CHAPTER 4

The Revenger’s Tragedy

It seems to me impossible to be French without wishing ill to England, but this sentiment, so just and so reciprocal, increases every day that one is obliged to live among the English. That is at least what I feel, and I would like to live long enough to see descending on them all the evils that their constitution prepares at home and their insolence deserves abroad.
DUC DE CHATELET, ambassador in London, 1769¹

The strains of the Seven Years War plunged France and Britain into turmoil. Monarchs and ministers were reviled. Opponents demanded a greater voice. The language of ‘patriotism’, citizenship, representation and rights infused political debate, and made conflict over taxation increasingly dangerous. American colonists rebelled. Political instability threatened Britain. Something approaching a royal coup d’état convulsed France, but could not suppress political tensions. What doomed both the British empire and the Bourbon monarchy was the determination of France’s rulers to overturn the outcome of the Seven Years War, which they considered both outrageous and precarious.

Choiseul Plans Revenge

I am completely astounded that England, which is a very tiny bit of Europe, is dominant . . . One might reply that it is a fact; I must concur; but as it is impossible, I shall continue to hope that what is incomprehensible will not be eternal.
DUC DE CHOISEUL, 1767²

Choiseul, a ‘virulent and impenitent anglophobe’,³ saw the Treaty of Paris as merely a truce. When ambassador in Vienna early in the Seven Years War, his impatience with the Austrian alliance was due to his conviction that it was forcing France ‘to neglect the sea war and America, which was the real war’.⁴ This nobleman from Lorraine could grasp the importance of ‘a few acres of snow’ because of their European consequences. If he could break Britain’s control of its colonies and take over their trade for France, his ability to influence the affairs of Europe would increase, and Britain’s meddling diminish. France’s prestige and security in the face of growing Prussian and Russian power would be strengthened. He wrote to the king that

England is the declared enemy of your power and your State: she always will be. Her commercial greed, her haughty tone in negotiations, her jealousy of your power . . . must make you foresee that it will take centuries to make lasting peace with this State, which aims at supremacy in the four corners of the earth . . . We must employ the genius and all the power of the nation against the English.⁵

That he reacted to crushing defeat by planning another war is testimony to the self-confidence and determination of this seemingly frivolous courtier, who prepared as heavy a blow against Britain as any statesman in history.

He believed that Britain had overreached itself – a commonplace in French political circles, and shared by many in Britain. Public debt, high taxes, trade upheavals, political factionalism and ethnic discontents encouraged the wishful thought that British power was built on sand. The most notorious spokesman of public grievances was the clever, unscrupulous, lecherous and charming political adventurer, John Wilkes – the biggest ‘scoundrel’ whose last refuge was, in Samuel Johnson’s famous phrase, Patriotism. In 1763 Wilkes fled to France to escape a charge of seditious libel and blasphemy, and stayed five years until forced to flee his creditors. A francophobic anti-papist Patriot might seem an unlikely refugee in France, and more unlikely still as a social celebrity. But a famous enemy of the British government could be sure of finding friends, and his campaign for ‘liberty’ struck a chord among opponents of the French crown too. Mouchoirs à la Wilkes – kerchiefs printed with his address to the electors of Middlesex plus a picture of the ‘patriotic hero’, pen in hand – became a fashion item. The British government tried unsuccessfully to silence him by paying an agent (who assiduously practised pistol shooting in his garden) to go over and try to kill him in a duel.⁶

Choiseul was contemptuous of Wilkes and his ineffective persecutors – ‘a government so weak that it dares not punish one of the dregs of its people who insults and taunts it’. He read reports of riots in London with ‘real pleasure’: ‘The English will never kill each other sufficiently to satisfy us.’⁷ It all showed that France had nothing to fear. Its political system and physical strength were inherently superior. That ‘the Poor of Tours’ petitioned that ‘the whole people is at the end of its tether’ did not ruffle Versailles.⁸‘What can Britain do beside a power that can raise a hundred and sixty thousand seamen and two hundred and fifty thousand soldiers?⁹ All that was needed was to act: ‘Only let a clever minister rise in France, and England will fall immediately into its original condition of mediocrity.¹⁰ And there was no cleverer minister than Choiseul.

The French identified as Britain’s vulnerable point the theatre of her greatest triumph: America. Choiseul told the king as early as 1765 that ‘only a revolution in America . . . will return England to the state of weakness in which Europe will no longer have to fear her.¹¹ If the colonies contributed nothing to the British state, the cost of the Empire would be crushing. But if Britain tried to tax them, ‘they will easily break away . . . without the slightest fear of punishment, for England would not be able to sustain a war against them’.¹² Events fortified these hopes: the American Duties Act (1764) and the Stamp Act (1765) caused mayhem in New England.

If Choiseul’s strategy was to wait on developments in America, he was far from passive. He sent agents to gather political and military intelligence in London and America, where an attempt – unsuccessful for the time being – was made to suborn the patriotic imperialist Benjamin Franklin. A key agent in London was the baby-faced Chevalier d’Eon de Beaumont, a cavalry officer later famous as a cross-dressing hermaphrodite. For the moment, he was merely a diplomat and spy – an agent of the secret du roi, the king’s private diplomatic and espionage service. Successive ambassadors joined the planning for war. ‘Whoever is born French,’ wrote the Comte de Guines, ambassador in 1773, ‘must see with extreme pain that there exists a nation that has always markedly prevailed over his own . . . This evil, though ancient, is not irremediable.’¹³ Guines was another colourful figure, famous for his flute-playing and his taste for tight breeches (his valet when preparing his outfit was reputed to ask whether he planned to sit down that day). He helped with espionage and plotted to make a stock-market killing when the crisis broke. Captain de la Rozière surveyed the Sussex and Kent coasts, permitting detailed disembarkation plans to be finalized with the Comte de Broglie, head of thesecret du roi. These were presented to the king in 1765. By 1766, strategic plans had been drawn up in Versailles and Madrid.¹⁴ But d’Eon quarrelled with his government over money, and began to ‘play the Wilkes’ by publicly attacking Versailles. This made him a political hero in England and an improbable student of seventeenth-century English republican writings, some of which he translated. The real danger was his threat to provoke a premature war by publishing the embassy’s invasion plans. This horribly embarrassed the French government, which tried unsuccessfully to poison and then kidnap him from Vauxhall gardens – making him even more of a celebrity.¹⁵

Choiseul pursued his campaign to fan patriotic zeal. Pierre Belloy’s government-sponsored play, Le Siège de Calais (1765), was ‘the first French Tragedy that has given the Nation the pleasure of seeing itself’.¹⁶ It drew enthusiastic audiences in Paris and the provinces. In garrison towns, officers staged amateur productions. The plot, loosely based on the English siege of Calais in 1347, featured the ‘proud’, ‘cruel’, ‘arrogant’ ‘ambitious’ English against the noble altruistic French, ‘an immense family’ indomitable in defeat, who shame the English into seeing the error of their ways. The play ends with a stirring appeal in the name of Humanity and Europe. Though dedicated to the king, the idea of monarchy the play presented would have seemed daring even in England: kingship was ‘vain without the approval of the Subjects’; ‘the free and proud People . . . make for themselves . . . just and supreme law’.¹⁷ Such ideas, the essence of Patriotism, were precisely what the absolutist monarchy would spend the rest of its existence trying to deny.

Preparation for revenge was far-reaching. The Austrian alliance had to be consolidated to keep Europe quiet when France acted overseas. Spain, needed for her navy, had to be tempted into the adventure and built up into an effective auxiliary. Envoys were sent to the Mughals in Delhi, the powerful Maratha federation, and other Indian warlords, notably Haider Ali of Mysore. Bases in the Mediterranean, the Caribbean and the Indian Ocean had to be prepared. Money had to be raised for naval and military modernization. All this needed formidable political support and control of the State machinery. So friends at court had to ensure that Louis XV heard helpful opinions and was surrounded by reliable people. Choiseul was in his element in this world of antechambers, bedchambers and nepotism. His ally was still Madame de Pompadour. She was now more the king’s friend than his lover, but ever present, and ambitious to be more than just a purveyor of amusements.

Choiseul’s priority was the navy, which, he told the king, ‘will be the salvation of the realm or its downfall’. During the war, it had been ‘not only crushed, but disgraced’.¹⁸ Ninety-three ships had been lost (compared to one lost by Britain), leaving only forty battered survivors. Choiseul handed over foreign affairs to his cousin, took over the ministry of the navy, and set out to learn about the sea. He aimed at a navy of ninety ships of the line and forty-five frigates, and promised the king to reach sixty-four ships of the line in four years. The seventeen mighty ships, a million livres apiece, patriotically pledged during the war, were coming off the stocks. Large strategic reserves of timber and masts were accumulated. By 1765 Choiseul informed the king he had ‘almost doubled’ the force ready for sea, with sixty-two ships of the line and twenty-three frigates. Spies were recruited at Portsmouth and Plymouth; others went to the English Black Country to discover techniques of coke-smelting for casting cannon. Dockyards were improved or built, including in the West Indies. Plans were made for a harbour at Cherbourg to support operations in the Channel. Ile de France (Mauritius) was strengthened as a springboard for operations in India. Corsica was occupied in 1769, largely to deprive the British of a possible base overlooking Toulon. The British public admired the resistance led by the Enlightenment hero Pasquale Paoli. Sympathizers gave arms and money, but Whitehall was unwilling to fight for Corsica. It took 25,000 French troops months to crush the Patriots and chase Paoli into honoured exile in England. Nabuleone di Buonaparte was born that very year, ‘as my fatherland was dying’. He was thus a French rather than a Genoese – or even conceivably a British – subject.

The Duc de Choiseul: ‘A little volatile being’, but a deadly enemy of the British empire.

