Lettres d'un observateur sur la Marine, Sur son Organisation actuelle, et sur la Guerre Continentale et Maritime en général

First edition of these observations and proposals for reform of the French Navy, published anonymously in 1802 and traditionally attributed to Pierre-Alexandre-Laurent Forfait, former Minister of the Navy and Colonies, who had left office only a few months earlier.

Contemporary full tree calf, smooth spine decorated with gilt false bands and ornamental tools, red shagreen lettering-piece, covers bordered with fine gilt rolls, marbled endpapers and pastedowns, all edges gilt. Joints slightly rubbed, some surface wear and losses of leather at the foot of the boards, corners worn.

An important copy from the library of Denis Decrès (1761-1820), with his manuscript bookplate mounted on a pastedown. Decrès succeeded Forfait directly as Minister of the Navy on 3 October 1801 and remained in office until 1 April 1814, before briefly returning during the Hundred Days.

A naval engineer and shipbuilder before becoming a minister, Pierre-Alexandre-Laurent Forfait (1752-1807) belonged to the generation of technical specialists from whom Bonaparte acquired part of his understanding of the particular constraints of maritime warfare. The two men were already in contact in the Italian and Venetian context of 1797; Forfait subsequently took part in the naval preparations for the Egyptian expedition before being appointed Minister of the Navy in November 1799.

The Lettres d’un observateur begin from a stark premise: British maritime superiority made it impossible for France simply to rebuild, by ordinary means, a navy capable of matching the Royal Navy. The author warns that “these masters of the seas will never allow the time necessary to recreate and form a navy by ordinary means, merchant shipping or fishing”, adding that Britain would always make war upon France before its naval forces had developed sufficiently to become a threat.

From this relative weakness emerges a more flexible conception of maritime warfare. Rather than waiting for the reconstruction of a great battle fleet, the author advocates means capable of acting rapidly and circumventing British superiority. Bonaparte’s plan for an invasion of England dated 21 July 1803, in which the flotilla was expected to operate without first awaiting the support of the battle fleet, strikingly extends the same strategic logic.

The presence of the present copy in Decrès’s library gives these arguments particular significance. Forfait’s immediate successor, Decrès would himself express to Bonaparte serious reservations about the capabilities of the flotilla and about the belief that it could alone make a Channel crossing practicable. The volume therefore materially brings together two different conceptions of French naval policy: that of a text advocating a response adapted to France’s maritime inferiority, and that of the minister who would direct the Imperial Navy for more than a decade.

The authorship of the work nevertheless remains disputed. Barbier and the Bibliothèque nationale de France attribute it to Forfait; a certain Degay, an assistant naval constructor, claimed authorship himself in a letter preserved in his file at the Service historique de la Défense. On the evidence currently available, this claim does not allow the question to be settled definitively, but it adds considerably to the bibliographical interest of a text published at the very centre of the debates surrounding the reconstruction of French naval power.

Whether written by Forfait or Degay, this pamphlet belonged to Denis Decrès, the very man charged after Forfait with turning such debates into policy; its provenance therefore places the copy at the heart of the strategic uncertainties of the Consulate, when Bonaparte was still seeking a French answer to British mastery of the seas and a practicable route across the Channel.