History of The French Navy - French Revolution and The First Empire

French Revolution and The First Empire

The French Revolution, in eliminating numerous officers of noble lineage (among them, Charles d'Estaing), all but crippled the French Navy.

The National Convention dissolved the Fleet Gunners Corps, which effectively put a halt to the training in gunnery, abysmally degrading the rate of fire and precision of batteries; in addition, the French doctrine was to fire at the rigging of enemy ships as to render them hapless; this doctrine could prove effective with highly trained crews, but was impractical with poorly trained gunners, and resulted in a number of instances where French ships did not manage to score a single hit on dangerously exposed English ships (as happened with the fight of the Ça Ira, or at the beginning of the Battle of Trafalgar). By contrast, the Royal Navy doctrine was to fire at the ship's hull in order to kill and maim the crew, and gradually degrade the firepower of their opponents — also much easier target for much better trained gunners.

Efforts to make it into a powerful force under Napoleon were dashed by the death of Latouche Tréville in 1804, and the Battle of Trafalgar in 1805, where the British all but annihilated a combined Franco-Spanish fleet. The disaster guaranteed British naval domination until the steam era.

From then on, the French navy was limited to frigate actions and privateers like Robert Surcouf. This started the French tendency to prefer large numbers of smaller but powerful and swift units, rather than large capital ships.