Choiseul would not be in power to taste the revenge he had planned. His need for money inevitably produced resistance from the parlements, which he tried to conciliate. But this offended conservatives at court, who accused him of weakening royal authority – he was even accused of poisoning the dauphin. It was at court that his fate was sealed, as with all Bourbon ministers. His self-assurance, greed for power and glory, contempt for his opponents, and recklessness with the fortunes of the kingdom, had made many enemies. The death of Pompadour in 1764 weakened his hold over the king, and he failed to have her replaced by one of his own followers – his sister had been in the running. He did not trouble to hide his disdain for the new incumbent – ‘Well, my girl, how’s business?’ He got rid of her by having the royal bedchamber spied on and bringing Louis a humiliating report of his own sexual inadequacies purportedly based on her gossip. Such petty triumphs were short-lived. In 1769 a more formidable operator, the gorgeous, funny, featherbrained Jeanne Bécu, the successful call-girl ‘Mademoiselle Ange’, found ways of reviving the flagging royal libido and was created Comtesse du Barry for her pains. Choiseul, motivated by jealousy and snobbery, tried to dispose of her too, so she became the channel by which Choiseul’s enemies dripped poison into the royal ear. They accused Choiseul of increasing his own power by conniving with the parlements: ‘Miss Angel’ persistently reminded her lover what had happened to Charles I. Realizing he was in danger, Choiseul arranged several Bourbon–Hapsburg marriages to cement the alliance with Austria, most importantly in 1770 that of the future Louis XVI with the Archduchess Marie-Antoinette, whom he had spotted while she was still a child.

His downfall came over the Falkland Islands, when the rival claims of Britain and Spain clashed in 1770. Choiseul at first urged caution on an over-confident Spain. He knew that they were not yet ready to take on the British navy, and he may have given up hope of an immediate American rebellion. The king, however, feared that Choiseul might gamble on war to maintain his power, and indeed the latter’s plans remain enigmatic.¹⁹ As was the Bourbon way, the king dismissed him without ceremony, giving him twenty-four hours to quit Versailles for his country estate. Choiseul lived until 1785 but never returned to power, in spite of lobbying by Marie-Antoinette. Property speculation and the sale of some of his paintings (now in the Louvre, the Hermitage and the Wallace Collection) occupied his spare time and partly defrayed his lordly extravagance. He became the focus of what was arguably France’s first opposition party, public, patriotic and vocal.

His fall marked a brief change of direction and a period of violent political conflict. His successors calmed relations with Britain so as to be free to crack down on domestic opposition and turn their attention to problems in eastern Europe. In 1771 the chancellor, Maupeou, tried to snuff out opposition by abolishing the parlements. Whether this was short-sighted obscurantism or a bold and salutary reform has divided historians ever since. But the sudden death of Louis XV in May 1774 – once ‘the Well Beloved’, now the generally detested – brought a reversal of policy. The young Louis XVI dismissed Maupeou and reinstated the parlements. Like George III, he aimed to be a ‘patriot king’, both leader and servant of the nation, a healer of wounds, and an example of virtue (both kings broke with tradition by remaining faithful to their wives). Louis seemed much more likely to succeed than George, whose realm was about to explode.

Taking the Great out of Britain:
the Second War for America, 1776–83

The ‘Great’ will be soon be gone from Britain . . . in a few years she will fall to the second or third rank of European powers without hope of ever rising again.
French foreign ministry report, 1777²⁰

The great power that once held France in check is now fallen utterly and for ever, all influence and force lost . . . a second-class power, comparable with Sweden and Denmark.
JOSEPH II, Holy Roman Emperor²¹

In the years after their shared imperial triumph in 1763, the American colonists and the home government fell out, as the French had expected. At stake were what the American leader Samuel Adams called ‘our British privileges’.²² The two greatest issues were control of vast territories gained through the defeat of the French, and management of the colossal war debt, which was straining the world financial system. It was necessary to raise taxes, but also difficult to do so. An inevitable post-war cut-back in government spending began a devastating economic slump. So taxpayers’ protests in Britain and America were radicalized by bankruptcy, unemployment and hunger.

The problem of land speculation and settler encroachment on native land was fundamental and insoluble. British officials feared a bloody and expensive Indian war. Many had good relations with Indian nations, now British subjects. The Northern Indian Superintendent, Sir William Johnson, was an adopted member of the Mohawk tribe, spoke their language, and lived with a Mohawk princess, Gon wa tsi ja yenni (usually known as Molly Brant or ‘the Indian Lady Johnson’). Their son became an officer in the British army. Their house, Johnson Hall, was the centre of a genuine British–Indian society.²³ In October 1763 a Royal Proclamation forbade further European settlement beyond the Appalachians and the Mississippi. To colonists, this meant that the fruits of victory over the French were being withheld.

Ministers in London wanted lightly taxed colonists to contribute to their own past and future defence costs. But colonists considered the Navigation Acts, which gave Britain a monopoly of American trade, to be a sufficient contribution. Riots, mass resignations of officials and above all a boycott of British imports convinced businessmen and politicians in Britain that the government had been too high-handed. William Pitt, out of power, and leading Whigs such as Edmund Burke eloquently defended the colonists. The Stamp Act of 1765 was repealed the following year, amid patriotic rejoicing and fireworks on both sides of the Atlantic. But joy was short-lived. The underlying problems of taxation, trade regulation, debt and land ignited further conflicts of ideology and of interest.²⁴ Public tranquillity was never re-established, especially in the biggest ports, Boston, New York and Philadelphia. This led to confrontation when in 1773 the port of Boston was closed as a punishment for disorder. A Continental Congress, representing all the colonies, met in Philadelphia in September 1774. Fighting broke out between militia and troops in Massachusetts in April 1775.

What was seen as a British civil war created dissension on both sides of the Atlantic, with the political opposition accusing the government of plotting to undermine liberty throughout the Empire. Ill-gotten wealth extorted from India was, they suspected, being deliberately used to corrupt the political system. The Quebec Act (1774), which recognized the Catholic Church in the conquered French colony but did not set up an elected assembly – ‘popery and slavery’ – seemed proof of absolutist tendencies. Leading Whigs such as Lord Rockingham, Lord Shelburne and Edmund Burke denounced the use of force in America. In Rockingham’s words, ‘If an arbitrary Military Force is to govern one part of this large Empire . . . it will not be long before the whole . . . will be brought under a similar Thraldom.’²⁵ Such views inspired the most famous ever Commons motion, in April 1780, that ‘The influence of the Crown has increased, is increasing, and ought to be diminished.’ The resistance of the colonists, culminating in the Declaration of Independence on 4 July 1776, had many supporters in Britain. The strongest of them were Dissenters – particularly English ‘rational dissenters’ and Ulster Presbyterians – who sympathized with the rebels on religious and political grounds. One of them, John Horne Tooke, opened a subscription for the ‘widows, orphans and aged parents of our beloved American fellow subjects . . . FAITHFUL to the character of Englishmen . . . inhumanly Murdered by the KING’S troops’.²⁶ Those who supported the government were broadly speaking all who believed that the rebellion undermined the rule of law, and threatened the existence of an empire without which Britain would be no match for France. This view was so strongly held in Scotland that English opponents denounced the conflict as ‘a Scotch war’. In Ireland, Catholics felt little sympathy with ‘Puritan’ rebels, and many were eager to demonstrate their loyalty to the Crown.

In France too, attempts to resolve post-war financial problems led to simultaneous popular and political resistance. Turgot, the controller-general of finances, was a philosophe in power, a physiocrat economist, dogmatic and self-righteous – though admittedly often right. Physiocrats believed that economic freedom would increase national wealth and government revenue. Turgot deregulated the grain trade, but at a time of bad harvests, which created popular panic. Rioting in the countryside spread to Paris and Versailles, where crowds besieged the palace itself. Emergency measures had to be taken to procure grain, and the ‘flour war’ was ended by force. Turgot’s ‘Six Edicts’ (1776), aiming to suppress financial privileges and reform taxation, aroused angry opposition from vested interests, including courtiers and the parlements. This French counterpart of the British troubles in North America was a more direct threat to the centres of power – the king himself saw the crowds of hungry peasants. But for that very reason it was easier to suppress: 25,000 troops were on hand for the ‘flour war’, whereas Britain had only 3,500 in Massachusetts. Moreover, the French State was again ready to brush its financial problems under the carpet by increasing its debts.

It even undertook large increases in military spending from the mid-1770s. ‘Providence has marked out this moment for the humiliation of England’, thought the new foreign minister, the Comte de Vergennes.²⁷ A gala performance of The Siege of Calais was arranged to stimulate patriotic fervour. William Wilkinson was hastily recruited to build a cannon foundry. Cod-fishermen off Newfoundland were ordered back to port to man warships. The British knew what was going on. They had an efficient spy network in France, supervised by the ambassador, Lord Stormont. When Benjamin Franklin, whose disillusioned imperialism had evolved into American patriotism, set up a makeshift embassy in a house in a Paris suburb, the British soon penetrated it.

One man tediously preached caution: Turgot. He sympathized with the American cause more than his opportunistic colleagues. He believed that American independence – indeed that of all colonies – was inevitable eventually. France’s interest, he argued, was to let the Anglo-American conflict drag on. Intervention might even reconcile the two sides and turn them against her. Above all, France could not afford war. ‘The king knows the State of his finances’: war would be ‘the greatest of misfortunes, since it would make essential reforms impossible for a long time, if not for ever . . . If we use our strength prematurely, we risk making our weakness permanent.’²⁸ He refused to increase the navy budget from 30 million to 62 million livres. On 12 May 1776 he was dismissed. Now, money was no object. The navy began to prepare at Brest and Toulon.

Turgot’s dismissal is regarded as one of the turning-points in French history: the end of the Old Regime’s best chance of reforming itself, and a fatal step towards its downfall. Turgot’s warning that the first cannon shot would mean revolution may be apocryphal, but fundamentally it was true. His voice, as head of the State finances, was surprisingly feeble. As one insider noted, ‘the habit of ministers is to regard a controller-general as a mere money gatherer, to execute and not to block their political plans’.²⁹This could serve as the epitaph of the Bourbon monarchy.

Vergennes, a career diplomat, resumed Choiseul’s policy of restoring France’s preeminence at Britain’s expense:

the separation of her northern American colonies; her shrunken and diminished trade, her more encumbered finances, will proportionately reduce her power and make her less worrisome and less proud. She will be unable to kindle and feed the fire of division and discord among the great States of Europe.³⁰

Vergennes detested the political ideas of the rebels; but ideology was not the issue. He would support Patriots in Boston as ‘our friends’ against Britain, as he simultaneously suppressed Patriots in Geneva as ‘agents of England’.³¹ But he was careful. Britain might try to foment a war on the Continent. So other states must not feel themselves threatened by French ambitions. ‘We shall be feared less if we content ourselves with cutting off our enemy’s arms than if we insist on running him through the heart.’³² Best of all would be to fight as long as possible by proxy, giving discreet help to the rebels, and simultaneously encouraging opposition to Britain in India. As the king put it, ‘the more they fight, the more they destroy themselves’.³³

ENTER FIGARO

The famous quarrel between America and England will soon divide the world and change the system of Europe [ . . . ] You will only maintain the peace you desire, Sire, by thwarting peace between England and America at all costs, and preventing the complete triumph of either.’
PIERRE AUGUSTIN CARON DE BEAUMARCHAIS to Louis XVI, February 1776³⁴

Pierre Caron, alias Caron de Beaumarchais, was a watchmaker, royal harp teacher, magistrate, entrepreneur, suspected murderer, would-be courtier and playwright. He was also an agent of the secret du roi, and factotum to the Duc de Choiseul, the Almaviva to his Figaro. The Barber of Seville was performed in 1775 – his first great literary success.

