182 Chapter Five
French,^53 whereas whenever a crisis arose, the British Parliament
could be counted on to authorize extra taxes, as might be needed, to
pay off indebtedness the Admiralty incurred in the course of naval
operations.
This difference reflected and also confirmed the fact that French
commercial interests remained politically muffled, if not handcuffed,
by the command structure of the royal administration. Lacking
nationwide cohesion, French merchants tended to support decentral
ized finance and management of armed force at sea—privateering—if
only because it put decisions as to the scale and incidence of such
enterprise into their own hands. But the guerre de course, seeking prizes
and avoiding encounters with enemy warships whenever possible, was
not amenable to strategic direction. Each captain and crew did what
seemed advantageous to themselves. In time of war, therefore, the
French commercial empire overseas was at the mercy of the British
navy, whose ships acted in response to governmental decisions about
when, where, and how they should act.^54
It might be supposed that the tasks of supplying the French army
with bread and other necessities might have served as a substitute for
the business of naval contracting. Assuredly, supplying the army was a
considerable business in eighteenth-century France, and private con
tractors were in charge of the supply of muskets^55 as well as of nearly
everything else soldiers needed. But most such items had to be pro
cured within a rather short radius because they were bulky and there
fore costly to transport overland. Bread and fodder far outweighed all
other army needs; and even when the bread contractors lived in Paris,
grain supplies were nearly always purchased locally. No nationwide
commercial network analogous to that stimulated by British naval
- Public reaction to naval defeats in the Seven Years War allowed the duc de
Choiseul, minister of marine 1761–66, to pay for sixteen new warships by subscriptions,
more or less voluntary, from various monied groups—tax farmers, provincial estates,
country gentlemen, Paris merchants, etc. Cf. the list of ships built by subscription in
E. H. Jenkins, A History of the French Navy (London, 1973), p. 142.
- Symcox, The Crisis of French Sea Power, pp. 221 ff., argues this point convincingly.
- Musket manufacture was organized at four centers where a handful of “entrepre
neurs” contracted with the government for the delivery of specified numbers of guns
each year. The muskets were actually manufactured by artisans who worked at the order
of the entrepreneurs; and the whole process was supervised by a government officer,
whose duty it was to make sure that each musket came up to official specifications. The
best account of French gunmaking I have found is Louis Joseph Gras, Historique de
l'armurerie stéphanoise (St. Etienne, 1905), pp. 36–40, 59, and passim. Production fluc
tuated between 10,000 and 26,000 muskets per annum in the second half of the
eighteenth century—a not inconsiderable figure but falling far short of the scale of
manufacture at Liège, where about 200,000 muskets were produced yearly, according
to Gaier, Four Centuries of Liege Gun Making, p. 42.
