Industrialization of War, 1840–84 227
erful guns by armoring their ships of war. This in turn required more
and more powerful steam engines to drive what soon amounted to
floating citadels through the water.
Use of steam engines in naval vessels had started a decade earlier.
The French were provoked to this particular technological adventure
by their humiliation at the hands of the Royal Navy during the Near
Eastern crisis of 1839–41, when a British squadron compelled the
French navy to withdraw support from Mehmet Ali of Egypt in his
quarrel with the Ottoman sultan. An influential faction within the
French navy reacted by seeking to find new technological means
wherewith to challenge British supremacy at sea. Steam-powered
ships of war, able to cross the Channel regardless of how the wind was
blowing seemed especially promising. French efforts to equip some
ships of war with steam engines soon provoked an invasion scare in
England and hastened the installation of auxiliary steam engines in the
Royal Navy’s ships of the line.^6
For the next twenty years, important technical advances continued
to come from the French side of the Channel. Repeatedly, French
engineers and politicians were lured by the hope of overturning
British naval hegemony with epoch-making new ship designs. Twice
they were able to outstrip the Royal Navy: once in 1850, when the
warship Napoleon was launched, capable of steaming at thirteen knots
with a 950 horsepower engine; and again in 1858, when four and a half
inches of iron plate made La Gloire proof against shot from any exist
ing gun.^7
Each French breakthrough provoked immediate countermoves in
Great Britain, accompanied by public agitation for larger naval ap
propriations and dire predictions of disaster if the French should de
cide to invade across the Channel. But Great Britain’s greatly superior
industrial capacity made it relatively easy for the Royal Navy to catch
up technically and surpass the French numerically each time the
French changed the basis of competition.
Financial restraints were always important in this, the heyday of
European liberalism. As in the eighteenth century, British public sen
timent supported the costs of maintaining naval superiority cheerfully
enough. In France, on the contrary, periods of naval buildup
- Cf. Stephen S. Roberts, “The Introduction of Steam Technology in the French
Navy, 1818–1852’’ (Ph.D. diss., University of Chicago, 1976).
- On the technical revolution provoked by the Gloire see Paul Gille, “Le premier
navire cuirassé: La Gloire” in Michel Mollat, éd., Les origines de la navigation à vapeur
(Paris, 1970), pp. 43–57.
