Grain as a Weapon? Britain's Scheme to Starve Revolutionary France, 1793–1796

Abstract

During Britain's transition to war against Revolutionary France in 1793, the administration of William Pitt expanded Britain's traditional military embargoes on enemy commerce to include grain—a policy that redefined "military stores" to include foods alongside other materials required for warfare. The goal of this blockade was to use starvation as a political weapon for ending the war by forcing France's National Convention to decide between feeding its civilian population and feeding its armies. The policy never received full support in London, however, and the National Convention in France prioritized feeding its soldiers over its people. Although the British effort to manipulate Europe's international food system to serve Britain's diplomatic and military ends was largely a failure, the redefinition of grain as military material reshaped the significance of food and agricultural geography in European military strategy at the turn of the nineteenth century.

Who sent ambassadors to Genoa, to Venice, to Naples, to demand, to order the war against France and to stop all communication with her? Who has insulted by visiting the flag of the friendly Nations to remove the subsistence brought to a people that one wants to starve to enslave it? This is the English government.

—Bertrand Barère de Vieuzac, Report on the Act of Navigation, Made on behalf of the Committee of Public Safety (Rapport sur l'acte de navigation, fait au nom du Comité de salut public [1794]), 7

In January 1795 Charles Mahon, 3rd Earl of Stanhope, stepped in front of the British House of Lords to denounce the war policies enacted by William Pitt the Younger against Revolutionary France. Of particular note, he criticized the cabinet's eagerness to starve thirty million Frenchmen into rebellion against the National Convention, a method he regarded as barbaric as it was ineffective.¹ Stanhope's accusation constituted more than mere rhetoric from a Whig who gained the sobriquet of the "minority of one" or the flailing of an opposition party.² As Barère voiced in the National Convention the previous year, the British government embraced hard-line policies against Revolutionary France with regard to food supply. Between 1793 and 1796, the British government waged war in the Mediterranean to maintain the status quo in Europe, protect commercial interests, and resist the spread of French Republicanism. As part of this ambitious containment policy, Pitt and his ministers embraced starvation as a means of arresting French advances. Britain's commitment to starvation as a tool for political change in France reflected a radicalization of maritime norms, a ratcheted response to the perceived excesses of the Revolution.³

Food and the Revolution are inextricably linked. Bread riots in Paris and revolt across France from 1789 to 1795 due to food shortages are well-known events in the history of the Revolution. The linkage between these disturbances and Allied military strategy are less understood. Long debated in political circles, the policy to weaponize food in 1793 sought to introduce a strategy of exhaustion into wartime calculations, to sow unrest and initiate regime change. Ultimately, this broad policy failed to garner the required support among the Allies and stretched British resources to their limit. However, its implementation reflected a radical approach, born of the perceived weakness of French economics and an increasingly vindictive approach to maritime supremacy.

Historians interpret the first conflict against Revolutionary France, commonly known as the War of the First Coalition, in terms of traditional military power and international order. During the first two years of the Revolution (1789 to 1791), the Legislative Assembly sought to share power with Louis XVI. However, increasing radicalization forced the royal family to attempt to flee France, encouraging politicians to call for the establishment of a republic. Those political efforts invoked the anger of the royal houses of Europe, who demanded the safety of Louis XVI and his family. Under pressure from the Prussian and Austrian monarchs to protect their French counterpart, the National Assembly declared war on Austria on 20 April 1792. Over the course of the next year, France declared war on Prussia, Great Britain, Spain, and Portugal, bringing much of western Europe into a devastating conflict over the future of monarchy and political hegemony. At the conclusion of the war five years later, France won swaths of territory in the Rhineland, Low Countries, and Italy. This dramatic shiftin the political landscape led to continued military conquest by subsequent French governments, putting Europe at war for much of the next twenty years.

Before the Revolution, warfare was marked by conservatism among European powers. Historians regularly describe these conflicts as cabinet wars, or wars for limited objectives. A small group of political leaders, perhaps even the monarch himself, defined the reasons for war. Soldiers represented a great expense to the state, and commanders protected this commodity from the risks on the battlefield. Battle itself was geometric, slow, bloody, and indecisive. Sieges, on the other hand, represented the pinnacle of warfare, a marriage of enlightened mathematical thinking and the carefully managed resources of the state.⁴ While conditions during a siege could include starvation and civilian suffering, commanders contained the devastating effects to the tactical and operational levels of war. The outcomes of war remained limited as well. Peace treaties resulted in minor territorial changes or the exchange of far- flung colonial holdings. Furthermore, unless living in a principality along routes of invasion, war minimally impacted the life of the average Frenchman, German, or Italian.⁵ Historians commonly argue that warfare in the eighteenth century lacked the universal suffering caused by the Wars of Religion a century earlier. Between 1648 and 1793, states embraced a formalized approach to warfare without interfering in the domestic affairs of an adversary.⁶

