Death or Victory: The Battle for Quebec and the Birth of Empire

At 0200 hours on 23 June the Stirling Castle, one of Durell’s squadron which had pushed up the river and now waited for Saunders and the main body of the fleet, anchored off the Île aux Coudres, heard the noise of cannon downriver. As dawn broke her log records that she ‘saw a fleet to the east’ sailing with the wind up the St Lawrence. The captain ordered his ship cleared for action and the shrill noise of the bosun’s whistle sent the watch below tumbling out of their hammocks and ‘to their quarters’.

(#litres_trial_promo) A flurry of signalling ensued and it was soon established that this was Saunders’ fleet. Gradually all the ships caught up and anchored in a protected bay on the north coast. The island was bleak; the 400-feet-high cliffs on its north side presented a defiant aspect to the ships as they sailed under them.

Quebec was about fifty miles ahead. But between the fleet and the French stronghold lay by far the most dangerous stretch of river. A passage through ‘the Narrows’ separated Île aux Coudres from the north shore and beyond that the St Lawrence was scattered with low lying islands and reefs just below the surface. A number of channels led through this natural barrier but they were ever-changing because of silting. The ebb tide tore down the river and in certain wind conditions could create steep, short waves that could swamp open boats and even small ships. They were a fearsome physical barrier. To make matters worse as the British fleet approached the heart of Canada, French intervention grew ever more likely. There was every possibility that the defenders of Quebec would take up positions to augment the natural barricades with ships, men and cannon. So far the enemy had hardly shown himself; the odd crack of a musket from the trees along the shoreline had been a fine gesture of defiance but held little menace. However, after years of desperate battles against the French and their Canadian colonists, no one in Wolfe’s army doubted that they would fight to the last extremity to protect their land from invasion. The all-too-visible progress of the fleet ensured that they would have plenty of notice of the British advance and although, as Knox commented, they saw no Canadians, they did see ‘large signal fires everywhere before us’.

(#litres_trial_promo) The French knew they were coming.

TWO (#ulink_c5c210ce-e973-53fa-8b07-d04edaf66423)

‘The enemy are out to destroy everything that calls itself Canada’

AT DUSK ON 22 MAY 1759 the keel of a small boat crunched into the sand and mud of the beach and a group of Frenchmen clambered over the sailors, who had shipped their oars, and jumped over the bows. They had made the 150-mile trip from Montreal in just thirty-six hours. With great urgency the group walked into the so-called Basse Ville or Lower Town. They passed a battery of ten cannon, huddled behind a three-feet-thick stone wall with wide embrasures lined with less brittle red brick, and into the chaotic huddle of buildings, clustered at the base of the cliff and penned in by the sweep of the river. On every side of them were the houses of prosperous merchants squeezed in among the storehouses that held their fortunes and numerous taverns that dotted the unpaved roadsides. The houses were all brick built, and nearly all were three storeys or more. Every one of them was coated in whitewashed mortar to protect the brick and give them a veneer of respectability. All had imposing, tall, sloping roofs to keep the winter snow from crushing them. Their windows were large but tightly latticed; made up of many small panes of glass that were easier to ship from France than large squares. Not an inch of land was wasted; the only real open space was the marketplace that dated back almost to the foundation of the city. There was a bust of Louis XIV in the middle and at its southern end a fine church: Notre Dame des Victoires, ‘Our Lady of Victories’, built and named to celebrate earlier failed attempts by the hereditary Anglo-American enemy to seize the town.

