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French Navy - Orleans Monarchy - 1830-1848

The French navy was vigorously revived under the Restoration and the government of Louis Philippe (the periods from 1815 to 1830 and 1830 to 1848). After Napoleon, the Restoration period (1814-15), which although it inherited a large number of vessels and small ships in good condition, very nearly lost everything and was on the verge of "liquidating" the entire navy, being unable to understand the importance - for France - of a fleet. The conquest of Algiers (1830) proved, however, that what remained of the French fleet could still be usefully and gloriously employed. The July government (Louis-Philippe I) sought to reconstitute a navy worthy of France, and was able, during its last years of office, to take advantage of new inventions, i.e., steam, the screw-propeller and steel construction.

As early as 1822 a French army officer, Henri J. Paixhans, succeeded in designing a gun that could fire explosive shells safely, and published a book explaining how his shell guns could easily destroy any wooden warship. In a trial firing two years afterwards Paixhans' guns did indeed destroy an old hulk, just as he had predicted. Thereupon, after appropriate deliberation lasting some thirteen years, the French navy decided in 1837 to install the new shell-firing guns on shipboard.

In 1840 the French Ambassador to England, M. Guizot, had a private after-dinner talk with lord Palmerston. " Is it true, my lord," said Guizot, "that you are increasing your fleet by several vessels?" This question had reference to the Mediterranean fleet. " Yes," replied Lord Palmerston, "we will raise it to sixteen vessels, - you. at this moment, have raised yours to eighteen. Moreover, you have five new ships building, which will give you a preponderance which we cannot accept." Mr. Cobden showed that in 1840-41 the accustomed proportion of the French navy to the British underwent a great and sudden derangement, and that instead of being content with two-thirds of the British force, the French navy approached almost to an equality with the British. The duke of Wellington, at the beginning of 1841, wrote: "I very much fear the consequences of these large armaments. It would almost appear that it was the interest of France to recommence the war in Europe."

In 1841 key figures in the French navy came to feel that their nation and service had been humiliated by failure to support the French protege, Mehmed Ali of Egypt, in his collision with the Ottoman Sultan and the British navy. Mehmed Ali (1769-1848) was an Albanian soldier of fortune, who seized control of the Ottoman province of Egypt in 1805, and then relied mainly on French advisers to help him modernize the country. His army, trained and equipped along European lines, soon proved far superior to any rivals in the eastern Mediterranean; and when the Ottoman Sultan imprudently attacked his over-mighty subject in 1838, Egyptian victories quickly threatened to topple the Ottoman regime. But the British were unwilling to see a French protege' installed in Constantinople, and by using their Mediterranean fleet to blockade Egypt made it impossible for Mehmed Ali to supply his army by sea. Land communications were inadequate, so the Egyptian army had to withdraw and submit to a settlement dictated by the European powers. French assent to this upshot was very grudging, and came only after King Louis Philippe refused to risk war in support of Mehmed Ali, thereby provoking the angry resignation of his fiery, patriotic prime minister, Adolph Theirs. Memory of this humiliation rankled, and one of Louis Philippe's sons backed French naval officers when they proposed a simple way to counter Great Britain's galling naval preponderance. Their plan was to install steam engines in French warships.

Francois Ferdinand Philippe Louis Marie d Orleans, Prince de Joinville, was born at Neuilly on Aug. 14, 1818, the third child of Louis Philippe, King of the French. The Prince was educated for the naval service, and in 1836 was given a commission as Lieutenant in the French Navy. A French prince of the blood, had, for the first time, made the navy his profession. In 1843 he was made a Rear Admiral and given a voice in the Admiralty council. It was in this capacity that he took an active part in the Investigations preliminary to the organization of a steam navy.

When the Prince de Joinville recommended in 1844, in case of war, the devastation of the great commercial towns of England, the Duke of Wellington wrote : "What but the inordinate desire of popularity could have induced a man in his station to write and publish such a production, an invitation and provocation to war, to be carried on in a manner such as has been disdained by the civilized portions of mankind."

In the year 1843 France was on the brink of the inevitable revolution worked in naval matters by the introduction of steam. The great object was to create, and that rapidly, under pain of being outstripped by others, a new naval force, more appropriate, perhaps, than the former one, to French national genius and resources. The Minister of Marine decided, at the entreaty of Prince De Joinville, to appoint a special naval commission on steam.

The commission made a modest beginning by altering the fighting armament of our existing ships, placing their guns fore and aft, so as to permit of their developing their artillery power to the utmost possible extent, while at the same time exposing the propelling machinery to as little danger as possible. It turned out ships of various types, such as the Descartes, the Cuvier, the Pluton, &c. Then came the turn of the fabric of the ships themselves, and a series of experiments were made on the practising ground at Gavres, near Lorient, to test the penetration of projectiles on every sort of substance -- wood, coal, gutta-percha, iron plates, and finally on iron plates superimposed one on the other -- in other words armor-plating. It was ten years before the armor plating was actually brought into use, so great was the delay caused by political agitation in the country.

At Lorient, too, M. Labrousse, a post-captain in the navy, made experiments to find out the best form to give to the rams of warships, while a literary man, M. Jal by name, was hunting all the old books and archives for everything touching the manoeuvres and tactics of ancient rowing ships and galleys.