Among historians, the First French Republic represents a significant change from these norms of military conduct, embracing a more destructive approach. Whether this change in the nature of war derived from the radicalization of politics, industrialization, or transatlantic cross-pollination depends on the individual author's attitudes and nature of research.⁷ Michel Foucault points to this shiftof power to the people as a precursor of "wars waged on the behalf of the existence of everyone" with the parameters of conflict becoming universal.⁸ Rhetoric outlined by the Allies in the Declaration of Pillnitz declared an open conflict between the Revolution and the monarchs of Europe. Conversely, the French Edict of Fraternity in November 1792 demanded the spread of Republicanism to foreign courts. Mobilization efforts, particularly in France through the levée en masse, brought more than a million military-aged males into uniform and brought its society onto a war footing.

International brinksmanship and political rhetoric paced military change. The French army transformed from a royalist force beset with conflicted political allegiances at the outset of the war, to an organization led by committed commanders and political commissars. Its composition consisted of a powerful mixture of royal army veterans, passionate volunteers, and conscripts. On the battlefield these armies mixed experienced troops with revolutionary motivation, particularly in the first two years of the war. According to many historians, revolutionary armies themselves represented a "Revolution," a killing machine yet unseen on European battlefields. These larger, more capable armies required a more significant harnessing of state resources and greater commitment of the population to sustain it.⁹

French warfare reached its apex under Napoleon as he pursued a strategy of annihilation. The French emperor used these refined resources and finely honed armies from the Revolution to dramatically redraw political boundaries, rebranding Italian and German states of the Holy Roman Empire as satellites of the new French empire. His decisive victories at Austerlitz, Friedland, and Wagram proved a commander could achieve political victory through the destruction of armies on one battlefield in one day. Similar mobilizations by France's enemies over the next twenty years established norms for national wars all the way to the Second World War.¹⁰ The annihilation of men, material, and political order reflect the historical commentary of the period. Other forms of strategy—attrition and exhaustion—receive scant mention during the period against the mountain of scholarship on warfare, battlefields, and famous commanders.

When trying to understand the influence of food on military strategy at the time of the French Revolution, British foreign policy represents the best vehicle to explore this interplay between trade security, maritime strength, and risk. The Revolution represented a less direct threat to Britain than to the other important allies: Spain, Austria, and Sardinia. The ravages of war on all fronts did not dramatically transform the British landscape or overturn the political system. Outside of exchanges in colonial territories, Britain looked the same in 1793 as it did in 1807, at the height of Napoleon's power. During the early years of the Revolution, Parliament stood aghast at the degradation of French royal power and the growing crisis on the continent, but it did very little to influence the situation between 1789 and 1792. These dynamics allow historians to put some distance between the British government and the extremes of the Revolution, making the government reactionary but not prone to ratcheting up the economic pain on Europe until the French Empire established the "Continental System" to close ports to British trade fourteen years later.¹¹

Britain's path to a starvation policy represented decades of political discourse over the decisiveness of maritime warfare. The concept of weaponizing commerce, including food, evolved dramatically over the course of the eighteenth century. Starting in the 1730s, British wartime efforts included the interdiction of neutral trade in the West Indies bound for Spain and France. During the War of Jenkins' Ear (1739–1748), the British navy intercepted ships flying the flag of France, a neutral power that continued to carry trade to Spanish ports. This represented a change in policy as belligerents regularly avoided disrupting neutral shipping during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. At the outset of the Seven Years' War, the Newcastle ministry approved the Rule of the War of 1756, a law that authorized the seizure of neutral trade to states at war with Great Britain. The law appealed to Parliament and merchants alike as a way to impact continental wars without a heavy commitment of British regiments to a land campaign. Terms such as "carrying trade" and "war material" were malleable concepts, allowing the state with the most powerful navy and irregular naval forces to dictate maritime conditions to their enemies. This policy focused solely on military stores and shipbuilding materials such as hemp and timber. While the Rule of 1756 appears solely directed at France and Spain, its influence became widespread and invoked negative responses from European courts.¹²

Revolt in the American colonies twenty years later represented a complicated problem that generated all types of solutions, including naval and commercial approaches. Over the course of the eighteenth century, the American colonies sought to bypass the restrictions of British control, trading directly and indirectly with Europe. Hubs in the West Indies facilitated the transportation of this legal and illegal trade between American cities and continental markets, making the European powers complicit in the dissolution of royal power in America.¹³ Sarah Kinkel posits that an increasingly broad interpretation of "contraband" and a growing sense of maritime supremacy provided ample resources for the Royal Navy to pursue maritime coercion against their own subjects. Maritime interdiction and blockade represented one of the underlying causes for the rebellion in 1776.¹⁴ Political and naval leadership struggled with how far to go in their coercion of the colonies, a heated debate in public spheres between enforcement and conciliation. As early as 1768, naval commanders called for the complete smothering of American trade, an act equivalent to waging war on British subjects. Despite the British empire's significant advantages at sea, many naval commanders believed the government in London never allowed them to apply the full extent of their naval strength to end the American Revolution.¹⁵