After just 100 paces the Lower Town ended abruptly at an almost vertical face of rock with only two real roads winding up it, besides a couple of paths that were almost too steep for carts. At the top of the slope, more than two hundred feet high, two principal batteries of fifty cannon and ten squat mortars perched on the edge, their mouths threatening the St Lawrence River. Up here, in the Haute Ville or Upper Town, the aspect of the buildings changed. The very wealthiest inhabitants had built magnificent homes, almost palaces, designed to the latest French architectural styles but with substantial adaptations to allow their inhabitants to survive one of the most extreme climates in the world. For months every winter Canada froze. The arterial St Lawrence, link to the outside world, was sheathed in ice. Temperatures plunged to minus thirty degrees. Generations of Canadians had feared the climate more than the English. In early summer, however, the horrors of winter could be forgotten. Formal gardens abounded in the Upper Town, giving it a fragrant, spacious, genteel ambience. Without the pressure for space of the Lower Town the houses were lower to the ground, usually only one or two storeys high. As the group of men ascended the steep road they passed the Bishop’s palace on the right, perched on the cliff; straight ahead was the cathedral and to their left the Château St Louis, the Governor’s palace. Cannon, Catholicism and Command: the pillars on which French power in North America rested. From the magnificence of the buildings, the dress and manners of the people in the street, visitors could have been in one of the finest towns in France. In fact, they were in Quebec, stronghold of empire, capital of the vast territories of New France.

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Quebec was the nucleus of Canadian life. It had been the very first seed of settlement planted in the barren turf of Canada and it had flourished. It was Canada’s political, religious, educational, and social centre, its link to the outside world, the depository for the wealth of an empire. It occupied the best natural defensive position in North America and it was the continent’s most powerful fortress. One of Canada’s greatest governors, Louis de Buade, Comte de Frontenac, wrote to Colbert in France in 1672 that ‘nothing has seemed to me so beautiful and magnificent as the site of the city of Quebec, it cannot be better situated, and is destined to one day become the capital of a great empire’.

(#litres_trial_promo) That prophecy had certainly come true.

Louis-Joseph, Marquis de Montcalm-Gozon, Seigneur of Saint-Véran, Candiac, Tournemine, Vestric and Saint-Julien-d’Arpaon, Baron de Gabriac, Lieutenant General in the army of Louis XV, and commander in chief of French forces in Canada, had arrived in Quebec. He was short, stocky, and energetic. Within minutes of the group installing themselves in Montcalm’s accommodation on the north of Upper Town overlooking the St Charles River, messages, requests, and orders started pouring out. An already febrile city was stirred up to new heights. Since 10 May the ships that had evaded Durell had been arriving from France. They represented salvation. The vast cereal producing areas of modern Canada were not settled in the eighteenth century. The land of the populated valley of the St Lawrence was far from ideal for growing wheat, and while enough was grown to feed the civilian population, the addition of several thousand hungry and unproductive soldiers brought the colony to the edge of starvation. New France had a slim industrial base, there was only one iron forge and the dawning of total war overwhelmed indigenous capabilities. The ships’ holds were packed with food, alcohol, and the stuff of war, including barrels of gunpowder and cannonballs that acted as ballast. Not least, the convoy had also brought news of Wolfe’s expedition, gleaned from intelligence sources in Europe and papers found aboard a captured British ship. Montcalm had spent the winter in Montreal, where he was better placed to strike out in the direction of the first attack that the British would launch on the colony. It was now clear that, despite threats on other fronts, he would be needed in Quebec.

Montcalm was 47 years old. His dark brown eyes were full of life and he had a passionate drive that could occasionally tip into a fiery temper. Contemporaries called him a typical southerner. He was born in the ancestral chateau of Candiac near Nîmes in southern France and his was an impeccably aristocratic, if not a wealthy line. His ancestors had been raised, lived and killed on the battlefield. Few of the Montcalms had died in their beds. He had been commissioned an officer at the age of 9 and by 17 was a captain. He saw active campaigning in the 1730s under the great Marshal de Saxe and was left in no doubt as to the dangers of high command when he was close to the Duke of Berwick as he was blown to pieces by a cannonball at Philippsburg in Germany in 1734. He had made the all-important advantageous marriage to Angelique Louise Talon de Boulay, daughter of the Marquis de Boulay, a well-connected colonel. Their marriage was a love match and of ten children six had survived, two boys and four girls. His poignant letters to his wife, enquiring after his children and full of longing for his native Provence, have made him an attractive figure to later biographers.

