruthless Montcalm, a personification of European courtly values, permitting the massacre for reasons of expediency: ‘generous sentiments, high courtesy and chivalrous courage [lost] their influence . . . when it became necessary to prove how much principle is superior to policy’. In reality, Montcalm hastened to stop the killing, and subsequently ransomed as many prisoners as he could – at 130 livres and thirty bottles of brandy per head. Several captives chose to stay with the Indian families that had adopted them. Montcalm’s attempt to placate the British without alienating the Indians proved unsuccessful on both counts. Indian support, vital for the defence of Nouvelle France, dwindled. The biggest human tragedy, however, was that smallpox, caught from prisoners and infected scalps, ravaged the Great Lakes region.⁴⁸

In Europe events also favoured the French. They and the Austrians marched into Germany. The British, desperate to draw the French away from Hanover and help the hard-pressed Prussians, sent a large invasion fleet in September 1757 to seize the Atlantic naval base at Rochefort. The expedition was an expensive damp squib (see below, page 134). The same month, the French forced the Duke of Cumberland to capitulate with his Hanoverian army. Hanover was overrun, while Prussia was invaded by the Russians, Austrians, French and Swedes. As after the Minorca defeat, there was a public demand that heads should roll. It looked as though French assertions that British power was a façade were proving true. Lord Chesterfield was

sure we are undone . . . at home, by our increasing debt and expenses; abroad by our ill-luck and incapacity. The King of Prussia, the only ally we had in the world, is now, I fear, hors de combat. Hanover I look upon to be, by this time, in the same situation with Saxony; the fatal consequence of which is too obvious. The French are masters to do as they please in America. We are no longer a nation. I never saw so dreadful a prospect.⁴⁹

In France, plays and songs celebrated victory and mocked les Anglois as cowardly buffoons. One theatrical triumph was La Mahonaise, celebrating the capture of Minorca, in which the scheming, mean and utterly un-sexy Englishman Faithless loses not only the island but the gorgeous Picolette, who is swept off her feet by the dashing, brave and honest Marquis de Francheville.⁵⁰ The British envoy to Prussia reported that ‘The English ’til now were envied and hated upon the Continent. At present they are despised . . . as triflers incapable of acting for themselves or of assisting their allies.’⁵¹

The situation was transformed on 5 November 1757 by the Prussians. Far from being hors de combat, they routed the French at Rossbach. This humiliation caused a sensation throughout Europe. The Prussians then turned on the Austrians and defeated them at Leuthen. French hopes of a rapid victory on the Continent, which would have enabled them to concentrate their forces against Britain, vanished. King Frederick II of Prussia became a British national hero, and enjoyed that rare distinction of having pubs named after him (though most would change their names in 1914). The war was now to become a long and bloody slugging match, giving Britain a second chance.

ENCOURAGING THE OTHERS

Voltaire’s novel Candide (1759), the century’s greatest international best-seller, describes its hero arriving at Portsmouth to see ‘a rather stout man kneeling blindfold on the deck of one of the naval ships. Four soldiers . . . each fired three shots into his skull, as calmly as you please.’ Candide is told that ‘in this country it is considered a good thing to kill an admiral from time to time pour encourager les autres’.⁵² The loss of Minorca had caused rioting, and Admiral Byng was an obvious scapegoat. It has been suggested that he was the victim of his homosexuality and ‘macaroni’ tastes – ‘effeminate’ French-style fashions and manners, supposedly undermining British martial valour. Ironically, Voltaire contributed to Byng’s death by sending him a secret letter congratulating him on his conduct, which was intercepted. Even more ironically, Byng’s execution does seem to have encouraged the others: according to the naval historian N. A. M. Rodger it had a ‘profound effect’. He suggests that Byng really had shied away from a superior enemy: admirals and captains on the quarter deck were particularly exposed to death and injury.⁵³ Whatever the truth about Byng’s action – his subordinates disagreed – the public outcry brought down two successive governments. This was a dangerous time to fail. The commander of the Rochefort expedition was court-martialled. The king’s own son, the Duke of Cumberland, victor of Culloden, was disgraced after his capitulation, and replaced by the veteran Huguenot Sir John Ligonier. After the Battle of Minden – a great British victory – Lord George Sackville was charged with cowardice. His disgrace was inscribed in the orderbook of every regiment, so that all should know that ‘neither high birth nor great employments can shelter offences of such a nature’.

Candide, on witnessing Byng’s execution, flees England in horror – a horror ostentatiously shared by Voltaire’s countrymen at this new example of English savagery. But they themselves were soon to execute a commander to encourage the others. He too won the sympathy of Voltaire. He was General Thomas Arthur, Comte de Lally, diehard Jacobite grandson of Sir Gerald O’Lally (who had followed James II to France in 1689), former ADC of Bonny Prince Charlie, and a veteran of Dettingen and Fontenoy. After surrendering Pondicherry to the British in January 1761, he was allowed to return to France on parole to defend his honour. Imprisoned in the Bastille, and found guilty of treason, he was bound, gagged and beheaded in May 1766 – another sacrifice to patriotic disappointment.

This national war changed both France and Britain. Economic disruption, food shortages, taxation, and demands for manpower produced violent dissent. In Britain, the loss of Minorca provoked riots in June and July 1756 in regions where war had disrupted trade and made workers idle, or where men had been impressed into the navy. The riots combined distrust of government with scapegoating of Byng, a symbolic ‘aristocrat’ who ‘lolls at ease on his soft couch, and is supported by a court interest’. Ministers were similarly attacked, especially the francophile Duke of Newcastle (nicknamed ‘Chateauneuf’), notorious for his profligate spending on French art, servants, food and wine.⁵⁴ The most serious food riots of the century began in August 1756, drawing on existing discontent with land enclosure and the game laws. By December, there had been 140 riots in thirty counties, mostly against what people saw as unjust and unpatriotic profiteering. Economic grievances aggravated by the war were combined with an attack on an eliteseen to be failing in its duty to the nation: popular patriotism was turbulent and demanding. At least twenty people were killed, 200 prosecuted, and four hanged during the food riots, yet in every case the government was forced to make concessions.

Organized ‘patriotism’ appealed to the idealism and interest of assertive commercial and artisan groups, most powerful in the turbulent and relatively democratic politics of the City of London, Westminster, Middlesex and America. The war saw the foundation or extension of organizations such as the Laudable Society of Anti-Gallicans, the Society of Arts, the Marine Society and the Troop Society, and some that combined patriotic and philanthropic causes, such as Captain Coram’s London foundling hospital. The patriotic societies published propaganda, awarded prizes for services to the nation, and recruited paupers and boys for the armed forces. This was an opportunity for men and some women from outside the elite to participate in political life, display their patriotism and promote both the national interest and their own. If the societies often enjoyed royal and noble patronage, they could also be violently critical of what they diagnosed as unpatriotic, aristocratic vices.⁵⁵

In France, the war created a comparable amalgam of ideological stresses and material grievances over food prices and taxes. The most important ideological conflicts were religious: the harsh though sporadic persecution of Protestants, and the running conflict between the Jansenist current of dissenting Catholicism and the official Church hierarchy backed by the Crown. Catholic orthodoxy as a pillar of royal authority was supported by the ‘devout’ (dévot) faction at court. Jansenism had become the core of political as well as religious dissent, representing the liberties of the nation against the Crown. It was influential within the parlements (law courts), which were the sole forum of licit political debate. Royal edicts to increase taxes gave the parlements a new cause of opposition. These tensions were dramatically manifested early in the war by the act of an unstable former servant, Robert-François Damiens, who committed the sacrilege of stabbing Louis XV (not very seriously) at Versailles on 5 January 1757. He declared that he had not intended to kill the king but to ‘prompt him to restore all things to order and tranquillity in his states’, and spare the ‘misery of the people’.⁵⁶ The horrific spectacle of his execution (with burning sulphur, red-hot shears, boiling pitch, and horses to tear the limbs from his living trunk) was powerless to exorcize sullen discontent and alarming rumours of plots. The dévots – not implausibly – accused the parlements and the Jansenists of stirring up dissidence. The Jansenists accused the dévots’ allies the Jesuits of having planned Damiens’s attack – regicide being one of their supposed specialities. Spies eavesdropped on conversations sympathizing with Damiens and criticizing the king and the authorities. Hostile placards appeared on Parisian walls. Speech crimes could bring disaster to the loose-tongued: prison, the galleys, torture, and in aggravated cases the noose or the wheel. Louis XV, reported a British agent, was deeply despondent, contemplating abdication, and having to be propped up by Pompadour – who herself narrowly avoided being dismissed from court as a pious gesture by the king, who habitually turned devout when frightened.