As the revolution in America progressed, many of the hard-line naval officers lamented the unwillingness of the government to destroy colonial trade. In addition to blockade duties, the navy absorbed the additional tasks of transport and supply. These tasks frustrated many of the senior naval officers, who saw the easiest path to defeating the colonists through applying the loosest terms of international law. "The greatest part of Lord [Richard] Howe's fleet," John Montagu, the Earl of Sandwich, wrote to Lord Frederick North in December 1777, "has been employed in convoying, embarking and disembarking the troops, and attending to the army. … The consequence of it was that our trade suffered, and that the enemy got the supplies from Europe by which they have been enabled to resist us."¹⁶ As First Lord of the Admiralty, Sandwich desired a broad expansion of the naval war and a divorce from a negotiated settlement. He demanded the use of naval power against trade to force the colonists into compliance. Starting in 1778, the fulcrum of American colonial trade, the West Indies, became Sandwich's target. Naval officers at sea certainly shared his perspective.¹⁷ Naval leadership allied with Sandwich believed they possessed the silver bullet, as Admiral George Rodney succinctly put it, because "an end to commerce is an end to rebellion."¹⁸ By 1780 the Caribbean descended into a theater of chaos as the British government shifted efforts to seizing American trade and European colonies.

Criticisms of an unrestrained maritime policy in the West Indies emphasized two important issues: human decency and the state of British relations with Europe. Britain's declaration against neutral shipping brought the Baltic powers into the conflict over access to French and Spanish ports. On 1 June 1780 William Petty, the Earl of Shelburne, called for the censure of the administration and the removal of Sandwich from First Lord of the Admiralty. Sandwich's insistence on targeting neutral trade and the lack of control over naval forces had "at once destroyed the laws of nations, as it had remained for many centuries. … It must terminate in the ruin of Great Britain, at least in the overthrow of her naval power."¹⁹ He considered the war to be a disaster that alienated Britain's remaining friends in Europe.²⁰ In the summer of 1780 Russia built a defensive alliance, one of armed neutrality, to protect shipping from capture by British vessels. By the middle of 1781 Russia, Sweden, and Denmark mobilized eighty-four warships to protect their neutral shipping. Holland extended that protection to their trading posts in the Caribbean, complicating an already grueling war in the Atlantic.²¹ Austrian foreign minister Wenzel Anton, Prince Kaunitz-Rietberg, complained to the British ambassador that in pursuing these aggressive policies, "can it be that Great Britain has determined to quarrel with the whole world? It would seem so by her treatment of the subjects of the neutral powers."²² For those politicians keeping an eye on European affairs, the Royal Navy turned into a self-destructive machine, threatening to bring the world down on top of its empire.

The second critique of maritime policy centered on the responsibilities of the Royal Navy to protect the rights of individual citizens and pursue norms of conduct. Edmund Burke in May 1781 publicly denounced the plundering of Saint Eustatius, a Dutch colony, by a fleet under the command of Rodney. He called for a halt to the pursuit of unilateral plunder and wanton destruction in the Caribbean at the expense of liberalism, an increasingly popular stance in eighteenth-century Britain:

We ought not, by instituting a scheme of human plunder and unjust oppression, to make more enemies, or to increase and provoke those with whom we are already involved. We ought, instead of pushing the war to its extremes, to endeavor, by every means in our power, to moderate its horrors, and to commit no other depredation that such as were necessary to public success, or contributed to national glory.²³

Of course, ideas of community and restraint came under fire from what can be termed "hard-liners." Henry Dundas, the Lord Advocate of Scotland and future colonial secretary under Pitt, argued, "If we were to carry those fine ideas of liberal war to the length which the honorable gentleman [Burke] seemed inclined to strain them, we should receive the character of being very good Christians and philosophers, but very bad soldiers and sailors." Dundas quoted eighteenth-century theories of international law as justification for the Royal Navy to seize anything in the name of security.²⁴ As the war ended in 1783 with mixed results, this struggle over unrestrained commercial warfare remained unresolved. However, it is clear through the remarks of men such as Dundas and Rodney that a significant portion of the British body politic considered unilateral maritime warfare justified.

