The Best-Laid Plans of the British Navy, 1783–1794

This article is adapted from a chapter entitled “What to Expect When You’re Expecting the French Revolution,” published in Evan Wilson and Paul Kennedy, eds., Planning for War at Sea: 400 Years of Great Power Competition (Annapolis, MD: Naval Institute Press, 2025), 36–52.

This is a story about a navy’s strategic failure. It really should be a story about a navy’s strategic success. After all, the navy in question did everything right in preparing for war. It invested in shipbuilding and dockyards. It examined its recent strategy and operations and came to a clear understanding of what had gone right and what had gone wrong. It knew who its enemy was going to be, and it knew how it was going to fight that enemy. Yet when the war came, it comprehensively failed to capitalize on its strengths. The question this article seeks to answer is, what went wrong?

In the age of sail, Britain and France engaged in a long-term competition for global supremacy. Britain won, but as the Duke of Wellington put it after the battle of Waterloo in 1815, it was “the nearest-run thing.”[1] Across the eighteenth century, both Britain and France scored major victories that seemed to herald a shift in the balance of power. After the Seven Years War (1756–1763), Britain was ascendant, with new conquests in Canada and India. Yet in the next war, the French and Spanish undermined that new empire by helping the thirteen colonies gain independence. It is in the aftermath of the American Revolutionary War (1775–1783) that our story begins.

After the embarrassing and presumably costly loss of the colonies, the British fretted that their isolation in Europe had caused their geopolitical situation to be irretrievably damaged. They had fought the American War with no major allies, and it was fair to wonder whether they could recover their dominant position. Yet some high-profile naval defeats in the last years of the war in the Caribbean meant that the French were unsatisfied with the peace as well. The result was a major naval arms race in the 1780s, in which the French and Spanish competed with the British to put themselves in the best possible position when the war resumed, as everyone knew it would.

The British were remarkably successful in the arms race. Fears about the consequences of losing the colonies proved overblown, as trade with the United States quickly returned to its pre-revolutionary levels. The economy boomed in the 1780s, growing at six percent per year. On several measures, this decade saw inflection points in British growth: tonnage leaving British ports, total exports and imports, and trade with the East Indies, West Indies, and central Europe all grew substantially.[2] The government taxed this growth, increasing its revenues to such an extent that the new 24-year-old prime minister, William Pitt the Younger, was able to create a sinking fund to manage the national debt. He also invested substantially in naval infrastructure and completed the shipbuilding that had been started during the war. His investments were sustainable, thanks to the underlying economic growth, and the British navy entered the 1790s in a much stronger position than many of its officers thought possible amid the humiliations of the American Revolutionary War.[3]

The French were remarkably unsuccessful in the naval arms race. That is not to say that they failed to build ships. On the contrary, the French and Spanish navies combined in 1789 were larger than the British. The French could put 324,000 tons of warships to sea and the Spanish 253,000, while the British navy boasted just 473,000 tons. The problem was that the French state could not actually afford all the ships that it had built. Naval spending made a significant contribution to the financial crisis of 1788. To raise revenue, the French King Louis XVI called the Estates General in 1789, which precipitated the French Revolution.[4]

Over the next three years, France tore itself to pieces in rebellion and civil war. All thoughts of a naval competition with Britain faded, replaced by a vicious fight over the future of the new Republic, which was declared on September 21, 1792. Three months later, the Republic executed Louis XVI, scaring monarchs around Europe into action to halt the spread of revolutionary republican ideology. The civil war and chaos of the revolutionary years left the French fleet in no state to meet the British when the European war began in 1792 and 1793.[5]

The British victory in the naval arms race combined with the chaos in France suggested that Britain had an opportunity not only to recover the prestige lost during the American War but perhaps also deal France’s global ambitions a fatal blow. The three men responsible for directing Britain’s war effort were Pitt, Lord Grenville the Foreign Secretary, and Henry Dundas the Home Secretary. They were competent and clear-sighted, even if they did not always agree.[6] Dundas convinced Pitt in the war’s early months to establish clear policy ends for British strategy: to prevent a French invasion and to capitalize on Britain’s naval supremacy to relieve France of her major overseas colonies.

