Trafalgar: A battle of exaggerated significance?

Trafalgar did not 'break the back of the French navy.' The Toulon fleet was lost at Trafalgar, not the entire French navy. There were still fleets at both Brest and Cherbourg and Napoleon ordered a new fleet built at Antwerp. And the fleets at Brest and Cherbourg were strengthened. The Toulon fleet was also rebuilt. And when Trafalgar was fought, the Austrians had already surrendered at Ulm.

It is difficult, if not impossible, for a naval power to defeat a self-sufficient land power. And that is one of the reasons for Great Britain to finance the coalitions against France.

First post here! Surely the battle is of significance simply for its material outcome? For one fleet to destroy another - with relatively insignificant loss to itself (20-0 in ships, 4,500 against 450 in dead), and despite being outnumbered - is surely without precedent in the age of fighting sail. But for the storm that followed immediately after, Gibraltar would have become home to the largest "enemy" fleet anywhere in Europe. That the battle did not end the potential threat from France has been known for some time (one of the Glovers wrote a book on it in the 1960s quoting high-level contemporary documents); however, the professionalism and skill of the Royal Navy in maintaining its blockade of French ports meant that, even had Napoleon realised his dream of 150 SoL, it would have been next to impossible for him to concentrate them in sufficient numbers to create any kind of superiority. To the Immortal Memory.

Have you considered that Trafalgar saved the Mediterranean from complete French domination and potentially driving the British completely out of that incredibly important theatre. Indeed without supplies of wheat and cattle from north africa Wellington probably couldn't have waged his campaigns in Spain later.

Having served in the RN Reserve, I have of course been instilled with the Nelson Touch and drunk to the Immortal Memory, but after reading up on Nelson’s behaviour in 1799, it is clearly mixed bag with this rather vain character - but I suppose charismatic characters do tend towards this dual character.

History is by its very nature a hindsight subject and a lot of the view of both Waterloo and Trafalgar is based on their being the great event, which was followed by relatively little fighting and British domination for the next one hundred years. We hear very little about the key naval victories of the 18th century, which established British naval dominance and the empire, while Jellicoe was described by Churchill as the only man, who could have lost a war in an afternoon (Jutland). Indeed, given our failure to smash the Germans at Jutland and subsequent eclipse by the USA, there is an element of ‘last great outing’ for the UK in terms of its nautical side.

While there is some validity in Stephen’s comment about the Continental System, that was part of a greater Napoleonic policy of trying concentrate the profits in France by securing the raw materials but leaving the finishing off to France. It tends to happen with all imperial powers.

Fascinating thread! One of my arguments in my thesis was that Trafalgar's importance has been over-inflated, as concerns about an invasion continued in Britain for much of the rest of the war (Copenhagen and Walcheren, for example, were largely motivated by the need to prevent Napoleon using the vessels of other powers to bolster his naval clout). Stephen's point about the Continental System and the invasion of Russia is an interesting one, though, and one I hadn't thought of before.

I'm not sure the French would ever have tried to cross the Channel, although Napoleon's bluff 1803-05 was pretty convincing in that regard -- but Ireland was a perennial problem and a very real risk. There had already been one failed French attempt to get to Ireland (1797) and an actual landing (1798). Scotland I believe was also a possible target, although I think marginally less volatile.

I'm curious as to why Stephen thinks Walcheren was a naval success -- I had a long conversation about just that topic with Andrew Lambert at the Wellington Congress and I'm afraid I wasn't entirely convinced, although I could kind of see where he was coming from...!

There was an interesting article in the Waterloo journal recently about the Martello Towers. I think you are right, Stephen, to draw attention to the fact that it's impact forced Napoleon to pursue other (ultimately disastrous) courses of action in an attempt to try to force Britain to sue for peace. Would defeat at Trafalgar have made a significant difference in the medium term though? Napoleon would not have had an army at his disposal to invade Britain until at least the summer of 1806, possibly not even then given the Prussian response to Austerlitz. That at least would have brought Britain time to gather a fresh fleet.

The significance in what way.

1. It broke the power of the Franco-Spanish Navies to contest the English Channel and made it impossible for Napoleon to invade. This combined with the building of the Martello Towers and the Royal Military Canals permitted Britain to commit an army to continental Europe.

2. Forced Napoleon to implement the disasterous Continental System to strike back at British trade as he had no other way of doing so. This caused him to invade Portugal, Spain, annex Oldenburg, absorb the Kingdom of Holand and other parts into Metrolpolitan France. This resulted in the Invasion of Russia and ultimate defeat at Leipzig (1813). 3. The Royal Navy could then snap up all the colonies of France and her Allies.

4. Trade with Europe increased with evasions of the Continental System. Yes it is significant and important. Waterloo was the end of the road that was sewn in 1805.