With a mandate to reform the government following the Treaty of Paris, Pitt did attempt to bring the Royal Navy back into European affairs and tamp down what Swedish diplomat Count Gustaf Philip Creutz called "despotism at sea."²⁵ However, fallout from British isolation and coercive practices continued to hamper European diplomacy for the next decade. For example, Catherine II of Russia negotiated a commercial agreement with France, undercutting efforts by British diplomats to establish their own relationship with Saint Petersburg.²⁶ Engaging in economic negotiations across Europe represented a step back into the international system, but it was not just a pursuit for balanced exchanges of commodities or diplomatic recognition. Pitt's major diplomatic success during that decade, the commercial treaty with France in 1786, laid the groundwork for more normalized maritime behavior. Both governments agreed to eliminate piracy at sea and prevent the harboring of maritime criminals. The treaty also unified the privateering forces of both countries in time of war, opening the British admiralty courts to French privateers.²⁷ Pitt explained his reasons for pursuing this idyllic relationship with France, which Whig politician Charles James Fox called a "frenzy of lunacy":

Was the necessity of a perpetual animosity with France so evident and so pressing, that for it we were to sacrifice every commercial advantage we might expect from a friendly intercourse with that country? Or was a pacific connection between the two kingdoms so highly offensive, that even an extension of commerce could not counterpoise it? The quarrels between France and Britain had too long continued to harass not only those two great nations themselves, but had frequently embroiled the peace of Europe.²⁸

Peace at sea between the two largest navies in Europe intended to normalize relations in the state system, particularly in contentious areas such as the West Indies and the Mediterranean.

However, the aggressions of a regicide regime in Paris washed away Pitt's egalitarian attitudes. The National Convention in the fall of 1792 declared the Scheldt River open to navigation, a clear challenge to British commercial and security interests in the United Provinces of the Netherlands.²⁹ Issued by the French government on 19 November 1792, the aforementioned Edict of Fraternity offered assistance to all people supposedly oppressed, which prompted a response from the British cabinet.³⁰ Advances in the Alpine frontiers and the plundering of Belgium, combined with the execution of Louis XVI, induced the ministry to eject the French ambassador and prepare for war.

The break in relations between France and Great Britain reinvigorated the process of applying naval power against the Republic. On 21 January 1793 Parliament passed laws against the shipment of cordage and hemp from ports in the British Isles, materials critical to the French navy. Privy councilors banned the exportation of corn to French ports on 24 January. In fairness to merchants engaged in trade with France, the Treasury promised to purchase these commodities from any ship in British ports bound for France. Privy Council issued the first letters of marque on 9 February 1793.³¹ Dundas himself wrote the draftto submit to the commissioners of the Admiralty advocating even looser restrictions on British privateers.³² By mid-February 1793 Britain reversed the French trade agreements of 1786 and initiated economic war.

With conflict now at hand, the method of attacking France became of paramount importance. The controlling ministers considered French expansionist policies an assault on liberalism and internationalism, a pretext for introducing previously unthinkable coercive policies. William Wyndham Grenville, the foreign minister, confessed to the House of Lords that the French Republic's method of waging war now transformed the nature of European conflict:

It was the distinguishing characteristic between the wars of civilized and barbarous nations, that … in the former, personal property was always considered as sacred; individuals were not only leftin complete possession of their property. … [The French Republic] not only seized the public revenue of such countries, but the private property was confiscated.³³

Pitt echoed a similar line the same day in the House of Commons. In his mind, the violations of neutrality by France justified any actions required to win this war thrust on them by the National Convention. "Whenever they obtain a temporary success," he stated to Parliament, "whatever be the situation of the country into which they come, whatever may have been its antecedent conduct … they have determined not to abandon the possession of it, till they have effected the utter and absolute subversion of its form of government."³⁴ Pitt's attitudes toward Republican France remained unchanged two years later, when he scolded the Whigs that was the "safety of Europe, and the order of society, not considered to be of such a nature as to require all energies of the country?"³⁵ George III also succinctly justified this policy of containment, declaring, "France must be greatly circumscribed before we can talk of any means of treating with that dangerous and faithless nation."³⁶ Because France operated outside of British interpretations of human decency and international law, the cabinet rationalized extreme measures to end the threat to the international order.

Encirclement and starvation matched Pitt's reactionary policies on other fronts. Pitt and many of his colleagues, originally encouraged by the Revolution in 1789, now embraced many unsavory solutions to the problem of Jacobinism at home and abroad. When French politicians declared the opening of the Scheldt Estuary, Britain's traditional economic sphere, and offered to support revolution outside France's borders, Pitt and the cabinet determined they needed to respond to this act of aggression. Their response included moving an army to Holland, launching a fleet to the Mediterranean, and eventually mounting a punitive expedition to the West Indies in the first year of the war.³⁷ Domestically, Pitt's willingness to wage war in his own country to quell dissent and eliminate political factions is indicative of how the government viewed the threat of the Revolution.³⁸ Pitt also entertained the counterrevolutionary crusade in France, supporting the Federalist movement in 1793 and the Quiberon expedition of 1795.³⁹ With war at hand, Pitt's desire to destroy Republicanism warranted measures in both foreign and domestic affairs.

