In summer 1779, to take the pressure off Washington’s hard-pressed men, France mounted a farcical attempt to invade Britain. An army of some 30,000 troops was amassed on the Channel coast and loaded on to French and Spanish ships. However, many of the ships had been supplied with dirty drinking water, and when they tried to provoke the Brits into a naval battle in the Channel, the English fleet kept sailing out of range, drawing the French away from their potential landing points. In the end, with French soldiers and sailors dropping like flies from scurvy and water poisoning, the invasion force simply sailed back to France. It is said that so many French corpses were floating round the Channel by this time that the Cornish stopped eating fish.
The French win American independence
Luckily, over in America, Rochambeau was making a better job of helping Washington, and in October 1781 a combined army of some 8,000 French and 9,000 Americans won the victory that, in American folk memory at least, finally clinched independence. They besieged the last big British army – 6,000 men – that was holed up in Yorktown, Virginia. Half of these men were wounded or suffering from smallpox and other diseases, and the British commander, Charles Cornwallis, was only holding out because he had been promised reinforcements from the north. But when a French fleet cut the reinforcements off, Cornwallis was forced to surrender Yorktown, and British resistance to American independence ended with it.
The surrender ceremony was a touching moment of Franco-American togetherness. Cornwallis, claiming to be too ill to attend, sent his second-in-command, an Irishman called Brigadier General Charles O’Hara, who tried to give his sword to Rochambeau. The Frenchman politely refused, implicitly forcing the British officer to recognize the legitimacy of the American cause. O’Hara turned to Washington, who also refused to accept the surrender from an inferior officer, and O’Hara was finally obliged to present his sword to the American second-in-command, Major General Benjamin Lincoln (no relation to Abraham).
As well as giving this diplomatic support at the end of British rule, the French had also suffered more casualties than the Americans during the siege of Yorktown – around 200 to the Americans’ 80. And it was their fleet, after all, that had sunk Cornwallis’s last hopes of rescue. It might therefore seem ungrateful on the Americans’ part that they started negotiating a formal end to the war with the British, excluding the French from the discussions.
In the subsequent agreement, the Americans and the Brits essentially got together to screw France. Britain had to recognize the independence of the American Colonies, but held on to Canada. The Brits and Americans guaranteed each other unmolested access to the Mississippi River. And as soon as the war was over, the Americans turned their back on the French traders who had been shipping over weapons and supplies, and started doing business with the Brits. Very quickly, the two former enemies were the best of business buddies.
The Native Americans, of course, received zilch, and having lost the protection of their old friend George III were not going to enjoy the nineteenth century very much.
All that France got out of the deal was the excitement of helping downtrodden Americans rebel against their monarchy – an idea that Frenchmen would soon apply at home. Poor Louis XVI thought he was giving his English neighbours a sly stab in the back. In the event, though, he had slotted his own head into the guillotine.
I’ve got a Bonaparte to pick with you
Incredibly (some might say masochistically), France managed to revive its dream of a French America one more time. And the man who rekindled the flame (and subsequently peed all over it, as most French leaders tended to do) was Napoleon Bonaparte.
When America gained its independence from Britain, it only possessed the eastern half of the country. Spain owned much more of North America than America did – in the 1763 Treaty of Paris, it had received French Louisiane, the vast, mostly unexplored, expanse of land west of the Mississippi that included Nouvelle-Orléans.
But the Spanish were having problems getting the most out of their possessions. There had been a revolt by the French population of New Orleans that had been violently put down by an Irish mercenary working for Spain called Alexander O’Reilly, and the Spanish had tried and failed to stop the Americans getting free access to the vital trade route up the Mississippi. America also had ‘right of deposit’ in New Orleans, which meant that they could use the city as a storage centre for merchandise going to and from their settlements on the east bank. Spanish colonization, meanwhile, was stagnating.
