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| HMS Lightning, the first modern torpedo boat (1877 Scientific American illustration, courtesy of Wikimedia Commons) |
Part I available here
Intellectual Roots of the Jeune École
Although the
French Navy’s senior leaders had embraced these emerging technologies and were
working to integrate them within their fleet, their efforts were deemed
inadequate by the group of officers and theorists who came to form the Jeune École.
Though these dissenters primarily concerned themselves with questions of fleet
structure and doctrine, their original motivations may actually have stemmed more
from misguided French Navy personnel policies. After the Franco-Prussian War,
both the French Navy and the National Assembly failed to institute a senior
officer retirement policy in order to enable continued upward mobility
opportunities for junior officers. Retirement pensions were viewed as too
expensive in an age of austere national budgets, and many senior officers doubled
as members of the Assembly. Officer promotions ground to a standstill as a
result. By the early 1880s, this career stagnation left French naval officers
the oldest on average for their paygrades in Europe. French Lieutenants of this
era averaged 52.3 years in age, whereas the average age of Royal Navy
Lieutenants was 32.2 years. More significantly, the French Navy’s senior
leaders tended to be in poor health, creating an image in the lower ranks of a
geriatric Admiralty acting solely in its own best interests. The transition
from sail to steam further reduced the number of warship command opportunities,
which in turn weighted down officers’ chances for promotion.[i]
Future core members of the Jeune École believed strongly that increased torpedo
boat procurement would create new opportunities for sea duty and warship
command, consequently breaking the officer corps logjam.[ii]
France’s
embarrassment in the Prussian war also contributed greatly to the Jeune École’s
rise. Although the French Fleet possessed superiority over the small Prussian
Navy, the latter never sortied to fight a decisive battle for that very reason.
Prussia’s ceding of command over the Baltic should have in theory allowed the
French to pursue forward offensive naval operations along the Prussian coast.
Nevertheless, the French did not do so because their shortage of sufficiently-armored
warships left their fleet exceedingly vulnerable to mines and shore-based artillery.
Naval warfare was resultantly viewed as a non-factor in the war, and the French
Navy’s prestige suffered accordingly. Needless to say, this triggered much
soul-searching amongst French naval theorists. Many were impressed by the
Confederate Navy’s campaign against Union commerce during the American Civil
War, especially in how Confederate raiders’ steam propulsion made the Union
Navy’s close blockade of Confederate ports highly permeable. Some concluded
that slow iron-armored warships could not defeat fast commerce raiders engaged
in Guerre de Course.[iii]
Captain Baron
Louis-Antoine-Richild Grivel emerged as one of the most provocative of these theorists.
Four decades before Julian Corbett’s seminal Principles of Maritime Strategy, Grivel argued that a navy needed
to secure what amounted to localized sea control in order to conduct effective
commerce-raiding or coastal attacks in a given area. The French Navy, Grivel
believed, could achieve this against other continental powers but not against
Britain’s naval supremacy. In his view, this meant the French Navy’s
configuration should be balanced such that it could readily tailor its
operations to the strategic particulars of a given adversary. Grivel understood
that heavy battleships of the line were necessary to secure the sea control
needed for coastal bombardment and other forms of power projection against
continental adversaries. While he endorsed a Guerre de Course-centric maritime strategy against Britain due to
the Royal Navy’s superiority, he nevertheless appreciated that French battle
fleet would be integral to helping commerce-raiding cruisers break out from
ports. “Without a battle fleet,” Grivel wrote in 1869, “[there is] no offensive
coastal war nor effective protection for the nation’s ports, [and] little
opening for cruiser warfare.” He called upon his fellow officers to make the
Navy’s case directly to the French people. “The Navy seems to remain in France
a sort of poetic legend,” he observed. “It is loved without understanding… In
the press, at the rostrum of the Chamber, in books, and in our daily
conversations, let us work for the naval education of our nation!”[iv] A
little over a decade later the Jeune École’s leaders would take Grivel’s
message about public advocacy and enthusiasm for commerce-raiding to heart, but
not his messages about the need for a balanced fleet and combined arms operations.
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| Vice Admiral Théophile Aube (Courtesy Wikimedia Commons) |
The Jeune École’s Leaders
Vice Admiral Théophile
Aube was the father of the Jeune École. A veteran of colonial campaigns in Asia
and Africa, he spent much of his career overseas and correspondingly lacked the
cumulative operational and technical experience that came with duty in the
mainline fleet. Curiously, from 1871-75 the Admiralty placed him on half-pay—a measure
that few of his fellow senior officers experienced despite the era’s promotion
stagnation. Unlike much of the senior officer corps, Aube is believed to have
possessed pro-republican
political views, which offers a possible explanation for his outsider status
during this period.
Aube made good
use of this exile. In his 1874 work “De
la Marine,” he examined Guerre de
Course’s potential role in French maritime strategy. He viewed the American
Civil War achievements of the CSS Alabama
as proof of Guerre de Course’s
effectiveness against superior naval adversaries. Aube stated that unlike
Britain, French national power did not depend on colonial holdings and naval
supremacy. Instead, as a continental power, France’s critical security needs
were limited to territorial defense of the homeland. Aube believed this meant
France should foreswear engaging in capital ship-centric competitions with
Britain, and instead should focus upon commerce-raiding and coastal defense.[v]
Following his
return from duty as colonial governor of Martinique, in 1882 Aube assumed
command of the French Navy’s Mediterranean squadron.[vi] His
ability to immediately fill this position, however, was delayed by a persistent
illness he had contracted during his governorship. While on convalescent leave,
Aube met Gabriel Charmes, a foreign affairs writer for the Journal des Débats suffering from tuberculosis. The two bonded over
their similar political leanings, and upon returning to active duty Aube
invited Charmes to observe the Mediterranean squadron exercises of 1883.
Particularly
impressed by how two 46-ton torpedo boats endured a storm during those
exercises, Charmes drew the erroneous conclusion that torpedo boats and their
crews could endure lengthy oceanic operations. Little is known about the actual
severity of this storm, and any reports or observations from those aboard those
two torpedo boats probably remain untapped within the French Navy’s archives.
Nevertheless, even though Charmes’s view was far from any position previously
staked by even the most fervent torpedo boat advocates in the French Navy, the
Vice Admiral did not correct his journalist ally when the latter began
publishing breathless essays extolling the boats’ seakeeping capabilities. Aube
firmly believed in torpedo boats’ combat potential, not to mention their utility
in addressing the French Navy’s officer corps promotion issues.[vii] In
fact, the egalitarian Aube believed the cramped boats would admirably break
down class barriers between officers and their crews as well as establish a
shared esprit de corps.[viii] The
evidence suggests Aube may have viewed Charmes’s embellishments as a means to
an end.
Tomorrow, the Jeune École's strategic and doctrinal theories.
The views expressed herein are solely those of the author
and are presented in his personal capacity. They do not reflect the official
positions of Systems Planning and Analysis, and to the author’s knowledge do
not reflect the policies or positions of the U.S. Department of Defense, any
U.S. armed service, or any other U.S. Government agency.
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