by Alan Schom
There were still more alarming elements of this already incredible plan. With large numbers of English ships ever present and vigilant all along the Channel coast, these flat-bottomed boats needed to be armed with at least a couple of pieces of artillery, Napoleon insisted. Naval architects, on the other hand, protested that such single-deck shallow-draft vessels were not capable of supporting cannon, howitzers, and mortars, and that the recoil from them would sink the boats or shatter their frames. Indeed even without guns, light frames, in swells and choppy seas, would soon take a beating. Nevertheless Napoleon thought that so arming these craft would largely eliminate the necessity of a powerful naval escort, while providing them with sufficient firepower to protect their own landing in England.
Now arose the problem of finding a few thousand additional pieces of artillery. The navy certainly had little enough to spare, as did the army. Then hundreds of pieces of artillery would have to be brought up to protect the coast and harbors as well. Where was it all to come from? Napoleon had neglected this matter. Even more difficult to answer was the question of where Napoleon or Decrès or anyone else was going to find the thousands of junior naval officers required to man and guide this massive flotilla, when the French navy was still grossly undermanned by officers of all levels. Indeed, five ships of the line were at present in mothballs at Brest for want of officers.
The French navy would also have to be involved in the separate role of providing a protective shield, convoying this curious herd of sheep across the open waters. For as Napoleon was to admit, even a thousand armed erratically sailing boats would hardly be capable of protecting themselves from a full-fledged attack by British battleships. Admiral Cornwallis had a fleet of forty-five ships of the line and frigates under his orders. These would first have to be scattered, and preferably destroyed. But how? One or more tactical feints would have to be devised, unfortunately involving large numbers of French warships to accomplish — warships they did not possess.
The problems continued to accrue with maddening severity and regularity as Napoleon, at St.-Cloud, where he now spent much of his time, paced the floor for hours trying to juggle all the balls. And yet he was neither baffled nor unhappy. If there was one thing he loved, it was a challenge, a real challenge that had defied everyone else. Thus Forfait’s “impossible” plan was the one he selected. Thousands of those wretched flat-bottomed boats would have to be built. But of greater difficulty was the fact that no ports yet existed along the stretch of coast he had selected from which to assemble and launch his armada. The very ports themselves would have to be planned and constructed if Napoleon was to continue to insist on the shortest possible crossing of the Channel. Cherbourg had never been completed by Louis XVI and would require years of work. Brest was a superb port, but too far south from which to launch small craft, as were the anchorages of Lorient and La Rochelle. The expedition would have to be launched from the northern Channel ports. But the sole harbor there, Le Havre, could accommodate only a few boats and was also judged to be too far south. In addition to all the above, an army had to be created, bivouacked, housed, and supplied. Boatyards would have to be built, supplies ordered, thousands of workers found, orders tendered. Then of course money had to be found — enormous sums of money.
Although Napoleon was later to dismiss this nautical fiasco as a feint, a charade, created to deceive Austria, Russia, and England, in fact it was a very serious affair. This gross miscalculation would weigh heavily on the French people and their subjected allies, who would have to bear the entire burden of a soldier’s whim. The shortage of senior naval officers capable of commanding large-scale operations was critical, and under the circumstances the choice of the forty-four-year-old Vice Admiral Bruix to serve as commander in chief of the national flotilla was wiser than most, despite his rather curious hobbies of practicing alchemy and writing occasional libretti for light opera.[536]
Born ten years before Napoleon, in the French colony of Santo Domingo, Bruix was the descendant of a long line of army officers, but his first love was the sea. Following a good education in France, at the age of sixteen he joined the French Royal Navy. He served in the Atlantic, then in the Caribbean, participating in the capture of Tobago. He was promoted to post captain in 1793, only to find himself arrested on his return to Brest because of his aristocratic birth. Restored to the navy’s active list in 1794, he organized the ill-fated Irish expedition of 1796. Named to the prestigious Academie de Marine, he was promoted to flag rank in 1797, as rear admiral. Between 1798 and 1799 he served as naval minister, when he canceled the next futile plan for the invasion of England (following Napoleon’s departure for Egypt) and instead allocated those funds for the construction of sixteen badly needed ships of the line and eighteen frigates. His primary objective as naval minister, in the face of Directory opposition and revolutionary incompetence, was to rebuild a French navy once again capable of protecting French shores and interests. In 1799 he was duly promoted to vice admiral.