But what levers to pull to end the French threat? Food supplies in France appeared a natural choice. Every person in France, whether rich or poor, relied on agriculture.⁴⁰ In the eighteenth century the population consumed a bread made of a mixture of wheat, rye, and barley. Depending on the region and the quality of harvest, the mixture fluctuated. In the colder areas such as the north and the Alps, local breads contained much more rye. The average French man or woman, who baked once a week, ate up to three pounds of bread a day because it constituted the cheapest source of calories. Grains were also expensive for the average French peasant, costing up to half of his wages to purchase.⁴¹ While efforts were made to diversify diets, particularly with the development of porridges based off of maize, peasants suffering through famines often depended on mixing rye with sawdust to replace barley or wheat. The entire French population remained shackled to this dietary staple.

Politicians on both sides of the English Channel understood the linkages between a stable food supply and political power in France. Steven Kaplan, whose work traces the political economy of France thirty years before the Revolution, describes what he terms a "cereal dependency," where the population worried about starvation and the government worried about the politicization of the peasantry due to malnourishment.⁴² The politics of the grain economy in France became more critical by 1771 with efforts to promote agricultural individualism through the elimination of the commons. This led to a continued problem of access to grain while eliminating opportunities for the peasants to augment their diet.⁴³ The grain trade also represented the fault lines of the French state, a force that counteracted the centralization of power during the early modern period. Access to food gave rise to regional seats of power. William Scott calls Marseilles "the granary of the Midi" due to its vibrant import of grain from across the Mediterranean. As a result, long before the Revolution the city and its leadership considered themselves, not Paris, the power brokers for the southern provinces.⁴⁴

The importation of grain not only fed the French population but also stimulated other economic activities. Grain influenced France's fiat monetary system and the ability to pay for trade. Because of the interconnectivity of the trade and the scarcity of resources, price fluctuations throughout the region prevailed and created wild changes in the market when famine or flood struck.⁴⁵ Import trade and the increasing dependence of the French Republic on paper money and credit provided another financial linkage between economics and political stability. In December 1789 the National Assembly voted to adopt paper money, the assignat. The departure of thousands of émigrés with gold and silver made paying for imports, including grain, increasingly difficult because trade relied on importers to accept the assignat, which lost value over the course of the Revolution. At times, the Republic reverted to hard currency, as it did with Genoa in 1793, because the grain trade was too important to rely on the devalued paper money.⁴⁶ As British agents gathered intelligence on the performance of the assignat, devaluing of currency represented an opportunity to pry apart the traditional economic relationship of France with other countries.

To make this dependency on grain for political stability more difficult, the French population exceeded internal production capacity. Politicians in Britain and France recognized this overseas dependency long before the Revolution. As Jacques Pierre Brissot noted in his book from 1787 on international trade and French commerce,

It is a truth, which every man of observation is acquainted with, that not a year comes forward without showing that some one or more nations in Europe are in want of corn. This want of grain being occasionally extended to all of Europe … France does not grow all the corn she consumes. She is obliged to get it from the north, from Sicily, and the coasts of Africa.⁴⁷

Despite France's power as a developed early modern state, its population and political stability depended on an exposed overseas grain trade. London publishers reprinted Brissot's book, a popular read for politicians and the merchant class, five times between 1787 and 1794. Structural weaknesses in France highlighted by Brissot matched up well with the disturbing reports from the French government regarding grain crises between 1789 and 1793.⁴⁸

French grain imports rested on the back of a highly developed system of interlocking ports and economic relationships. As Adam Smith remarked in Wealth of Nations, cities and rich commercial countries such as Holland and Genoa were prone to hoard grains because they lacked the land to feed their populations.⁴⁹ Shipments of raw grains flowed from the Italian states, the Barbary regencies, and the United States into French ports, particularly Marseilles. Subsequent transactions occurred between Marseilles and the smaller ports.⁵⁰ As wheat and other grains were far too heavy to move in quantity on land over large distances in animal-driven carts, the system relied on littoral trade routes on flat-bottomed boats and ships to ferry shipments from port to port.⁵¹ Towns across the south of France milled grain to feed their populations and provided flour to the French overseas colonies, an exchange of raw goods such as sugar for sustenance to feed the slave population and colonial overseers.⁵²