That summer he was sent to London as a secret agent to sort out the long-running problem of the Chevalier d’Eon, now earning a living as a female fencing instructor for ladies, and still threatening to publish secret documents unless paid 318,000 livres 26sous. Louis XVI, to end the embarrassment, wanted d’Eon to return to France and live as a woman, wearing exclusively women’s clothes. Beaumarchais made contact: ‘the wench is mad about me . . . who the devil would have thought that the king’s service would require me to pay court to a captain of dragoons?’³⁵ He persuaded d’Eon to hand over the compromising papers in return for a pension of 12,000 livres a year, payment of his London debts, a dress allowance of 2,000 écus, and royal permission to wear the Cross of St Louis with female clothes (‘only in the provinces’). Beaumarchais also contacted Wilkes and other pro-American politicians. He himself had no sympathy for democratic ideas in France, but became their enthusiastic supporter in America. He wrote to the king and Vergennes urging the dispatch of money and weapons to the rebels: ‘this meagre aid they are asking for . . . will assure us the fruits of a great victory without the dangers’.³⁶ In May 1776, Vergennes authorized him to float a company ‘at your own risk’ to supply arms: ‘it is important that the operation should have in the eyes of the British government and even the Americans the character of a private speculation of which we know nothing’.³⁷ The government advanced 2 million livres, the Spanish another million, and the farmers-general a fourth. Beaumarchais set up Roderigue Hortalez et Compagnie in Paris and bought weapons from government arsenals. The Americans immediately ordered 30,000 muskets, 30,000 uniforms, 2,000 barrels of gunpower, cannon, shot and 4,000 tents, to be paid for in tobacco. By March 1777, Beaumarchais had dispatched nine vital shiploads, only one of which was intercepted.³⁸ Soon he had his own miniature navy. But he never made much profit.

After the war, he returned to the theatre, writing The Marriage of Figaro. Its insolent mockery of the nobility by a clever upstart caught the post-war mood. The fashionable court set loved it and had it staged in April 1784, despite the vehement objections of Louis XVI, who famously said that allowing its performance would be like demolishing the Bastille.

London, hoping to limit the war, ignored French gun-running. But Versailles allowed American privateers to seek shelter in French ports, and this caused a diplomatic crisis. In June 1777, the British navy was ordered to stop and search French ships heading for America. Britain seized 158 French merchant vessels and their crews³⁹ – an act, echoing 1755, to deprive France of seamen. In December 1777 came the sensational news of the surrender of General Burgoyne’s force at Saratoga, causing a stock-market collapse in London. A popular French song praised ‘The Successes of the Insurgents’:

To finish the job one day
Send your children to dance
On the ruins of England.⁴⁰

The king and Vergennes did not want the Americans to win before France had time to encumber them with help. They believed (on Beaumarchais’s assurance) that the British had decided to grant American independence and recoup their losses by attacking French and Spanish colonies, perhaps in alliance with the former rebels.⁴¹ Vergennes decided to provoke war ‘without [France] being materially the aggressor’.⁴² The foreign ministry predicted that ‘the year 1778 will decide the fate of England and the predominance of France.’⁴³ American privateers were again given port facilities, and in February this was made official when the French navy gave a nine-gun salute to the American flag carried by the notorious privateer John Paul Jones in Quiberon Bay. In March Versailles informed London that France had signed treaties with the Americans, recognizing their independence. Both sides withdrew their ambassadors, and the British ‘Commissary and Inquiror’ at Dunkirk was expelled amid patriotic jubilation. On 20 March, Benjamin Franklin was officially presented at court as the American envoy. The assembled ladies, prelates and nobles were thrilled by his New World candour: brown suit, heavy shoes, glasses and no wig (which was taken to be a Puritan statement, but apparently it had been blown overboard on the crossing). Still the British would not be provoked into declaring war.

First blood came at last on 17 June 1778 off Roscoff, when the frigates Belle Poule and Arethusa fought. Both sides celebrated a glorious victory – a difference of opinion still reflected in each country’s histories. Though the Belle Poule was severely damaged and forced to seek shelter with a fifth of her crew dead, her captain became a national hero: Isaac-Jean-Timothée Chadeau de La Clochéterie was a third-generation naval officer whose father had died in combat against Admiral Anson thirty years earlier. His ‘courage, if not lunacy’⁴⁴ finally triggered hostilities, though it took another three weeks to declare war formally. At Versailles, women wore the ‘Belle Poule’ hairstyle, with hair combed and lacquered into the form of a hull.

The war was popular. Admirers of English liberty saw the colonists as its true defenders. Conservatives welcomed the chance of demonstrating the inferiority of what Beaumarchais termed Britain’s ‘mixed and turbulent . . . royal-aristo-democracy’. Traders hoped for customers. All looked forward to France’s resuming (in the words of one newspaper) ‘her empire, her preponderance . . . the place she should never have forfeited among the first powers of Europe’.⁴⁵ A popular song hoped that ‘You will knock down the rostrum/Of these merchants, so-called statesmen/Petty politicians of the Commons.’⁴⁶

REVOLUTIONARY ARISTOCRATS

We stepped out gaily on a carpet of flowers, little imagining the abyss beneath.
COMTE DE SEGUR⁴⁷

Marie Joseph Motier, Marquis de La Fayette, is the most famous of a cohort of young French nobles who sought glory and revenge by aiding the Americans. The Duc de Lauzun, one of Marie-Antoinette’s favourites, commanded his own Legion. The young Comte de Ségur, son of a minister of war, Baron de Montesquieu, grandson of the philosopher, Comtes Théodore, Charles and Alexandre de Lameth, the Prince de Broglie and the Vicomte de Noailles all offered their services. The Swedish Count Fersen (later famous as Marie-Antoinette’s would-be rescuer and assumed lover) wangled a position too.

Several of them only took ship in the spring of 1782, dawdled at the Azores (establishing ‘amiable relations’ with young Portuguese nuns), narrowly escaped from the British navy and landed when the fighting was nearly over. La Fayette’s role was far more prominent. An ancestor was a Marshal of France during the first Hundred Years War, and his father had been killed at Minden. He was eager for adventure, glory and vengeance – ‘to harm England is to serve (dare I say avenge) my country’.⁴⁸ He slipped out of France in 1777 without royal permission, having bought his own ship, and offered Washington his help. Washington was eager for French aid, and La Fayette offered to use his social influence to that end. At first relations between the twenty-year-old marquis and his American allies were edgy – as between the French and the Americans generally – but La Fayette idealized America, its natives and colonists. French officers were irritated ‘to see on so many occasions the Marquis de La Fayette lower himself to copy the manners and habits of American democrats’.⁴⁹ He worshipped Washington, who repaid him with paternal affection.

La Fayette returned to France a hero, and remains a symbol of Franco-American friendship. He, and other noblemen who had served in America, especially the Lameth brothers, later took leading parts in the political opposition to the absolute monarchy and in the early phase of the revolution.

La Fayette and his black servant: the double irony of a patriotic aristocrat helping a slave-owning republic.

French intervention burst on a bitterly divided Britain, and changed perceptions of the war and its reality. On one hand it created a widespread sense of foreboding, redoubling criticism of the government for leading the country into such peril. There were riots, hangings in effigy, attacks on ministers’ houses, and agitation in Ireland. On the other hand, many opponents rallied to what now seemed a patriotic struggle, and a mortal danger that reduced the American rebellion to a sideshow.⁵⁰ A Dissenting congregation in Cambridgeshire, which had prayed for ‘an end to this bloody and unnatural war’ against the Americans, now prayed for divine aid ‘against the French’. Similarly, Ulster volunteers toasted ‘Speedy peace with America, and war with France’.⁵¹

French strategy was to wage a limited war: to force the British to keep forces, especially ships, at home by threatening invasion, and then to attack isolated outposts in India, the West Indies and especially North America, disrupting trade, causing panic and undermining the British ability to fight. So in early spring 1778, before war began, they had sent the Toulon fleet to America. This time, it all worked. There was no Continental war to divide French forces. The British, especially the navy, were weak and ill-prepared: they had not kept up with French and Spanish naval expansion, and had delayed mobilization for fear of being provocative. They decided to withdraw most of their forces from North America to defend the vital West Indies.

Events in North America, however, were not progressing anything like as well as the French had expected. The rebels were on their last legs, and the British too were looking for a compromise. France risked missing its revenge. Spain, the necessary ally in a naval war, now decisively influenced French plans. The Spanish government had suffered its own colonial tax revolts since the Seven Years War and disliked aiding rebellion. They would only contemplate a short war with major rewards – Gibraltar and Minorca – and would then happily abandon the Americans. Only an invasion of England could achieve this. Vergennes proposed a limited landing in Ireland to stir up the ‘fanatically democratic’ Presbyterians. An Irish veteran of the 1745 invasion, General Wall, drafted plans. But the Spanish insisted on a decisive landing in England. Otherwise, warned the French ambassador, they would only contribute their worst ships, commanded by their ‘most ignorant and unpleasant officers’.⁵² Wall’s plans were filed and came in useful in 1796. Vergennes, seemingly drawing on the Comte de Guines’s plans, agreed to land 20,000 men on the Isle of Wight and at Portsmouth to destroy the naval base and end British dominance of the Channel. Attacks could then be made on Bristol, Liverpool, Dublin and the main supply base for the army in America, Cork, where there were 50,000 barrels of salt beef to be looted. Portsmouth might even become a French Gibraltar, crippling Britain and making France dominant in Europe. The French daydreamed longingly: ‘The Bank of England is destroyed; its fake currency shrinks to its real currency, at least nine-tenths less; its credit lost; its resources annihilated; and general terror.’⁵³