France’s alliance with Catholic Austria and subsequently with Spain against Britain and Prussia was widely perceived on both sides as having a religious dimension. The well-placed Marquis d’Argenson saw it as ‘a general crusade of the Catholic party against the Protestant in Europe’.⁵⁷ In Louis XV’s words, it was the ‘only way . . . to maintain the Catholic religion’.⁵⁸ The British government proclaimed the cause was ‘liberty and religion’.⁵⁹ By now, this was for the British no more than conventional phraseology – they had, after all, previously been allies of Catholic Austria for sixty years, and showed little solidarity with their new Protestant ally, Prussia. In France religion was more serious. French Protestants saw the war as an opportunity to gain greater toleration. Some, especially those within reach of the south-western coast, hoped to link up with a British invasion.⁶⁰ The Catholic majority, whether orthodox or Jansenist, saw Protestants as potential or actual traitors. A consequence of British coastal raids was disarmament of Protestants, a further wave of dragonnades, arrests, the demolition of clandestine chapels, sectarian murders and military attacks on religious assemblies. However, the most notorious single event in this, the last major religious persecution until the revolution, was the Calas case, in which an elderly Protestant shopkeeper was wrongly convicted in 1761 of murdering his Catholic son, and broken on the wheel.

Voltaire bravely championed Calas, but the philosophes were on the defensive. Anglophilia could now be seen as treason, and seditious writers ‘of whatever rank or condition’ were threatened with the death penalty. The message was reiterated in a satirical pamphlet and a satirical play, which, because they were officially sponsored, were viewed by the philosophes as unveiled threats. The pamphlet Nouveau Mémoire pour servir à l’histoire des Cacouacs (1757) was a Swiftian fable about a strange people who considered themselves superior, worshipped foreign ideas and had no loyalty to their native land. The play Les Philosophes (1760) presented at the Comédie Française with the support of the court, attacked them as uncritical admirers of foreign ways, unpatriotic and irreligious. Abbé Morellet, who answered back, landed in the Bastille. Helvetius’s De l’Esprit was condemned and burnt in 1758; and he warned his friend David Hume that he could not write to him too often ‘without being suspected’. Diderot’sEncyclopédiewas banned in 1759. A pro-philosophe newsletter lamented that ‘The light that was starting to spread will soon be out; barbarity and superstition will soon have regained their power.’⁶¹ Voltaire played the patriotic card. His attitude was complex and oftenduplicitous. As a cosmopolitan philosopher, he genuinely detested the war as ending a golden age for Europe. As a sceptic he mocked it as absurd, even publicly celebrating the fall of Quebec, to him an unwanted liability. But he believed in France’s cultural primacy, and as a man of the world he cultivated those in power. So in 1761 he entered the lists in a characteristic manner, with a pseudonymous but transparent attack on British culture known as his ‘Appeal to All the Nations of Europe’ (see above, page 109).

The most serious challenge to the French Crown came from within the legal establishment, which resisted the huge rises in war taxation.⁶² It had already honed its weapons and found outspoken leaders during the Jansenist conflict in the early 1750s. When an edict of July 1756 doubled the vingtième tax, resistance appeared in the Assembly of Clergy, provincial Estates (elite representative bodies existing in certain provinces), and the law courts. This was the beginning of an insoluble political struggle that would fatally undermine Bourbon absolutism. The Paris parlement refused its consent to tax increases in 1756, warning that the result would be an ‘inexpressible series of injustices’ and ‘extreme misery’.⁶³ By 1759 the Crown was nearly bankrupt, and had to suspend naval building. Another edict of 1760 added a further 50 per cent to the vingtième and also doubled the capitation (poll tax). Various parlements defied royal orders – even when uttered directly by Louis himself: ‘I am your master . . . I ought to punish you . . . I want to be obeyed.’ Royal governors who marched into sessions with troops to dictate edicts to court clerks were no more successful. Parlementaires illegally published their protests. Ministers realized that news of this defiance would ‘spread in a week to the cafés of London and the newspapers of Holland’, and increase the difficulty of raising international loans. It became steadily clearer that this was an ideological challenge to the authority of the Crown. The finance minister condemned as ‘Anglican principles’ demands to vote taxes and supervise expenditure. Parlementaires publicly used dangerous language, talking of legislative sovereignty, ‘liberty’, ‘despotism’, the rights of the ‘nation’ and its ‘citizens’, and even, fatefully, demanding a meeting of the Estates General, the representative body of the realm that had not met since 1614. The chief minister Choiseul and the king changed tactics after 1760 and tried persuasion, urging the parlements to let ‘our enemies see that we are in a condition to resist them’; but they soon reverted to repression.

Both Britain and France, if shuddering with unrest, still managed to fight across the globe for seven years. Their governments were able to gather and expend blood and treasure. These exertions were associated at the time and since with two great ‘patriot’ ministers, both called to power as things went wrong, William Pitt, subsequently created Earl of Chatham, and Etienne-François de Choiseul-Stainville, created Duc de Choiseul. Pitt was appointed a secretary of state briefly in 1756, aged forty-eight, and again in uneasy coalition with the veteran Duke of Newcastle, from June 1757 to October 1761. Choiseul was appointed minister of foreign affairs in November 1758, aged thirty-nine, and remained in office until 1770. Both were to have profound effects on the history of both countries.

Pitt and Choiseul

His ambition . . . is not wealth, for he despises it, and is incorruptible, but power . . . An extreme Republican in a moderate Monarchy, he wishes above all to be patriotic, or at least appear it, to be the favourite of the people . . . Mr Pitt, insolent to his sovereign, in France would end his days imprisoned in Mont Saint-Michel; . . . in Russia, would have made a revolution, or had his tongue torn out and perished under the knout; . . . in England, he obtained a great and lucrative office . . . Woe to States which in times of crisis have such ministers.
French foreign ministry report, October 1763⁶⁴

After dinner was presented . . . to the duc de Choiseul . . . a little volatile being, whose countenance and manner had nothing to frighten me for my country. I saw him but for three seconds, which is as much as he allows to any body or thing.
HORACE WALPOLE, October 1765⁶⁵

In their different worlds, Pitt and Choiseul harnessed the novel forces of ‘patriotism’. In Britain, this meant appearing to come from outside the supposedly corrupt ruling elite, and to represent the interests of the nation. Pitt was an outsider, if less than he seemed. The grandson of ‘Diamond Pitt’, who had grown rich in India, he gloried in the sarcastic label ‘the Great Commoner’. A political maverick, he depended on swaying the House of Commons by the power of his bombastic, rambling but sometimes brilliant oratory. His heedlessly destructive and implacable ambition made him a man whom it was safer to have inside than outside the tent. He was an early example of a coldly professional politician; yet he cared little for his supporters inside or outside the Palace of Westminster and sat for a rotten borough. In the international sphere patriotism meant opposing continental involvement (seen as the selfish interest of the Hanoverian court) and supporting a ‘blue water’ policy of imperial conquest and trade. Pitt famously promised the House in 1757 that he ‘would not now send a drop of our blood to the Elbe, to be lost in that ocean of gore’.⁶⁶ His actions belied his words – the ‘now’, of course, is the hallmark of the professional – but he was blessed with the gift of being able to ‘deny his own words with an unembarass’d countenance’.⁶⁷ He managed to make ‘patriotism’ an instrument of government rather than of opposition, enjoying the support of the relatively democratic and fully plutocratic world of the City of London, of Tories in the shires, and of many on the fringes of the political nation. He was thus the channel by which public opinion could act on governments, and governments influence public opinion: ‘that Genius [who] first raised the abject Spirits of the Nation and . . . conducted them to Glory and Conquest’.⁶⁸ His great contributions were to justify increased involvement in Germany, which he and other patriots had long opposed; to persuade Parliament to vote unprecedented sums of money for the war; and (even if this was often exaggerated) to communicate a feeling of boldness and determination. Choiseul considered him a ‘charlatan’ and a ‘demagogue’, but learned from him the need to engage with public opinion.