He had bled for France. Montcalm had been wounded during the defence of Prague in his late twenties and then almost starved to death on the infamous retreat from Bohemia during the War of Austrian Succession. As a colonel he had led his men from the front and twice rallied his fleeing regiment during the crushing French defeat at Piacenza. He ended the battle a pathetic prisoner in Austrian hands, his unit annihilated and his body savaged with no less than five sabre cuts. He was exchanged for an Austrian prisoner of equal rank only to be wounded in another French defeat in a ravine in the Alps. Just after the inconclusive peace that ended the War of Austrian Succession he petitioned the Minister of War for a pension, citing his thirty-one years, eleven campaigns, and five wounds. He was given an annual stipend of 2,000 livres in 1753.

(#litres_trial_promo) He could have easily seen out his days as a stout provincial nobleman, a pillar of Montpellier society, finding good matches for his daughters and regiments for his boys, but that was never the fate of the Montcalms.

Given the jingoistic enthusiasm for empire that swept across the world in the late nineteenth century, it is perhaps surprising that the idea of trans-oceanic empire was unfashionable and unpopular for much of the time since its inception in the sixteenth century. Colonies were often seen as expensive millstones around the neck of the mother country, enriching bourgeois merchants or propping up royal egos. Colonies were lethal to the health of Europeans, peopled by new men on the make who sought opportunities denied them in the stratified societies of Europe. They were crucibles of immorality. Colonists often proved willing to adopt the habits and the women of the Natives. ‘Civilized’ values were eroded and social barriers scaled as turbulent young societies coalesced and fragmented. Above all, for military men, there was nothing glorious about a war of ambush, stockades, river crossings, and forests. The eighteenth-century officer regarded the plains of northern Europe as the natural theatre for war. Here honour was to be won, in battles of foot, cavalry, and artillery which were fought as their fathers, and grandfathers, had done, under the eyes of royal dukes or perhaps even the sovereign himself. Even Wolfe dreamt about commanding a cavalry regiment on the Continent, in the Anglo-Pruss-ian force that was defending George II’s small German Electorate of Hanover from the armies of Louis XV. French policymakers and military men also regarded this as the primary theatre. Traditionally British gains in West Africa, India, the Caribbean, or North America were wiped out at the peace table as long as French armies occupied strategically important Channel ports or German cities.

The capture of the Baron Dieskau, commander of French forces in Canada, in a skirmish on the banks of Lake George at the very fringe of empire was a case in point. Few senior officers were willing to replace him and serve in the New World. It was a forgotten theatre of war, and one in which the imbalance was slowly increasing as every spring more reinforcements were sent from Britain than from France. Montcalm’s name was chosen from the list of junior field officers. It was ‘a commission that I had neither desired nor asked for’, he recorded in his journal. But ‘I felt I had to accept this honourable and delicate commission’, because it ‘ensured my son’s fortunes’. Like many a proud, noble but impecunious family, the Montcalms depended solely on the crown for patronage. Part of the package was a promise that ‘the King would give my regiment to my son’. He was also promoted to Maréchal de camp, a Major General in British parlance, with a 25,000 livres salary, resettlement money, and living expenses. He would receive a pension of 6,000 livres a year, and half for his wife if he failed to return. This last provision was ‘dear to my heart’, he wrote and ‘touched me because I owe Madame de Montcalm so much’. On 11 March 1756 he had gone to Versailles, to collect his commission and present his son to the King, who duly made the teenager a colonel. Having guaranteed the social, military, and financial stability of his line, he had ridden for Brest on the fifteenth where he met his staff and boarded ship for Canada.

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The crossing had taken five weeks. Like Wolfe, he tired of being cooped up aboard ship and he disembarked as soon as he could, below Quebec, travelling up the last thirty miles of the St Lawrence to the town on horseback. As he rode he no doubt cast his practised eye over the shoreline, placing artillery batteries and forts in his mind’s eye to impede the progress of the British fleet that he knew one day would try to penetrate up the river. He had arrived in Quebec in May 1756 and stayed a week. Long enough to realize that this was ‘a country and a war where everything is so different from European practice’.

(#litres_trial_promo) It was not a compliment.

