An Anglo-French squadron of steamers bombards Odessa
in the Black Sea, 22 April 1854. Left to right, the attacking ships are:
Terrible (RN), Vauban, Mogador, Sampson (RN), Descartes, Retribution (RN), Tiger
(RN) and Furious (RN).
Impératrice Éugenie with the Escadre de la
Méditerranée between May and December 1859. When this fleet anchored off Venice
on 9 July 1859, without Impératrice Éugenie but with her sister Impétueuse,
included the fast three-decker Bretagne, the fast 90-gunners Algésiras, and
Arcole, and the corvette Monge, all of which are probably visible here.
Impératrice Éugenie sailed in May 1860 for the Far East where she remained
until 1867
1852 to 1861: Towards a New Fleet
On 2 December 1851 Louis Napoleon carried out a coup d’état
which gave him control of the government and made him, a year later, Emperor
Napoleon III. The new regime quickly embarked on a revolutionary transformation
of the battle fleet from sail to steam, which it finally codified in 1857 in a
new naval programme just before another technological revolution took place.
In early 1852, the first French screw ship of the line to
run trials, Charlemagne, demonstrated that the large screw-propelled warship
was a practical reality. At this time, the navy estimated that Britain had
afloat or under construction 10 such ships compared to 3 for France. Shortly
thereafter, the new French government substantially increased the funds
available to the navy for shipbuilding in 1852 and 1853, and in mid-1852 the
navy decided to use the funds to convert seven more ships of the line along the
lines of Charlemagne.
In justifying this programme, the Minister of Marine (then
Théodore Ducos) told his senior advisory council in May 1852 that he felt
France’s strategy in a war with Britain should be to strike hard at British
commerce while threatening a rapid, unexpected landing on the coasts of the
United Kingdom. The need for speed and carefully coordinated operations ruled
out the construction of additional sailing ships. Converted ships like
Charlemagne could make a substantial contribution with their dependable speed
of around 8 knots. (They were also a practical necessity, as they made use of
existing materiel and could be completed more quickly than new ships.) Fast
ships of the line like Napoléon would be even more appropriate, but the navy
avoided committing itself to this type before the trials of the prototype. The
sensational success of Napoléon in August 1852 caused the navy to start
additional ships of the type as quickly as possible. Five new ships and one
conversion (Eylau) were begun in 1853 alone.
In Britain, the return of a Bonaparte to absolute power in
France aroused old fears and triggered a full-blown naval scare in 1852 and
1853. Between August and November 1852 the Admiralty responded to developments
in France by ordering the conversion to steam of eleven additional ships of the
line, and more soon followed.
Ironically, this period of rivalry soon gave way to a period
of close cooperation as the two nations combined their efforts in the Crimean
War against Russia. In September 1853 the fleets of the two powers entered the
Dardanelles together, and they continued to coordinate their operations in the
Black Sea and the Baltic until the end of the war in 1856. They also shared
some of their latest technological developments, the British receiving the
plans of the French armoured floating batteries and the French receiving plans
of British gunboats.
In October 1853 Napoléon gave dramatic proof of the
importance of steam by towing the three-decker sailing French flagship Ville de
Paris up the Turkish straits against both wind and current while the British
fleet had to wait for more favourable conditions. Subsequent operations
reinforced the lesson that only screw steamers could be considered combatant
warships. In October 1854, while preparing the list of construction work to be
undertaken in 1855, the ministry of marine proposed converting to steam all 33
of its remaining sailing ships of the line in the next several years. One-third
of the resultant fleet was to be fast battleships like Napoléon (including a
few conversions like Eylau), and the remainder were to be conversions like
Charlemagne. Conversions of existing ships of the line were carried out as
quickly as the ships could be spared from war operations.
The Crimean War placed heavy operational demands on the
navy. Fleets were required in both the Black Sea and the Baltic. The French
used 12 ships of the line in the Baltic during 1854 and 3 in 1855; they used 16
in the Black Sea in 1854 and 31 during 1855 (including about 19 as transports).
