1000 Years of Annoying the French

by Stephen Clarke

  Lally’s bad day got worse when he was told that a British fleet that had set out from Europe three months after d’Aché had arrived in Madras five weeks earlier. It is easy to imagine the corrupt councillors’ suppressed amusement as they broke this news, and even easier to picture them pointing out to sea and adding, ‘Oh, and by the way, voici les Anglais now.’

  Before Lally’s troops had even disembarked, the British ships attacked, their gunners wreaking havoc on the densely crowded French decks. In reply, the French fire was so wild that most of it flew way over the attacking ships, and a complete defeat was only avoided because high shots damaged the Brits’ rigging.

  If the British navy had taken the offensive so quickly, it was because they knew that Madras was incapable of defending itself from a land assault. The British governor of the region, the legendary Clive of India, was away taking revenge on the Bengalis for having locked British prisoners in the Black Hole of Calcutta (and, incidentally, robbing the East India company of £2 million in revenue), and in his absence Madras was being guarded by a skeleton force of soldiers who had been deemed unfit to go and fight in Bengal.

  As soon as Lally heard this, he gave the order to load up the supplies he’d ordered and march north. It was his very first day in India, he still hadn’t got the salt air and sea biscuits out of his system, and he was leaping into action.

  Again, it is not difficult to imagine the local councillors feigning bafflement – ‘Er, what supplies are these? You say you sent money? Well, we never got it. Anyone seen Monsieur’s hundred thousand francs? No, sorry.’

  Although by now Lally must have been close to either a nervous breakdown or a murderous rage, he shrugged off this new setback and issued a decree conscripting all Indians within Pondicherry into service as bearers for his army. It was a strategy that might well have worked in a slave economy, or even in a conquered European country, but in India it broke just about every taboo possible, enraging both the high castes who could never envisage doing such lowly work and the lower castes whose only consolation for their poverty and inferior social position was that it was all part of the rigid caste system.

  The French colonials must have realized that it was going to be even easier to sabotage this righteous hothead Lally than they thought.

  The Rajah’s tennis match

  The question is, of course, what were these Frenchmen up to? Lally had come out to India to defend their interests and they were doing everything to stop him bar poison his chapattis. The answer is that the merchants didn’t care who was ruling India, because they knew that international politics weren’t going to affect the insatiable European market for spices and cotton. Whatever happened, for them it would be business as usual.

  Lally seems to have been too tunnel-visioned to realize this, because he just kept on charging ahead with his military plans. Only partially deterred by his failure to recruit bearers, he decided to besiege a closer target: Fort St David, a 30-kilometre trot south of Pondicherry – that is, in the opposite direction to Madras. Fort St David was Clive’s main base in the region, but like Madras it had also been left lightly defended. If Lally could capture the town, he would put a successful stamp on the start of his campaign and show everyone that he meant business.

  So he marched his men south and began a siege, and everything seemed to go well for ten days. Lally wasn’t too disheartened when he received news that British ships had left Madras and been sighted off Pondicherry, heading south on their way to defend Fort St David. This was no great problem, he replied, d’Aché’s ships could intercept them. Well yes, he was told, in theory that was true, but the Admiral’s sailors were refusing to set sail until they been paid the arrears they were owed. They were on strike.

  Pondicherry’s rich French councillors naturally didn’t see why they should advance the money, so Lally had to ride back to town, pay off the sailors out of his own cash and convince d’Aché to put to sea immediately. And, miracle of miracles, it worked – harried by the French fleet, the small force of British ships couldn’t get close enough to help Fort St David, and the garrison capitulated. To prevent any future mishaps, Lally simply razed the fort to the ground.

  Giddy with success, he then tried to persuade d’Aché to sail north with him and attack Madras. Total victory in southern India was in their grasp.

