Admiral comte Pierre André de Suffren de Saint Tropez, bailli de Suffren

While the final years of the American war saw the solidification of a centralized system of command and control in Britain’s Royal Navy, the French navy moved in a different direction. Suffren, who had led d’Estaing’s van at Grenada, challenged the prevailing wisdom. Commanding the French squadron in the Indian Ocean between 1781 and 1783, Suffren embraced the offensive at the strategic, operational, and tactical levels of warfare.

Historians, impressed by Suffren’s aggressiveness, have made him the lone Frenchman in the pantheon of great sailing-age admirals, alongside the likes of de Ruyter,Hawke, Rodney, and Nelson. This is especially true of French naval historians. Castex, for example, viewed Suffren as the successor to the aggressive Dutch admiral de Ruyter, while Lacour- Gayet concluded: “Suffren, among the grand sailors, is the perfect model.” Napoleon I, during his exile on St. Helena, learned of Suffren’s exploits and wondered: “Why did he not live until my time? Why could I not find someone of his kind? I should have made him my Nelson and our affairs would have taken a very different turn. Instead I spent all my time looking for such a sailor and never found one.”

While much of the praise for Suffren is hyperbolic, he was certainly an atypical French naval commander. Suffren was an eighth-generation French aristocrat notorious for his obesity, slovenly dress and appearance, and bullying of subordinates. “Demonic energy, frenetic impatience, uncontrolled fury, contempt of caste and passion for battle,” a recent biographer concluded, “were the five dominant characteristics of the man who burst unexpectedly into the Bay of Bengal in January 1782, and which earned him the sobriquet from his admiring lascars of ‘Admiral Satan.’”

When Suffren received the Indian Ocean command in the spring of 1781, he was a veteran of thirty-eight years of naval service. He had joined the navy in 1743 at the age of fourteen and the next year fought at the battle of Toulon. At Second Finisterre in 1747 Suffren found himself a prisoner of war after watching Hawke destroy much of the French squadron, including Suffren’s own ship. During the Seven Years’ War he experienced additional frustrations. In 1756 he fought with de la Galissonnière’s fleet against Byng at Minorca, but, according to Castex, the failure to follow up the victory convinced Suffren that the destruction of the enemy’s fleet must be the goal of naval strategy. Three years later Suffren was serving in l’Océan 80, flagship of de la Clue’s ill-fated Toulon squadron. During the action with Boscawen’s fleet in Lagos Bay, the individual French ships, Suffren’s among them, fought valiantly, but to no avail. The captain of the badly battered l’Océan drove the ship aground along the Portuguese coast, where she was later burned by the British. Suffren once again was a prisoner of war.

After his release, as the French reexamined their naval policies, Suffren conducted his own reappraisal. He did not work as a member of l’Académie de Marine, the body responsible, in Castex’s view, for the “pseudo-renaissance” of the French navy. Instead, he combined a reassessment of his own professional experiences fighting the British with the study of historical works, especially those which discussed the battles of the great Dutch admiral de Ruyter. Suffren concluded that French strategical and tactical methods had “resulted in the paralysis of the spirit of audacity, intelligent response, support under fire, and the camaraderie of combat.” As Roderick Cavaliero, Suffren’s most recent biographer, noted: “Suffren did not share this gallic confidence in order. He shared the conviction of men like Hawke and Boscawen that all naval action was futile unless it destroyed the enemy’s ships. He chafed during the naval dress-rehearsals of the escadres d’evolution sent to sea to test the new ships and the newly trained sailors.”

Suffren’s experiences in the first years of the American war strengthened his convictions. Unimpressed by d’Estaing’s handling of the French squadron off Rhode Island and Grenada, he wrote of “idiotic maneuvers,” “stupid, perfidious counsels,” and lost opportunities.