The American War of Independence

In the spring of 1779, 30,000 troops made ready to sail from Le Havre and Saint-Malo. La Fayette, back from America in a state of high excitement, dreamed of ‘planting the first French flag in the midst of that insolent nation . . . The thought of seeing England humiliated and crushed makes me tremble with joy.’ D’Eon was eager to gird up his loins and volunteer for the navy: ‘I might wear skirts in peace time, but in wartime, impossible.’⁵⁴ Instructions were issued for dealing with the natives:

The Englishman is puffed up when he is prosperous, but easily depressed by adversity . . . Money will all the more readily induce them to sell us their wares, since profit-making is the main interest of this nation.⁵⁵

Courtiers and their ladies converged on Normandy to share in the glory, and officers’ billets became outstations of Versailles. Young René de Chateaubriand all his life recalled the sight of the dashing Duc de Lauzun on an Arab horse – ‘one of those men in whom a world was ending’.⁵⁶

Across the Channel, camps were set up at Coxheath near Maidstone and Warley near Brentwood to defend the capital. As in France, they became the focus of fashionable society, and the subject of plays, cartoons and musical comedies. Coaches from London catered for visitors. Dr Johnson went. So did the king and queen, who stayed with a local Catholic peer – a remarkable gesture of patriotic unity. The Duchess of Devonshire and her friends, dressed in fetching versions of military uniform, appeared daily on horseback and pitched camp with several rug-bedecked marquees composing entertaining rooms, sleeping quarters, kitchens and a servants’ hall.⁵⁷ The troops’ equipment was less impressive: they had no wagons or stores. Combining patriotism with self-promotion, citizens pleaded for permission to command their own corps of volunteers. Major Holroyd was allowed to recruit Sussex smugglers ‘lately out of business’. Their regimental song went: ‘No Spaniard nor Frenchman our women need fear/While Holroyd’s Dragoons in their cause will appear.’⁵⁸ But most such requests were turned down, including one from a Mr Wentworth, who wished to form a unit from imprisoned debtors, bearing François I’s famous motto, ‘All is lost save honour.’⁵⁹ Only when manpower shortages grew severe did the government allow private recruiting, especially in the Scottish Highlands.

In July 1779, excited Parisians saw soldiers practising with cork life-jackets in the Seine. Rumours anticipated Vergennes’s appointment as Viceroy of England, with George III interned at the Château de Chambord. In August, Beaumarchais claimed that ‘all the London café patrons are bandying the question whither they should retreat in the event of a Descent. The concensus is in favour of Scotland.’⁶⁰ A run on the Bank of England was predicted. A firm of London merchants wrote to Ireland that ‘this Kingdom’ had been thrown into ‘a Consternation never before experienced’. Bumbling preparations began to remove livestock, vehicles and grain from threatened areas. An optimistic military planner hoped that all male civilians would make ‘a Stand against the enemy’, with ‘women and boys blocking roads and driving off cattle’. The Morning Post and Daily Advertiser encouraged their readers:

Tho’ Monsieur and Don should combine,
What have true British Heroes to fear?
What are Frogs, and soup-meagre and wine,
To beef, and plum-pudding, and beer?⁶¹

Experts on both sides considered British land defences feeble, while the combined Franco-Spanish fleet – 104 ships – would greatly outnumber the British. Five hundred transports were waiting to embark the army in Normandy. ‘Never, at any moment in history . . . was the French navy so near the goal it had so often contemplated, a landing in England: the Channel was open, the enemy was skulking in port.’⁶²

Not for the first or last time, England was saved by its enemies’ ineptitude and the forces of nature. The French fleet arrived to rendezvous with its allies off the Spanish coast on 10 June 1779. It then sailed around for six weeks waiting. When the Spanish finally arrived, the two fleets had to practise manoeuvres; they could not read each others’ signals: ‘The number of mediocre captains is even greater than last time.’ Food and water dwindled. Smallpox, scurvy and cholera broke out, ‘a terrible plague that disarms our ships’. ‘Men had been taken on who were unfit . . . water had been drawn from tainted springs. We set out with no sorrel and no lemon. Catastrophe is inevitable.’⁶³ On 15 August, the Allies arrived off the Cornish coast. The British fleet, its commanders quarrelling, retreated up the Channel. The Allies, aware that time was running out, switched their target to Falmouth, with the intention of occupying Cornwall as a bridgehead. The French commander Admiral d’Orvilliers then missed his chance of making history. He decided he could not risk a landing before defeating the British fleet: but this was keeping ingloriously but sensibly out of reach. After sailing forlornly up and down in worsening weather, d’Orvilliers returned to Brest in mid-September, with 8,000 sailors sick and dying – worse losses than in any naval battle. So many corpses had been thrown into the sea that the people of Cornwall and Devon were said to be refusing to eat fish. It was ‘the worst strategic French mistake of the war’.⁶⁴ Indeed, of the century. Wrote Marie-Antoinette, ‘The public is much annoyed that M. d’Orvilliers, with forces so far superior to those of the English, was unable to join battle with them . . . It will have cost a great deal’ – 100 million livres! – ‘and accomplished nothing, and as yet I see no indication that peace can be treated this winter.’⁶⁵

So the struggle would continue, and become worldwide. The navy minister, Sartine, secured huge increases in his budget, which rose from a peacetime level of about 20 million livres to 35 million in 1776, 100 million in 1778, 169 million in 1780, and 200 million by 1782.⁶⁶ The French discovered that the Spanish fleet had to be repaired and remasted from their own precious stocks of timber.⁶⁷ At least they could import timber from the Baltic, and indispensable masts and other naval materials could be safely carried in Dutch ships or floated via Holland’s canals, out of reach of British cruisers; whereas the British had lost vital supplies from North America. The British army and navy were diverted from decisive action in America: they had to defend Britain against another possible invasion, relieve Gibraltar, resist France and her Indian allies in the subcontinent, and guard the West Indies. With Spain and later Holland in the war, the British navy was outnumbered: to its ninety-four ships of the line, the Allies opposed 137.⁶⁸ Control of the sea was lost, and ‘the consequences were to be felt throughout the world’.⁶⁹

Britain mobilized its people and resources to a degree beyond that in any previous war. The navy increased from a peacetime strength of 16,000 men to 100,000 by 1782; by then, 250,000 men were in the regular army or the militia, plus 60,000 Irish volunteers. Taxes rose by 30 per cent, and by the end of the war absorbed 23 per cent of national income – more than in any previous war or in any other belligerent country. The struggle enhanced the sense of ‘Britishness’ in Great Britain and Ireland. The army in America celebrated the feast-days of ‘our brother saints’, Andrew, David, George and Patrick. This the government encouraged. Unlike in previous wars against France, there was no longer any danger of a Jacobite ‘fifth column’. The wearing of Scottish Highland dress was not merely legalized, but large orders for tartans to clothe new Highland regiments were placed. Greater autonomy was given to the Irish parliament. The Catholic Relief Act (1778) reduced legal disabilities against Catholics, whose recruitment into the army was welcomed.

This caused a radical pro-American backlash among Protestants, who accused the government of flirting with ‘popery’ to undermine liberty. Starting in Scotland, it culminated in London with the most destructive outburst of political violence in modern British history: more property was wrecked than in the whole of the French revolution.⁷⁰ On 6 June 1780 Lord George Gordon, backed by a crowd of 50,000, presented a protest to Parliament. Ministers and the archbishop of Canterbury were mobbed. Nearly a week of uncontrollable rioting followed in the capital and some provincial towns, in which radical associations were involved. The legend of the ‘Gordon riots’ – drunken anarchy and primeval savagery – is overdrawn. The rioters consistently targeted Catholic institutions, pro-government politicians and symbols of authority, including finally Newgate prison and the Bank of England. Working-class Catholics were mainly left alone.⁷¹ The effects were to deter opposition politicians from further encouragement of mass action, discourage reform proposals, increase official suspicion of Dissenters, and make Catholics seem less dangerous.

We know little about the immediate effects of the war effort on France; historians have been preoccupied with the longer-term consequences that culminated in the revolution of 1789. The war must have affected the French people far less than the British. The number of troops engaged was far smaller than in earlier wars, for there was no fighting on the Continent. Naval conscription struck the maritime population of Brittany, Normandy and Provence: sailors tried to avoid the call-up, for service in unhealthy naval ships was grim. The sick from the 1779 fleet filled the hospitals for miles inland. As always in wars against England, commerce was disrupted by naval action and privateering. The government decided to pay for the war by loans, not by a combination of borrowing and increasing taxes as in Britain. In the short term, this caused an economic boom. A popular song proclaimed:

The Briton sees enraged
Our exploits and his debts
But we have lots of cash
Just look at all our fêtes.⁷²

The war affected the French elite in a way that Simon Schama has described as ‘profoundly subversive and irreversible’.⁷³ This was not obvious at the time: how could glorious revenge be dangerous? As usual the authorities commissioned patriotic paintings and statues. However, the conflict popularized the new kind of patriotism already visible during the Seven Years War, and now embodied by the Americans. This was different from old traditions of service to the king. One indication was the lionizing of La Fayette on his return in 1779. At first he was placed under house arrest for going to war without royal permission. But he was cheered in the Parisian theatres, and soon the king invited him to the royal hunt, and Marie-Antoinette, previously contemptuous, had him appointed commander of the royal dragoons at the age of twenty-two. Benjamin Franklin was no less a star. His rugged simplicity, brilliantly acted, recalled the imagery of Rousseau and Greuze. His Poor Richard’s Almanach became a best-seller as La Science du Bonhomme Richard, and his fashionable electrical experiments seemed to show that genius lurked within his ‘ostentatiously unostentatious’ exterior.⁷⁴ The Court joined in and even led the adulation; but both La Fayette and Franklin embodied cultures and values that implicitly passed judgement on the frivolous routine of Versailles.

