The Influence of Sea Power upon the French Revolution and Empire: 1793-1812. Alfred Thayer Mahan
to kill, the other to save him. Pricked with bayonets, clubbed with muskets, and even ignominiously kicked, this gallant old seaman, the companion of De Grasse and Suffren, was dragged through the streets amid cries of "Hang him! Cut off his head!" and thrust into the common prison. Bad as all this was, there was yet worse. Any age and any country may suffer from a riot, but De Rions could get from the national authority no admission of his wrongs. The assembly ordered an investigation, and six weeks later made this declaration: "The National Assembly, taking a favorable view of the motives which animated M. D'Albert de Rions, the other naval officers implicated in the affair, the municipal officers, and the National Guard, declares that there is no ground to blame any one." [16] De Rions told his wrongs in words equally pathetic and dignified: "The volunteers," said he, "have outraged the decrees of the National Assembly in all that concerns the rights of the man and of the citizen. Let us not here be considered, if you will, as officers, and I myself as the head of a respectable corps; see in us only quiet and well-behaved citizens, and every honest man cannot but be revolted at the unjust and odious treatment we have undergone." [17] His words were not heeded.
The Toulon affair was the signal for the spread of mutiny among the crews and the breaking-up of the corps of commissioned sea-officers. Similar incidents occurred often and everywhere. The successor of De Rions was also hauled by the mob to prison, where he remained several days. The second in command to him, a little later, was dragged to a gallows, whence he was only accidentally delivered. In Brest, a captain who had been ordered to command a ship on foreign service was assaulted as an aristocrat by a mob of three thousand people and only saved by being taken to prison, where he remained with nineteen others similarly detained. Orders to release them and prosecute the offenders were issued in vain by the cabinet and the king. "It was evident," says Chevalier, "that the naval officers could no longer depend upon the support of local authorities, nor upon that of the government; they were outlaws." [18] "Thenceforth," says another French naval historian, "if some naval officers were found sanguine enough and patriotic enough to be willing to remain at their post, they but came, on account of their origin and without further inquiry, to the prison and to the scaffold." [19]
In the fleets, insubordination soon developed into anarchy. In the spring of 1790 a quarrel arose between Spain and Great Britain, on account of the establishment of trading-posts, by British subjects, at Nootka Sound, on the north-west coast of America. These posts, with the vessels at them, were seized by Spanish cruisers. Upon news of the affair both nations made conflicting claims, and both began to arm their fleets. Spain claimed the help of France, in virtue of the still existing Bourbon Family Compact. The king sent a message to the Assembly, which voted to arm forty-five ships-of-the-line. D'Albert de Rions was ordered to command the fleet at Brest, where he was coldly received by the city authorities. The seamen at the time were discontented at certain new regulations. De Rions, seeing the danger of the situation, recommended to the Assembly some modifications, which it refused to make, yet, at the same time, took no vigorous steps to ensure order. On the same day that it confirmed its first decree, September 15, 1790, a seaman from a ship called the "Léopard," visiting on board another, the "Patriote," used mutinous language and insulted one of the principal officers. The man was drunk. The case being reported to the admiral, he ordered him sent on board the flag-ship. This measure, though certainly very mild, called forth great indignation among the seamen of the "Patriote." De Rions, hearing that mutiny was beginning, summoned before him a petty officer, a coxswain, who was actively stirring up the crew. He quietly explained to this man that the first offender had not even been punished. The coxswain, being insolent, was sent back, saying, as he went, "that it belonged to the strongest to make the law; that he was the strongest, and that the man should not be punished."
The next morning the admiral went to the "Patriote," mustered the crew, told them that the first offender had not been punished, but that the conduct of the coxswain had been so bad that he must be put in confinement. The crew kept silent so far, but now broke out into cries of "He shall not go." De Rions, having tried in vain to re-establish order, took his boat to go ashore and consult with the commandant of the arsenal. As he pulled away, several seamen cried out to her coxswain, "Upset the boat!"
Meanwhile a riot had broken out in the town against the second in command at the dockyard, based upon a report that he had said he would soon bring the San Domingo rebels to order, if he were sent against them. This officer, named Marigny, one of a distinguished naval family, only escaped death by being out of his house; a gallows was put up before it. These various outrages moved the National Assembly for a moment, but its positive action went no further than praying the king to order a prosecution according to legal forms, and ordering that the crew of the Léopard, which ship had been the focus of sedition, should be sent to their homes. D'Albert de Rions, seeing that he could not enforce obedience, asked for and obtained his relief. On the 15th of October this distinguished officer took his final leave of the navy and left the country. He had served at Grenada, at Yorktown, and against Rodney, and when the great Suffren, bending under the burden of cares in his Indian campaign, sought for a second upon whom the charge might fitly fall, he wrote thus to the minister of the day: "If my death, or my health, should leave the command vacant, who would take my place? … I know only one person who has all the qualities that can be desired; who is very brave, very accomplished, full of ardor and zeal, disinterested, a good seaman. That is D'Albert de Rions, and should he be in America even, send a frigate for him. I shall be good for more if I have him, for he will help me; and if I die, you will be assured that the service will not suffer. If you had given me him when I asked you, we should now be masters of India." [20]
It was a significant, though accidental, coincidence that the approaching humiliation of the French navy should thus be prefigured, both ashore and afloat, both north and south, on the Mediterranean and on the Atlantic, in the person of its most distinguished representative. The incidents, however, though conspicuous, were but samples of what was going on everywhere. In the West India colonies the revolutionary impulse transmitted from the mother-country had taken on a heat and violence of its own, characteristic alike of the climate and of the undisciplined temper of the colonists. Commotions amounting to civil war broke out, and both parties tried to command the support of the navy, even at the price of inciting mutiny. Here the Léopard, afterwards the centre of the Brest mutiny, first inhaled the germs of disorder. In July, 1790, the crew revolted, and deprived the captain of the command, to assume which, however, only one commissioned officer was found willing. The commandant of the naval station at the Isle of France, Captain McNamara, after once escaping threatened death, was enticed ashore under promise of protection, and then murdered in the streets by the colonial troops themselves. In the peninsula of India, Great Britain, being then at war with Tippoo Saib, undertook to search neutral vessels off the coast. The French commodore sent a frigate to convoy two merchant ships, and the attempt of the British to search them led to a collision, in which the French vessel hauled down her colors after losing twelve killed and fifty-six wounded. The significance, however, of this affair lies in the fact that when the commandant of the division announced that another such aggression would be not only resisted, but followed by reprisals, the crews of two ships told him they would not fight unless attacked. The officer, being thus unable to maintain what he thought the honor of the flag demanded, found it necessary to abandon the station.
Things abroad thus went on from bad to worse. Ships-of-war arriving in San Domingo, the most magnificent of the French colonies in size and fruitfulness, were at once boarded by the members of the party uppermost in the port. Flattered and seduced, given money and entertainment, filled with liquor, the crews were easily persuaded to mutiny. Here and there an officer gifted with tact and popularity, or perhaps an adept in that deft cajoling with words which so takes with the French people, and of which the emperor afterwards was so great a master, induced rather than ordered his ship's company to do their duty up to a certain point. As usual the tragedy of the situation had a comical side. Three ships, one of the line, anchored in San Domingo. The seamen as usual were worked upon; but in addition two of the commanders, with several officers, were arrested on shore and, after being threatened with death, were deprived of their commands