Reinterpreting the French Revolution: A global-historical perspective by BAILEY STONE Read Free Book Online

89–90.
    14 On Louis XVI’s diplomatic philosophy, see Pierrette Girault de Coursac, L’Education d’un roi. Louis XVI (Paris: Gallimard, 1972), esp. 152, 168, 171–72; and Robert R. Crout,
    “In Search of a ‘Just and Lasting Peace’: The Treaty of 1783, Louis XVI, Vergennes, and the Regeneration of the Realm,” International History Review 5 (1983): 364–98.
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    Reinterpreting the French Revolution
    and revenge themselves upon the haughty English; in carrying out the
    second mission, they just might be able to restore that delicate equilib-
    rium of European forces best calculated to maximize French security and
    influence.
    For reasons explored in depth elsewhere,15 Vergennes’s imposing but
    complicated strategy – except insofar as it concerned the insurgency in
    North America – miscarried. Still, the few years intervening between the
    conclusion of that struggle and the final collapse of the ancien régime wit-
    nessed a reappearance of the old assertiveness in French foreign policy.
    This emerged most clearly in connection with the preparations for renewed
    maritime warfare coordinated by Naval Minister Charles-Eugène-Gabriel
    de La Croix, maréchal de Castries.16 Castries, who had unavailingly called
    for transformation of the American War into a worldwide campaign against
    British colonial interests, acted after 1783 to build the navy back up to at
    least eighty ships of the line and to train it in offensive tactics on the high
    seas. He also expended enormous funds on stocking French arsenals with
    masts, hemp, and other war matériel. Most revealingly, perhaps, he tried to
    upgrade the seaworthiness of French naval forces – and probe for British
    weaknesses in the Far East – by sending one expedition after another around
    Africa into the Indian Ocean. British and French naval forces in fact clashed
    in waters off India during 1785. Also, Versailles acted the following year to
    shore up the finances of a local Indian prince, Tippoo Sahib, lately antago-
    nistic to the British in the Mysore War.17 But, if Castries’s bellicosity was
    especially on display, contemporaries were just as quick to note the efforts
    of his counterparts in the war ministry to modernize that most venerable
    instrument of French geopolitics, the army. Those efforts would culmi-
    nate on the very eve of revolution in a special council of war convened by
    Louis XVI.18
    There seemed to be yet other harbingers of renewed French aggression
    in those years. Rumor had it that the French were planning facilities for
    no fewer than one hundred ships of the line at the artificial harbor under
    construction at Cherbourg. Did this augur an eventual strike across the
    Channel? Certainly Louis XVI, ordinarily untraveled, was willing to make
    a highly publicized inspection of the naval works at Cherbourg two years
    later. Then there was the formal alliance concluded between the French and
    the Dutch in November 1785. Since yet another French ally, Austria, held
    15 See Stone, The Genesis of the French Revolution , pp. 119–29.
    16 On Castries, see Murphy, Charles Gravier, Comte de Vergennes , p. 325; Labourdette,
    “Vergennes,” pp. 91–92; and Dull, The French Navy , pp. 336–38.
    17 On French activities in the Far East, see especially Blanning, Origins , pp. 47–51.
    18 On this subject, refer to Bien, “La Réaction aristocratique avant 1789,” pp. 23–48 and 505–34; and Samuel F. Scott, The Response of the Royal Army to the French Revolution (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1978).
    The ancien régime
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    the intermediate Netherlands, did this presage a French strategic grip on
    both the Channel and North Sea coasts? Furthermore, there were the nu-
    merous indications, some of them already noted, of Versailles’s scheming in
    the Far East. Since (as additional points in this connection) the French pos-
    sessed the islands of Bourbon and Mauritius in the Indian Ocean, and since
    their Dutch allies held the even more