  But once again, colonial success just wasn’t to be. D’Aché initially said that most of his sailors were too sick to fight, and when Lally insisted, he abruptly changed tack and said that he was going off to see whether he could find some British merchant ships to plunder – his crew were clearly not too sick to do that. So, ignoring Lally’s argument that the defeat of the whole British presence in South India outweighed the off-chance of capturing a few spices and rolls of cloth, off d’Aché sailed, taking 600 badly needed troops with him. Lally probably didn’t go down to the harbour to say bon voyage.

  The old soldier was now in deep merde. He had no money and no Frenchman willing to lend him any, no naval back-up and no way of transporting his much-reduced army’s food and equipment overland.

  His only hope, he decided, was to do a bit of debt-collecting. The Rajah of Tanjur, the ruler of a region about 150 kilometres inland from Pondicherry, owed a large amount of money to France, enough to equip an army. All Lally had to do was march there and scare the Rajah into paying – the only problem being that his men would have little or nothing to eat until they got to Tanjur. He set off anyway, feeding his disgruntled troops on rice (the same diet as most of the local peasants) and promises of some pre-emptive plundering on arrival.

  The journey across country was tough but relatively uneventful, and the pillaging went well, with both private houses and temples yielding enough booty to keep the troops happy and convince the Rajah that Lally was not intending to leave empty-handed. In fact, the Rajah was so convinced of this that, while playing for time over delivering the money, he sent word to the Brits that if they were in the mood for some fun, a tired and underfed French army was camped outside his town.

  Lally smelled a rat and issued an ultimatum: if he didn’t get his money, he would send the Indian and his whole family off to France as slaves. This had exactly the opposite effect to the one he intended. The Rajah was so offended by Lally’s threat that he decided not to wait for British help, and immediately began firing at the French.

  Lally was taken completely by surprise at this sudden turnaround. He had more soldiers than the Rajah, but had brought so little ammunition that his artillerymen were soon reduced to picking up Indian cannonballs and shooting them back. And in the middle of this absurd tennis match, a messenger arrived to tell Lally that the second-in-command he had left in charge at Pondicherry, an officer called the chevalier de Soupire (soupir aptly meaning sigh), was threatening to abandon the town because 800 British soldiers were on their way, and he only had 600 to defend it. Lally was forced to retreat yet again, and even had to abandon three of his heavy cannons because he no longer had enough oxen to pull them.

  Back in Pondicherry, he found d’Aché, who had returned from his pirate cruise to a fiery welcome from the British navy. The Admiral was wounded, and refusing to fight any more. Sportingly leaving behind 500 men to strengthen the garrison, he sailed away to safety in Mauritius.

  Lally had now been in India for about three months, and it must have begun to dawn on him that the whole sub-continent was up in arms against him. The Brits were determined to kill him, but they were only slightly more dangerous than his own compatriots in Pondicherry. His naval back-up had backed out, and his number two had no backbone. And to cap it all, he had managed to turn all the Indians against him.

  Given this disastrous state of affairs, you have to admire the man for calling an emergency meeting of Pondicherry’s French officials and haranguing – or maybe blackmailing – them into contributing enough money from their own pockets to finance an attack on Madras using every man they had: 2,000 French foot soldiers, 300 cavalrymen and 5,000 sepoys
(Indian troops).

  Lally must have known as he set off north with his newly subsidized army that the forthcoming siege was going to be all or nothing. And deep down, he probably suspected that it would be nothing.

  Once more unto the breach? Non merci

  No sooner had the French troops arrived in Madras than everything started to go wrong. A faction of them ransacked Black Town – the racist name for the area where the Indian dockers lived – and looted everything they could carry. It seemed the attack on the British garrison could wait.

  When serious fighting did begin, one of Lally’s generals, Charles-Henri d’Estaing,* accidentally offered himself up as a prisoner when he mistook a group of British redcoats for some of his own volunteers and tried to lead them in a charge against themselves.

