Strains on Europe's Bureaucratization of Violence 179After the disasters of the Seven Years War, French ministers drew
the conclusion that they needed a navy as good as or better than the
British, in order to reverse the verdict of 1763. But French naval
architects were not so fortunate as Gribeauval, inasmuch as no im
portant technical improvements came within their reach that might
have permitted them to leave the British behind. Bored-out cannon
improved naval gunfire too, but the British kept pace with this change;
and the difficulties of aiming heavy cannon from a pitching ship made
the refinements in aiming, which were so important for field artillery,
ineffective on shipboard. French warships were nearly always better
built than their British counterparts, but in the last decades of the
eighteenth century, the Royal Navy pioneered two important techni
cal advances—copper sheathing for ships’ bottoms, and the use of
short-barreled, large caliber guns, known as carronades.^47
Throughout the century, the shape and strength of oak timbers set a
definite limit to the size of warships. Improvements of design that did
prove feasible, such as the use of a steering wheel to give mechanical
advantage to the steersman, the use of reef points to adjust the area of
canvas to variations in the strength of the wind, and the use of copper
sheathing to prevent fouling the bottom, although they cumulatively
did much to improve the maneuverability of heavy warships, never
established a clear break with older performance levels of the kind
Gribeauval’s field guns enjoyed.^48
Numbers, therefore, were what mattered, and between 1763 and
1778 the French succeeded in building enough new ships of the line to
be able to confront Great Britain on almost even terms at sea. Indeed,
when war broke out again and Spain allied herself with France, the
combined French and Spanish fleets briefly dominated the English
channel. Later in the war, however, the British recovered their tradi-
- To accommodate these large caliber (and thin-walled) guns on shipboard, it was
necessary to lessen the charge, since otherwise recoil became too great for wooden
construction to withstand. This meant lesser muzzle velocity and shorter range; but the
projectiles’ extra weight nevertheless proved more destructive than standard cannon
fire. First manufactured in 1774, carronades were initially sold to merchant vessels and
then in 1779 the Royal Navy accepted them as supplementary armament. The car
ronade thereafter provided the technological basis for Nelson’s famous injunction to lie
close alongside the foe, since its fire became effective only at short ranges. - On the technical constraints of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century naval ves
sels, see the very instructive pages in Ehrman, The Navy in the War of William III. pp.
3—37; G. J. Marcus, Heart of Oak: A Survey of British Seapower in the Georgian Era
(London, 1975), pp. 8–9, 39, and passim. Shipbuilding remained an affair of artisan
skill, fitting odd-shaped timbers to the curves of the hull, etc. Efforts to bring theory to
bear on how best to proportion hull and sails made little difference, though the French
began such attempts as early as 1681.