They had to take the threat of a French invasion seriously because a French army moved into the Austrian Netherlands and defeated a Prussian army at Valmy in September 1792. It was difficult to invade Britain from the French coast of the English Channel because the prevailing winds blow from the west and there are few good ports along the French side of the coast. It was much easier, however, to launch an invasion from the Netherlands. French Revolutionary armies massed there were possibly an existential threat that could not be ignored.[7]

Pitt, Grenville, and Dundas determined to respond to the threat in the Low Countries by tackling French sea power first, but without making the mistakes of the American Revolutionary War. After all, an army in the Netherlands was destined to remain in the Netherlands if it had no fleet to carry it to Britain. While the British navy went about tackling French sea power, Britain could send a small army to the Low Countries to help the larger armies of the German states. Here was the first mistake of the American Revolutionary War that ministers vowed not to repeat. In that war, Britain had not been able to rely on a continental ally; this time, perhaps, would be different.[8]

The strategic model they had in mind was what Pitt’s father had done in the Seven Years War: concentrate British forces in European waters with the goal of keeping the French also in European waters. If that could be done with less than all of Britain’s available forces, the remainder would then be free to operate in the empire to capture French colonies. Doing so would, they assumed, bring France to the negotiating table, as it had done in all previous eighteenth-century wars.[9]

British deployments in 1793 emphasized protecting the western approaches to the English Channel and watching the French fleet at Toulon. Those two fleets—the Channel Fleet and the Mediterranean Fleet—accounted for a large percentage of the available forces, but not all. There were about half a dozen ships of the line, and possibly as many as thirteen thousand troops, available to be launched at some suitable target. This is what the theorist Sir Julian Corbett later called the disposal force. The question facing Dundas was where to send it.[10]

Dundas’s answer reflected his study of previous wars: the West Indies. It was widely assumed that France’s economy depended on overseas trade, in particular from the West Indies. That region generated about two fifths of France’s foreign trade and two thirds of its deep-sea shipping. Furthermore, the islands in the region were easy to isolate with naval power, weakly defended, and fabulously wealthy. Capturing French islands would strengthen Britain’s position at the negotiating table when this war, like all previous wars, inevitably caused financial crises in the major combatants and petered out. The West Indies were therefore a suitable target.[11]

That, then, was the strategic situation for the British in February 1793: Britain had a stronger navy than its traditional enemy, and that navy was unhampered by revolution. Britain had a competent, experienced leadership team—Pitt had been in office for ten years—while France had just guillotined its king. Britain had a coherent strategy that relied on recent history to help it avoid obvious pitfalls. In short, there was every reason to expect that Britain would be able to destroy what remained of French sea power quickly, take control of valuable colonies, and cruise to an easy victory. Having thought about their enemy in advance for a decade, the British were poised to exploit their enemy’s weaknesses and capitalize on their own strengths.

Instead, none of that happened. Britain’s strategy was wrongly conceived and poorly executed. Five years later, Britain had still not destroyed French sea power. Eight years later, when the war finally ended, Britain had to concede most of her gains to secure a peace, and that peace lasted less than two years before war resumed on a scale previously unknown. The first two years of that new war were characterized by a serious invasion threat, and once again France and her allies had more ships of the line than the British. What went wrong?

Pitt, Grenville, and Dundas made two mistakes. The first was that they misunderstood how the French Revolution had changed France’s war aims. They were no longer fighting Louis XVI’s France—literally, as he was dead—but more than that, they were no longer fighting a France whose foreign policy was shaped by dynastic concerns. British leadership was slow to recognize that the Revolution changed both why France was fighting and how France would fight, and that those changes should have major implications for British strategy.

Revolutionary France’s primary war aim was the survival of the French Republic, which was declared two days after the victory at Valmy. Its enemies were both foreign and domestic, and its aspirations were as much ideological as geopolitical. What Pitt was doing in 1793, then, was doubly dangerous. Not only was he fighting to recoup losses in the last war, but he was literally fighting the last war. Meanwhile, France was fighting a different kind of war, for different reasons.[12]

From the first mistake flowed the second. Sending the disposal force to the West Indies might still have made sense in a war with Revolutionary France, but the turmoil inside France caused Pitt and his team to hesitate about sending their primary strike force overseas. There was a clear need to bolster allied forces in the Austrian Netherlands following their defeats the previous autumn. Then, a month after the war began, a major rebellion against the Revolutionary government broke out in the Vendée region in western France. Here was an interesting opportunity for the British because the region was accessible by sea. There were always likely to be challenges to supply the rebels and coordinate with them, but through the spring, summer, and fall of 1793, it was reasonable to argue that committing British resources here would do major harm to Revolutionary France.[13]