Choiseul was more of an insider: a cosmopolitan, pedigree-conscious nobleman from the still independent Duchy of Lorraine, one of those hereditary all-purpose soldiers, diplomats, administrators and courtiers that every European monarch employed. Yet his family was not one of the great metropolitan dynasties that dominated the court by right. He, like Pitt, had to make his way by ruthless use of his talents and opportunities. Fashionable, amusingly impertinent, charming when necessary, a Don Juan, vain, indiscreet, a spendthrift, a patron and connoisseur (he had an English garden and an opulent collection of paintings), he claimed to

detest work, I love pleasure as if I were twenty years old, I am little concerned with money . . . I have a very fine and comfortable house in Paris, my wife is very clever and, amazingly, does not cuckold me, my family and circle are infinitely agreeable . . . people say I have had passable mistresses.

Despite this dilettante pose (which deceived Walpole) he was no lightweight. He even proved an effective administrator: ‘I have always made others work more than I work myself. One should not bury oneself in papers.’⁶⁹ He depended on those who provided the king with essential services – the great financiers and the ambitious women. Madame de Pompadour, to whom he had been useful, was his patroness. She raised him from the diplomatic corps to the foreign ministry: enemies called him ‘her little monkey’. His wife was the granddaughter of Antoine Crozat, one of the richest and most powerful of the State financiers, and an early patron of Pompadour. So both Pitt and Choiseul were connected with the new wealth derived from imperialism and war. Choiseul supported the Austrian alliance because he hoped it would free France to fight the British upstart overseas, and in general he seems to have had a clearer view of international strategy than Pitt, whose supposed global vision was an invention of his admirers – and his enemies. Choiseul hated and feared Pitt as the evil genius of British power: ‘This minister is greedy for glory.’ He suspected that, ‘drunk with success’, he had adopted the ‘vast project’ of stripping France of all its colonies.⁷⁰

The obvious differences between the two men reflect the gulf between two systems of power. Pitt was a parliamentarian, one of the most compelling there has ever been. Choiseul was a courtier in a country where all political careers began and ended at court. Pitt acted mainly in public; Choiseul in private. Pitt orated, Choiseul chatted. Pitt hectored, Choiseul charmed. As his most recent biographer puts it, in France, there was no need to seduce a nation, only to please one man, or one woman.⁷¹ For that reason, Pitt became more of a legend in his own lifetime and for two centuries thereafter. He was given credit for the work of others and aided by events, and people began to take him at his own estimation: ‘I am sure I can save this country, and nobody else can.’ He was the prototype of those great war leaders – his son William Pitt the Younger, David Lloyd George and Winston Churchill – who by mastery of parliamentary oratory and through its resonance in the country gave utterance and inspiration to a nation in peril. Like them, he found his apotheosis in war, and lost direction in peace. He was, without doubt, a more seriously flawed personality and more of a fake than they. Yet, within Britain and in France and Prussia, the belief grew that his willpower and inspiration underpinned Britain’s greatest-ever victory. Edmund Burke best expressed the ambivalence of insiders, calling him ‘that great artificer of fraud . . . Oh! but this does not derogate from his great, splendid side.’⁷²

Despite being a courtier, Choiseul believed that, like Pitt, he must harness new political forces in the struggle. He wrote to the king, ‘Make no mistake, patriotic virtue is degenerating year by year in France . . . One of my objects . . . is to reestablish the interest and love of the Fatherland in French hearts; I would like us to put the interest of our villages, our provinces, our kingdom before our own interest.’⁷³ He commissioned patriotic and anglophobe propaganda, set up a newspaper to put the government’s line, and himself drafted pamphlets arguing his policies to a public well beyond Versailles. He made conciliatory moves to the parlements in the hope of winning their financial support for war. He (along with Pompadour) maintained contacts with the philosophes, even while permitting attacks on their anglophilia. And later he did nothing to oppose the expulsion of the Jesuits in 1764 by the Paris parlement, using as a pretext the collapse of the their West Indies sugar business, ruined by British naval action. The Jesuits were the hate-figures of Gallicans, Jansenists, philosophes and parlementaires – in short, of France’s ‘patriot’ party – and Choiseul hoped their expulsion would win him popular support, and prevent criticism of the peace terms he had negotiated.

Choiseul’s internal policy has been interpreted by his many admirers as an attempt to modernize the monarchy and link it with progressive forces. One even calls this ‘the birth of the Left’.⁷⁴ No such nativity was intended. Although Choiseul had read his Montesquieu and Voltaire, as he liked to show, his aim was certainly not to favour representative government in France. He despised parliamentary politics except in so far as, under a demagogue like Pitt, they could stimulate warlike patriotism. His aim was to do the same in France, but under the banner of an absolute monarchy. Central themes of his propaganda were the loyalty and happiness of the French under strong, paternal rule, and the superiority of that system over Britain’s corrupt, faction-ridden and ultimately doomed parliamentary regime.

Choiseul’s propaganda had one remarkable triumph. In November 1761 he discreetly engineered an ‘offer’ of money by the Estates of Languedoc to build a warship for the battered navy. This inspired a wave of patriotic enthusiasm, as the provinces and great corporations of the realm each vied to pay for their own ship, with the lesser guilds and trades (such as the roofers and maîtres-limonadiers) clubbing together. Patriotism was also good policy. Dons gratuits (free gifts) to the Crown were the way for privileged bodies to purchase their advantages, and so much the better if they could serve local interests too. The canny Bretons made sure that the battleship Bretagne was built with oak from Breton forests, sails woven in Rennes and ironwork forged at Paimpont.⁷⁵ Soon sixteen line-of-battle ships had been pledged, whose names would proclaim the civic virtue of their donors: the ‘Languedoc’, the ‘Ville de Paris’, the ‘Diligent’ (sponsored by the postmasters), the ‘Zealous’ (by the tax collectors), the ‘Useful’ (a hopeful public-relations effort by the farmers-general), and (fashionably though with some effrontery) the ‘Citizen’, by the court bankers and military financiers. Choiseul thus boosted morale at a depressing time, but the propaganda was risky. The donors – many of them opponents of tax increases – were asserting their patriotic ‘citizenship’, voluntarily subscribing money for spending of which they approved. The contrast with the Crown’s attempts to impose tax increases was glaring. But however magnanimous these gestures seemed to those making them, the amount of money they produced was a drop in the ocean. The struggle over taxes, patriotism and citizenship was only beginning. The Seven Years War opened the era of revolution.

We have seen the by now familiar gambit of both France and Britain: forcing the other to commit forces to Europe, hence weakening it further afield. Britain enjoyed the immense advantage of having Frederick the Great of Prussia as an ally. As both Austria and Russia wanted to bring Prussia down, he had no option but to fight desperately; and as he was the greatest military leader of his day, Britain’s investment of money and men to support him paid a large dividend. Austria and France proved to be a less successfulcombination, each pursuing different aims, and each suspecting the other, with reason, of trying to pass on the main burden of war.