The year was 1800. France had come through the upheaval of the Revolution, and its new leader, Napoleon, was turning his attention to matters outside the country’s borders. He looked at the Spanish dossier and saw a way of furthering King Charles IV of Spain’s and his own interests with one neat swap – France would take back the troublesome former Louisiane in exchange for extending the territory governed by Charles IV’s son-in-law, the Duke of Parma, in Italy. Even today, there are many who would agree that a few square kilometres of Tuscany are worth all of Missouri, Kansas, Oklahoma and a whole bunch of other American states, and back then Charles seems to have been very satisfied with the deal. However, Napoleon insisted that Spain should not brag about its new Italian acquisition, because he wanted to keep the agreement a secret from the Americans. As a result, no one told the French Louisianans themselves, who thought that they were still living in a Spanish colony.
It was a difficult secret to keep, though, and before the handover had even been made, the Americans sent envoys to France to make sure that their old access agreements to the Mississippi would be respected.
Thus it was that in 1801 President Jefferson sent a New York lawyer, Robert R. Livingston (Americans had already started celebrating their independence from Britain by inserting initials in their names), to Paris to try and buy New Orleans. It was a mission impossible, though, mainly because Livingston had to deal with a notoriously slippery character: Napoleon’s Foreign Minister, Charles-Maurice de Talleyrand-Périgord.
Talleyrand was a womanizing nobleman with a limp, a non-believer who had become a bishop in order to get rich, only to abandon the clergy when religion became taboo during the Revolution. By 1801, he was renowned as a politician who had no real principles except self-advancement – he once said: ‘Treason is a matter of dates.’ Talleyrand’s boss, Napoleon, was no fan of his Foreign Minister, and apparently called him ‘a piece of shit in a silk stocking’. A difficult man to do business with, then, especially because he was rumoured to want a personal cut of any financial deal he did for the French government.
Talleyrand was the right man to negotiate with the Americans,* though, because he understood their aspirations. He had spent a couple of years in exile in America after the French Revolution, selling land in Massachusetts and books and condoms in Philadelphia.
The 1801 negotiations to sell New Orleans fell through, but by 1803 Napoleon was in urgent need of cash – he was at war with Britain and there was a revolt in his sugar colony of Saint-Domingue (Haiti), which threatened to lower his income even more. Worse, he owed the Americans 18 million francs ($3.75 million) in reparations for French acts of piracy committed on American shipping since their independence.
So when Robert R. Livingston (bizarrely, the ‘R’ stood for Robert – it was also his father’s name) came back to Paris in April 1803, hoping to buy unlimited access to the Mississippi for $2 million, he was astonished to be offered the whole of Louisiane west of the river for $15 million, minus the above-mentioned reparations. Livingston’s co-negotiator, James Monroe, arrived a few days later, and the two of them concluded that it had to be a trick – they weren’t empowered to discuss such a massive deal, and thought the French were trying to buy time by forcing the two men to wait for consent from Jefferson.
America was not built on prevarication, though, and Livingston and Monroe quickly decided that it was an opportunity not to be missed. The price, they worked out, was less than three cents an acre. Even 200 years ago, this was
ridiculously cheap. What’s more, Jefferson had told them that they could, at a pinch, spend $9 million on river rights and the ownership of New Orleans. For $6 million more, they were being offered half a continent. The only real worry seemed to be that the French refused to say exactly where they considered Louisiane’s frontiers to be. The Mississippi formed a natural border on one side, but America would just have to work out the rest for itself.*
Nevertheless, it was an unbelievable opportunity. Terrified that Napoleon would change his mind, the two Americans scribbled out a contract, the so-called ‘letter that bought a continent’, by which France would receive 80 million francs ($15 million), minus the 18 million francs that it owed America, in exchange for all remaining French possessions in America. The agreement was signed on 30 April 1803, and announced to the Americans on 4 July (that date again). The Louisiana Purchase (or Louisiana Sale – Vente de la Louisiane – as the French logically called it) was complete. Napoleon had kicked himself and his country out of North America once and for all.