Finally, another opportunity presented itself when counterrevolutionaries in Toulon, site of France’s largest naval base in the Mediterranean, took control of the city and offered the French Mediterranean fleet to the blockading British squadron. Admiral Hood, the commander-in-chief of the Mediterranean, boldly chose to accept their offer and take possession of the city in the name of Louis XVII (the Bourbon claimant to Louis XVI’s vacant throne). Perhaps here a disposal force could be used to take out half of France’s naval power in one swoop while simultaneously undermining the authority of the Convention in Paris. Like the Vendée, the rebellion in Toulon could be supported by sea. While neither rebellion seemed likely to bring about a comprehensive counterrevolution, both provided tangible, achievable missions for a disposal force that would contribute to the larger fight against revolutionary ideology, not just France’s military power.[14]

The Cabinet met at Grenville’s office on November 16, 1793, to consider their options. They compared the possible benefits of the expedition to the West Indies with supporting rebels in the Vendée and Toulon. The Cabinet also considered sending more reinforcements to the Low Countries. They concluded that it would be worth sending some troops to the Vendée at the expense of the West Indies, even if the chances of real success were low.[15]

Second, ministers compared the West Indies expedition with Toulon, and Pitt concluded that Toulon might have a better chance of success even than the West Indies. Admiral Hood, the commander-in-chief in the Mediterranean, had been screaming for more resources for the last two months, both because he recognized the value of the opportunity and because he saw the risk of losing it if he was insufficiently supported.[16]

The result of the Cabinet meeting was, predictably, that the disposal force was divided into three. The original strike force for the West Indies was 13,000 men; now it was to be just 7,000. The other 6,000 were divided between the Vendée and Toulon.[17] All three expeditions failed.

In the Vendée, British hesitation cost them their opportunity. British forces arrived too late to support the rebels, and the government in Paris not only defeated the rebellion but also ordered mass executions that resulted in the deaths of 225,000–250,000 people.[18]

At Toulon, the outcome was mixed. Revolutionary forces, including a young Napoleon Bonaparte, overran Hood’s Anglo-Spanish-French coalition forces, which were not strong enough to hold the city. The allies managed to destroy nine ships of the line and burn some stores, but thirteen ships of the line and five frigates escaped. It was an enormous missed opportunity.[19]

In the West Indies, the expedition was initially successful, capturing Guadeloupe, Martinique, and St. Lucia in March and April 1794. Shortly thereafter, though, French reinforcements arrived at Guadeloupe, declared the abolition of slavery, and reversed British gains.[20]

Pitt, Grenville, and Dundas made some good choices in the buildup to the war and even in its first year. They invested in the infrastructure necessary to sustain naval power, and they recognized that keeping French forces in Europe should be a high priority. Where they went wrong was in failing to understand the ways the Revolution had changed France. We should be forgiving of them—it is difficult to recognize epochal events that overturn the international system while they are happening. Nevertheless, the execution of Louis XVI was surely shocking enough to jolt them out of their established patterns.

This historical case raises questions policymakers today should consider about the insufficiency of peacetime investments and the importance of understanding the enemy’s war aims. Peacetime investments provide a platform for success, but they need to be paired with an understanding of how the enemy’s war aims should shape one’s own war aims. From those questions flow the deployment of force. Pitt, Dundas, and Grenville should have asked themselves: How might the enemy’s new ideological underpinnings cause them to behave, and does that suggest that our best approach is to stick to our pre-war strategy, or adjust based on new information? Both approaches might have worked, but the middle path did not.

Moreover, as Mahan pointed out more than a century ago, it is very difficult for a sea power to win a quick victory against a land power.[21] The more prudent course of action for Pitt and his team would have been to reconsider the point of the West Indies expedition altogether given the developments in France in 1793. With their enemy clearly in turmoil, adopting a more patient, blockade-and-see approach would have retained the strategic flexibility that underpins effective sea power. To adopt this course of action, though, would have required a reconsideration of their own war aims, and they were not able to do that in 1793. The result was that the strategy the British adopted, of half measures in all, was never likely to succeed. They assumed that chaos in France meant weakness in France, and as a result, threw away many of the advantages they had spent the last decade building up.