Three years later he had not changed his mind. He never came to love Canada nor its rugged inhabitants. The deeply conservative aristocrat could not bring himself to embrace the mobility of Canadian culture. Skilled labourers or fur traders could amass fortunes, buy enough land to become seigneurs, obtain military commissions for their sons, who could then build the family’s reputation on the battlefield and eventually acquire noble rank. Soldiers could make fortunes from the massive funds that were earmarked for the colony. Montcalm complained that Le Mercier, the commandant of the artillery for Quebec, ‘came out twenty years ago a simple soldier, [but] will soon be worth about six or seven hundred thousand livres, perhaps a million if these things continue’.

(#litres_trial_promo) ‘He does not care for much,’ Montcalm confided to his journal, ‘other than his own interest.’

(#litres_trial_promo) One of his aides wrote that ‘one must agree that this spirit of greed, of gain, of commerce, will always destroy the spirit of honor, of glory, and military spirit’. He worried about the effect of this brave new world on the men under their command. ‘Soldiers,’ he wrote, ‘corrupted by the great amount of money, [and] by the example of the Indians and Canadians, breathing an air permeated with independence, work indolently.’ He concluded that ‘this country is dangerous for discipline’.

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The art of war was another area in which Montcalm found himself deeply at odds with Canadian thinking. He saw warfare only through the lens of a regular officer, unable to escape the mindset in which he had been immersed all his life. He regarded war in America as barbaric. For generations Canada had defended herself from the Native Americans and British settlers alike by adopting the tactics of the former. Raids, ambushes, massacres, and farm burning were the norm for Canadians, much to the horror of regular officers sent out from France. In Europe the behaviour of armies was tightly circumscribed. Rules and conventions protected women, civilians, the wounded, and prisoners of war. Enemy commanders wrote shocked letters to each other, always in impeccable French, if any of their subordinates broke this code. No commander could ever ask a junior officer to obey an order that conflicted with his duty as a gentleman. Indeed, the officers of all the ancien régime armies counted themselves as members of a supranational group espousing the principles of honour and gentility. They would even socialize freely during the regular truces or breaks in fighting. The prospect of total war was anathema; it was believed that it would destroy religion and property, and invert the social order. Anarchy of this sort threatened to be catastrophic for the combatant powers and would certainly outweigh any short-term military advantage gained.

In North America war had none of this refined veneer. War was total, and cold-blooded slaughter was common. Communities, French or British, white or Native, faced utter annihilation at the hands of the enemy. Native Americans routinely enslaved prisoners or tortured them to death with excruciating exactness. Settlers on both sides faced an existence of scarcity and brutality with no reward for civility. Faced with the bloody realities of life on the frontier Montcalm was appalled. Yet Canadians were certain that their strongest weapon against the encroachments of the far more populous British settlers from the south had always been their Native American allies. Native raids could throw back British colonists almost to the coastal cities, as time and again they were hopelessly outmatched by tribes bred to fight among the rivers, lakes, and forests of the backcountries of New York, Pennsylvania, and Virginia. Armed with French muskets, powder, and knives, fed when necessary with French provisions and paid in brandy and gold, the Native war parties terrorized vast swathes of frontier. Among them were handfuls of Canadian colonial soldiers, fluent in their language, dressed and painted like Natives so that it was hard to tell the difference. These men attempted to channel Native American aggression along avenues that would serve the cause of New France. Montcalm and many French officers regarded the Native Americans with at best suspicion, but usually utter disdain. As for the Canadians who served alongside them, men who chose to live like the ‘savages’ even when presented with the opportunities of Christian civilization, they were worse than the ‘savages’ themselves. Traders, the voyageurs, travelled to the far west adopting the attitudes, dress, language, and women of the Natives. Louis Antoine de Bougainville, one of Montcalm’s aides-de-camp, wrote of these men, that ‘one recognizes them easily by their looks, by their size and because all of them are tattooed on their bodies with figures of plants or animals’. Tattooing in New France was a ‘long and painful’ process with burning gunpowder poured into holes pricked in the skin. Bougainville observed that ‘one would not pass for a man among the Indians of the Far West if he had not had himself tattooed’.