Then from paddle-ships the Commission passed on to those with propellers which were submerged, and therefore much more easy to protect. The first screw-ship was the Napoleon, a name which was afterwards exchanged for that of Corse, under which she served as a despatch-boat for over forty years. The first ironclad, a screw-ship, too, the Chaptal, was built at Asnieres by M. Cave. The Pomone, was the first frigate built with auxiliary engines, which was fitted with a screw-propeller designed by a Swedish engineer, Mr. Erickson.

An organ-builder at Amiens, of the name of Dallery, was the first person to think (in 1803) of building a boat driven by a screw. He ruined himself over it, and broke up all his machinery in his despair. The idea was taken up again later by M. Sauvage, a shipbuilder, who made some progress with it. There was more future promise about Sauvage's work on the screw-propeller, but he himself did not reap the benefit accruing from it. It became public property. The English built a trial ship, the Rattler, and the Americans another, the Princeton.

But the Napoleon was earlier than these, and besides was more successful than either of them. She was originally ordered as a mail steam-packet, from a private shipyard, by the Ministry of Finance, which was much bolder as to introducing innovations than the Ministry of Marine, and her construction was confided to two eminent men -- M. Normand, of Havre, for her hull, and an Englishman, Mr. Barnes, for her engines and propeller. Each of these gentlemen was equally successful in his first attempt. During the summer of 1843 Prince De Joinville was in command of a flotilla, formed for the purpose of making experiments to compare ships of the old-fashioned type with this little vessel, which was tested in every imaginable way. The ship was commanded in first-rate style by a very efficient naval lieutenant, M. de Montaignac, who since that time had acted as Minister for Marine Affairs.

The advent of the war steamer, the swift battleship, independent alike of wind and sea, was close at hand. The creation of such a ship had preoccupied M. Dupuy de Lome for a long time past. He had gone to England to see and study everything there -- both in the State dockyards and the building yards at Liverpool and on the Clyde. He published under the title of "Memoire sur la Construction des Batiments en Fer" in 1844.

The French experiments never fail to cause a fairly serious concern in the UK, exacerbated by the publication in the Revue des deux mondes 15 May 1844 (reproduced in many French and British) an article in the Prince de Joinville. In this " Note on the status of the naval forces of France" Prince de Joinville argued that the steam had considerably reduced the disadvantages the French navy had previously suffered, due to the small size its maritime population. Although the French navy's steam fleet was still much smaller than the British navy, its development was, said de Joinville, soon to envision a war of offensive thrust. While a French fleet ensured control of the Mediterranean, cruisers could harrass British trade overseas, , could inflict unprecedented losses on the enemy coasts, and another fleet could cross the Channel at night. The great french naval program of 1846 providing 93 million francs for construction threw panic in England. Alarmists led by Palmerston stated that the Channel was no longer a protection but "a river bridge that steam could at any time span" and that France could throw 20,000 men and 30,000 on the English coast in one night.

The design for an iron frigate was Dupuy de Lome's pet scheme. "Iron-built ships will be the ships of the future," he used to say, and he was quite right. But the experiments at Lorient upon iron plates had been disastrous. The damage done by oblique firing on them was terrible. In 1845 Dupuy De Lome addressed a remarkable report to the Minister of Marine, suggesting the construction of a full-powered screw frigate, to be built with an iron hull, and protected by a belt of armor formed by several thicknesses of iron plating.

In 1846 Prince De Joinville was called to command the evolutionary squadron in the Mediterranean. A new duty was added by the addition, now made for the first time, of a certain number of steamships to the squadron. The new art of simultaneously navigating ships for whom the laws of wind did not exist, and which could move in any direction, and with great swiftness, according to the will and fancy of their captains, without allowing them to collide, was in its earliest infancy. Numerous test maneuvers were conducted, drawing on the tactics of the ancient galleys, and also on cavalry movements, at the slow march and at the gallop.

Built in 1848, L'Orenoque was the first French frigate with mixed propulsion sail-steam. Although equipped with mechanical propulsion advanced in conception, it kept the typical masting of the frigates in that time.

A ministerial crisis threw the Ministry for Naval Affairs, ad interim, into the hands of M. Guizot. Prince de Joinville explained to him how a real and material step in naval progress was being adjourned on mere questions of form; and how the outgoing minister had not dared, in spite of his own good-will, to shake himself free of administrative procrastination in this particular. France's first war steamer was begun in 1847 [Le Napoléon was launched in 1850].

The July Monarchy was very far from representing the traditional hereditary principle. Born of one insurrection, it was overthrown by another. Set up on the electoral principle, it fell, as though in mockery, with a full electoral majority behind it. The Prince de Joinville was in Algiers with his brother the Duc d'Aumale when the revolution of February 1848, overthrew the constitutional monarchy. Resolving to share the misfortunes of their family, the two brothers sought refuge in England, and joined King Louis Philippe at Claremont.

Driven suddenly from a brilliant position into the narrow limits of private life, he accepted his new situation with simplicity arid dignity, and remaining at heart a French sailor, endeavoured to render himself useful to the navy of his country by his pen, if not by his sword. He had already, in 1844, begun publishing in the Revue des Deux Mondes his studies on the French navy. One of his articles, published in 1865, was a comparative review of the fleets of the United States and of France, and excited much attention at the time. Happening to be in the United States about a twelvemonth after the breaking out of the civil war, he accompanied his nephews, the Comte de Paris and the Duc de Chartres, to the camp of Gen. McClellan, with whose staff he witnessed the principal actions of the Virginian campaign of 1862. After the downfall of the Napoleonic dynasty, he went back to France with the other Orleanist princes.