THE YEAR 1795 IN THE ATLANTIC AND ON THE CONTINENT.
The year 1795 was for France one of reaction and lassitude. The wave of
popular ferment which had been rushing forward since the fall of the
royalty, gathering strength and volume, and driving before it all wills
and all ambitions, crested and broke in July, 1794. Like the breakers
of the seashore, a part of the accumulated momentum was expended in
a tumultuous momentary advance, of increased force but diminishing
depth, and then recession followed. The forward and backward impulses
met and mingled, causing turmoil and perplexing currents of popular
feeling, but the pure republican movement had reached the highest
point it was destined to attain. It had stirred France to its depths,
and brought to the surface many a gem which under quieter conditions
would have remained hidden from the eyes of men; but, in the confusion
and paralysis which followed, these were left stranded and scattered,
waiting for the master hand which should combine them and set each in
its proper sphere for the glory of France.
The recoil which followed the death of Robespierre took shape in
several ways, all tending at once to lessen the internal vigor of
the government, and to deprive it of means hitherto possessed for
external effort. The revulsion to mercy provoked by his bloody tyranny
was accompanied by sentiments of vengeance against the men who were,
or were supposed to be, identified with his policy. The indulgence
extended to those before proscribed brought them back to France
in numbers, clamorous for revenge. These discordant sentiments,
agitating the Convention as well as the people, the provinces as well
as Paris, shattered that unity of purpose which had been the strength
of the government after the fall of the Girondists, and during the
domination of the Jacobins. At the same time were revoked the measures
by which the Revolutionary Government, living as it did from hand to
mouth, had provided for its immense daily necessities. The law of the
Maximum, by which dealers were forbidden to charge beyond a certain
fixed price for the prime necessaries of life, was repealed. The paper
money, already depreciated, fell rapidly, now that the seller could
demand as much as he wished for articles of universal consumption. The
government, obliged to receive the assignats at their face value in
payment of dues, sought to meet its difficulty by increased issues,
which accelerated the decline. At the same time, requisitions in kind
having been suppressed, as part of the reaction from a rule of force,
supplies of all sorts were with difficulty obtained. Distress, lack of
confidence, abounded in all directions; speculation ran riot, and the
government, having relaxed the spring of terror, that most powerful
of motives until it becomes unendurable, found itself drifting into
impotence. These various measures were not completed till near the end
of 1794; and the evil effect was, therefore, not immediately felt in
the armies,—whose wants were also in part supplied by liberal demands
upon their new allies in Holland. Boissi d'Anglas, in a speech made
January 30, 1795, in the Convention, and adopted by that body as
voicing its own sentiments, declared that the armies would demonstrate
to Europe that, far from being exhausted by the three years of war,
France had only augmented her resources. The year then opening was to
witness to the emptiness of the boast, until Bonaparte by his military
genius laid the Continent again at her feet.
The internal history of France during this year, though marked by
many and important events, can be briefly summed up. The policy
of reconciliation towards the classes who had most suffered under
Jacobin rule was pursued by the government; but against the party
lately dominant the reaction that set in was marked by many and bloody
excesses. If in the North and West the insurgent Vendeans and Chouans
accepted the proffered pardon of the Convention, in the South and
East the reactionary movement produced a terror of its own; in which
perished, by public massacre or private assassination, several thousand
persons, many of whom had not been terrorists, but simply ardent
republicans. In Paris, the Jacobins, though depressed and weakened by
the loss of so many of their leaders, did not at once succumb; and the
tendency to agitation was favored in that great centre by the poverty
of the people and the scarcity of food. On the 1st of April, and again
on the 20th of May, the halls of the Convention were invaded by crowds
of men, women and children, demanding bread and the constitution of
1793. On the latter occasion a member of the Convention was shot while
endeavoring to cover the president with his body, and the greater part
of the deputies fled from the hall. Those who remained, belonging
mostly to the old Mountain, voted certain propositions designed to calm
the people; but the next day the crowd was driven out by the national
guard from some sections of the city, and the reaction resumed its
course with increased force and renewed thirst for vengeance. The
deputies who had remained and voted the propositions of May 20 were
impeached, and the arrest was ordered of all members of the Committees
which had governed during the Terror, except Carnot and one other.