The French government realized that it would have to commit not only ships, arms and money but also troops to rescue the American rebels. The British were strongly established in New York and were making progress in the southern colonies. The Crown had strong support from colonial loyalists, not least German and Scottish settlers (among the latter Flora MacDonald, thirty years after her intrepid rescue of Bonny Prince Charlie). More Americans were fighting as Loyalists than in Washington’s army. Thousands of Shawnees, Creeks, Mohawks, Cherokees and other nations sided with the Crown against the land-hungry settlers. African slaves leaving rebel masters were offered freedom, and Loyalist African military units were formed. As many as 100,000 seized the chance – ‘the first mass escape in the history of American slavery’ – including many belonging to George Washington.⁷⁵ A leading Pennsylvania politician feared that high taxes were making colonists ready to ‘renew their connexion with Great Britain’. Wrote one congressman in 1780, ‘we are pretty near the end of our tether’.⁷⁶ Washington implored French help. An American historian judges that ‘without money and supplies from France, the survival of the United States would have been unlikely, and without French military and naval help the expulsion of the British from all their American positions would have been almost impossible’.⁷⁷

In July 1780, seventeen warships, thirty transports and 5,000 troops slipped into Newport, Rhode Island – fewer than had been sent to Ireland in 1689, but a huge logistical and financial effort none the less. The soldiers came from all parts of France, though as usual more recruits came from the military and patriotic eastern provinces – comparable with the role the Scottish Highlands were beginning to play for Britain. The sailors were mainly Normans and Bretons, as the maritime conscription system dictated, who had learned to hate the English over generations of wars, raids, and privateering. They were commanded by the Comte de Rochambeau, whose job the previous year had been to spearhead the invasion of England. He was a capable professional, who ‘talked only of feats of arms . . . without an idea outside his profession’. The French did not expect much of the Americans. Rochambeau had been told to ‘conceal his grievances, his fears, and accept silently the incompetence of the people with whom he will have to combine operations’. Even so they were taken aback by the state of Washington’s forces, wracked by desertion and mutiny despite harsh punishments. The French naval commander reported that ‘the continent is in desperate straits. They want peace.’ Rochambeau appealed to Vergennes for ‘troops, ships and money, but do not count on these people nor on their resources, they have neither money nor credit, their forces only exist momentarily’.⁷⁸ But Vergennes was reluctant to send more troops when the Americans themselves were giving up.

French soldiers and ships remained cooped up in Newport, preparing for a British attack and largely dependent for news on loyalist newspapers from New York. They killed time by grumbling, gambling and quarrelling. Their relations with the Americans were polite but wary. They knew that many Americans regarded Frenchmen with suspicion, and the troops were kept in camp to prevent friction between French ‘gallantry and légèreté’ and American ‘austerity and rusticity’. To avert accidental conflict, sentries were instructed, if there was no answer to their challenge ‘Qui vive?’, to shout ‘Ou is dair?’⁷⁹ Officers were trusted to mingle with Americans, who were surprised to find that they were not weedy and ‘effeminate’ as national stereotypes suggested. The burghers of Newport seemed flattered that noblemen were ready to risk their lives in their cause. Montesquieu, benefiting from his grandfather’s renown, was lionized. In return, when George Washington visited the French camp in March 1781, he was idolized by officers getting their first exposure to republican virtue. The unfortunate Jumonville incident of 1755 was forgotten.

Only weeks after Rochambeau’s arrival it seemed the British were winning. France was desperately short of money, despite raising loans on exorbitant terms in Geneva and Amsterdam. The country was haemorrhaging cash. Coins were short everywhere, as over 100 million livres were sent to America and India. Sartine secretly issued 21 million livres in IOUs to keep the navy going, which led to his sacking in October. Jacques Necker, a Genevan banker and France’s latest finance minister, resigned the following May when he was refused control over expenditure – the first time a minister of the French crown had ever presumed to walk out. British intelligence reported this optimistically as ‘a fatal stab to the credit of France, and to the independence of America’.⁸⁰ French, Americans and Spanish were all making unofficial peace approaches to London. The French expected Britain to retain the territories it held, namely New York, the Carolinas, Georgia and most of Maine. As the British war minister Lord George Germain saw it:

so very contemptible now is the rebel force in all parts, and so vast is our superiority, that no resistance on their part is to be apprehended . . . and it is a pleasing . . . reflection . . . that the American levies in the King’s service are more in number than the whole of the enlisted troops in the service of the Congress.

Lord North, the prime minister, assured Parliament that there was the prospect of ‘a just and an honourable peace’.⁸¹

Vergennes decided on a final throw of the dice. He persuaded the king that honour was at stake. The Americans were sent the equipment and money (barrels of hard cash sent by fast frigate) for one last campaign; and in March 1781 twenty ships of the line sailed to the West Indies under Admiral the Comte de Grasse. The British Admiral Rodney, brilliant but crooked, was too preoccupied with capturing West Indian booty to intercept him: arguably, North America was lost in the Caribbean. So Grasse could move north to support Rochambeau, or evacuate him if things did not improve. Expectations in Versailles were not high: ‘it is not in North America that we may expect to strike the decisive blow’.⁸² In June 1781, Rochambeau’s 5,000 men at last stirred from Rhode Island and joined Washington’s hopeless siege of New York.

The British situation was not as strong as it looked. Troops were withdrawn to defend the West Indies. The king’s army could still win battles, but the rebels could replace their losses more easily. As one general put it, ‘the enemy’s plan should be to lose a battle with you every week until you are reduced to nothing’. This is what happened with General Cornwallis’s intrepid or foolhardy sweep from South Carolina to Virginia in the summer of 1781, aiming to destroy the core of American resistance. It reduced his own force from 4,000 to 1,400 men, so he withdrew to Yorktown, on the Chesapeake Bay, to be picked up by the navy.

In August 1781, Washington and Rochambeau, at the latter’s insistence,⁸³ moved south against Cornwallis, in response to a summons from Grasse. As always in this war, control of the sea was decisive, and Grasse had sent a message that he was taking his fleet and troop reinforcements from the West Indies to the Chesapeake. He sailed into Chesapeake Bay and landed 3,000 more French troops. Admiral Graves came south from New York with his fleet, arriving at the mouth of the Chesapeake on 5 September, just after Grasse. Though outnumbered, he attacked the French and achieved a draw, leaving both fleets damaged. But the French were still there, cutting off Cornwallis’s army. Graves has often been criticized for not forcing his way into the Chesapeake to help Cornwallis’s force to escape. But his own ships might have been trapped. Piers Mackesy sums up the dangers:

important though the loss of Cornwallis’s army was to prove, the loss of the fleet would have been a worse disaster . . . The Leeward Islands and Jamaica would have fallen. New York would have been assaulted or starved. India could not have been defended. And if the French had permitted it, Nova Scotia and Canada would have passed to American rule.⁸⁴

Graves withdrew to New York for repairs. Plans were made to return for Cornwallis, who was expected to hold out for several weeks.

But Rochambeau and Washington were ferried down the Chesapeake in Grasse’s ships, and on 6 October besieged Yorktown. This was the French army’s only significant combat in America. They were well equipped with tools and heavy artillery, and the attack was professionally and vigorously pressed forward: it was Rochambeau’s fifteenth siege. La Fayette, commanding an American brigade, incensed his compatriots by offering American help when they were having difficulty in taking one of the English strongpoints. By 16 October, Cornwallis had just over 3,000 fit men against 7,800 French, 5,800 of Washington’s army, and 3,000 Virginia militia. He had run out of artillery ammunition, and had no way of resisting the imminent final assault. On 19 October 1781 his men marched out to lay down their arms, with a band playing ‘The World Turned Upside Down’. It was France’s greatest naval and military victory over Britain, and it made history.

Cornwallis, pleading sickness, sent his Irish second-in-comand, General O’Hara, to make the surrender. O’Hara tried to hand his sword to Rochambeau, who politely refused it, rather than to Washington. This was surely deliberate. The British and Americans now loathed each other, and there were many mutual accusations of atrocities, often justified. The French instinctively sympathized with the British, and wished to preserve the ‘usages of European nations at war’.⁸⁵ This became a source of discord between the Allies. Some of the French had been shocked by their first sight of the ‘implacable, bloody and ravenous’ behaviour of American soldiers near New York. They considered the Americans’ demeanour after Yorktown unchivalrous, and their mistreatment of British prisoners criminal. The Americans resented French fraternization with the captured British – Rochambeau, for example, lent money to Cornwallis, who later paid glowing tribute to his generosity. The French retorted ‘that good upbringing and courtesy bind men together, and that, since we had reason to believe that the Americans did not like us, they should not be surprised at our preferences for the English’.⁸⁶ Prisoners of war on parole in Brittany were treated with similar kindness.

The surrender of Yorktown: the British detested surrendering to the Americans, and would have preferred to surrender to the French, shown here on the left under their white banner.

SAVING CAPTAIN ASGILL

One of the Yorktown prisoners, nineteen-year-old Charles Asgill, was chosen by lot to be executed in retaliation for the hanging of a rebel officer by loyalists. In desperation, his mother wrote a pleading letter to Vergennes on 18 July 1782, and he showed it to Louis and Marie-Antoinette. Asgill’s youth won him much sympathy, and the king and queen told Vergennes to intervene. He sent a courteous but unambiguous letter to Washington. Writing ‘as a Man of sensibility and as a tender father’, but also ‘with the knowledge and consent of His Majesty’, he reminded Washington that the prisoners had been captured with the aid of the French army, and stated that ‘the goodness of their Majesties’ Hearts induces them to desire that the inquietudes of an unfortunate Mother may be calmed’.⁸⁷ Though there were grumblings in the Congress about ‘obsequiousness’ to France, the Americans had no option but to release Asgill (who lived to be a general). The whole Asgill family went to Versailles to express their gratitude to the king and queen in person. The British and the French regarded themselves as inhabiting the same world of chivalry and ‘sensibility’. Americans, it seemed, did not.

News of Yorktown, carried by the Duc de Lauzun, reached Versailles in November 1781. The court was more interested in the recent birth of a royal heir, and Lauzun was the first of many to resent indifference at home to their distant victory. In both countries Yorktown’s importance was psychological more than material – it was a tiny battle compared with Spain’s simultaneous siege of Gibraltar. But how much more significant. La Fayette wrote to Vergennes, ‘after this attempt, what English general will undertake the conquest of America?’⁸⁸ Lord North took the news like ‘a ball in the breast’, throwing up his arms and exclaiming ‘Oh God! It is all over.’ This was the universal reaction, at least for the moment. Coming after French successes in India, the Mediterranean and the Caribbean, with the Allied navies able to strike across the globe, and with the financial burden of war ever increasing, it was a recipe for despair.

