Mention the ‘classic age’ of naval historical fiction and most people immediately think of the ‘age of Nelson’, Horatio Hornblower, Jack Aubrey and Stephen Maturin. The gallant British Navy, hearts of oak and the Battle of Trafalgar. But there are two sides to every story, as JD Davies writes, and his new series takes the bold step of retelling that conflict from the French point of view.
Three nautical fiction authors walk into a bar…
In the best traditions of historical novels, certain facts have been modified for reasons of dramatic licence. In this particular case, there were more than three of us. But we were definitely in a bar – in a hotel in Cumbernauld, of all places – and during the course of our conversation, one of our number mentioned how regrettable it was that to all intents and purposes there were virtually no novels in English from the French point of view set in the ‘classic age’ of naval historical fiction, namely the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic wars. (Which is more dramatic licence; delete ‘virtually’.)
Of course, this is hardly surprising. This period has been immortalised in popular mythology as ‘the age of Nelson’, and CS Forester’s classic Hornblower series and Patrick O’Brian’s magnificent Aubrey/Maturin canon tower above a substantial and ever-growing sub-genre of books, many penned by seriously impressive authors in their own right.
All of these titles have one thing in common: the heroes are British, the villains French.
Writing a book set in the age of Nelson with the French, the archetypal ‘bad guys’ of sailing-era naval fiction, as the protagonists, would surely be an act of supreme folly or worse. Yet that throwaway comment made in the bar in Cumbernauld nagged at me.
After all, there’s a long and distinguished tradition of stories written from the viewpoint of the enemy striking a chord with English-speaking audiences: witness the likes of All Quiet on the Western Front, Das Boot, Conan Doyle’s Brigadier Gerard stories, and even, from an earlier age, The Three Musketeers.
From the acorn planted in the bar in Cumbernauld grew the oak of a proposal for a series sailing the crowded seas of Revolutionary and Napoleonic naval fiction from the French point of view. To my astonishment, my publisher loved the idea and said yes; but as reality dawned, I wondered what on earth I had let myself in for.
In the cold light of day, though, I realised the idea had possibilities. The political backdrop in France in the 1790s is vastly more interesting than that in Britain, with, say, William Pitt’s introduction of income tax lacking much of the drama and tragedy of the guillotine or the rise of Napoleon.
In many ways the early years of the French Revolutionary war also constituted a civil war in France, with powerful royalist forces in Brittany and elsewhere providing a real threat to the existence of the infant republic. In the naval context, too, the French experience was undoubtedly more complex than that of the hugely storied Royal Navy.
Always outnumbered, the French were always the underdogs (despite the tortuous efforts of O’Brian and others to make them appear otherwise). The navy was almost irrevocably crippled during the early years of the Revolution when many aristocratic officers were purged and (in many cases) guillotined, while many others resigned and went into exile. Yet the navy somehow put ships to sea, albeit often in a poor state of repair and with woefully inexperienced officers and men, and performed surprisingly well in many encounters, for example the ‘Glorious First of June’ in 1794.
There were other advantages to looking at the subject from the French side. For example the Royal Navy had many eccentric warship names, but none were in the same league as the likes of the Ça ira (‘It’ll be fine’), Bonnet-Rouge (‘red hat’) and the Sans Culotte (literally ‘without pants’).
I had several obstacles in the way of writing a series from the French perspective. The most significant was my absolutely dire ‘command’ of the French language, with my conversational skills extending little further than ‘excusez-moi, monsieur, parlez-vous Anglais?’ and ‘vin rouge s’il vous plaît’. I certainly could never have tackled the subject in the dark ages before Google Translate.
I was also woefully ignorant of many aspects of French naval history in the period, but that was relatively easily remedied. There are many superb books in English on the French navy of the 1790s, while I was especially fortunate that the French have built a replica of the exactly contemporary frigate L’Hermione, which I saw under construction at Rochefort years ago and which sailed to the United States on completion (the original L’Hermione was the ship that carried the Marquis de Lafayette to America during the Revolutionary War).
There is a huge amount of published and online material about L’Hermione, including a superb Youtube channel, and from all this I was able to get a good grasp of the layout and handling of a French warship of the period.
Having established the background, I needed a hero and a story. I’d have preferred to avoid another aristocratic protagonist like Matthew Quinton, the central character of my series set in the 17th century, but it soon became clear that there were good reasons for making my new hero an ‘aristo’ after all.
Philippe Kermorvant comes from an old Breton family with a crumbling chateau and an overgrown estate, but he has grown up in America where his father, a renowned but controversial writer, was living in exile with his English wife.
An unusual career has seen Philippe fight for the fledgling United States and then serve in the Russian navy of Catherine the Great, but an unspeakable personal tragedy and his republican convictions compel him to return to France in 1793 to offer his services to the republic.
Despite the ever-present threat of the guillotine, conflict with his maimed, bitter half-brother and confusing feelings for his sister-in-law, Philippe secures command of a frigate and has to earn the respect of a suspicious crew ready to denounce him for the slightest excuse and a hostile, resentful first officer who believes the command should have been his.
It has been a long, often interesting and sometimes fraught journey from the bar in Cumbernauld to the publication of Sailor of Liberty by Canelo. One particular friend of mine is convinced that it will all end in tears, that a British audience will never want to read stories which have a French hero. Perhaps he will be proved right, but I hope that, like Philippe Kermorvant and the French navy of the 1790s, the underdog will put up quite a fight!
Sailor of Liberty by JD Davies is published on 19 January, 2023.
David Davies is chairman of the Society for Nautical Research, a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society, and the winner of both the Pepys and Anderson prizes for his non-fiction titles. He has published two previous series of naval historical fiction, The Journals of Matthew Quinton, set in the 17th century, and the Jack Stannard of the Navy Royal trilogy, set in the Tudor period; both available from Canelo.
He has written for Historia about the background to his Jack Stannard books in (Re)writing the Spanish Armada and All at sea in Tudor England.
Jddavies.com
Twitter: @quintonjournals
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Images:
- The ‘Brunswick’ and the ‘Vengeur du Peuple’ at the Battle of the First of June, 1794 by Nicholas Pocock: National Maritime Museum, Greenwich, London via Wikimedia (public domain)
- Pills for Paul; or, English prescriptions for northern complaints!! Cartoon, 1801: Bodleian Library via Wikimedia (public domain)
- Lord Howe’s action or The Glorious First of June by Philip James de Loutherbour: National Maritime Museum, Greenwich, London via Wikimedia (public domain)
- Le San Culote, drawing of the figurehead: National Maritime Museum, Greenwich, London via Wikimedia (public domain)
- Reconstitution de l’Hermione tirant au canon à Bordeaux le 13 octobre 2014, jour de son départ (replica of the Hermione in Bordeaux, 13 October, 2014, the day of her departure): Dark Attsios for Wikimedia (CC BY-SA 4.0)
