The French Navy and the Seven Years' War (review)

This excellent book deserves a wide audience. It far surpasses most histories of the Seven Years' War, especially those recent myopic works published on this continent which cover only the Franco-British War in North America. This new book treats the world-wide, especially the European, dimensions of the war from a unique point of view. The war in Europe had consequences that stretched well beyond the continent. Indeed, the author's main contention is that the Seven Years' War cannot be understood unless both European and American wars are studied as a single conflict, and that the French navy's role in this war is a useful way to do this. After 1760, the dominant issue between Britain and France was whether the latter would continue to be a major naval power or leave uncontested command of the seas to her rival.

Jonathan Dull, who is a senior associate editor of The Papers of Benjamin Franklin and author of The French Navy and American Independence: A Study of Arms and Diplomacy, 1774–1787, has written a magnificent book. One must go back more than eighty years to Sir Julian S. Corbett's England in the Seven Years' War: A Study in Combined Strategy, 2 vols. (London, 1918) to find a comparable work. Owing largely to the work of a host of historians who have written during the interval, Dull has successfully integrated diplomatic, political, military, and naval history, even comparative financial history, into a well-written narrative that presents a full treatment of the war and the most complete account of the French navy's important role in it.

The book is organized chronologically which allows the author to develop his complex tale without losing the many threads of his story. Dull, who displays a rare mastery of diplomatic archives, argues compellingly that Russia rather than Great Britain was the chief threat to French interests in Europe though previous French conduct during the years 1740 to 1754 led the British to believe otherwise. The book's early chapters well illustrate what someone once called "diplomatic misunderstanding efficiently achieved" as each side escalated its response to its rival's actions as failures in leadership allowed war hawks to lead each country into war. Throughout, Dull shows a comfortable familiarity with even the most recent, as well as the standard, secondary works on aspects of the war.

The war in Europe from which France had hoped for a quick victory had become by 1758 a seemingly endless war of attrition financed by doubtful loans and dubious expedients. French policy that sought to attack Hanover to check English ambitions elsewhere was flawed from the beginning because the British failed to put enough troops into Europe to enable a defeat there to bring them to the peace table. It also led the French to put insufficient resources into their navy before the war. By 1759, France was caught in a cleft stick. The duc de Choiseul correctly abandoned the flawed policy of defeating Britain by capturing Hanover. Yet, following British victories in Canada, the Caribbean, and the Carnatic in India, Britain's only vulnerability to French arms lay in Germany. No wonder that France was unwilling to abandon its harebrained scheme of invading Great Britain.

This book belongs on the shelf of anyone seriously interested in early American and Atlantic history, French maritime and naval history, and in the history of international relations in the eighteenth century.