Men of Honour by Adam Nicolson

told the people, ‘it is the law; it is la Patrie .’
    The Convention appointed a ferocious revolutionary zealot, André Jeanbon Saint-André, as its representativeresponsible for rebuilding the Republic’s navy after the chaos of the early revolutionary years. ‘Because all here was gangrenous,’ he told the fleet in Brest in October 1793, ‘all needed the scalpel of patriotism, the billhook of Republicanism.’ Guillotines were set up on pontoons among the fleet so that the crews could see the punishments dealt out to the mutinous. A form of naval terror was instituted, during which the language of French naval administration reached new depths of Orwellian doublespeak: ‘Do not think that we usurp your rights,’ Jeanbon told the men who were to be executed
when we defend them; to assist you is not to oppress you; to break your chains like this is not to attack your liberty! They say we exercise arbitrary power; they accuse us of being despots: Despots! Us! Hah! Doubtless, if it is despotism which is necessary for the triumph of liberty, this despotism is political regeneration.
    Politically-vetted instructors attached to each ship taught republican virtues to the fleet. French sailors in the 1790s had to learn a new Rousseauesque and totalitarian catechism:
Work, the principal good of the free man; virtue, the torch of revolution and the foundation of republican government; nature, the source of the virtuous man’s sweetest pleasures; la Patrie, to which our duty directs everything: force, talent, virtue, luck.
    The French fleet was governed by an ideology of terror and virtue. Political commissars sailed with the admirals. All movements of the fleet were to be uniform, simultaneous, and executed with as much precision as speed. Captains who surrendered their ships would be guillotined, as would those who failed to execute an order signalled by theadmiral or even those who failed to repeat signals made to them. Special signals were developed so that any French captain could be instantly dismissed and replaced at sea. And captains must attack without pause and without thought of the cost in lives:
The captain and officers of ships-of-the-line of the Republic who have struck the flag of the nation [surrendered] to enemy vessels, whatever their number, unless their ship has been damaged to the point where it runs the risk of sinking and there is no time left to save the crew, will be declared traitors to their country and punished with death.
    With its traditional culture erased; with any hint of individualism suspect; with a poorly found, meanly fed, scantily provisioned and inadequately equipped force; and with a sense of failure somehow implicit in the strictness of such controls, the French fleet fell apart. Fleets do not work unless fed, clothed, equipped and encouraged. They require, in other words, both a sense of their own dignity and a conviction that they are the agents of freedom. The anarchic and impassioned qualities which fuelled the rampaging French armies sweeping all before them in Europe, living off the land, bringing spontaneity and shock to the level of high military art: none of these things can sustain a navy which depends, in its deeper levels, on the far more rationalist, organisational virtues of steadiness of supply and practice, on orderly coherence and a sense of unquestioned mutual reliance. Only when that foundation is set can the famous spontaneities of Nelsonian battle find a role. Nelson could act with Napoleonic aggression and violence in battle only because the Royal Navy had preserved systems which were completely immune to those modern subversive methods.
    The direction of French naval affairs under theDirectoire and the Consulate made no improvement: chaotic inflation, a lack of consistency and intermittent supply crippled the French navy. Bonaparte systematised much of the chaos, creating maritime prefectures and appointing at the head of the