The following month, June, the project for a new constitution was
submitted to the Convention, and by it adopted on the 22d of August. It
provided for an Executive Directory of five members, and a Legislature
of two Chambers; the upper to be called the Council of the Elders, the
lower the Council of Five Hundred. To this scheme of a constitution,
the Convention appended a decree that two thirds of the new Legislature
must be taken from the members of the existing Convention. The
Constitution and the decree were submitted to the country in September.
The Provinces accepted both, but Paris rejected the decree; and the
protest against the latter took form on the 4th of October in the
revolt of the Sections,—a movement of the bourgeoisie and reactionists
against the Convention, which on this occasion fell back for support
upon the party identified with the Jacobins. The defence of the
Hall of Legislature and of its members was entrusted to Barras, who
committed the military command to General Bonaparte, from whose skilful
dispositions the assault of the Sections everywhere recoiled. On the
26th of October the National Convention dissolved, after an existence
of three years and one month. On the 27th the new Legislature began
its sittings; and the upper council at once elected the Executive
Directory. Among its five members was Carnot.
On the sea the year 1795 was devoid of great or even striking events.
On the 22d of February the six ships destined for Toulon, which had
been driven back early in the month with the rest of the Brest fleet,
again set sail under the command of Admiral Renaudin, and, although
much delayed by heavy westerly winds in the Atlantic, reached their
destination in safety early in April. Not an enemy's ship was seen on
the way. The Channel fleet had gone back to Spithead as soon as Howe
learned that the Brest fleet had returned to port after the disastrous
January cruise; while in the Mediterranean the British, now under
Admiral Hotham, were at anchor in a roadstead of Corsica when Renaudin
drew near Toulon. This made the French in the Mediterranean twenty to
the British thirteen. "What the new Lords of the Admiralty are after,"
wrote Nelson, "to allow such a detachment to get out here, surprises us
all."[100]
Under the new admiralty small divisions of the Channel fleet continued
to cruise to the westward or in the Bay of Biscay; but not until the
12th of June did the main body, under Lord Bridport, put to sea. Ten
days later, numbering then fourteen sail-of-the-line, it fell in with
Villaret's fleet of twelve ships close in with its own coast, about
eighty miles south of Brest. This meeting was due to a succession of
incidents which are worthy of narration, as showing the conditions of
the war and the prostration of the French navy. The supplies of the
squadron at Brest and L'Orient, as well as much of the local traffic
of the country, were carried by small coasting vessels rather than
by inland roads. A division of three ships-of-the-line was sent to
protect a numerous convoy coming from Bordeaux. On the 8th of June
these vessels encountered the British division of five ships cruising
in the Bay of Biscay, which took from it eight of the convoy before
they could escape under the land. When news of this reached Brest,
Villaret was ordered to take the nine ships that alone were then ready
for sea and join the other three. This junction was made, and on the
16th of June the twelve again fell in with the British five, which,
after temporarily withdrawing, had returned to their cruising ground.
Chase was of course given, and as two of the British sailed very badly
there was a good prospect that either they would be taken, or the rest
of the division compelled to come down to their aid; which, with the
disparity of force, ought to result in the capture of the whole. The
admiral, Cornwallis, behaved with the utmost firmness and coolness; but
with such odds and the disadvantage of speed, no courage nor conduct
can avert some disaster. The inefficiency and bad gunnery of the French
saved their enemies. After a cannonade which lasted from nine in the
forenoon of the 17th until six in the evening, one British ship had
thirteen men wounded, and Villaret abandoned the pursuit.
Five days later Bridport's fleet was sighted, and the French being
inferior stood in for their coast, intending to anchor and await action
under the island called Groix. The pursuit continued with light airs
all day and night; but at daybreak of June 23 the fastest British were
within three miles of the slowest of the French, which opened fire at
six A.M. All Villaret's signals could not bring his fleet into line,
nor induce the undoubtedly brave, but ill trained, men who commanded
the faster ships to take station for the support of the slower. A
desultory action continued till half-past eight, ending in the capture
of three French vessels, the last hauling down her flag within a mile
of Île Groix. Bridport then called his ships off. It is the opinion
of French writers, apparently shared by English critics,[101] that
if he had pursued energetically, the remainder of the enemy must
either have been taken or run ashore to avoid that fate. As it was,
Villaret was permitted to get into L'Orient without molestation,
although to do so he had to wait till the tide served. Such was the
extreme circumspection characterizing the early naval operations of
the British, until Jervis and Nelson enkindled their service with the
relentless energy of spirit inspired by Bonaparte on land. Those to
whom St. Vincent and the Nile, Algesiras and Copenhagen, have become
history, see with astonishment nine ships of capital importance
permitted to escape thus easily from fourteen; forgetting the hold
tradition has on the minds of men, and that it belongs to genius to
open the way into which others then eagerly press. How the admiralty
viewed Bridport's action may be inferred from his retaining command of
the fleet until April, 1800. The ships that reached L'Orient had to
remain till the winter, when they slipped back two or three at a time
to Brest.
