Pierre André de Suffren Simulacrum

The Life

Pierre André de Suffren de Saint Tropez was born in Provence in 1729, into a family of the minor Provençal nobility, and entered the French navy at the age of fourteen. His career through the middle decades of the eighteenth century was conventional — service in the Mediterranean, the Caribbean, and against the British in the Seven Years War — but at the age of fifty he was given the command that made his name. In 1781, during the American Revolutionary War, he was sent with a small squadron to support the French ally Hyder Ali of Mysore against the British in the Indian Ocean.

The Indian Ocean campaign that followed, from 1782 to 1783, consisted of five sharp naval engagements against the British admiral Edward Hughes — Sadras, Providien, Negapatam, Trincomalee, Cuddalore — in which Suffren fought at numerical parity or disadvantage and repeatedly forced his opponent to retreat. None was a Trafalgar; all were tactical successes. He retained his temporary hold on Trincomalee, the strategic port of the Indian Ocean, until the peace of 1783 ended the campaign. He returned to France, was promoted vice-admiral, and died suddenly in 1788 in circumstances that have never been fully explained.

The Thought

Suffren's strategic contribution was not written but enacted. In a navy whose fighting doctrine was dominated by the *ligne de bataille* — the formal engagement in line-ahead, with the two fleets exchanging broadsides at a distance — Suffren argued for and practised aggressive concentration: break the enemy's line, attack a portion of the enemy fleet with the weight of one's own, force a decisive local action before the remainder could intervene. The doctrine anticipated, by twenty years, the tactical innovations that Nelson would make famous at the Nile and Trafalgar.

His subordinate captains often refused to execute his orders — the French navy of the late *ancien régime* was riven by factional and social resistance to command — and his campaigns were achieved despite, rather than through, the cooperation of his own officer corps. What Suffren could not impose institutionally he compensated for by personal energy and by his willingness to take the decisive risk himself. The British admiral Hughes, no admirer of the French, later remarked that Suffren was the only French officer who had fought him on the terms of equality.

The Legacy

Suffren's reputation in the French navy ran well ahead of his formal honours. Napoleon called him the only French sailor in the eighteenth century who understood war at sea. The aggressive doctrines he articulated and practised — concentration, breaking the line, forcing the decisive action — were absorbed, through French reading of his campaigns and through British awareness of them, into the mainstream of nineteenth-century naval strategy. Mahan treated his Indian Ocean campaign as a textbook case of what a smaller fleet could achieve through tactical initiative.