Pitt, reluctant to send forces to sink into ‘that ocean of gore’ in Germany, pressed for a landing in France, which would appeal to the ‘patriot’ preference for seaborne operations and mollify the Prussians by forcing the French to keep thousands of troops guarding their coasts. In fact, the French coasts were scarcely defended, as their cannon had been taken for the navy. The governor of Brittany, the Duc d’Aiguillon, lamented that ‘not one battery in the province is armed . . . there is not a pound of gunpower on the coast, not a single cannonball’.⁷⁶ A large invasion fleet of eighty-two ships, carrying 10,000 troops, sailed from Spithead on 7 September 1757. In the words of a classic French history, ‘this was certainly more than was necessary to be sure of success’.⁷⁷ The target was the naval base of Rochefort. The fleet nosed around off the estuary for ten days, demolished a small fort on the Ile de Ré, and then the commanders decided that a landing on the mainland was too risky and they sailed home, losing a ship on the way to a Dunkirk privateer. Though arguably justified on grounds of military prudence, this fiasco caused disappointment and recrimination comparable with that following the fall of Minorca. Pitt’s reputation suffered. However, he persisted with this strategy, urged on by the Prussians, who must have realized this was the only help they would get. Careful preparations were made, including the building of special landing craft. The target was the privateering port of Saint-Malo, ‘which had always gloriously provoked English anger’,⁷⁸and on 5 June 1758 16,000 troops were landed at Cancale, nine miles east. The state of the roads and the impassable bocage country of hedges and banks – like that which caused serious trouble to tanks in 1944 – made it impossible to move siege artillery to Saint-Malo. Meeting no resistance on land or sea, the invaders re-embarked after four days on French soil, burning ships and ‘destroying everything in their path’. Both sides seemed satisfied. The mayor of Saint-Malo reported that ‘in burning our ships, the enemy has only inflamed our zeal’, and asked as a reward that his town should be given duty-free status.⁷⁹

Two months later, Cherbourg was attacked. Its small garrison (containing many ‘cripples, beggars and children’) had fled, and thirty-five ships were captured and the harbour destroyed during a week’s occupation. The victors re-embarked with a substantial sum of money, over 10,000 cattle, sheep and horses, and ‘a prodigious quantity’ of poultry.⁸⁰ So far, the British had met no significant resistance, but the landings were causing increasing outrage among the Bretons, who were clamouring to take up arms. When the British made a second attempt to capture Saint-Malo in September, it became clear how dangerous invasions were for the invaders. They landed 4,000 men safely, but for practical reasons took an inland route towards Saint-Malo, losing touch with the fleet. A French force of some 10,000 regulars, coastguards and militia, led by d’Aiguillon, came hurrying to meet them. The British retreated to the sea at Saint-Cast, where most re-embarked. However, the French arrived on 11 September as the Guards were still on the beach, and despite courageous efforts by Admiral Howe and naval boat crews to take them off, some 750 – far more according to the French – were killed or captured. ‘At last we’ve thrashed the English . . . For a loss of 300 men, we have made them leave 1,000 – 1,200 to manure the beach.’⁸¹ D’Aiguillon politely invited captured officers to dinner, but he was not in a forgiving mood after recent depredations: when the British drank the health of the king of France, ‘I did not return the compliment.’⁸² A hundred years later, a victory column was erected on the dunes. But both sides could celebrate victory. The British had carried out the biggest landings in France since the Hundred Years War without the French navy daring to leave port. They had destroyed a lot of troublesome privateers, and paraded twenty-two captured cannon triumphantly through Hyde Park. The French, for their part, were delighted to have ‘thrown them into the sea’. Voltaire, in one of his patriotic moods, wrote, ‘I greatly doubt that they’ve killed 3,000 English near Saint-Malo; but I admit I wish they had. It’s not humane; but can one pity pirates?’⁸³

Whether the landings had diverted more British forces than French remains debatable. Arguably Versaillles was more worried that ships and men might be sent to Flanders or Germany than by the fate of Breton fishing boats and poultry. However, the raids did have one serious, utterly unpredictable, consequence. D’Aiguillon raised local taxes to improve Brittany’s feeble defences and roads. This caused a confrontation with the parlement at Rennes, which accused him of acting illegally. The cause was taken up by the whole dissident legal establishment, and it led eventually to what is generally called a coup d’état by the chancellor, Maupeou, in 1771 – one of the milestones towards revolution in 1789.

The British gave up raiding France. Pitt insisted on diversionary attacks in West Africa and the Caribbean instead. But he, like everyone, now realized that the decisive point was Germany. If the French won there, they could turn against Britain; but while the French army was engaged, Britain could risk sending most of its own army across the Atlantic: in 1759 there were thirty-two battalions of redcoats in America, and only six in Germany; while of France’s 395 battalions, only twelve were in Canada and four in India.⁸⁴ Keeping a land war going in Germany was costing both sides more and more money. We have seen the difficulties the French had in trying to raise taxes. The British too felt the strain: in 1758, there was a crisis of confidence in the City as the government delayed paying its bills and the Bank of England warned that a collapse of credit was looming. The Duke of Newcastle calmed fears by raising the interest on government loans, though he himself worried that ‘we are engaged in Expenses infinitely above our strength’.⁸⁵ Yet by the end of 1758, the war seemed slowly to be going Britain’s way. The situation in Germany was stable, if costly. Trade was flourishing, while that of France was being wrecked by attacks in Africa, India and the West Indies, where rich Guadeloupe was captured. In North America, after a series of failures, 45,000 men were preparing to invade New France.

Years of Victory, 1757–63

Come, cheer up, my lads! ’tis to glory we steer,
To add something new to this wonderful year,
’Tis to honour we call you, not press you like slaves,
For who are so free as the Sons of the Waves?

‘ Hearts of Oak’, DAVID GARRICK, 1759⁸⁶

Can we easily leave the remains of such a year as this? It is still all gold . . . We have not had more conquest than fine weather: one would think we had plundered East and West Indies of sunshine. Our bells are worn threadbare with ringing for victories.
HORACE WALPOLE, 21 October 1759⁸⁷

The war had begun in North America, which was to be its greatest prize. Events there were at last taking a decisive turn. One might ask – as some contemporaries did – why it had taken so long. The struggle was less one-sided than it might seem. The French could field 25,000 regular troops and militia, most used to fighting in American conditions. They had many Indian allies, a potent advantage. Distance, ‘those hellish forests’, mountains, bad weather, the absence of roads (requiring movement by boat) and shortage of supplies made moving large forces arduous and dangerous, and made it hard for the British to employ their numerical advantage. For all these reasons, French officers regarded New France as impregnable.

On the British side, the colonial militias were unreliable and far less hardy than their French counterparts. Friction between British generals and colonial governments was constant. London, and especially Pitt, did not help by formulating unrealistic plans, giving orders too late, and sacking commanders when things went wrong. Pitt was, however, willing to spend vast sums in America as in Europe. His assumption of the costs of the campaign smoothed many difficulties with the colonists and fuelled an economic boom, as barrels of gold and silver arrived from London. British commanders and troops learned forest warfare. Lord Howe adapted tactics and equipment to local conditions: coat-tails were cut off, pipeclay and starch forgotten, and moccasins and tomahawks adopted. Officers had to eat stew out of a common pot. Scottish highland units, including men who thirteen years earlier had fought for Bonny Prince Charlie, began to create a new military legend under the Union Flag. Some were happy to fight the French to punish their ‘treacherous promises in 1745’.⁸⁸ Irregulars such as Robert Rogers’s Rangers became famous, or notorious, for adopting the ruthless practices of frontier war. Yet disaster could still strike. In July 1758, an attack on Fort Carillon, at Ticonderoga, which commanded the Lake Champlain route from New York to Montreal, began with Howe being killed in a skirmish, and then the incompetent General Abercromby, fearing the approach of French reinforcements, attempted to rush the defences with his regular troops. Two thousand men were shot down in suicidal attacks, and the army streamed back in disorder. Montcalm thought at first it was a ruse; he then decided it was a miracle, and erected a cross with a pious inscription. But there was no simultaneous miracle 600 miles to the north-west, where New France’s fate was sealed by a daring seaborne attack on the fortified naval base of Louisbourg, which commanded the approach to the St Lawrence, and made French reinforcement and supply impossible. It would only be a matter of time before the competent and methodical General Jeffery Amherst, who replaced Abercromby, converged on Quebec and Montreal. In retaliation for the massacre of Fort William Henry, Amherst shipped off the Louisbourg garrison as prisoners, and the 8,000 civilian inhabitants were deported to France, their homes being taken by settlers from New England.