Vergennes reacted more soberly: ‘one would be wrong to think that it means an immediate peace; it is not in the English character to give up so easily’.⁸⁹ He knew that time was not on his side. News of Yorktown in fact saved the Allied war effort from collapse.⁹⁰ The battle of the Saints – Les Saintes – on 9–10 April 1782, one of the most important naval battles of the century, was sudden proof that the scales had tilted away from France. After Yorktown, Grasse sailed to the West Indies, taking St Kitts, Nevis, Montserrat and other islands. The great prize was Jamaica, whose loss it was hoped would force the British to give in, and against which Grasse led his fleet. So vital were the sugar islands that the main British fleet sailed to stop him in the only great battle the Royal Navy has ever fought outside European waters, and the last time until late 1944 that its main force went so far from home. Rodney and Hood smashed through the French fleet, capturing five ships of the line, including the flagship Ville de Paris – one of Choiseul’s patriotic vessels – and its admiral. Rodney boasted to London, ‘You may now despise all your enemies.’ The new French navy minister, Marshal the Marquis de Castries, greeted the news as ‘a grim disaster’.⁹¹ The government persuaded theparlementsto agree to an emergency tax increase – the last such increase the Old Regime would ever be given. Like Yorktown, the Saints had a psychological impact. As Vergennes saw it,

the English have to some degree regenerated their navy while ours has been used up. Construction has not been at all equivalent to consumption; the supply of good sailors is exhausted and the officers show a lassitude which contrasts in a disadvantageous way with the energy that not only the sailors but the entire English nation eagerly manifest.⁹²

Vergennes was not wholly wrong. Rodney joined the select band of heroes whose surname became a boys’ Christian name. For many in Britain, the war could now be seen as at least a moral victory. In the words of the vicar of Hanbury, Staffordshire,

To future ages it will appear to be an incredible Thing . . . that these Kingdoms shd. Maintain . . . a glorious, but unequal, Conflict for several Years, with the most formidable & unprovoked Confederacy . . . viz. France, Spain, the United Provinces of the Netherlands, & the 13 revolted Colonies of North-America.⁹³

It was time, to everyone’s relief, for the usual duplicitous game of diplomatic musical chairs. Lord North was succeeded by the erratic, devious and confusedly high-minded Irish magnate Lord Shelburne, a francophile as well as a sympathizer with the Americans. He offered generous terms to the latter in the hope of salvaging trading and political relations. He also talked of Franco-British partnership in Europe. He abandoned Loyalists and Britain’s Indian allies to the Americans and to political expediency – a betrayal attacked in the House of Lords as ‘shameful and unpardonable’.⁹⁴ But Albion was far from being uniquely perfidious. The Americans, conscious of their weakness, suspected the French of wanting a deal with Britain to partition America – fears the British confirmed by showing them captured French documents. The French all along had the corresponding fear of an Anglo-American deal by which the British would recoup their losses by seizing French and Spanish possessions. The Americans indeed secretly urged the British to retake Florida from their own ally. The Spanish were interested in Gibraltar: if they secured it by force or concession, or if they gave up hope – as they had to after the failure of their four-year siege in 1783 – they too would seek peace. Shelburne was willing to exchange Gibraltar for Puerto Rico, but was prevented by a parliamentary outcry. All combatants were in desperate financial straits. Moreover, a new danger threatened: Russia was taking advantage of the situation to threaten Turkey, one of France’s traditional allies. So peace beckoned, and Shelburne signed preliminary terms with the Americans in January 1783, who thus betrayed their French ally by making a separate peace.

On the other side of the world, the Anglo-French struggle continued. France’s allies, principally the Marathas and Haider Ali, the ruler of Mysore, with help from French troops and ships, had come within sight of destroying the British position in India in 1779–80. French strategists believed that as the United States must sooner or later dominate the Americas, India had become the great prize, and this was France’s chance to win some of it. As in America, ultimately everything depended on sea power. French activity was reinvigorated by the arrival in 1782 of Admiral Suffren, one of the most remarkable of the many French naval heroes ignored by British history but immortalized in French street names and school textbooks. Pierre-André de Suffren de Saint-Tropez was a fat, scruffy, irascible and Rabelaisian southerner who, unlike most French commanders, had been long at sea – he had joined the Knights of Malta in his teens. Throughout 1782 and the first half of 1783 he fought a series of engagements with Admiral Hughes’s British squadron off south-eastern India. They are unique in naval history for the intensity and balance of the fighting. But the French had no overall strategy and, despite Dutch and Danish help, they had insufficient forces either at sea or on land to defeat the British decisively. News arrived in June 1783 that an armistice had been concluded five months earlier.⁹⁵

In September 1783, the Treaty of Versailles was signed. The police proclaimed the good news in the Paris cafés. There was jubilation in France. The war had lasted eight years, from the first shots in New England to the last in southern India. The French had taken dazzling revenge. Britain had been humbled and reduced: a quarter of the nation had broken away. ‘With America largely lost; British India wasted by war, famine, and corruption; Ireland restive; and the British West Indies in economic difficulties . . . the British empire faced an uncertain future.’⁹⁶ Even the indomitable George III had moments of despair. The First Lord of the Admiralty, Lord Sandwich, expected that ‘we shall never again figure as a leading power in Europe, but think ourselves happy if we can drag on for some years a contemptible existence as a commercial state’.⁹⁷ The Norfolk Chronicle feared that ‘Great Britain seems hastening to a revolution or a dissolution’.⁹⁸

These were not foolish predictions. Parliamentary government, already shaken by the American revolt, was soon in crisis. Shelburne was overthrown by the Commons in February 1783 for being unpleasant, dishonest, too generous to Britain’s enemies and indifferent to the Loyalists. Shortly afterwards a coalition government was formed by the wealthy, dissolute, francophile populist Charles James Fox and the discredited loser of the war, Lord North. This was greeted with widespread revulsion as a piece of corrupt politicking. George III considered abdicating and retiring to Hanover. But in December 1783, in a bold, or reckless, act which combined principle, personal vindictiveness, and an unexpectedly shrewd calculation of political opinion, the king forced the coalition out of office and appointed the straitlaced reformer William Pitt, aged twenty-four, as prime minister. This might have caused constitutional crisis, abdication, even revolution. Instead it became a royal triumph when in 1784 Pitt smashed the Fox–North party in a general election and set out to clean up the financial system and reduce the debt burden. Time-servers, moralists, tax-payers and modernizers rallied to Pitt’s reforms. George III, helped by his deserved reputation for dullness and domestic virtue, came to embody the Patriot King, guardian of the constitution. In France, these strange contortions confirmed views that Westminster politics were no model for France. Louis XVI, a close observer of British politics, wished George well. He faced similar problems himself.

For France, the fruits of victory contained little juice. Prestige was brilliantly restored, but material gains were ‘derisory’.⁹⁹ The Allies, including America, were more weakened by victory than Britain by defeat. Holland had been humiliated, its hold on its colonies shaken, and its internal stability undermined. Spain – as its rulers had feared – was to find an independent America as dangerous as Britain, and its days as a major colonial power were numbered. Not only could things have been worse for Britain – the West Indies, India, Canada and Gibraltar might also have been lost – but commercial relations with the United States were re-established with remarkable speed.

American trade was crucial. The French had seen it as the means to equal or overtake British financial power. But the gains never appeared: the vision of Choiseul and Vergennes was ‘the pipe-dream of armchair strategists who confused diplomatic intrigue with commercial conquest’.¹⁰⁰ British businessmen knew the market, could supply the world’s cheapest manufactured goods, and offered unmatchable credit. American demand for British goods became ‘the most dynamic factor during the long boom of 1783–1801 and beyond’,¹⁰¹ and fuelled the Industrial Revolution. Franco-American relations, often cool even when they were allies, became increasingly distant, and French exports to the United States collapsed after the war. As Turgot had warned, France had made its financial weakness permanent.

French intervention prevented the British from keeping more of America. Did France do Britain an unintended favour in forcing a clean break? Otherwise, like South America, the northern continent would probably have become a patchwork of colonies and independent states. How much worse transatlantic tension would have been if Britain had ruled not only Canada and the West Indies, but New York, South Carolina, Georgia and large areas of the West. Even if Britain had managed to suppress the rebellion and recover all the colonies – compromising over taxation and self-government – the resentment between ‘Patriots’ and ‘Loyalists’ would doubtless have festered, as many British politicians and soldiers realized. London would also have met in extreme form the problem it largely failed to solve in South Africa and Australia: how to restrain attacks on and dispossession of native peoples. It would have faced the formidable problem of slavery: with the movement for abolition emerging in Britain from the 1780s onwards, friction with slave-holding American colonies would have been inevitable. If open conflict could miraculously have been avoided, would not the centre of imperial power have moved, as Adam Smith predicted and Benjamin Franklin hoped, from London to New York? If Britain’s defeat was not without consolations, France’s victory triggered the greatest cataclysm in her history.

The Biter Bit, 1783–90

The war . . . that abyss of so much money, the greatest cause of our financial disorder and of the evils with which France is now assailed . . . Gentlemen of the Third Estate, who wanted that war? You yourselves, who . . . saw in imagination the whole English navy swallowed up, and drank in long draughts, in advance, the pleasure of vengeance.
‘Avis salutaire au Tiers Etat’, 1789¹⁰²

The war . . . favoured the coming of the revolution in three ways: it filled the nation with ideas of revolt and liberty, it undermined the army’s loyalty to the old order, and it led to the collapse of the old financial system.
ANTOINE BARNAVE, revolutionary leader¹⁰³

The American war, which contemporaries estimated cost 100,000 dead, also, because of its global extent, cost a vast amount of money. The British spent £80 million, and ended the war with a national debt of £250 million, requiring £9.5 million per year in interest – more than half the total tax revenue. The French spent about 1.3 billion livres (£56 million) – they could not be precise because of the complexity of their financial system. French government debt had reached at least 2–3 billion livres (£187 million), which required 165 million livres (£7.2 million) in interest – 50 per cent of state revenue. The French hoped that Britain’s greater burden would be crushing. But the British government, helped by the City and its superior record as a debtor, could borrow more cheaply. Hence, while the French debt was only 62 per cent of the British, its interest payments were 75 per cent. France, with its larger population and GDP, should have been better able to bear its smaller burden. But for reasons noted earlier, it was unable to raise taxes. So state expenditure exceeded revenue by over 100 million livres per year.¹⁰⁴

France’s financial burden was worsened because ministers contemplated yet another war with Britain. Vergennes preferred to consolidate his victory peacefully, confirming France as the world’s predominant power through diplomatic influence and expanding trade. He hoped the chastened and diminished British might submit. But he feared, quite wrongly, that ‘proud and haughty’ Britain might seek revenge, and so even his peaceful policy required an expensive navy. Others, led by Marshal de Castries, went much further. Castries believed Vergennes had made peace too soon in 1783, missing a decisive victory. France must prepare for another war to wrest global power from Britain once and for all: ‘More than two centuries of experience have taught that the power that rules the waves can dominate the Continent.’ India, the key to world power, was the prize. He refused to allow his enormous budget to be supervised by the controller-general – ‘a powerful navy is a good investment’.¹⁰⁵ The British had a shrewd suspicion of these plans, and the embassy reported in February 1786 that ‘France is at this moment straining every nerve to put her navy on the most formidable footing’.¹⁰⁶ The combined strength of the French and allied Spanish and Dutch navies was rapidly drawing further ahead of the British. In 1786 work started on a fabulously expensive naval base at Cherbourg, to support a Channel fleet opposite Portsmouth. The works were visited by Louis XVI – the only time since his coronation he had ventured more than a few miles from Versailles. Louis shared the public fascination with ships and the sea, encouraged by France’s recent victories. It was now, as we saw earlier, that expeditions were sent into the Pacific. Interested eyes were also cast on Egypt and Indo-China.