This cultivated, gracious, and even elegant gentleman of the old school didn’t hesitate to speak his mind, however. When asked by Decrès to provide “a donation” for the commissioning of a new statue of Napoleon, and what sort of uniform he thought the great man should be wearing, Bruix snapped, “Keep him completely nude, it will be easier for you to kiss his ass!”[537] Decrès did not ask a second time. But despite some hesitation over aspects of the admiral’s independent nature, Napoleon finally agreed to his appointment as commander in chief of the flotilla, for among other factors in his favor, Bruix had supported the coup of 18 Brumaire.[538] Napoleon rarely forgot his political and military obligations.
On July 30, 1803, First Consul Bonaparte officially announced the creation of the “National Flotilla” intended for the specific purpose of invading England. But it was not until two months later that he ordered Bruix and Forfait to draft the first detailed plans for the organization of the proposed invasion scheme, including the number of vessels required. In reality, however, Napoleon had already ordered hundreds of vessels without any blueprint at all, and he was planning on 114,000 troops (excluding all naval personnel) and seven thousand horses (for staff, cavalry, and artillery), although these figures would be increased in the ensuing months. Over the strong objections of both Decrès and Bruix, the nucleus of the proposed flotilla was to comprise four classes of armed vessels to be custom-built to transport these troops:[539] prames, chaloupes canonnières, bateaux canonniers, and péniches, following Forfait’s designs and specifications. All were flat-bottomed, keelless boats. The largest craft, the three-masted prame, would have an overall length of 110 feet, capable of transporting 120 soldiers and a few horses, armed with twelve twenty-four-pound guns on her single deck. The smallest vessel, the lug-rigged péniche, could in theory transport 71 troops, armed with a couple of howitzers. Most of these overloaded boats were to have little freeboard and to prove completely unseaworthy, but instead of testing models of each class first, an impatient Napoleon ordered the whole lot, an error for which he and the navy were to pay a heavy price.
All the vessels swamped easily, even when riding at anchor, and without a keel had difficulty in holding a given course.[540] The advantages in using them were their very low building cost compared with traditional warships, and the brief time and work required for their construction (obviating as they did the complex, time-consuming work involved in laying down the usual hull design). These boats also had the advantage of being able to land in very shallow water, leaving even light warships behind. In that sense they would have been ideal for the shores of nearby Kent or the muddy banks of the Thames Estuary.
Even before announcing the official plan and initial number of vessels required, an ever impatient Bonaparte put in an order for the construction of the first 1,050 flat-bottomed vessels, with the stipulation that the first 310 were to be delivered in seven months, by December 23. Timber, tar, hemp, and canvas had to be ordered, skilled shipwrights found, and boatyards stocked and
prepared. Scarcely had the contracting boatyards received these orders, when, five days later, he informed the naval minister that he wanted the first 310 boats delivered in four months’ time. He further instructed a now exasperated Forfait to “try to have twice that number completed by the end of September.” Bonaparte was not an easy man to work for. “Just keep in mind that every hour is precious,” he reminded Forfait. Anticipating his next question, the first consul assured him: “There will be no shortage of money.”[541]
In order to build these boats — and they were just a part of the initial orders — Napoleon ordered new boatyards to be created at once throughout France wherever there were rivers available for the launching of vessels. These would be in addition to the traditional coastal shipbuilding yards at Cherbourg, Brest, Nantes, Rochefort, Marseilles, and Toulon, not to mention new boatyards to be erected overnight in Paris. The newly conquered territories and countries were ordered to pitch in as well, and vessels were soon being built as far east as Mainz and the Rhine, and throughout Belgium.
