264 Chapter Eightthe navy and still compel British warships to withdraw from the
Mediterrannean and retire from the Atlantic coasts of France seemed
irresistible. Accordingly, in 1881, the Chamber of Deputies voted
funds for seventy torpedo boats and halted construction of armored
warships. Five years later, when the protagonist of the jeune école, Ad
miral H. L. T. Aube, became minister of marine (1886–87), he per
suaded the Chamber to approve a program for constructing fourteen
commerce-raiding cruisers and an additional one hundred torpedo
boats. Although battleship admirals continued to exist in France and
indeed regained ascendancy over the French navy in 1887, it certainly
seemed by the mid-1880s that Britain’s traditional rival had pinned its
faith on a radically new weapons system for close-in operations, while
falling back on the age-old strategy of commerce-raiding for action at
longer distances.^3
Such a strategy seemed genuinely threatening to the small group of
technically minded British officers who had followed the development
of self-propelled torpedos since their invention at Fiume in 1866 by a
British emigrant, Robert Whitehead.^4 Small, fast torpedo boats of the
sort the French proposed to build had little to fear from existing capi
tal ships in 1881. British warships carried ponderous muzzle-loaders,
weighing up to eighty tons. Such monsters might have a devastating
effect when fired at stationary objects from close range. That was what
they had been designed to do, on the assumption that future naval
battles would be fought yardarm to yardarm, as in Nelson’s day. But
their slow rate of fire and inaccuracy of aim at long ranges meant that
fast, maneuverable boats could dart in, release their torpedoes, and be
off and away before the Royal Navy’s guns could catch up with such
3. Volkmar Bueb, Die “Junge Scloule’ der franzosischen Marine: Strategic und Politik,
1875–1900 (Boppard am Rhein, 1971) gives the best account I have seen. For a French
point of view, see Henri Salaun, La marine française (Paris, 1932), pp. 18 ff. The shift of
naval policy between 1881 and 1887 in France duplicated earlier turns away from
all-out competition with England, and largely for similar reasons: French taxpayers’ re
sistence to the excessive cost of naval armament (cf. chap. 5 above). For British re
sponses see Brian Ranft, “The Protection of British Seaborne Trade and the Develop
ment of Systematic Planning for War, 1860–1906,” in Brian Ranft, ed., Technical
Change and British Naval Policy, 1860–1939 (London, 1977), pp. 1–22.
- “Torpedo” initially referred to any explosive package designed to strike a ship
under the water line. Water being far denser than air, such an explosion could exercise a
much greater force against the ship’s side than a similar one occurring in thin air. This
made torpedoes particularly lethal. The problem of bringing a charge up against an
enemy ship’s side was first resolved by tow^7 ing torpedoes from projecting spars. But as
self-propelled torpedoes began to achieve a degree of accuracy, weapons of this design
supplanted all others. On the history of torpedoes see Edwin A. Gray, The Devil’s Device
(London, 1975).