William Pitt managed Britain’s financial problem by ostentatious economies (especially cutting Crown employees), setting up a Sinking Fund to reduce the debt, and increasing parliamentary scrutiny by the Accounts Committee, thus creating an impression of prudence and responsibility. (He was habitually careless with money, but only with his own, not that of the State.) Vergennes too tried to control expenditure by creating a conseil des finances and reforming tax collection, but was defeated by Castries and his ally the war minister, Marshal the Marquis de Ségur. Both were military aristocrats who saw attempts to control their spending as ‘dangerous economies’ and ‘a war to the death between the bureaucrats and people like us’.¹⁰⁷ So the government, under Charles de Calonne, controller-general from 1783, tried the opposite tack: to spend and borrow even more. The British ambassador reported that ‘there appears at present no disposition whatever to economy’.¹⁰⁸ This was not quite as mad as it sounds. France was, compared with Britain, lightly taxed. Calonne believed that lack of confidence in government was the problem, and that he could remedy it by behaving confidently himself, ‘like an adroit steward to a bankrupt debauchee’.¹⁰⁹ In France, he declared, ‘resources are increased by the very act of expenditure’.¹¹⁰ He could seize the opportunity created by victory to encourage trade and economic growth. So new loans were raised – over 650 million livres between 1783 and 1787. Money was spent on the court – ‘useful splendour’, thought Calonne – including the refurbishment and purchase of palaces. The unpopular Wall of the Farmers-General was built round Paris to increase excise revenue. Castries kept laying down more battleships. Money was spent on industrial schemes which, it was optimistically assumed, would quickly enable France to catch up with Britain in ‘the industrial combat’. Loans, subsidies, and investments by courtiers and the Crown’s financial officers went into sugar refineries, a planned freight service using hot-air balloons, waterworks, coalmines, arms factories and overseas trading companies. Le Creusot became the biggest plant in France, a showcase of British-style industry, with blast-furnaces, steam engines, glassworks and railways. As we have seen, some of the greatest names in Franco-British economic history were involved, including Wilkinson, Watt, Boulton, Wendel and Perier. But although in 1785 with Wilkinson’s help Ignace de Wendel produced the first coke-blast iron on the Continent there, Le Creusot soon became a white elephant, lacking a developed economic and technical environment to sustain it.

Calonne, an unctuous and self-assured hybrid of John Law and John Maynard Keynes, has divided contemporaries and historians: a reckless, slippery charlatan, or the monarchy’s last great statesman? Certainly ‘the most creative and the most destructive force in politics’.¹¹¹ Doubts surfaced in 1785, when the Paris parlement had to be commanded in person by the king to register a new loan – the last the unreformed monarchy got away with. The British embassy – who thought the French ministers insane – were hoping that inevitable financial disaster would oblige them to keep the peace.

In 1786 Britain and France, on the latter’s insistence, signed a trade treaty, known in Britain as the Eden Treaty after its chief negotiator, William Eden. The intentions of Vergennes and Calonne were to forestall confict (every Frenchman knew that the way to an Englishman’s heart was through his pocket), to facilitate the import of technology, and to increase tax revenue by increasing trade volume and decreasing the flood of contraband. The treaty raised an outcry from domestic manufacturers on both sides of the Channel, most damagingly in France, where it unfortunately coincided with an economic recession. Before the treaty, legal trade was about 23 million livres each way; by 1787, legal French exports had increased to 38 million, but British to 51 million.¹¹² Many French manufacturers were ruined. Workers rioted. ‘Buy French’ campaigns were organized, and in Rouen and Lyons balls were held to which only those wearing French-made modes patriotiques were admitted. The mayor of Lyons, France’s second city, banned advertisements for British goods. Even the government’s own intendant for commerce condemned ‘that fatal treaty with England, the death warrant for French manufacturers’.¹¹³ Guilds, chambers of commerce and the press all denounced the betrayal of French interests and the creation of 200,000 unemployed. There could have been no worse time for the scandalous ‘diamond necklace affair’, an elaborate confidence trick played on the court jeweller and Marie-Antoinette, the main consequence of which was to besmirch the queen with slanderous charges of adultery and fraud.

Calonne’s bubble burst in 1787, when bad harvests reduced revenue, wartime taxes lapsed, and the State and many of its major financial officers, badly overstretched, became insolvent. In February the treasurer-general of the navy, Claude Baudard de Sainte-James, one of the most opulent and envied of the Parisian plutocracy, had to beg the king to confine him in the Bastille so that he could unravel his accounts with thick stone walls between himself and his creditors. Over the next few weeks four more leading statefinanciers failed, including the treasurer-general of the army.”¹¹⁴ Prominent courtiers and royal personages burnt their fingers. But Calonne was a cool customer. As his schemes unravelled he pulled out the blueprints for root and branch fiscal reform that had been discussed and shelved for years. They amounted to remodelling government as well as finance: new provincial assemblies of landowners would administer a new universal land tax. This would bypass the parlements, end fiscal privileges and of course greatly increase the Crown’s revenue. An Assembly of Notables was convened to rubber-stamp his plans and give them political legitimacy.

The 144 Notables gathered at Versailles in February 1787, just as Baudard was going bankrupt. Although chosen to be pliable – princes, dukes, bishops, judges, officials – they showed that they no longer feared the Crown, and were unwilling to buy ‘a used cabriolet’ from Calonne.¹¹⁵ They refused to authorize open-ended changes in taxation. They demanded more information and an equivalent of Pitt’s Public Accounts Committee. La Fayette made the fateful demand for the summoning of the Estates General for the first time since 1614. Calonne tried public blackmail. The clergy had to read from the pulpit his attack on the Notables: ‘Some people will pay more . . . But who? Only those who have not paid enough in the past.’¹¹⁶ The consequence of this fiasco was that the Assembly was prorogued and the king was forced to dismiss Calonne – the first such defeat of a monarch for over a century. Calonne’s successor, Archbishop Loménie de Brienne, tried to force through a stamp tax – many recalled the prelude to the American revolt – and the land tax. The government painted an absurdly rosy picture of ‘order restored to the finances . . . a formidable navy, the army regenerated . . . abuse eliminated, a new port built on the English Channel to ensure the glory of the French flag, laws reformed, public education perfected’.¹¹⁷ The reality was that the Paris parlement had been forced to accept the royal tax decree and then exiled. The government was facing determined resistance both to tax increases and (the obvious alternative) to a default on its debt: this dilemma was the dominating political issue. With breathtaking aplomb, Calonne appeared in London and was soon briefing Pitt on France’s financial weakness and its consequent inability to go to war over Holland.

With friends like these, the monarchy had little need of enemies. Alas, it had those too. It was forced to slash foreign affairs spending by 40 per cent, and the army had less money than at any time since the death of Louis XIV. The other powers took advantage. The most serious consequence came in the Netherlands. France needed the Dutch for their navy and Indian Ocean bases, and for loans from the Amsterdam banks. Castries – ‘this old Bitch’ as one British diplomat called him – was actively promoting a Franco-Dutch campaign to ‘chase the British out of India’, in alliance with powerful Indian rulers, and finally reduce British power to the level of ‘Denmark or Sweden’. For Castries, ‘France’s greatest interest is to maintain the alliance with Holland, and that of England is to break it’.¹¹⁸ But the cost to the Dutch of being France’s ally in the American war had caused financial and political turmoil. The Patriot party – opponents of the stadholder William of Orange – presumed on French support to go on the political offensive. Britain’s enterprising envoy Sir James Harris financed and organized the rival Orangist party. When the Patriots arrested the Princess of Orange (who was the king of Prussia’s sister), Britain and Prussia decided to act. Prussian troops marched into Holland on 13 September 1787. Versailles and Whitehall were both clear that their global ambitions were in the balance. British warships made ready in case France intervened. Ségur and Castries wanted to pick up the gauntlet. An intervention force under Rochambeau began to assemble on the northern frontier. La Fayette hoped to command a corps of volunteers. Could another war with England have solved, or at least postponed, the crisis of the monarchy? Castries urged Louis XVI to

present the idea of glory to Frenchmen, and you will effect . . . the most useful diversion from the present turmoil. Give the appearance of necessity to taxation, and the mood will calm and perhaps you will see government recapture a part of what it is ready to lose.¹¹⁹

But, as Calonne informed Pitt, the French government had no money. So it accepted humiliation, abandoning its Dutch allies and its own global and Continental ambitions. Ségur and Castries resigned: ‘We have lost everything.’¹²⁰

Thus, disillusionment came only five years after the great American revenge. Louis and his ministers lacked the money to maintain the honour of France. But that very failure made it unthinkable that they would be allowed to raise taxes without fundamental political concessions: ‘all classes of the population, from the galleries of Versailles to the cafés of the Palais Royal,’ said Ségur, ‘spoke out against the negligence of the ministers’.¹²¹ This loss of confidence, even contempt, affected groups whose loyalty was indispensable: the nobility, the army, the ruling elite itself. Army officers had been discontented since the failures of the Seven Years War, and now cuts in the army budget and new restrictions on promotions further angered them. The highest circles of the established system questioned its practices and principles, using the language of Patriotism, increasingly familiar since the 1760s. Their spokesman turned out to be the suddenly popular Duc d’Orléans, the royal anglomaniac, hereditary troublemaker for his Bourbon cousins and the richest man in France (who privately estimated that tax reform would cost him 200,000 livres a year). In an unprecedented scene, he stood up in the Paris parlement on 19 November 1787 and told Louis XVI that his tax increases were illegal, to which the astonished king could only mumble the stock absolutist answer that they were legal because he said so. D’Orléans was arrested and exiled to his estates. There followed months of conflict between the Crown and the parlements. An attempt in May 1788 to suppress opposition by force led to insurrection in several provinces. In Rennes, Grenoble, Toulouse and Besançon noble army officers neglected to suppress popular riots, even resigning their commissions. In Paris and the provinces, soldiers joined in the demonstrations.