The disaster at Île Groix, with some similar small misfortunes in the
Mediterranean,[102] accompanied as they were by evidences, too plain
to be any longer overlooked, of the inefficiency both of officers and
men in the French fleets, determined the government to abandon all
attempt to contest the supremacy of the sea. To this contributed also
the extreme destitution, in the dockyards, of all sorts of stores for
equipment or provision. With the English Channel and the forests of
Corsica in the hands of Great Britain, the customary sources of supply
were cut off; and moreover the providing for the navy—not the most
cherished of the national institutions—met with the same difficulty
as was experienced by other branches of the public service in the
depreciation of the assignats, with which alone naval administrators
could pay contractors. At the end of 1795 twelve hundred francs
in paper were worth scarce twenty in gold. Having accepted naval
inferiority as a necessary condition, the Committee of Public Safety
resolved to maintain the great fleets in the ports simply as a threat
to the enemy, and to send to sea only small divisions to prey upon his
commerce and to levy tribute upon his colonies.
From the end of 1795 forward, this policy prevailed and was finally
accepted even by the emperor after several attempts, fruitless through
the incompetence of his sea-officers, to realize on the sea that
employment of great masses in which he so wonderfully excelled on
land. The reluctance of his supreme genius to accede to this system
of petty war may be accepted as testimony that on sea, as on shore,
great results can only be expected by wielding great masses. Upon
this conclusion history too has set its seal; for the squadron and
division warfare of the French navy, seconded though it was by hosts
of commerce-destroyers, public and private, produced practically
no results, had absolutely no effect upon the issue of the war. On
the other hand, that Napoleon, when convinced that he could expect
nothing decisive from his fleet, accepted the use of it as a means of
harassment or of diversion, must be received as a weighty indication
of the naval policy suited to the inferior power. To assume a menacing
attitude at many points, to give effect to the menace by frequent and
vigorous sorties, to provoke thus a dispersion of the enemy's superior
force, that he may be led to expose detachments to attack by greater
numbers,—such must be the outline of conduct laid down for the weaker
navy. But that such a course may be really effective,—that the inferior
may, as in some of Bonaparte's wonderful campaigns, become ultimately
superior,—there must be at some fitly chosen point of the sea frontier
a concentrated body of ships; whose escape, if effected, may be the
means of inflicting a great disaster upon the enemy by crushing
one or more of the exposed fractions of his fleet. Unless there be
such a central mass, mere dissemination is purposeless. Inferiority
carried beyond a certain degree becomes impotence; nor will all the
commerce-destroyers fancy can picture restore the balance to the nation
hopelessly weaker in ships of the line-of-battle.
On land as well as on sea weakness was stamped on the military
movements of the year 1795. Its diplomatic successes were due to the
arms of 1794. Early in the year Pichegru was removed from Holland
to the upper Rhine, being succeeded by Moreau. Between the armies
commanded by these two lay that of the Sambre and Meuse, still under
Jourdan, concentrated on the left bank of the Rhine between Dusseldorf
and Coblentz. It was provided that, in case of the three armies acting
together, the chief command should be with Pichegru. The removal of
the restraint enforced by the Terror was evidenced in these Northern
forces by the number of desertions during the severity of this unusual
winter. In the army of Italy the case was even worse; and the frightful
destitution of the soldiers, made known a year later in Bonaparte's
celebrated proclamation upon taking command, led to even greater
losses from the ranks. Toward the end of January seventeen thousand
men were detached from this army to Toulon to take part in a projected
invasion of Corsica. The expedition never sailed; but such was the
horror inspired by the sufferings they had undergone that the hardiest
soldiers forsook their colors, and of two fine divisions not ten
thousand men rejoined the army.[103]
Under such conditions military operations could not but be sluggish;
the genius of a Bonaparte was needed to supply the impetus which the
emasculated central government could no longer impart. The great
Carnot, also, had been removed from the direction of the war, March
4, 1795, under the law prescribing periodic changes of members in the
Committee of Public Safety. The fall of Luxembourg, already mentioned,
was obtained only by the slow process of blockade. Not till September,
when the season was nearly over, did the French armies move; Jourdan
and Pichegru being then directed to undertake a concerted invasion,
from their widely separated positions, intending to form a junction in
the enemy's country. Jourdan crossed the Rhine, advanced south as far
as the Main, and invested Mayence, the Austrians retiring before him.