The principal naval engagements involving the French were all against
fortifications: the capture of Bomarsund in the Baltic in August 1854, the
bombardment of Sevastopol in the Black Sea in October 1854, the capture of
Kinburn in the Black Sea in October 1855, and the bombardment of Sveaborg in
the Baltic in November 1855. The bombardment of Sevastopol was carried out by
ships of the line and was a failure – Napoléon, one of many ships damaged, was
forced to withdraw after a shell produced a large leak in her side. In
contrast, the bombardment of Kinburn exactly a year later made extensive use of
technology developed during the war and was a success. The French armoured
floating batteries proved practically impervious to the Russian shells, while
groups of gunboats, mortar vessels, and armed paddle steamers also inflicted
heavy damage on the defenders.
In May 1855 the Minister, Admiral of France
Ferdinand-Alphonse Hamelin, circulated to the ports a list of questions raised
by the October 1854 memo regarding the composition of the battle fleet. In
August 1855 a navy commission, formed at the Emperor’s direction to examine the
responses, drafted a formal programme for the modernisation of the fleet. The
key elements of its programme were a combat fleet of 40 fast battleships and 20
fast frigates and a fleet of transports large enough to transport an army of
40,000 men. While the combat fleet was being built, the navy was to rely on a
transitional fleet of screw ships converted from sail, which was to be
completed as quickly as possible. This plan called for the expenditure of 245
million francs in 13 years beginning in 1857. The commission was reconvened in
December 1855 to consider the implications of the success of the armoured
floating batteries at the bombardment of Kinburn in October. It completed the
technical and fiscal details of the programme in November 1856, and the Emperor
referred the plan to the Conseil d’Etat in January 1857 for study. Three
changes were made during 1857. Two ship of the line conversions were deleted
(Friedland and Jemmapes). The number of transports was reduced from 94 to 72,
probably reflecting a decision to abandon all but five of the frigate
conversions and instead convert some sailing frigates to steam frigates. The
financial arrangements were also changed to provide for the expenditure of 235
million francs over 14 years beginning in 1858. The final programme was
promulgated by imperial decree on 23 November 1857.
While refining the technical portion of the programme in
late 1856, the navy’s engineers under Stanislas-Charles-Henri-Laur Dupuy de
Lome, designer of Napoléon, had included a clause allowing the Minister of
Marine to replace ship types in the programme with others equivalent in
military strength and construction cost. Dupuy de Lome knew better than most
how quickly the programme would become obsolete, because he was already working
on the plans for the world’s first `armoured frigates’. In March 1858 the
Minister (Hamelin) ordered the first three of these, including Gloire, and
simultaneously cancelled construction of two fast 70-gun ships of the line,
Desaix and Sébastopol, which had not yet been laid down and a proposed class of
fast 40-gun steam frigates. By October 1858 the navy had decided that the new
armoured frigates were not just equivalent but superior to line of battle
ships. At the same time, it replaced the fast frigates in the programme with
smaller `cruising frigates’. (Two similar `station frigates’, Vénus and
Minerve, followed by a series of `armoured corvettes’, were eventually built in
the 1860s.) The Programme of 1857 remained the legal basis for the modernisation
of the French fleet to the end of the 1860s, but the ships built under it bore
little resemblance to those in the initial 1855 proposal.
The navy saw considerable action in the 1850s besides the
Crimean War. In 1851 a French force carried out a reprisal bombardment of the
Moroccan port of Salé. In 1853 the navy occupied the Pacific island of New
Caledonia. In 1855 the French in Senegal began to expand their control upriver
into the interior of Africa. In 1856 Britain and France agreed upon joint operations
for the revision of their treaties with China, and two joint naval and military
campaigns were conducted before another treaty settlement was made in 1860.
During this operation, the French occupied Saigon in 1859 and over the next few
years took control of all of Cochinchina.
Elsewhere, the traditional Anglo-French rivalry was quick to
revive. A French naval and military intervention in the Danube principalities
after the Crimean War aroused British fears of a Franco-Russian alliance. The
Franco-Austrian war of 1859, in which France helped Italy become independent,
antagonised British conservatives as much as it delighted liberals. The French
navy helped transport and supply the French armies in Italy and blockaded the
northern Adriatic ports. Such activity focused British attention on the naval
balance, and they found that France had reached near parity in fast steam ships
of the line and had an advantage in the number of ironclad warships under
construction. In February 1859 the Admiralty triggered the third major
Anglo-French naval scare since 1844, which intensified in 1860-61 as France led
the world into the ironclad era.