Proving flexible, this grain trade transformed over time to account for political upheaval, blights, and droughts. In 1783 Marseilles imported 245,362 livres of assorted grains from across the region. Roughly onethird of that amount came from Italian ports, and 68,010 livres came from Spanish production. The Barbary States only contributed roughly 4,180 livres that year, a small percentage of the annual imports nine years earlier, when French merchants brought in more than 107,000 livres from the regencies in Tangiers, Tunis, Algiers, and Morocco.⁵³ In years of scarcity, the dependency on this overseas grain, particularly from the Levant and Barbary, became paramount, but flexibility was critical.⁵⁴ It also became increasingly more diversified. By 1776 Georgia and South Carolina exported 150,000 barrels of rice, or 37 percent of the colonial grain exports, to southern Europe.⁵⁵ In 1793 alone the United States exported 1.2 million bushels of corn, 1.4 million bushels of wheat, and more than a million barrels of flour to Europe. The greatest consumers of American grains in Europe were Spain and Portugal, but in times of scarcity, American merchants competed with the grain producers in northern Europe for Mediterranean markets.⁵⁶

The grain trade also created bizarre economic relationships with some otherwise unsavory regimes. French mercantilism thrived in North Africa in the eighteenth century, backed by the strength of the fleet stationed at Toulon. Merchants at Marseilles employed more than three hundred ships annually, each carrying between eighty and three hundred tons of goods, between that port and the regency of Tunis alone.⁵⁷ Politicians in Paris maintained close supervision of the grain supplies arriving from the regencies.⁵⁸ British agents needed to exert diplomatic pressure on the Muslim regents to sever these profitable ties, but the French ties to these volatile regencies should have been an indication to the British government that the economic relationship with France held more value with Mediterranean states than the threat of French invasion.⁵⁹

With France mobilized for war, these problems became more pronounced. Wheat provided societies with a crop that army commanders preferred because of its resistance to spoiling and nutritional value. Armies in western Europe issued roughly two pounds of bread per day to every soldier, requiring a significant process of baking bread at a central location and distributing sustenance daily.⁶⁰ Horses to sustain supply trains, artillery, and cavalry required the long logistics tail, forcing units to allocate space for human or animal consumption. Prussian units fed each of their horses a daily ration of eight pounds of oats, eleven pounds of hay, and fourteen pounds of chopped straw. Allowing horses to forage for extended periods led to sickness and death. During periods of rationing or limited campaigning, armies during this period dispersed their cavalry to reduce the burden to feed them.⁶¹ With more than a dozen armies in the field in 1793–1794, the movement of grain supplies to the front represented a significant burden on the state, from the harvest to the mouth of every soldier.

There were few shortcuts to sustain the armies. Living offthe land proved problematic, particularly in areas contested for months. In areas of difficult terrain and low yield, requisitioning from the local population proved almost impossible. In developed areas such as the Austrian Netherlands or the Rhineland, road networks and existing magazines made this more feasible. However, in the Alps and Pyrenees, transportation of food became even more difficult, with the army of the Pyrénées Orientales slaughtering its own animals for food and requesting that new recruits bring carriages of grain with them when they joined the army at the front, effectively stealing from families already contributing to the war effort.⁶² Large armies in areas such as the Alps and Pyrenees required supplies to arrive to the army via vessels or overland from areas with more sustainable farming, pulling supplies from populations deep inside France. The armies of Italy and the Alps requisitioned grain as far away as Averyon in France, hundreds of kilometers from the front lines.⁶³

While France appeared ripe for political change motivated by human suffering, incorporating a starvation policy in 1793 constituted significant risk for the coalition and a threat to stability in the Mediterranean. When war broke out, Grenville requested an assessment from his diplomats on the region's capacity for waging war based on a standardized unit of measurement: corn harvests.⁶⁴ He quickly learned that food shortages were not just a French problem but a regional one. Naples suffered intense shortages during the year, even seizing Genoese grain ships in port to feed the poor of the city.⁶⁵ Meanwhile, Spanish authorities, particularly at Barcelona, struggled to feed the population with grains from the Adriatic by way of Venetian merchants. By early March 1793 British diplomats feared the situation could influence Spanish mobilization.⁶⁶ Stability of the alliances could not be ignored for a binary war against France.

However, the cabinet remained committed to forcing a food war on the Mediterranean. Pitt and Grenville believed starving the French people a suitable alternative to the political ruin of the allies at the hands of the Jacobins. As Great Britain held the diplomatic initiative, Grenville articulated this radical policy to the Spanish court:

Another point of infinite utility which would arise from the adoption of this plan would be the cutting offall supplies to the French ports of corn and naval stores from the coasts of Italy and Africa. The importance of this point cannot be stated too highly especially as the present state of the North of Europe and the measures now taking … are such as must deprive France of all resources of this nature except what she can draw from the Mediterranean. His Majesty is more inclined to hope that this plan will be adopted by the Court of Spain.⁶⁷

In terms of coalition maritime targets, grain imports now rose to the rank of timber and hemp as a tool of war. As sea power alone provided an effective, albeit porous, system of blockade, Grenville's goals in the Mediterranean included influencing other allies to accept these British initiatives to reorient European economic power against France.⁶⁸ This was not simply a blockade but was envisioned as the starvation of a nation.