In India, naval strength had swung the conflict decisively against the French. Already in June 1757, by a mixture of boldness and trickery, Clive had defeated France’s ally the Nawab of Bengal at Plassey, which gave the British control of one of India’s richest provinces. In the south, the French were defeated at Wandewash in 1759 – the Irish Colonel Coote overcoming France’s Irish troops led by the Irish General Lally.

The usual logic dictated that France must now go for checkmate: an invasion of Britain. Since the end of 1758 troops, ships and barges had been assembling in the Channel ports, and attempts were made to enlist Russian and Swedish support. The French plan was to land diversionary expeditions in Ireland and Scotland, where some hoped to fan the embers of Jacobitism; then to sail down the North Sea to cover the main crossing to Essex from Ostend. This aimed at a knockout blow on London, causing the collapse of government and the financial system. English land defences were negligible, especially as Pitt, blithely sceptical of the threat, was still dispatching troops abroad. The militia would not hold up French regulars, even if drilling them did help Captain Edward Gibbon to understand the tactics of the Roman legions. Once landed, the French could certainly reach London. Large sums were spent on landing craft. The problem was to assemble a fleet strong enough to escort the troopships.

As the invasion force waited, 1759, Britain’s great ‘Year of Victories’, began – even though all the victories were risky, and some even partly accidental. The first, and unexpected, British and Hanoverian victory was on 1 August, at Minden, in north-western Germany, when a seemingly unstoppable French advance was reversed. What warmed British hearts was that a mere six battalions of British infantry – marching forward intrepidly, though seemingly by mistake – threw back repeated assaults from superior forces of French infantry and cavalry, commanded by the Stuart Duc de Fitzjames. The French lost 7–10,000 men to the British–Hanoverian 2,700. At the end of the day the French army, its confidence shattered, was in humiliating retreat. The threat to north-west Germany was removed for another year, and the French could not withdraw more troops to invade Britain. The only blot was that mentioned earlier – General Sackville had failed to attack with his cavalry.

The most famous victory was the capture of Quebec on 13 September, which made General James Wolfe the posthumous hero of a saga once known to every British schoolboy. Wolfe’s small army had been carried 300 difficult miles up the St Lawrence in 170 ships – a feat the French thought impossible, and which owed much to the skills of the yet unknown Lieutenant James Cook. But it stuck before the city’s formidable natural and man-made defences, whose numerous garrison included even a unit of students (nicknamed the ‘Royal Syntax’). Montcalm had only to hold out until the approach of winter forced the British to sail away till next spring. Various attempts by Wolfe to find a way of attacking the city, perched high above the river, came to nothing. The British were reduced to trying to provoke an attack by waving their hats, and more grimly by ravaging the surrounding country, which produced the usual massacres and scalpings. The young Wolfe was to attain a halo of patriotic martyrdom as a brilliant and humane soldier – he was reputed to have refused to kill a wounded Jacobite at Culloden. In fact he had a vicious streak and a highly neurotic personality, which proved an effective combination in the circumstances. As George II famously remarked, if Wolfe was mad, he hoped he would bite some of the other generals. With only a week before winter would have forced a retreat, and convinced that he was both terminally ill and facing disgrace, Wolfe came up with a death-or-glory plan to lead an amphibious night attack up the steep cliffs overlooking the St Lawrence west of Quebec. The French were taken by surprise – ‘the enemy hasn’t got wings’, said Montcalm. Without waiting for outlying detachments, Montcalm led his available 5,000 men out of the city to throw back the 4,500 British before they could dig in. His mixture of French regulars, Canadian militia and native auxiliaries was unsuited to the open field of the Plaine d’Abraham, and they were quickly routed by the devastating tactic perfected by Wolfe: mass volleys at point blank range. Quebec fell. If Wolfe’s gamble had failed, everything would have had to be put off for another year, with unpredictable political consequences: it is not impossible that a compromise peace would have saved part of Nouvelle France. And if the French had still been there, the British colonies would not have been so soon tempted by independence.

DEAD HEROES

Neither Wolfe nor Montcalm had been keen on a posting to the American backwoods, away from the real soldiering in Germany. Both had welcomed the opportunity to fight a proper battle at last at Quebec. Wolfe was hit by two bullets from irregular sharpshooters on the flank of the attack, and he died as the battle was ending. Montcalm was struck by grapeshot from a cannon the sailors had managed to haul up the cliffs, and he died the next morning. Deeply shamed by Indian treatment of prisoners, Montcalm had struggled to impose European standards on a frontier war: the resulting desertion by native allies weakened him badly. Wolfe had been less scrupulous about the occasional massacre and even paid cash for scalps. The capture of Quebec caused jubilation in America and Britain, with fireworks and bonfires, illuminations, toasts, feasts, concerts and sermons. One Boston preacher predicted a great imperial and Protestant future, ‘great cities arising on every hill . . . great fleets . . . happy fields and villages’.⁸⁹ Wolfe’s victory was not conclusive. Quebec was almost recaptured by the French the following spring. But as a symbol it was unforgettable. The painting of Wolfe’s death by the American artist Benjamin West celebrated not only the sacrifice of the young general, but also the unity of the Empire, personified by the American ranger, the Scottish highlander, and the faithful Mohawk warrior – none of whom was actually present. Several French artists tried to emulate or plagiarize West, here Louis-Joseph Watteau. Both paintings became icons: Wolfe symbolized the youthful daring of a rising empire, Montcalm (the Marquis de Montcalm-Gozon de Saint-Véran, in full) the stoical chivalry of a beleaguered aristocracy. There was some truth in the contrast. The French armed forces were dominated by the nobility and court. Among 151 French generals there were eight princes, eleven dukes, thirty-eight marquises, forty-four counts, six barons and fourteen chevaliers.⁹⁰ It is unthinkable that a thirty-two-year-old untitled son of a marine officer like Wolfe could have commanded a French army, even in the colonies. Yet Wolfe and Montcalm, like most regular officers, had more in common with each other than with their respective colonial compatriots. When West’s picture was shown in 1770, it attracted more spectators and probably made more money than any British painting in history.⁹¹ But the unity it celebrated was already collapsing.

Dead heroes: rival attempts to create an iconic image, with similar heroic poses, lamentations, and participants.

The French could still turn everything round by invading Britain. To prevent this, the British fleet under Admiral Hawke were managing for the first time ever to stay at sea for weeks on end, managing to keep healthy by strict cleanliness and taking fresh provisions from supply ships. This closed the main French western ports, with serious economic and strategic consequences, and kept the main fleet bottled up in Brest. The British Mediterranean fleet was similarly blockading Toulon. However, it was impossible to stay indefinitely, largely owing to weather. The French could wait for any interruption in the British screen to break out. In August, the French fleet escaped from Toulon to reinforce the veteran Vice-Admiral Marshal de Conflans at Brest, but it was caught and savaged off Lagos in Portugal. Arguably, the French should now have cancelled their invasion plans. But an invasion was their only hope, and Conflans, who believed the credibility of the navy was at stake, was ordered by Versailles to undertake what was, in the opinion of a sympathetic American historian, ‘little better than a suicide mission’.⁹² When gales blew Hawke off his station, Conflans sailed on 14 November with twenty-one ships of the line to pick up d’Aiguillon’s 20,000 troops in Quiberon Bay and sail for Scotland, and thence to Ostend. But Hawke came plunging back through a gale with twenty-three ships of the line and sighted the French on 20 November. Conflans raced for shelter amid the rocks and shoals of Quiberon Bay, not thinking ‘the enemy would dare to follow me’ in such weather.⁹³ But Hawke did, trusting in his men and his weather-beaten ships. Two French battleships were cannonaded into surrender with huge casualties, and three were sunk by the sea billowing in through their gunports as inexperienced crews struggled to fire broadsides. Only a handful of survivors were picked up by British boats. Nightfall halted the battle, and permitted eight French ships to escape. Next morning, the rest, including Conflans’s flagship, ran themselves aground and were set on fire, or escaped into the Vilaine estuary, where eleven were trapped and their captains dismissed in disgrace. The British had lost about 300 men to the French 2,500, mainly Breton conscripts.