Where were the boatwrights to be found to cope with these orders? “Conscript them,” Napoleon ordered Admiral Decrès. “Requisition all the laborers in Belgium and along the Rhine,” and do the same in France. But it was the theoretically independent miniature Dutch, or Batavian, Republic that was forced to bear a surprisingly large brunt of the burden for the construction of the French armada.[542]
On June 25, 1803, the Dutch government, under severe duress — the country had been occupied by French troops since early in the previous decade — reluctantly signed the Franco-Batavian Convention. The terms, dictated by Napoleon himself, forced a full-time military partnership on the Dutch. Dutch ports had long been major importers and transshippers of British goods. The country was a famous international trader in its own right, thanks to a large merchant fleet. By controlling the Dutch, Napoleon could seriously hurt British trade there and elsewhere on the Continent. FFolland always remained a wealthy financial center from which France could demand sizable “loans.” Then, of course, Dutch frontiers had access to northwestern Germany, from which French armies could easily launch invasions. Under French military occupation, however, the Dutch could not move without prior French approval. The Netherlands had become a de facto prisoner state.
According to the terms of the Franco-Batavian Convention, the Dutch were forced to cut their own throats. First they were required to provide two military expeditions for the French. One comprised five ships of the line, five frigates, and enough transport vessels to ferry some 25,000 French troops and 2,500 horses. In the other they were required to provide 350 more ships with which to transport another 36,000 men, their artillery and equipment, and some 1,500 horses. Altogether they were held responsible for shipping some 61,000 French troops and their equipment and mounts to British shores. Not only that, but then Napoleon insisted — quite contrary to the terms of the convention — that the Dutch fully rig, arm, and outfit — and in some cases even man — all these vessels at their own expense. For the people of Holland, which had a population of fewer than two million, it was not only humiliating but onerous if not impossible. This, combined with the closure of all Dutch trade with Great Britain, would result in the near bankruptcy of their maritime trade, the country’s lifeblood.
Not content with that, the French government then obliged the Dutch to hand over their entire navy — again contrary to the terms of the convention — thereby leaving the Dutch coast virtually unprotected except for one older French warship sent for that purpose. That still not sufficing, Napoleon next demanded — this time contrary to any convention ever drawn up in Europe — the handing over of the entire Dutch naval officer corps.[543] Ultimately Holland was expected to provide nearly half of the vessels of the entire “French expedition” to England, quite exclusive of later demands for Dutch troops and vast sums in gold.
Dutch foreign affairs spokesman Rutger Jan Schimmelpenninck, future grand pensionary heading the republic, protested that his minuscule state could not satisfy the instatiable French demands, pointing out the “great hardship” they were under, while protesting the seizure of the remaining 280 Dutch naval officers. Nor did the Dutch — hardly a nation of warriors like the French — possess the hundreds of cannon Napoleon also quite illegally demanded, even if they stripped their own navy. Nevertheless Napoleon ordered them to do just that.
With no apparent alternative, Schimmelpenninck capitulated:
We shall spare neither hardship nor trouble in order to comply with your orders...[But] my government wishes to be convinced and persuaded that the First Consul does indeed appreciate the efforts sustained by a country exhausted by such long, enormous sacrifices...It expressly enjoins me to represent to him once more that the financial situation of my unfortunate fatherland is truly heartrending.[544]
Foreign Minister Talleyrand, on Napoleon’s orders, warned the Dutch of the “unfortunate consequences” should they fail. The result was that by the end of 1803 the entire Dutch navy had disappeared, apart from three small coastal vessels, the largest with a crew of sixty men. Decrès himself was then dispatched to the Dutch ports to see for himself, reporting back to Napoleon that “the Batavians have stripped all points of their coast” and were now “completely defenseless. There is nothing left.”[545] He also praised the Dutch rear admiral, Charles-Henri Verhuell.