However, convincing governments in the Mediterranean to accept economic ruin proved a difficult sales pitch. Spain depended on grain from many of the same suppliers as France. Seizing neutral shipping could induce a break in relations with those countries who fed the Spanish population. Furthermore, American antagonism to these economic restrictions increased the likelihood of a transatlantic war.⁶⁹ It was not until November 1794, when diplomats agreed to the Anglo-American Treaty of Commerce, commonly known as the Jay Treaty, that concerns over American trade into France subsided. The agreement offered compensation for those American merchants who lost shipping in the first years of the war. In exchange Grenville raised American rice to the level of a military store, a tool of war, making it illegal to be traded in French ports.⁷⁰ British diplomats endeavored to reduce the risk of war with the United States to make food coercion more palatable to the Spanish government.

However, Spanish and British courts never resolved their differences due to international and maritime realities. Both sides regularly engaged in diplomatic fratricide, seizing ships from each other despite a formal alliance. Second, merchants from neutral countries continued to slip the blockade around France, providing much needed relief to the French government and armies. Beyond raw military power, both sides agreed that a comprehensive plan required consultation with the Baltic and Italian states to make it effective.⁷¹ Manuel Godoy, secretary of state for the Spanish government, expressing his displeasure in 1794 over the lack of coordination between fleets, offered to coax Russia into a threepower conference. He intended to normalize the war by eliminating false orders and flags flown by Danish and Swedish ships in the Mediterranean. Godoy also requested a more comprehensive plan to support the ideas Grenville introduced in 1793.⁷² Despite short period of successful interdiction of trade in the fall of 1794, broad coordination between the two naval powers in the Mediterranean never materialized. When Spain withdrew from the First Coalition in 1795, ports and shipping became available to the beleaguered grain trade. British admirals lacked the forces to cover every port from Gibraltar to Leghorn.⁷³

Negotiations with the Italian states also proved inconsistent. Sardinia, having lost significant territory to France in the fall of 1793 and in need of financial support, possessed few options to resist Britain's maritime plan. An alliance with London forced Victor Amadeus III of Sardinia to concede to major tenets of the British plan. While naval dominance promised to control the shipping lanes and the coastline, Sardinia remained the only land barrier to a French invasion of Italy.⁷⁴ Grenville wanted assurances that Sardinian troops would intercept any Italian trade destined for France that traveled overland through Piedmont. Caught between Republican armies and British demands, the Sardinian government passed an edict preventing the exportation of wheat and cattle to France.⁷⁵

In contrast, the Genoese government instead chose neutrality to protect trade and his state's close political relationship with France.⁷⁶ Grain shipments on Genoese ships continued to Marseille and Nice with regularity, to the chagrin of Joseph Brame, the British consul at Genoa.⁷⁷ Furthermore, the National Convention already poured millions of assignat into Genoa to promote egalitarian ideals in a state already closely aligned with Paris.⁷⁸ Despite pressure from Turin and London, nothing swayed Genoa to join the war. The direct and indirect application of military power provided a double-edged sword in the region that could only go so far in convincing the Allies to join a war of exhaustion.

British diplomats also accomplished little in smothering French trade in Africa. The Offices for Home and Colonial Affairs, under the direction of Dundas, managed diplomacy in North Africa. In anticipation of the outbreak of the war, the home secretary tasked Envoy Simon Lucas to deliver gifts to the rulers at Algiers and Tripoli, requesting their assistance in a Mediterranean conflict.⁷⁹ Lucas also carried £2,000 worth of Spanish currency as gifts from Madrid, hoping to use British prestige to make peace between the Spanish and the Muslims. The mission ended in a disaster due to the lack of a naval escort and French ships sailing off the African coastline, stranding Lucas in Algiers for more than a year.⁸⁰ His inability to complete his task helped unravel support for the British during the fall of 1793.

Other diplomats also failed to make inroads at Tunis. Hammuda ibn Ali, the bey of Tunis, expressed outrage over the execution of Louis XVI. The bey ranted against French representatives who requested that he honor their present treaty, arguing that he made the agreement with Louis XVI, not the "fictitious" French Republic. Hammuda desired war with France, but without a British fleet in the Mediterranean and the Tunisian fleet away, he agreed only to the temporary halt of grain shipments to France contingent on further negotiations with both states.⁸¹ With French diplomats still at the Muslim courts in North Africa and no formal declaration, nothing could guarantee compliance from them without the threat of naval action.⁸² The half-hearted efforts of the Barbary regencies to support the anti-French coalition continued to hamper British efforts in the Mediterranean over the next three years.

