The Anglo-Spanish
fleet entering Toulon, 1793.
Major British naval action during the French Revolutionary
Wars. In the Mediterranean theater, Vice Admiral Lord Alexander Hood commanded
21 ships of the line, including the 100-rates Victory and Britannia. Opposing
him at Toulon, French Rear Admiral the Comte de Trogoff had 58 warships
comprising nearly half of the French navy. Seventeen of these were ships of the
line ready for sea, including the 120-gun Commerce de Marseille. Trogoff had
another four ships of the line that were refitting, and nine that were
undergoing repairs.
In August 1793 Hood was able to take advantage of royalist
reaction in southern France against the radicalism of Paris. In July Toulon had
overthrown its Jacobin government and declared for the monarchy. When Paris
dispatched troops, Toulon’s counterrevolutionary leaders invited in Hood.
Accompanied by a Spanish squadron of 17 ships of the line under Admiral Don
Juan de Langara, Hood arrived off Toulon. Many of the French crewmen were
willing to fight, but a great many simply deserted.
On 27 August Hood’s ships sailed into the port, and Spanish
and other allied troops then went ashore. The British disarmed the French ships
and put 5,000 captured French seamen on board four disarmed and unserviceable
74s to sail under passport to French Atlantic ports.
In September French Republican forces invested the port from
the land side. The Republican troops did little until December, however, when
young artillery Captain Napoléon Bonaparte convinced his superiors of a plan to
use land artillery to force the British from the port. On 17 December French
troops took the heights, and on the night of 18–19 December the British and
Spanish sailed away, lifting off the allied land force and some French
royalists.
Sir Sidney Smith, meanwhile, volunteered to burn the
dockyard and those French ships that could not be gotten off. This improvised
effort was only partially successful. Although some smaller storehouses were
burned, the large magazine escaped destruction. In all, 19 French ships (11 of
them ships of the line), including those under construction, were destroyed;
the Spanish took off three small French warships and the British secured 15,
including three ships of the line.
Few of the ships captured were of value. The Commerce de
Marseille, which became the largest ship of the Royal Navy, was found to be too
weak structurally for fleet service and became first a storeship and then a
prison hulk. The French recovered largely intact at least 16 warships,
including 13 ships of the line. Later these formed the nucleus of the fleet
that carried Bonaparte’s expedition to Egypt.
This action, in addition to signaling the beginning of the
meteoric rise of young Bonaparte, marked the end of Spanish participation in
the naval war on the British side. Following this fiasco the French had only
their Atlantic fleet, and it was in poor repair.
References
Crook, Malcolm. Toulon in War and Revolution: From the
Ancien Regime to the Restoration, 1750–1820. Manchester, UK: Manchester
University Press, 1991.
Gardiner, Robert, ed. Fleet Battle and Blockade: The French
Revolutionary War, 1793–1797. London: Chatham Publishing, 1996.
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