Money had caused the problem and it decided the outcome. The Crown had spent in advance 240 million livres of the 1788 tax receipts, and so needed to borrow an equivalent amount in order to meet its 1788 obligations, including interest payments on its war debt. Political disorder and uncertainty, and rumours of default and even civil war, discouraged lenders. Hailstorms in July 1788 destroyed crops and reduced tax receipts. By August, the treasury was effectively empty: cash payments were suspended; government stocks collapsed; and there was a run on the banks. Brienne, desperate to revive government credit, was forced to summon the Estates General for 1 May 1789. He then resigned and advised the king to recall Necker, widely believed to be a financial genius – the first time in history that a dismissed minister had been recalled. Necker postponed all reforms until the Estates General met. The absolute monarchy thus effectively abolished itself, and appealed to its subjects to solve its problems.

How very different was the home life of George III. His recovery from a spell of madness in April 1789 was greeted with genuine rejoicing. It ended a constitutional crisis that had threatened to bring the detested Prince of Wales to power as regent, along with his discredited crony Fox. Why this apotheosis of the defeated Hanoverian, when the victorious Bourbon teetered on the edge of the abyss? Both kings tried to reign as patriots. George was certainly more resolute and experienced, and had the accidental advantage of not being isolated in a British equivalent of Versailles (which British monarchs had lacked the money and the nerve to build). He had an outstanding minister in Pitt, whose priggish high-mindedness was better suited to austerity than Calonne’s viscosity or Necker’s trickiness. More fundamentally, Britain had functioning political institutions, while France was trying to improvise new ones in the teeth of a crisis. Finally, it came down to money. Britain could raise more tax and had solid credit; the French monarchy was insolvent. Shelves have been filled with books about why the Bourbons failed to reform their financial system. But had it not had to pay for the struggle with Britain, that unreformed system would have been no more inadequate than those of its neighbours. The Bourbon monarchy was the victim of its own revenge, and of its determination to prepare for yet another war. A ‘fundamental misreading’ of British intentions ‘warped’ its foreign and domestic policy.¹²² On the edge of bankruptcy, it was still building battleships.

Its slide down the precipice is one of the great stories of history: voters drafting lists of complaints (cahiers de doléances); political clubs burgeoning; the economic situation deteriorating, with bad harvests in the summer of 1789. Most important of all was the self-assertiveness of the Third Estate, the Commons, when the Estates General met in Versailles in May 1789. On 17 June, with support from some of the clergy and nobles, it declared itself a ‘National Assembly’. Three days later it openly defied the Crown in the famous Tennis Court Oath. Violent popular discontent shook Paris: attacks on Calonne’s customs wall, riots, seizure of grain and a search for weapons culminated in the storming of the Bastille on 14 July 1789. One of the few prisoners in the notorious fortress was a long-bearded Major White, who demanded to be taken to a lawyer and soon showed further symptoms of insanity. Even luckier was Lord Massareene, who, after eighteen years’ incarceration for debt, escaped from La Force prison in the confusion.

‘Patriots’ (otherwise called the ‘National Party’) played a leading role during these months. Prominent were nobles such as d’Orléans and many military men, who had vehemently expressed their anger with the government in the cahiers of the Second Estate.¹²³Leading patriots were the American connection (the Lameth brothers, Noailles, Ségur, La Rochefoucauld-Liancourt, Lauzun), members of former Jacobite families Dillon and Lally-Tollendal, and above all La Fayette, made vice-president of the National Assembly and commander of the Paris militia. Many of their ideas – including the very term patriote, and La Fayette’s idea of adopting red, white and blue as the national colours – were influenced by British and American practices. In return their efforts were greeted with enthusiasm by British and American sympathizers. La Fayette discussed his drafts for a Declaration of the Rights of Man with the American ambassador Thomas Jefferson. Lord Lansdowne (who as Lord Shelburne had negotiated peace in 1783) and his progressive intellectual circle, which included Samuel Romilly, young Jeremy Bentham, leading radical Dissenters such as Richard Price and Joseph Priestley, and exiled Genevan revolutionaries, were generous with advice to fledgling French politicians. Lansdowne paid a young Genevan exile, Dumont, to act as research assistant, speech-writer and publicist for the rising political star the Comte de Mirabeau. Romilly wrote a summary of House of Commons procedures for the guidance of the new National Assembly.¹²⁴

Many in Britain assumed that the French, a century after the Glorious Revolution, would adopt a perfected version of the British constitution. The embassy secretary Hailes thought they had developed a taste not only for British goods but for British ideas: ‘The intercourse of the French with the Americans . . . has brought them nearer to the English than they had ever been before. The almost unrestrained introduction of our daily publications [has] attracted the attention of the people more towards the freedom andadvantages of our constitution.’¹²⁵ The ambassador, the Duke of Dorset, was one of many who assumed that the revolution was over. Two days after the storming of the Bastille he reported that ‘the greatest Revolution that we know anything of has been affected with . . . the loss of very few lives: from this moment we may consider France as a free country; the King a very limited monarch, and the Nobility as reduced to a level with the rest of the Nation.’¹²⁶

There was also great relief that the threat from France had vanished. The embassy reported that

the Army is without discipline and almost without soldiers. The Treasury is without money and nearly without credit . . . It is certainly possible that from this chaos some creation may result; but I am satisfied that it must be long before France [can be] a subject of uneasiness to other nations.¹²⁷

Dorset’s private reactions combined the common Protestant obsession with nuns with his own notorious libidinousness: ‘the people continue to pillage everywhere, and they have violated two nunneries and fu-k [sic] all the nuns, I think there is something jolly in that idea’.¹²⁸ British tourists continued to circulate, and to write home with their excited and usually positive impressions. They commonly found that their nationality assured a friendly reception:

Englishmen say they, [are] our friends. We also shall be free now . . . The industry of the French is astonishing. This added to their happy climate and fruitful soil and enjoying as they soon will do the blessing of Liberty must make them a very happy and glorious people.¹²⁹

But France and Britain were not converging. Tensions emerged as early as the summer of 1789. The obvious reason is that ‘for the Frenchman of 1789, the Englishman is the enemy’.¹³⁰ The cahiers de doléances, especially from ports and textile towns, demanded action to stem English imports. There were persistent rumours that the British were fomenting revolutionary violence – Dorset was worried about reports that he had been ‘distributing great sums of money for the purpose of cherishing and augmenting the discontents’.¹³¹ There was lasting recrimination over the failure of Britain to supply grain. Even those who admired the British system were not arguing for friendship.

Throughout the debates in the Constituent Assembly and in the press, the British example was constantly referred to. No other country, even the United States, was so present in minds and speeches. But leading Patriots no longer considered it a model. The American rebellion and subsequent turmoil in Britain had tarnished the image of parliament. Abbé Sieyès, the leading ideologist of the National Assembly, dismissed the British constitution in his seminal pamplet of 1789, Qu’est-ce que le Tiers état? as ‘much more the product of chance and circumstance than of enlightenment’, and he called on the French to supersede Britain as ‘an example to the nations’. When Mirabeau, prompted by the Lansdowne circle, proposed adopting House of Commons procedures, there were shouts of ‘We want nothing that is English, we have no need to imitate anybody.’¹³²

Some French politicians, especially those from outside the cosmopolitan nobility, seized on the idea of starting afresh, and creating a superior system that would be specifically French, with no external inspiration except ancient Greece and Rome. This marked a great ideological divide from the British and American revolutions of 1649, 1688 and 1776. Maximilien de Robespierre declared that ‘The representatives of the French nation . . . were not delegated to copy slavishly an institution born in times of ignorance.¹³³They would design new rational institutions to express the ‘general will’ of the nation. The horse-trading and corruption of British politics were spurned, and appeals to tradition and precedent rejected. Others were interested in learning from England, but it was not the England of George III that inspired them, but that of Oliver Cromwell. The earliest French republicans thought the Commonwealth of the 1650s provided the best modern example of a working democracy, and they pored eagerly over its histories and political tracts with the aim of producing a better version. The young orator Camille Desmoulins declared that ‘We shall go beyond these English, who are so proud of their constitution and who worked at our servitude.’¹³⁴ The constitutional monarchists were the most anglophile. One of their leading members, Mounier, deplored the changing climate: ‘Not a year ago we spoke enviously of the liberty of the English . . . and now while we are still exerting ourselves in the midst of anarchy to obtain liberty . . . we dare to look with contempt upon the constitution of England.’ He urged the National Assembly to ‘consult the lessons of experience and not disdain the examples of history’.¹³⁵ The Protestant minister Rabaut Saint-Etienne scotched that idea succinctly: ‘history is not our law’. British institutions, long admired, now became divisive shibboleths. Those who favoured the ‘separation of powers’, ‘lords’ and ‘commons’, or a royal prerogative were identified with resistance to the revolution. British reformers who had hoped to be at the centre of exciting developments in both countries found themselves and their French friends marginalized. Mirabeau cut his connections with Lansdowne’s circle. ‘While the English viewed Lansdowne and the Dissenters as the secret emissaries of the French Revolution which had in fact rejected them, the French denounced them as the apologists of a political establishment which was in the process of disowning them.’¹³⁶

CRICKET: THE TOUR OF 89¹³⁷

What is human life but a game of cricket – beauty the bat and man the ball.
THE DUKE OF DORSET

The ambassador, the finest all-rounder of his day, thought that cricket might calm tensions in Paris and demonstrate his own, and Britain’s, goodwill. He contacted a cricketing chum, the Earl of Tankerville, who agreed to bring a side consisting of himself, William Bedster (once his butler and a well-known Surrey batsman, now running a Chelsea pub), Edward ‘Lumpy’ Stevens (the Earl’s gardener and a formidable bowler) and various well-known veteran players. The ambassador himself would make up the numbers. They planned to arrive early in August 1789. However, Paris had become so volatile that the embassy was at risk, and Dorset left Paris and intercepted the team as they were about to embark at Dover. At least the duke was able to see the first day of the Kent–Surrey match, in which ‘Lumpy’ played. Revolution thus prevented the first real attempt to introduce the French to the spirit of fair play. Marie-Antoinette was said to have kept Dorset’s bat as a souvenir.