With no unified command structure or political leadership for the First Coalition, diplomatic efforts remained bilateral. Maritime trade remained far more complex than the color of the flag on the vessel, an underappreciated dynamic that haunted the British diplomatic corps. Passes were issued between ports by governments for individual merchants to carry their trade, regardless of country of origin or flag flying over the vessel. Dutch and Danish ships regularly traded between the ports of the Mediterranean, making money in the absence of political consequences.⁸³ British politicians already learned this lesson during the American Revolution, that trade endeavored to avoid the impact of war, but the cabinet did not appreciate the inability to eliminate every freethinking merchant in the region. Coercion could only go so far in achieving the unilateral objectives of the cabinet without the support of a unified European response.

Failure of the British starvation policy must not be assessed simply as a failure of diplomacy. French victories overcame the economic crisis of 1793–1794. There is clear evidence that food shortages, exacerbated by army requisitions in 1793, helped fuel the counterrevolutionary movement. Federalist representatives used the argument that "Paris eats cheap bread and the provinces are dying of hunger" to rally support in Saint-Geniez-d'Olt, already ravaged by the military commissaires.⁸⁴ In response, the newly formed Army of the Midi waged a bloody campaign from Avignon to Toulon, extinguishing armed rebellion in the south. Victories came at sea as well. In 1794 the French navy harnessed enough warships to escort American grain to Brest, running the British blockade and delivering 150 ships' worth of grain to the country.⁸⁵ As Stanhope mentioned in his address to Parliament, French victories in the Rhineland, the Low Countries, and Italy secured food for the armies, making them less dependent on their own country and long supply lines to feed them.

At the same time, ministries answering to the Committee of Public Safety became more adept at solving the national level problem of feeding the armies. Radical politics in 1793 brought motivated but inexperienced bureaucrats to control of many government posts, including subsistence efforts. Over the course of the crisis of 1793–1794, these men gained the hard-won expertise to manage the flow of grain from civilian to military hands.⁸⁶ The expanded capabilities and extraordinary powers of the army commissaires allowed for unprecedented seizure of food supplies. These authorities made the national government the primary mechanism to ensure the survival of the armies, even at the expense of the civilian population.⁸⁷ Maturation of military bureaucracy matched the education of the armies over the course of the Revolution to overcome the loss of experience in logistics due to emigration.⁸⁸ Committees in the French government also made hard choices, including the stopping of shipments of flour to the colonies in the West Indies, keeping their share of the harvest to supply the armies.⁸⁹ Nationalizing efforts and growing the bureaucracy at a time of war proved enough to overcome the dangers to the patrie in Year II of the French Republic.

Efforts to destroy the European grain trade also represented the limits of British military power. Commanders in the Royal Navy proved unable to apply tight blockade controls to enforce the liberal interpretation of war materials. The Mediterranean fleet, built for naval warfare against a French adversary, lacked the smaller vessels to interrupt coastal trade. Fortifications located near these ports, many built by the French army as it advanced, prevented British intervention. After a year at sea, the fleet lacked the capacity to rotate vessels for repairs, watch Toulon for military activity, support army operations on Corsica, blockade, and protect their own trade.⁹⁰ Clearly defining combatants proved easy to write in diplomatic treaties but hard to enforce with trade so broadly interconnected between states and only so many ships to accomplish a myriad of military tasks.⁹¹

Finally, the British government failed to appreciate that Great Britain and France applied equal pressure on neutral states in the region. Admiral Samuel Hood, the commander of forces in the Mediterranean, admitted in May 1794 that the grand duke of Tuscany, Ferdinand III, "now buys grain, and sells it, at an underprice to keep his subjects quiet."⁹² Ferdinand admitted to his brother, Emperor Francis of Austria, that the British did not treat him like a neutral. "The British have all their ships retrieved from Livorno, so I am now again all alone and exposed," he admitted. "God knows what will happen now."⁹³ Ferdinand IV of Naples conceded that a "general panic" existed among the Italian principalities, caught between French armies and British naval power.⁹⁴ Unlike Britain, all other European states assumed a greater risk in fighting France, an indicator that economic considerations carried more weight in the Mediterranean than counterrevolutionary rhetoric.

When assessing British strategy, the targeting of the French food supply cannot be overlooked as a unique and aggressive tool against the Revolution. A victim of its own historical tendencies, Pitt's ministry endeavored to make maritime warfare decisive, even at the expense of coherence in the coalition. Structural weaknesses in the Mediterranean trade system and French grain production presented an opportunity to take drastic measures against a dangerous threat to the European order. In taking a hard-line approach to the Revolution, Britain forced states to choose between the political upheaval of the Revolution or economic disaster. While the efforts to starve Revolutionary France failed, the cabinet's policy paved the way for a broadening of maritime conflict and international intervention. It also represented a willingness to make starvation a defining feature of war policy, and to make Europe vote against republicanism with its bankroll and stomach.