The battle, called Quiberon Bay by the victors and Les Cardinaux by the vanquished, was one of the most audacious in naval history. In Hawke’s own words, it was ‘akin to a Miracle that half our ships was not ashore in the pursuite of the Enemy, upon their own coast, which wee were unacquainted with’.⁹⁴ Had that happened, Britain would have been open to invasion, and history might have taken a different turn. As it was, Quiberon Bay became ‘the graveyard of the French navy’, and the end of France’s last hope of defeating Britain. ‘What is in store for this unhappy country!’ wrote a French officer. ‘God help us! I have wept for it and am weeping still!’⁹⁵ The British made themselves at home on France’s offshore islands, planting vegetables, playing cricket, and cocking a snook at Versailles.

The following year, French resistance in Canada was mopped up. Captain Vauquelin, commanding the only French frigate left on the St Lawrence, dropped anchor, nailed his colours to the mast, fought till his ammunition ran out, and threw his sword into the river rather than surrender it. Equally defiant, 700 French soldiers escaped by a seven-month march to Nouvelle Orléans. French settlers, economically desperate and angry at their seeming abandonment, gave up the struggle, swore allegiance to King George, and started trading with the British. The British responded by guaranteeing freedom of religion. This beginning of reconciliation, notes one French historian, marked the end of Nouvelle France.

The ‘Year of Victories’ ended, but the war was far from over. If Britain had triumphed overseas, France had hopes of winning on the Continent, and it planned to commit 300,000 men to the war in Germany.⁹⁶ Prussia – also beset by Austria and Russia – was desperate, and demanded more men and above all more money from Britain. Moreover, Spain was preparing to join France. Pitt demanded a pre-emptive strike to seize its treasure fleet from South America, and he resigned in October 1761 when his colleagues demurred. Spain declared war in January 1762. Unpredictably, the death of the tsarina Elizabeth that same month transformed the situation in Germany, for her successor Peter III at once made peace with Prussia. Spain proved to be a soft target for the British. Fired up by the prospect of huge sums of prize money, navy and army enthusiastically attacked two of the richest colonial cities, Havana and Manila, and took both. Disease proved the most dangerous enemy: nearly one-third of the troops diverted from North America died in Cuba. Manila was taken by a scratch force gathered in India, including French prisoners. The attackers had the advantage of surprise, as news of the outbreak of war had not reached the Spanish defenders. The loot from both cities was stupendous. After the government had taken its cut, the lion’s share went to the commanders, with a few pounds each for ordinary soldiers and sailors. In India, General Lally failed to take Madras in the biggest and most expensive expedition the French ever mounted in India: it bankrupted the Compagnie des Indes. Then, with his troops deserting after a five-month siege, Lally surrendered Pondicherry. Pigot, the British governor of Madras, who was of Huguenot origin, ravaged Pondicherry in reprisal for damage done to Madras. ‘The dazzling white palace of Dupleix, like the dreams of its builder, sank in the dust and ruin of unsuccessful war.’⁹⁷ The French and Spanish dreamt of reversing their defeats by yet another plan to invade England late in 1762, but naval weakness forced its rapid abandonment.

It was obvious now, after the death of a million soldiers, that neither side had anything more to fight for. The new king, George III, who had acceded in 1760, and his close adviser and former tutor the Earl of Bute, a donnish Scot, were eager for peace. They wanted to cut loose from European conflicts, being indifferent to the future of Hanover – ‘that horrid Electorate’, the king called it⁹⁸ – and heedless of the interests of the bloody but unbowed Prussians. The main issues for Britain lay outside Europe. Yet contrary to contemporary French belief, still tenaciously held by French historians, the British had no plan for world domination or for destroying the French empire. Pitt even thought of giving back Quebec. The British feared alarming other European powers by excessive gains. The Duke of Bedford, their principal peace negotiator, opposed asking the French to ‘let us cut their throats’, and thought

We have too much already, more than we know what to do with, and I very much fear, that if we retain the greater part of our conquests out of Europe we shall be in danger of over-colonizing and undoing ourselves by them, as the Spaniards have done.⁹⁹

Some colonies would therefore be returned to France and Spain: but which? Britain’s priority now was defence. It preferred to keep Canada, thus ending the conflict in North America, rather than the French sugar islands of Guadeloupe and Martinique. Choiseul seemed to have abandoned the colonial game by offering Louisiana to Spain, but his secret intention was to induce the Spanish to agree to a quick peace and then build up its navy for a new war against Britain in five years’ time. Choiseul wanted the return of the sugar islands and he was adamant in keeping fishing rights off Newfoundland. He told the royal council that the fisheries were worth more than all French possessions in North America.¹⁰⁰ The reason was that this ‘nursery’ provided one quarter of all French seamen, and so was indispensable to his plans for a maritime war of revenge. Britain kept several smaller islands (Grenada, St Vincent, Tobago) and regained its naval base at Minorca. Havana and Manila were returned to Spain, in return for Florida. In West Africa and India, the French trading posts were returned, but they were demilitarized. ‘Pondicherry is only a pile of ruins, wells are filled in and trees cut down . . . and the Chandernagore settlement is almost in the same state.’¹⁰¹

The French monarchy, as contemporaries realized, had been weakened. Defeat had exposed Louis XV as a nonentity, apparently allowing himself to be dominated by the Austrophile Pompadour and her cronies. The raising of a statue of Louis in Paris in 1763 provoked open derision. The war had intensified traditional resentment of Austria, blamed for France’s defeats, a resentment that a generation later brought down retribution on the uncomprehending head of Queen Marie-Antoinette, ‘l’Autrichienne’ chosen by Choiseul to embody the alliance. The war made anglophobia a staple of French patriotism. Although fashionable ‘anglomania’ persisted on a superficial level, the idea of England as a model was undermined, both by patriotic resentment and by the post-war conflicts that shook the British political system.

The greatest consequence of the Seven Years War was economic. The Industrial Revolution was beginning. The causes and extent of this transformation have long been debated. Recent research links it firmly with the expansion of British overseas trade, as well as with the financial power of the City, both products of the struggle against France: ‘Britain’s economic progress cannot be separated from the establishment of its military hegemony.’¹⁰² Its ability to win, and keep, dynamic overseas trade, financed by the City and protected by the navy, was its unique advantage over the rest of Europe, and the Seven Years War increased that advantage. As everyone at the time knew, trade helped pay for war, and war extended trade. Trade encouraged investment, raised wages, broadened consumption and spurred new technologies and skills. Much of the new manufacturing output was exported, increasingly outside Europe. In some industries, such as Black Country hardware or Yorkshire woollens, up to 70 per cent went abroad. Had Britain lost the war – as was repeatedly possible – its economic, as well as its political, history would have been different. ‘Power and plenty came together; indeed power led to plenty . . . and without the control of the seas the growth of the economy would have been limited and some other European power possibly become dominant.’¹⁰³

The Treaty of Paris (1763) could be seen as conciliatory: Britain had returned several conquests without compensation. The French were relieved, and some in Britain grumbled. It remained none the less ‘the most favourable peace treaty in European history’,¹⁰⁴Britain’s greatest-ever victory, and France’s greatest-ever defeat. It confirmed Britain as a global power. But could it remain one? Britain’s triumph proved temporary, as we shall see; yet France’s defeat turned out to be permanent: Britain, not France, would dominate the next century. Yet hindsight is doubly misleading if it makes history seem obvious and inevitable. The Seven Years War appears now as a watershed, but only because it was eventually confirmed through another fifty years of conflict: 1763 was only the halfway stage. France continued to challenge Britain’s new hegemony outside Europe, both politically and commercially. It had no choice.

Taking Possession of the Globe

Regions Caesar never knew
Thy posterity shall sway
Where his eagles never flew
None invincible as they.
WILLIAM COWPER, ‘Boadicea’

North America was lost – the French never seriously attempted to regain territory there – but that was all the more reason to press on elsewhere. Choiseul immediately established a new colony in Guiana in 1763–4. It was a horrific failure, with 10,000 colonists quickly dying of disease and hunger. British predominance in India, as some realized, potentially shifted the world balance of power, with implications for Europe. This could not be allowed. Versailles was invincibly sure that Britain could not be as strong as it looked. Its victory was ascribed to the devilish talents of Pitt and the financial trickery of the City. It could be resisted.

