Une Education Geostrategique: La Pensee Navale Francaise de la Jeune Ecole a 1914 (review)

Until a few years ago, French naval writing was a sleepy, sideline affair. Most of it was done either by retired naval officers or by a few civilian historians who taught at the École Navale or worked in the archives at Vincennes. When the old publisher Éditions Maritime disappeared, there was concern that all was lost, but a new house, Economica, filled the void, first in military history and then in a line of naval and maritime studies. Martin Motte's new work is the latest in this series, which includes translations of Paul Kennedy, Sun Tzu, Julian Corbett, Carl von Clausewitz, and Edward Luttwak from the non-French world. Globalization is the theme in this series on maritime thought, edited by Hervé Coutau-Bégarie.

While relying mostly on published sources, Motte's title does not do his work justice. Imagine a book which is one-third Mahan, Corbett, and their critics; one-third French naval history; and one-third French social and political history. The result is a bit like Arthur Marder's Anatomy of British Seapower with a dash of Peter Karsten's Naval Aristocracy and Theodore Zeldin's eclectic France, 1848-1945, vol. 1, Ambition, Love and Politics.

The author goes through the already-known problems facing French naval leadership after the Franco-Prussian War: governments totally focused on an Army-first policy against Germany without sufficient money to pay for a modern fleet. Added to this were the chronic divisions between the command and staff establishments in the naval officer corps, each focused on pet projects for restoring French naval power through unrealistic schemes. The absence of uniformed guidance played right into the hands of a Parliament not interested in modernizing the fleet. It took the Dreyfus scandal coupled with the strategic disaster at Fashoda to refocus national attention on the Navy. The outline of this is generally known to readers of Ropp, Earle, and Halpern, but up to now the "why" behind it all has not been fully explored, and this is the core of Martin Motte's 800-page work, derived from his Sorbonne dissertation.

We find out, for example, that French naval officers justified fleet modernization on the basis of their own version of the White Man's Burden. We also see that in spite of several reform-minded Ministers of Marine, the admirals resisted innovations taking place in most other countries. We even see a group of young officers, the so-called Jeune École, proposing a navy of torpedo boats to match the French Army of red pants and offensive à l'outrance. To make his point, the author compares naval thinking with that of the nationalist poet and reserve infantry officer, Charles Péguy, who died with his company on the Marne, red pants and all, leading an attack on von Kluck's right flank.

We also see how frustration with the entire political process, the embarrassments of the Dreyfus Affair and the seeming impossibility of building a modern fleet attracted right-wing political figure Charles Maurras who believed all might be solved if the Parliament were dissolved and the monarchy restored. In the end, the HMS Dreadnought may have been the most important force in overcoming French factionalism just in the nick of time to assist with the Entente Cordiale, the Anglo-French Naval Accord, and producing a fleet capable of escorting Lyautey's Armée d'Afrique across the Mediterranean in September 1914.

Martin Motte doesn't tell us which piece of the equation was most important in French naval developments leading up to the First World War. Instead, he provides the entire menu, letting us prioritize the political, social, and intellectual reasons in this very messy story which mysteriously turned out all right.

This is a very interesting account of how a navy and its parent society...