  There can be little doubt that this really was an accident, because d’Estaing was known to be a brave officer, and when the Brits subsequently released him, he broke his promise to them and returned to the fighting, an offence against the military code of honour that almost got him hanged when he was captured a second time. And in fact he did end up on a scaffold, but a French one – he was guillotined as a traitor during the Revolution. During his trial, he refused to defend himself against trumped-up charges, and told the court: ‘When you have cut off my head, sell it to the English; they will pay you well for it.’

  Meanwhile, back in Madras, Lally was settling in for a long siege. The Brits had received reinforcements, and the only hope was to starve them out. However, instead of concentrating on making life miserable for the enemy, many of Lally’s troops began roaming the area for booty and drinking away their profits.

  The French merchants had also got in on the act and had turned the siege into a fully fledged business opportunity: looting warehouses and using the bearers who had been hired by Lally to keep his army supplied with food and ammunition to haul sugar and pepper to Pondicherry. Some even forged Lally’s signature on orders procuring boats to sail their treasure down the coast.

  The resolve of the soldiers who were taking an active part in the siege was sinking by the day. The money Lally had raised had been spent and, unlike the looters, the troops weren’t getting paid. Food was running out – officers were complaining because they were on ordinary soldiers’ rations, and the hired sepoys were leaving. Morale was weakened still further by French deserters inside the British fortifications who would climb up on to the ramparts, a bottle of wine in one hand, money in the other, and call out to the French troops to come and join them. In an exchange of prisoners, the Brits cunningly handed over 500 of these Frenchmen who had been well fed and looked after, and as soon as they were returned to their own underfed army, they led a mutiny.

  Lally’s only option was to focus his troops’ attention by starting a bombardment, which he somehow managed to keep up for forty-two days. (Perhaps his men went and asked the Brits for their cannonballs back.) And the tactic did more than concentrate French minds – it actually made a breach in the fortifications, opening the way for an attack on the battered garrison inside.

  Yet again, victory was in Lally’s grasp, and yet again, his own men let him down. His officers had clearly never heard Shakespeare’s ‘once more unto the breach’ speech. To charge the fortifications would mean certain death, they said, and refused point blank to lead the assault. Instead of having them all shot for cowardice (or sending them out to buy a copy of Henry V), Lally decided to go it alone with his best troops, and was just putting together a plan of attack when a British fleet sailed over the horizon.

  As luck would have it, Admiral d’Aché was back in India on one of his frequent guest-star appearances, and actually agreed to get into the action. He sailed up to Madras and engaged in a brutal stand-off with the British ships. But when no clear victory was won for either side, the Admiral declared once and for all that fighting these people was pointless. Lally begged him to stay, explaining that this time Pondicherry really would be lost if he left, and even threatening to report d’Aché to the King. But the aged mariner simply sailed away again, ignoring British ships as they cruised past him to close in on Madras.

  Like a madman sinking in quicksand, Lally flailed pointlessly on. He gave up the siege of Madras and retreated to home base, but as G. B. Malleson puts it, he ‘found the enemies he met with inside the walls of Pondicherry worse than those he had to combat without’.

  Inevitably, the Brits came marching along the coast to take back all their pillaged cloths and spices and – pourquoi pas? – do some plundering of their own. And when they arrived at the French colony to besiege it, Pondicherry’s civilian residents refused to put on army uniforms to fool the attackers into thinking the city was well defended.

  Eventually, after four months, Pondicherry simply ran out of food, and Lally was forced to surrender on 16 January 1761. As he was escorted away by the British troops, the civilians who had conspired against him came out to yell insults at him, and he only escaped with his life thanks to his captors’ protection. A seventy-year-old, nearly blind general called Dubois wasn’t so lucky. When the French civilians realized that he was attempting to leave Pondicherry with documents proving the corruption that had been largely responsible for Lally’s failure, the old man was impaled on a sword, and the incriminating documents were spirited away.

