228 Chapter Seven
These illustrations register the onset of the age of steam and iron in naval design.
Above, opposite page. H.M.S. St. George has a funnel obtruding among its sails.
But the steam engine in its bowels involved minimal alteration in overall design.
This sort of compromise between old and new became obsolete in 1861 when the
French navy launched La Gloire, pictured below. Its ironclad hull was proof
against all existing naval guns, but instead of remaining a sovereign and invulner
able weapon, La Gloire soon became obsolete in its turn as new and more powerful
guns carried by more and more heavily armored warships came off rival designers’
drawing boards.
Illustrated London News 38 (January-June, 1861): 78, 227.
Industrial Revolution on the Sea
alternated, as before, with periods of dearth when the government
decided that outstripping Great Britain at sea was impractical and cut
back on naval appropriations accordingly.^8
Ups and downs in expenditure for the French navy reflected, in
part, Louis Napoleon’s view that his uncle’s great mistake had been to
antagonize Great Britain. From the time that he became emperor of
the French in 1851, therefore, he sought not only to win glory on the
battlefield and to topple the settlement of 1815, as befitted the heir of
the great Napoleon, but also to cooperate with Great Britain, or at
least to refrain from open quarrel. Frictions and rivalries between the
two governments did not entirely disappear during the 1850s and
1860s when Napoleon III ruled France. Far from it. But even a
sporadic and imperfect cooperation between France and Great Britain
sufficed to upset the European balance of power as defined in 1815.
The Crimean War made this apparent. Russia had emerged in 1815
as the greatest land power of the European continent, and the Russian
army remained by far the largest of Europe in the years that followed.^9
Its efficiency had been tested repeatedly in numerous wars on differ
ent fronts and diverse terrains: in Central Asia (1839–43 and
1847–53); in the Caucasus (1829–64); against Persia and Turkey
(1826–29); and against Polish (1830–31) and Magyar (1849) rebels.
- In addition to works already cited on the mid-nineteenth-century French-British
naval rivalry see James Phinney Baxter, The Introduction of the Ironclad Warship (Cam
bridge, Mass., 1933); Bartlett, Great Britain and Sea Power; Oscar Parkes, British
Battleships, “Warrior" to “Valiantrev. ed. (London, 1970), pp. 2–217; Bernard Brodie,
Sea Power in the Machine Age, 2d ed. (Princeton, 1942); Wilhelm Treue, Der Krimkrieg
und die Entstehung der modernen Flotten (Gottingen, 1954); William Hovgaard, Modern
History of Battleships (London, 1920).
- Its manpower totaled 980,000 before hostilities began in 1853, and by the war’s
end had expanded to a total of no less than 1,802,500 men, despite some 450,000
casualties. John Shelton Curtiss, Russia's Crimean War (Durham, N.C., 1979), p. 470.