At the time, he claimed to have won a great coup against the Brits by elevating America to the rank of a world power: ‘I have given England a maritime rival who sooner or later will humble her.’ But this was proved wrong almost immediately. Just two years later, an Englishman called Nelson would humble (or rather, blast to smithereens) Napoleon’s own maritime force at Trafalgar. And Britain and the USA became firm friends in the early nineteenth century and have stayed so ever since.
It’s cruel, really. Rather like Monty Python’s blue parrot, the French have never stopped pining for Louisiane. And it’s lucky they don’t know how many square kilometres they actually lost, because they have grown so distressed at letting America slip through their fingers that they even had to invent Johnny Hallyday, their own imitation American, to try and ease the pain.
And the cruellest thing of all is that Britain had the last laugh.
The Americans paid $3 million of the Louisiana Purchase price in gold and the rest in government bonds, redeemable for cash. However, French banks were too nervous to accept bonds, and two foreign banks had to step in to provide the cash. The first was Hope and Company, a bank based in Amsterdam but set up by Scotsmen. The second was a London bank, Barings (which was then a healthy institution, two whole centuries away from being bankrupted by rogue trader Nick Leeson). Napoleon was in such dire straits that he agreed to sell the bonds to these two banks at a 12.5 per cent discount. Basically, Boney gifted the Brits, his worst enemies, a million-plus dollars in commission for doing the deal.
It’s no wonder that French accounts of the whole Louisiane debacle tend to gloss over the details. There’s only so much American-inspired pain that a French person can take.
* Incidentally, Rochambeau’s own aide-de-camp was the dashing Swede Count Hans Axel von Fersen, who is seen swashbuckling Marie-Antoinette in Sophia Coppola’s film. The royal adultery has never really been proven, though.
* Incidentally, Talleyrand’s former home on the place de la Concorde is now the American Embassy in Paris.
* One map drawn up by the French Treasury even seems to suggest – falsely – that Louisiane stretched west as far as Washington state.
14
India and Tahiti: France Gets
Lost in Paradise
As we have seen earlier, there were several problems with French explorers and colonizers. First, even as early as the sixteenth, seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the Brits travelled the globe as they do now, thinking, ‘Hey, I could buy a house here and do it up’ (or, in areas without houses, build a new one). They would then start up an import–export business and run it until someone kicked them out.
The French, on the other hand, were more prone to deciding, ‘Oh, this place isn’t as nice as France – as soon as I’ve earned enough money, I’m going home to settle in the village where my parents and grandparents grew up.’ If they were forced to stay in an unpleasant colony, they usually ended up hating it and causing total anarchy there in order to show everyone just how awful it was. This is probably why French settlers prospered in North Africa, which was a sunnier extension of the Côte d’Azur, in West Africa and Vietnam, where the colonies mainly needed engineers and short-term managers to ship out the natural resources, and on various sunny islands that could be turned into Club Meds. In general though, the concept of la colonisation quickly acquired a decidedly bitter taste in France.
There remained, however, two places that seemed to be perfect candidates for gallicization. They were blessed with a warm climate, valuable resources and (in one case) exceedingly willing women …
The Pondicherry on the cake
France’s most cynical writer, Voltaire, who famously made insulting remarks about Canada, seems to have been genuinely sad that France lost India. In an essay called Fragments historiques sur l’Inde, he says of the Brits in India that ‘happiness followed them everywhere, and this happiness was the fruit of their worthiness, their prudence and their solidarity in the face of danger. It was discord that doomed the French.’*
Voltaire was all the more depressed because he knew that France could have done spectacularly well in India. Unlike wild and untamed North America, India was already civilized. It had well-organized rulers who needed only a little persuasion – backed up by military threats if necessary – to let Europeans build trading posts and start making serious money exporting spices, timber, cotton and saltpetre (an ingredient of gunpowder).
