France's navy launched the first ironclad, steel warship and mechanical submarine
In just four decades of the 19th century, the French Navy put to sea the first steam-powered ship of the line, the first seagoing ironclad, the first mechanically propelled submarine, the first steel-hulled warship and the first armoured cruiser. Its sailors still call it la Royale, a nickname that survived the revolution.
Cardinal Richelieu founded the first true royal navy in 1626 for Louis XIII and oversaw it personally until he died in 1643. His protégé Jean Baptiste Colbert wrote its first regulations and built the original dockyards at Brest and Toulon; Colbert and his son ran the service for twenty-nine years between them. Older roots reached back to the Middle Ages, to the Mediterranean fleet of the Knights of St John, the seafarers of Normandy and the Breton navy on the Atlantic. The revolution renamed the service the Marine Nationale, but the royal nickname never died.
Its fortunes swung wildly. The Seven Years' War all but wiped it out, yet within fifteen years a rebuilt fleet joined the American Revolutionary War and, though outnumbered, held the British off, reaching a historic peak with actions such as the Battle of the Chesapeake. Then the revolution dismissed or executed many veteran officers for their noble birth. Napoleon hoped to rebuild it for an invasion of England, but at Trafalgar in 1805 the British destroyed a combined Franco-Spanish fleet and settled naval supremacy for the rest of the war.
After 1815 the old rivalry cooled, and the fleet became a tool of empire, invading Algiers in 1830 and fighting alongside the British at Navarino. It also became a laboratory. The Paixhans gun transformed naval artillery; Napoléon, launched in 1850, was the first steam ship of the line; Plongeur in 1863 was the first submarine driven by mechanical power; Redoutable in 1876 had the first steel hull. French officers devised the Jeune École idea of using cheap torpedo boats against costly battleships, and the first seaplane, the Fabre Hydravion, flew in 1910.
Today the navy counts 44,000 personnel, more than 180 ships and about 200 aircraft as of 2021. Its flagship, Charles de Gaulle, is the one carrier with nuclear propulsion that the Americans do not own, and one of only two non-American ships that fling aircraft off by catapult.
Source: French Navy
