Eighty Years Of French Navalism In 1/700 Scale
Eighty Years Of French Navalism In 1/700 Scale
An update on a potted history
French naval engineers of the 19th Century worked with cultural materials, not just wood and sails. Anthropologists and archaeologists specializing in watercraft are able to recgonize specific areas, tribal patterns, and eras of construction in found examples. French battleships were no different from the human norm in that they are, or were, a form of material culture.
Moreover, because French naval engineering was the most innovative and advanced in the world at the beginning of the wood-to-steel transition, an evolutionary history of the French battleship can serve as a Rosetta Stone for understanding the history of all battleships. France started the battleship race only to fall behind and lose. Telling that story is an obsession of mine — thus the growing collection.
Much like French shipyards of the 1880s, my production schedule has been too slow of late. Nevertheless, I can now report some progress with the completion of three ironclads designed, or immediately influenced by, Henri Dupuy de Lôme, the most consequential naval engineer of all time.
On the left is La Gloire, the first oceanic ironclad battleship, commissioned in 1859. Next to her in the middle is Solférino, launched just two years later. It is unique for being the only class of ironlad ever built with two gun decks, re-creating the old ship-of-the-line as an ironclad. Finally, on the right and in colonial livery, is Triomphant, laid down just a decade after La Gloire was commissioned, but unfinished until 1877.
The procurement system of the Marine Nationale was broken. A combination of bureaucratic, political, and cultural factors resulted in build times of a decade or more. France failed to observe a fundamental rule of the Industrial Revolution that obsolescence begins at the point of design, not the moment a technology sets sail.
To understand the reasons why this happened, to tease them apart and explore them and figure out why France lost the battlehsip race they had started, requires a fair bit of academic historical reading across multiple domains of knowledge. No single volume on the topic exists in English yet. Yet.
Navalism was not as popular or successful in France as it was in Britain, the United States, Japan, or Germany during the 19th Century. Enthusiasm for global empire was thus a political project of the Marine Nationale by default.
No surprise, then, that French naval policy instigated colonial expansion in Tunisia, Madagascar, and Vietnam, which was known as Cochin China at the time.
A positive effect, at least from the admiralty’s perspective, was that ships which might be obsolete in European waters were still more powerful than anything the locals might procure against them.
Thus the white paint scheme on Triomphant, which like others of its generation, served as a “station cruiser” for much of her life without ever seeing a battle. Rather than the coal-black paint scheme of warships prowling the cold Atlantic, the white paint was an adaptation to tropical climates far from the shores of France.
Known as a “central battery ironclad,” Triomphant is also the development link betwee the ironclads and the steel-hulled battleship.
Whereas La Gloire and Solférino have iron-shuttered gunports on their sides, a clear evoluton of the classic Age of Sail wooden ship, Triomphant has added two larger, more powerful guns on the middle of either side (the ports I have fixed open just ahead of the mainmast; only one is visible here, the other being obscured by the starcase), plus two more in open “barbettes” (a word borrowed from land fortifications) on either side of the smokestack.
Unlike the rest of the cannons on the gun deck, these main guns are able to penetrate the armor of an enemy ironclad. Having two of them positioned in the barbettes gives the captain an option of sailing straight at an enemy vessel, clearing a path with the guns to ram their opponent in the side with that prominent, reinforced bow.
For as soon as engineers began to put engines on ships, ramming came back into style as a tactic. In fact, ramming tactics were the key driver of naval engine development. Coal-fired boilers on these vessels were solely intended for combat. To get from France to any distant port, the ship used wind power, as there was not enough space on board for the coal that would be needed to get there.
When college professors explain the 19th Century, imperialism, and colonialism to their students, this artwork by Charles Daschner often comes up. Printed in 1900 as the cover of a school copybook used by students all over France, it is perfect in its naive self-assurance that subject peoples love and welcome all the wonderful benefits of civilization France has brought them over the seas.
Colonialism and navalism were close partners in France at the time. In the upper right-hand corner of the Daschner drawing we see two central battery ironclads like Triomphant. It is the exact scene that someone on the shores of Cam Ranh Bay might have witnessed at the time.
Bear in mind as well that until 1893, France administered her colonies as a sub-department of the Navy.
The ship type has therefore become something of an icon of France in the Belle Epoque. De Lôme was first to build a warship out of steel, Le Redoubtable, in 1876. Her photographs adorn the covers of both major academic historical volumes about the 20th Century French Navy that are available in English, one in the foreground and the other in the background. She was the model for the class that includes Triomphant, designed by one of de Lôme’s protegés.
As can be seen in the models and photos, French engineers built these ships on the “tumblehome” lines of the earlier wooden ones. That is, all of these vessels were wider at the waterline than the deck, appearing to lie squat in the water.
My research has revealed that this was a particularly French way of thinking about the design of a ship. Curved guides used to draw the sides of warships, known to art design history as “French curves,” were supposed to be the products of artistic and scientific inquiry. De Lôme and his students were the inheritors of a shipbuilding tradition that had explained itself as geometry for centuries, developing into a whole body of mathematical theory.
Which is not to say that the French naval engineers were unscientific. One of de Lôme’s students, Émile Bertin, became a key figure in the development of actual hydrodynamic science, buiding the first testing tank outside of Britain. Rather, the 18th Century theoretical approach had become a pseudoscience, producing ships that proved unfit for the naval battles of even the early 20th Century.
It was bad enough that ministerial turnover and doctrinal infighting delayed naval construction programs. The added political turmoil of the Third Republic, and the impossible politics of industry consolidation, made French naval procurement doubly inefficient.
French naval engineers conceived of themselves as a school of art, each man being an individual artist leaving his own personal design stamp on the world, all of them riffing on the same aesthetic. Which is ironic, for the inheritors of de Lôme would end up creating some of the most aesthetically-hated warships of all time — but that is another chapter.