  Poor Lally’s sufferings were far from over. He was taken back to London as a prisoner of war, and while there, heard that his old adversaries had returned from India and were blaming the loss of Pondicherry – and, effectively, the whole of South India – on him. Even Admiral d’Aché was heaping accusations on Lally, and the old fool had wangled himself a medal for his supposed valour during the campaign: the Grand Cross of the Royal Military Order of St Louis, no less. Lally’s temper and sense of honour got the better of him and, released on parole, he went back to Paris to defend himself.

  It was a literally fatal mistake. He was thrown in prison for two years, then subjected to a show trial and condemned to death. The sentence caused a public outcry, and many expected King Louis XV to spare him, but the anti-Lally lobby was too vehement and the sentence was carried out only three days later.

  And still the humiliation wasn’t over. Lally was taken to the scaffold bound and gagged so that he wouldn’t be able to proclaim his innocence. There, still denied the chance to make a final speech, he was laid on the guillotine and the blade came clattering down on his allegedly treacherous neck. It was probably lucky that he was gagged, too, because the blow failed to kill him, and the executioner’s father (a retired guillotine artist himself) had to jump up and finish the job.

  The cruellest irony was that by the time Lally was executed, France had in fact regained control of Pondicherry thanks to one of the few favourable clauses in the Treaty of Paris that marked the end of the Seven Years War – Lally’s supposed failure to hold on to the colony was already old news. And the territory had a new French governor, a certain Jean Law de Lauriston, the nephew of John Law, who fifty years earlier had caused the financial ruin of France with the connivance of the great-uncle of the same Louis XV who let Lally go to his botched execution.

  In the long run, France triumphed in Pondicherry, which, despite two more British occupations at the end of the eighteenth century and the beginning of the nineteenth, stayed in French hands until 1954, seven years after the rest of India had gained independence. There would be over fifty more French governors, and Lally’s ghost was no doubt present at every single investiture, howling its frustration through its gag.

  Bougainville, the flower of France’s explorers

  We are constantly reminded that at least one Frenchman successfully travelled the tropics – tourist brochures for practically every sunny city in the world feature gardens dripping with pink bougainvillea. The South American plant is named after Louis-Antoine de Bougainville, France’s most famous explorer, who became a celebrity in March 1769, when he completed a 28-month circumnavigation of the globe. His idyllic descriptions of f
ree love amongst the coconut palms also made Tahiti famous, and sent Parisian philosophers into a frenzy of idealization about the ‘Noble Savage’ islanders and their pre-biblical innocence.

  Only one man put a damper on all the hero worship – and he was, of course, a Brit. When James Cook arrived home after his first Pacific voyage in 1771, it quickly became clear that, compared to him, Bougainville hadn’t actually achieved very much. For a start, the Frenchman hadn’t really discovered anywhere new, and had somehow failed to notice Australia. And – worst of all – Bougainville was accused by Cook of infecting the Noble Savages with sexually transmitted diseases.

  Once again, an Anglais was gatecrashing France’s colonial party …

  Louis XV tries to stir up the Pacific

  Shortly after Cook’s return to Europe, Bougainville published an account of his trip, catchily and simply called Voyage autour du monde (Voyage around the World). He did so mainly as a record for future mariners who might want to sail that way themselves – his book is full of depth measurements and latitude co-ordinates. But he also seems to have been determined to refute Cook’s allegations in public.

  To be fair, Bougainville is full of praise for Cook, and charmingly honest about his own modest achievements. Far from presenting himself as a conquering hero, as his nation would have liked him to be, Bougainville deliberately or inadvertently dispels several myths about his voyage.

  The most important of these is that he is usually said to be the first Frenchman to circumnavigate the globe. This is only natural because it was the official reason for his trip. Louis XV wanted a morale-booster for the country after the traumas of the Seven Years War, and in 1766 he commissioned Bougainville to sail around the world, ‘taking the time in different places to erect poles and attach to them orders of possession in the name of His Majesty’ – a fancy way of saying ‘get us some colonies out in the unexplored Pacific before the other European nations grab them all.’