This is why the following decades saw an intense period of maritime exploration, which made those involved European celebrities. It centred on the Pacific Ocean, where geographers expected to find new territories, even a new southern continent ‘adapted to the product of Commodities usefull in Commerce’, and a north-west passage joining the Atlantic to the Pacific. Strategic points, such as the Malouines/Falkland Islands, were coveted. France wanted to compensate for defeat; Britain, to consolidate victory. Exploration became a characteristic expression of eighteenth-century culture. It combined intense scientific curiosity – in mathematics, astronomy, cartography, mechanics, philosophy, biology and anthropology – with national prestige and an unashamed thirst for profit. And it followed the typical Franco-British pattern of competition and cooperation, jealousy and admiration. ‘Geographers from the two countries continued to correspond, and British and French explorers would meet and part amicably enough; but beneath the exchange of mutual compliments national rivalries ran deep and strong.’¹⁰⁵

Louis xvi giving orders to La Pérouse: showing the king’s interest in global exploration, and also the poise and elegance of courtly decorum.

From the 1740s, the French ministry of marine and the intellectual establishment had cooperated in a succession of well-funded expeditions, which reached the Polynesian islands, Australia, Tasmania and New Zealand. An astronomical event – the transit of Venus across the sun in 1769 – was the occasion for the first French circumnavigation of the world, by a large expedition under Louis-Antoine de Bougainville, a former musketeer who had been Montcalm’s ADC in Canada. His orders were to observe the transit (a means to calculate the distance from the earth to the sun) and search for the southern continent. This stimulated the Admiralty, never before interested in such esoteric matters, to send out a scientific expedition in a converted collier renamed Endeavour, commanded by Lieutenant James Cook, a junior officer with a reputation for navigation. It was kitted out from the ample private fortune of an enthusiastic naturalist and Fellow of the Royal Society, Joseph Banks: ‘they have all sorts of machines for catching and preserving insects; all kinds of nets, trawls, drags and hooks’, and even ‘a curious contrivance’ for seeing underwater.¹⁰⁶ Like Bougainville, Cook also had orders to seek the southern continent, and contact local peoples to ‘gain their consent for possession to be taken of convenient situations’. The President of the Royal Society urged him to ‘patience and forbearance’ towards peoples who were ‘the natural [and] legal possessors . . . the work of the same omnipotent Author’, and perhaps more ‘entitled to his favour’ than ‘the most polished European’. Louis XVI gave like instructions. French and British expeditions aimed to bring the unknown into the European intellectual, political and economic realm. They followed similar itineraries and had similar experiences with Polynesian societies – mutual astonishment, admiration, misunderstanding, tension, violence and awkward reconciliation. Across Europe their reports had avid readers. Both expeditions brought a Polynesian back to Europe, who was similarly fêted by fashionable French and British society. Reports of peoples that were unspoilt, noble and seemingly unfettered by convention fascinated a Europe that idolized Rousseau. ‘Farewell, happy and wise people,’ wrote Bougainville in his internationally best-selling account in 1771. ‘Remain always as you are now. I will always remember you with delight, and as long as I live will celebrate the happy island of Cythera, it is the true Utopia.’¹⁰⁷ Cythera was the island of Venus, and it was not only the intellect of the explorers and their readers that was stimulated. Polynesian hospitality, curiosity, propitiation and trade extended to uninhibited sex. Both British and French left venereal and other diseases – something that Cook tried vainly to prevent. This was not the only dark side to the discovery. The Europeans unknowingly envenomed local power struggles and infringed religious rules.

The voyages were the focus of another field of rivalry: in navigation and time-keeping, most testing in the expanses of the Pacific. The inability to compute longitude caused recurrent navigational disasters. Solving the problem – for which a huge prize of£20,000 had been offered by Parliament in 1714 – required either unfeasibly precise astronomical observation and complex mathematics, or a way of comparing with incredible accuracy local time with that of a known place – for example, Greenwich. A Yorkshire carpenter turned clockmaker, John Harrison, devoted most of his life and his extraordinary ingenuity to making a series of chronometers that by 1760 managed to keep time indefinitely in the harshest sea-going conditions. English and French clockmakers, notably Pierre Le Roy, vied with each other in the 1760s to 80s – including by plagiarism and espionage – to equal or surpass Harrison. The French Academy of Sciences offered its own prize. George III and Louis XVI – both amateur clockmakers – were keenly interested in what were by far the most sophisticated manufactured objects in existence. Examples still work 250 years later. The king ensured that Harrison, in the teeth of obstruction from the astronomers, got his prize – ‘By God, Harrison, I’ll see you righted!’ Le Roy, whose own chronometer was successfully tested in 1769, proclaimed this a patriotic triumph, vindicating ‘the reputation of our Arts among Foreigners, especially those of a nation that has always been our competitor and rival’.¹⁰⁸Copies of Harrison’s latest model were tested by Cook on his second and third voyages in the 1770s, and their worth was proved in accurate navigation and mapping. French manufacturing was less technically advanced, and it was the British who from the 1780s managed to make chronometers in quantity and at a reasonable price.

Cook answered Europe’s big questions about the Pacific, and his journals, soon published in French – and read by Louis XVI and Marie-Antoinette – made him famous. He charted New Zealand and the east coast of Australia, of which he claimed possession, and established that no other southern continent existed except Antarctica. In the words of one of his officers, ‘The Grand Bounds of the four Quarters of the Globe are known.’¹⁰⁹ He was killed on his third voyage, in a clash with Hawaiian islanders in February 1779 – shocking proof that contact between even the most ‘enlightened’ Europeans and ‘noble savages’ could not be innocent. The news was received across Europe as a tragedy, including in France, despite the two countries being again at war. The court banker, Jean-Joseph de Laborde, deeply involved in French overseas trade and exploration, built a great monument at his chateau inscribed ‘Cook, receive this tribute from a son of France’.¹¹⁰

France’s victory in the American War of Independence (as we shall see in the next chapter) revived its ambitions of global hegemony. The navy continued to expand, with the goal of breaking British power in India. Meanwhile, peaceful expeditions were dispatched, combining scientific research with military reconnaissance. Work was also pursued in conserving forests, establishing botanical gardens and introducing new plants. Here the British felt ‘twenty years behind’ and struggled to catch up.¹¹¹ In 1785, French balloonists made the first Channel crossing. That same year came the culminating effort. An expedition of two ships was planned under the command of Jean-François de Galaup, Comte de La Pérouse, an admirer of Cook. Louis XVI was closely involved in the planning. The expedition included botanists, an engineer, a geographer, an astronomer, a geologist, a clockmaker and several draughtsmen. They carried seeds, gifts, and more than 1,000 shrubs. La Pérouse was personally instructed by the king to avoid violence and conquest, but to seek sites for trading posts, carry out discreet espionage and affirm France’s ascendancy over the British. After an accident off Alaska and a clash with Samoans, they reached Botany Bay in January 1788 to check what the British were up to – and found that a fleet of eleven British ships under Captain Arthur Phillip had arrived just before them to establish a penal colony. The French sailed away, and were never seen again. A lonely memorial at Botany Bay, still visited by passing French naval crews, symbolizes the disappearance not just of the expedition, but of France’s maritime dreams, which the turmoil of the French revolution the following year snuffed out. Louis XVI, that vicarious explorer, asked on the way to the guillotine if there was any news of La Pérouse.