Bonaparte remained unmoved, Talleyrand complained of his “great disappointment” that the latest boats delivered were “all in the worst possible state...and without crews or artillery...You have no idea how upset the First Consul is by all this,” he concluded.[546]
While snapping at the heels of the Dutch people, Napoleon continued preparations in France. First he gave Naval Minister Decrès perhaps the largest naval budget in the history of the country, 130 million francs (out of a total national budget of only 589 million), or just under one-quarter of the French income for the entire fiscal year.[547] Next he borrowed 20 million francs from various banks. When this was still not enough to meet the skyrocketing expenses involved in the invasion preparations, he resorted to what he referred to as “patriotic contributions.”
After notifying Eugène de Beauharnais in Italy that he expected the Italians “to offer” to build some flotilla vessels, he was able to report that “the Italian Republic has offered us twelve chaloupes canonnières.” Talleyrand then popped off another threatening letter to the unfortunate Schimmelpenninck, informing him that the first consul expected an even better offer from the Dutch. A favorable response was again duly received, the Dutch offering to prepare, at their own cost, an additional thirty completely outfitted chaloupes.[548]
These were followed by patriotic offers, extorted for the most part, from the grateful people of every department of France. Nor did individual cities ignore this opportunity, sometimes vying with their neighbors for an honorable place. Military units were invited by their commanding officers to give up a day’s pay, and by October some 24 million francs’ worth of cash donations or the equivalent in constructed boats had been pledged or received. To this were added most of the proceeds from the sale of the Louisiana Territory to the Americans for 80 million francs (in fact 54 million, after deducting earlier American claims). The first consul thought that amount quite sufficient and ordered a halt to further offers. Money now seemed to be the least of Napoleon’s problems, and yet somehow naval contractors were to find it extremely difficult to obtain payment from the government, causing substantial delays in delivery.
Napoleon’s audacious invasion plan encountered grave obstacles and unforeseen setbacks from the beginning, from which the national flotilla itself was not excluded. As early as August 22, 1803, for example, the first consul informed Admiral Bruix that the composition of the flotilla could now be “definitively decreed” as to the number and type of craft needed. Theoretically some 2,008 vessels were already reported completed and prepared. But when Bruix made a special tour of inspection of the ports to take a precise tally of t
he boats actually in the water, he found only 1,026 (including 172 former fishing boats converted to transports, and dozens of Dutch vessels). Napoleon’s figures reflected an error of 982 nonexistent boats, a miscalculation of nearly 50 percent.[549]
What was happening? an astonished Napoleon asked Decrès and the newly appointed Inspector General Forfait. Dishonest shipyard owners, was the naval minister’s answer. They had accepted payments but had not begun building the boats, he said.[550] Forfait, on the other hand, in permanent contact with all the Channel boatyards, strongly disagreed with the assessment by Decrès. He insisted that, quite the contrary, the shipyards had not yet received a single payment. It was Decrès’s Naval Ministry that was responsible.[551]
Caught between two contradictory reports, Napoleon dispatched Monge — the one person he could trust — to look into the situation. Napoleon finally conceded that there might be some truth to Forfait’s allegation. He announced that all the contractors who had not completed their orders by January would be given until March. Though it was not much of an extension, it was an admission of government culpability. Indeed, the failure of Napoleon’s government to pay every sort of contractor and bank over the next ten years was to continue to undermine the efficacy of many of his national reforms and military campaigns. In some cases the first consul deliberately refused to pay the full sums agreed on through bona fide contracts. In other cases, such as the present boat-building phase, bureaucratic incompetence and widespread corruption among government and military personnel siphoned off many of the millions allocated by the treasury for official payment. The situation was very bad indeed, and by the time Pitt resumed office as British prime minister in May 1804, France had only 1,273 of the 2,008-vessel flotilla ordered thus far — and of those only 149 were fully outfitted, armed, supplied, and properly crewed.[552] Every set of figures seemed to be contradictory. As for the British, they were worrying in vain at this stage, even one year following the resumption of hostilities.