And in the early eighteenth century, both France and Britain were rupeeing it up in India, because they had a gentlemen’s agreement not to let purely European conflicts interrupt the flow of Asian money into their pockets. Britain’s East India Company was trading profitably out of major cities like Madras, Calcutta and Bombay.† The French, meanwhile, had built their very own luxury business park in Pondicherry, some 150 kilometres south of the British-dominated port of Madras on the southeast tip of the sub-continent.
Ever since the 1680s, Pondicherry had been flourishing like a French orchid on the trunk of India. By the 1740s, it had grown from a fishing village into a colonial capital of around 80,000 inhabitants, with wide avenues, grandiose Indo-French administration buildings, flamboyant churches, classical gardens, fortified walls and even a shopping district – in short, it was a decent-sized French new town. Pondicherry’s several hundred European residents were doing so well that when France and Britain returned to their usual state of war in 1756, the French felt cocky enough to want to end the gentlemen’s agreement and kick the Brits out. So they chose one of their most fanatical Anglophobes as the new governor for their Indian affairs, and set him loose …
A Frenchman goes doolally
Thomas Arthur, comte de Lally, baron de Tollendal (Lally for short), was born in 1702, the son of a French noblewoman and an Irish baronet. Lally had fought against the Anglais at the Battle of Fontenoy in 1745, at the head of Louis XV’s Irish brigade, and had been promoted on the battlefield by the King himself. You might therefore conclude that he was the perfect man for the India job – a leader with battle experience who had volunteered for the Indian mission because he was dying for a chance to have another go at the Brits. But in fact he was exactly the wrong man, for several typically French reasons.
Lally is described by the nineteenth-century historian G. B. Malleson as ‘a daring soldier’ and ‘a man of hasty temper, yet possessing a ready mind’. On the other hand, Malleson says that the Franco-Irishman had ‘a supreme contempt’ for anyone who had been living the spicy life out in the colonies and filling their pockets while people like him had been fighting to defend France. Just like his contemporary in New Orleans, the chevalier de Kerlerec (see Chapter 12), Lally was possessed by the noble but misguided conviction that he owed it to France to rap a few corrupt knuckles amongst his own colonists. It was time, he naively declared, for a bit of honesty. And as if to prove the depth of his naivety, he sent 100,000 francs to Pondicherry with a note instructing the city’s councill
ors to spend it on supplies, labourers and pack animals to support his arriving troops.
‘Cash?’ said the councillors. ‘That will do nicely,’ and the money disappeared without trace.
The corrupt Pondicherrians had plenty of time to secrete their ill-gotten gains because Lally’s journey from France to India took almost twice as long as necessary. He could probably have canoed there faster. This was because the admiral chosen to transport Lally and his 2,000 soldiers was, to quote G. B. Malleson again, ‘the feeblest, the weakest, the most nerveless of men’ and ‘the most unfit man in the world to be the colleague of Lally’.
Anne-Antoine, comte d’Aché (yet another Frenchman with a girl’s first name), was an ageing Norman nobleman who would probably have been hanged from the yardarm if he’d been in the British navy.
Shortly after leaving France, d’Aché had chanced upon a lightly defended British cargo ship and captured it. Piracy like this was an integral part of sea warfare at the time, but d’Aché decided to take the ship to a safe harbour, Rio de Janeiro, and sell the cargo there, and it took six valuable weeks to complete the deal. Lally obviously had no jurisdiction over his naval escort, because not only did he put up with this delay, but when they finally made it to the Indian Ocean, he also had to endure long periods when d’Aché refused to sail because the wind was too strong. It was rather like Admiral Nelson chickening out of Trafalgar on account of mild seasickness.
Lally’s relief at finally reaching Pondicherry in April 1758 was tempered by the welcome he got from the French community when his ship entered the harbour. Somehow, the cannons fired to salute him had been loaded with live ammunition, and five cannonballs smashed through the hull of Lally’s own ship. Un accident, bien sûr.
1000 Years of Annoying the French Page 28