Pichegru received the capitulation of Mannheim, which opened its gates
upon the threat of bombardment without receiving a shot. He showed
no vigor in following this success, and his dilatory ill-combined
movements permitted the Austrian general, Clairfayt, to concentrate his
armies in a central position between the Main and Mannheim, parting the
two French leaders. The new direction of war, either through folly, or
from sharing the growing inefficiency of the general government, had
failed to accumulate the supplies of all kinds needed by the masses
thus gathered in a wild and impoverished region. Clairfayt combined a
powerful movement against the destitute and suffering army of Jourdan,
compelling him to retreat and recross the Rhine. Leaving a corps of
observation before him and holding Pichegru in check on the south,
he then himself crossed the river at Mayence and assaulted vigorously
the lines on the left bank with which the enemy during the past year
had surrounded the place. The blockading forces were driven back in
divergent directions; and the Austrians in increasing numbers poured
into the country west of the river, separating Jourdan from Pichegru.
It was at this moment that the National Convention was dissolving and
the Directory assuming the reins of government. Carnot became one of
its five members. Impressed by the importance of retaining Mannheim,
the loss of which was threatened by the recent reverses, he sent urgent
orders to Jourdan to move south to the support of his colleague, using
his own judgment as to the means. It was too late. The mingled weakness
and ignorance of the preceding government had caused a destitution of
means and an inferiority of force wholly inadequate to cope with the
superior strategic position of the Austrian masses. Mannheim, which
had surrendered on the 20th of September, was regained on the 22d of
November by the Austrians, who at once re-enforced the troops on the
west bank, acting against Pichegru, while Clairfayt pushed further
back the other French army. With this success his brilliant operations
closed for the year. The weather had become excessively bad, causing
great sickness; and on the 19th of December he proposed an armistice,
which Jourdan was only too glad to accept. The Austrians, who when the
year opened were east of the Rhine, remained in force on the west bank,
holding well-advanced positions based upon Mayence and Mannheim,—the
two capital places for sustaining operations on either side of the
river.
The suspension of arms lasted until May 30, 1796, when the French,
having given the notification required by the terms of the armistice,
again crossed the river and began hostilities. But, although great
and instructive military events followed this new undertaking, the
centre of interest had by this time shifted from the north and east
to the Italian frontier of the republic, where the successes of
Bonaparte enchained it until the Peace of Campo Formio dissolved the
coalition against France. That dazzling career had begun which becomes,
thenceforth until its close, the main thread of French history, to
which other incidents have to be referred, and by following which
their mutual relations are most easily understood. We have reached
therefore the period when a naval narrative reverts naturally to the
Mediterranean; for Bonaparte's Italian campaigns profoundly affected
the political and maritime conditions in that sea. Upon it also he
next embarked for the extraordinary enterprise, condemned by many as
chimerical, and yet so signally stamped by the characteristics of
his genius, in which he first came into collision with the Sea Power
of Great Britain, destined to ruin his career, and with the great
seaman in whom that Sea Power found the highest expression it has ever
attained.
"During the year 1795," says the distinguished military historian of
these wars, "France, after a twelvemonth of victory, came near losing
all her conquests; threatened with a dangerous internal reaction, she
only with difficulty succeeded in freeing herself from embarrassments
and modifying the defects of her institutions. The next year we shall
find her launched in a yet vaster career, by the great captain who so
long presided over her destinies, who raised her to the pinnacle of
glory by his victories, and thence plunged her to the abyss through
disregard of justice and moderation."[104]