In a phrase used by several French historians, France thus ‘missed her rendezvous with the ocean’. To Pierre Chaunu, this became an essential part of Frenchness:

Our sedentary peasant mentality means that we cannot endure the hiatus of the sea. To board a boat, to cross the sea, is an uprooting, a rupture. In so far as we have intensely interiorized France . . . we cannot really take an interest in the overseas . . . The French . . . have their piece of land . . . and they need nothing else to imagine the universe.¹¹²

If this is true, the corsairs, the merchant-venturers, the woodsmen of the Great Lakes and the oceanic explorers became decreasingly part of the nation’s self-image. France’s greatest heroes were not overseas adventurers, but those who had united France, rounded out its territory and fortified its frontiers.¹¹³ In contrast, the British came to see themselves as having a global destiny. Despite occasional defeats, Britannia ruled the waves and London was the crossroads of the world. However bumbling and unplanned their acts, and however unforeseen the consequences, they liked to think of themselves as a people of seafarers, traders, explorers, conquerors and, increasingly, rulers. Whereas the million people who emigrated from France largely ceased to be French, the British – Scots and Irish in the lead – become a diaspora nation, scattered across the globe but linked to ‘home’. Europe, with its ‘oceans of gore’, was now regarded even by the House of Hanover as a place to be wary of. Blenheim and Minden were outshone in memory by Plassey and Quebec.

LANGUAGE: THE CHALLENGE TO
FRENCH ASCENDANCY

The English have corrupted the mind of my kingdom; let us not expose the new generation to the danger of being perverted by their language.
LOUIS XV¹¹⁴

Talk of war with a Briton, he’ll boldly advance,
That one English soldier will beat ten of France;
Would we alter the boast from the sword to the pen,
Our odds are still greater, still greater our men . . .
First Shakespeare and Milton, like Gods in the fight,
Have put their whole drama and epick to flight . . .
And Johnson, well-arm’d like a hero of yore,
Has beat forty French, and will beat forty more!
DAVID GARRICK, ‘On Johnson’s Dictionary’, 1756¹¹⁵

The time of the Seven Years War seems as good a point as any to mark the time at which the English language was set to become the first world language, despite the predominance of French in Europe. Voltaire was right: the language of Shakespeare was not superior to the language of Racine. But languages are spread not by literature or even by fashion, but by power and money.

French only became established as the language of diplomacy in the early eighteenth century. The Treaty of Utrecht (1713) was in French. The older practice of using Latin persisted a little longer, and governments in Spain, Germany and Italy still for a time used their own languages. But during the first decades of the century, French became increasingly the medium for international exchanges for both its prestige and its convenience – not least because the British were competent only in French. This practice would last broadly until the First World War. Bérenger and Meyer have pointed out that the hegemony of the French language was established just as the hegemony of the French state was about to decline.¹¹⁶ David Hume predicted complacently just after the Seven Years War, ‘Let the French, therefore, triumph in the present diffusion of their tongue . . . Our solid, and increasing establishments in America . . . promise a superior stability to the English language.’¹¹⁷ However, in very few parts of the world is the subsequent spread of English due to direct American influence. It was the defeat of France, the consequent expansion of the British empire, and corresponding British domination of international commerce and communications that would ensure that English became the practical medium of communication for much of the world.

French was long unrivalled as the language of the cultural and social elites. When Corneille was given an English translation of his play Le Cid, he regarded it as a curiosity, kept on the shelf with another exotic translation, into Turkish. France was by far the biggest exporter of books between 1680 and 1760.¹¹⁸ Saint-Evremond, a habitué of the Stuart court, learned no English during his forty years in London – a feat almost matched by the long-serving twentieth-century ambassador Paul Cambon. At Versailles in the 1740s, according to one story, no one could be found able to translate an English document except a musketeer from Calais.¹¹⁹ Louis XV opposed its being taught more widely. In Britain, knowing French remained part of approved general culture well into the twentieth century. The travel writer Grosley even thought that England was returning to French, as under the Normans, and there was indeed a fashionable tendency to gallicize vocabulary and spelling (older forms – ‘honor’, ‘center’ – survived or were readopted in America).¹²⁰ Learning French was an important aspect of the ‘grand tour’. Most British intellectuals could at least attempt salon conversation, even if (as in the case of David Hume and Adam Smith) it was a struggle. Anthony Hamilton and William Beckford gained renown as French authors. In the mid nineteenth century, young women wishing to be governesses commonly trained by teaching in schools in France, because ‘French acquired in France’ was in high demand in upper-class English families.¹²¹

French interest in English increased during the eighteenth century for both fashionable and ideological reasons. Voltaire played as important a role in propagating English in France as he did in universalizing French in Europe. He was probably right in claiming to be the first member of the French Academy to learn English, though he was soon followed by Montesquieu. Voltaire’s intimate patron the Marquise du Châtelet learned it well enough to translate Newton, and also to bicker in Franglais with Voltaire. As English was not taught in schools, Irish and Scottish Jacobites gave private tuition, and many language textbooks were published.¹²² The encyclopédiste Denis Diderot managed to learn with a Latin–English dictionary. Only in the 1770s and 80s did English become widely fashionable, along with other aspects of ‘anglomania’. For ladies, it was replacing Italian as an elegant cultural attainment. M. Pissot began publishing cheap editions of English classics, as ‘the English language has so spread in France in recent years’.¹²³ A satirical writer in the 1770s mocked those who could ‘mangle a few words’: ‘O di dou miss, kis mi’.¹²⁴ At court, the Comte de Provence (the future Louis XVIII) decided to learn English – which would prove infinitely more useful than he could have imagined during his long exile during the revolution. Louis XVI, who both resented and was fascinated by England, taught himself English against the wishes of his mother, who considered it the language of sedition.¹²⁵ He translated passages from Milton and his version of Horace Walpole’s history of Richard III was published posthumously. He studied the history of the Stuarts while himself awaiting the guillotine. It became fashionable – including by the king – to use anglicized turns of phrase or words: siteforsituation; prononcer for exprimer. This annoyed purists, especially when such terms had social or political implications: tolérance, budget, vote, opposition, club, pétition, constitution, législature, convention, jury, pamphlet.

Inevitably, comparisons were made between the two languages. Some philosophes praised English – though Voltaire twisted his earlier praise into sarcasm:

The genius of the English language [lies in] its naturalness, which does not shun either the basest or most monstrous ideas; in its energy, which other nations might take for harshness; in its daring, which minds less accustomed to foreign usage would consider gibberish.¹²⁶

Rousseau’s influence led to some shifts in values. Graceful French conversation began to be criticized as over-refined, loquacious, insincere and ‘effeminate’.¹²⁷ What had previously been criticized as English bluntness and taciturnity could be interpreted as sincerity and naturalness. There were deliberate moves to simplify both languages. Samuel Johnson laboured in his Dictionary (1755) to rein in the ‘Gallick structure and phraseology’ so fashionable among the social elite. The poet Christopher Smart hoped that ‘the ENGLISH TONGUE’ would become the ‘language of the WEST’.¹²⁸

A resounding international vindication of French came in 1783, when the Royal Academy of Sciences in Berlin held a competition on the theme ‘What has made the French language universal? Why does it merit this prerogative? Is it likely to keep it?’ Essays could only be submitted in Latin, German, or of course French. The international competitors broadly agreed on the unique attractions of French, its popularity, the greatness of its literature, and its durable primacy. The joint winner, Antoine Rivarol – ‘the man with the best hairstyle of his day’ – judged German too guttural, Spanish too solemn, and Italian insufficiently virile. As for English, apart from the unpleasantness of those who spoke it, it was too close to barbarism, too peripheral to Europe, its literature lacked taste, its grammar was ‘bizarre’ and its pronunciation inferior. French, as well as literary greatness, had a unique ‘genius’: other languages might be more poetical or musical, but French was unique in its politeness, logic, clarity, and hence ‘probity’. Moreover, it was sustained by French intellectual leadership, and crowned by its recent liberation of America, which had eclipsed both English literature and English power. Rivarol’s brilliant summary of what was already widely accepted helped to fix certain notions about the inherent virtues of the language: in his most famous phrase, ‘If it is not clear, it is not French.’¹²⁹ For Marc Fumaroli, this precision of meaning is very different from what he calls the ‘flabby transparency’ (transparence molle) of twentieth-century global English, able only to convey approximate meaning without style, which makes it incapable of providing a civilized global language for the twenty-first century.¹³⁰ Its role is indeed very different from that of French in its heyday, associated with power and high culture. French has been a badge of distinction; English, ‘a passport to self improvement’.¹³¹