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Montcalm argued strongly that a new era of warfare had dawned in North America. No longer would small numbers of tough, tattooed fighters and their Native American allies protect New France. Since the outbreak of this round of fighting, the scale of the resources sent by the French and the British had brought modern warfare to the continent. ‘The war had changed character in Canada,’ he wrote to France in the spring of 1759, ‘the vast forces of the English’ meant that the Canadian way of making war was obsolete. Previously, ‘the Canadians thought they were making war, and were making, so as to speak, hunting excursions’. Once, ‘Indians formed the basis; now, the accessory.’ He made little attempt to disguise his disdain; apparently he had tried to tell the Canadians, ‘but old prejudices continue’.

(#litres_trial_promo) In 1758, he asserted that ‘it is no longer the time when a few scalps, or the burning [of] a few houses is any advantage or even an object. Petty means, petty ideas, petty councils about details are now dangerous and waste material and time.’

(#litres_trial_promo) Bougainville loyally agreed with his commander. ‘Now war is established here on the European basis,’ he wrote. ‘It no longer is a matter of making a raid but of conquering or being conquered. What a revolution! What a change!’ The effect of Montcalm’s dismissal of the traditional tactics of Native Americans and Canadians was malignant. As the war progressed rifts between French regulars sent out from Europe and the home-grown defenders of New France grew ever wider. Regular troops robbed the habitants and their officers snubbed their opposite numbers in the militia. Both Montcalm and Bougainville were withering in their criticism of Canadians. New France ‘will perish’ predicted Bougainville, ‘victim of its prejudices, of its blind confidence, of the stupidity or of the roguery of its chiefs’.

(#litres_trial_promo) To Montcalm, one man personified Canadian attitudes, and, in his view, failings. He sat at the pinnacle of New French society: the Canadian-born Governor and Lieutenant General, Pierre de Rigaud de Vaudreuil de Cavagnial, Marquis de Vaudreuil.

Vaudreuil’s father had been sent out from France at the end of the seventeenth century to command the royal troops in the colony, and had then been appointed Governor General of New France. Vaudreuil had been enrolled as an ensign at the grand old age of 6, was a captain at 13, and a major at 27. He had campaigned in the west against the Fox Indians during the 1720s and from 1743 to 1753 he was Governor of the portion of New France called Louisiana: the lands from New Orleans at the mouth of the Mississippi up the river to the Great Lakes. He was appointed Governor General in 1755, the first to have been born in Canada. In 1759 he was 60.

Vaudreuil was proud, indecisive and deeply defensive about the abilities of Canadians. Like many colonial soldiers, he was extremely keen not to be seen as inferior to French-born officers. Vaudreuil had tried to convince the Minister of Marine in France that he did not need to send out a commander for the regular troops. Vaudreuil himself knew how to save Canada; he just needed an infusion of regular troops. But the army were having none of it. French regulars would fight under their own officers, not Canadians.

Vaudreuil was disliked by the influx of French officers. Montcalm regarded him as a meddling amateur. Bougainville described him as a ‘timid man and who neither knows how to make a resolution nor to keep one once made’.

(#litres_trial_promo) For three years Montcalm and Vaudreuil had clashed over strategy. In 1758 Bougainville noted in his journal: ‘I see with grief the growing misunderstanding between our leaders.’

(#litres_trial_promo) Vaudreuil lacked the stomach for direct confrontation but his letters to his masters at the French court in Versailles are full of complaints about Montcalm and reveal a great sensitivity over his position within the colony. At the end of the campaigning season of 1758 he informed Versailles of the ‘indecent observations made by the officers of the regular troops of which I had the largest share’. He feared they had ‘even become so public that they form the conversation of the soldiers and the Canadians’. He knew full well who was to blame: Montcalm, who had given ‘too great liberty’ to his officers who were ‘giving an unrestrained course to their expressions’. The situation was clearly grave, but ‘I pass the matter by in silence, I even affect to ignore it, in the sole view of the good of the king’s service, already aware of the consequences which might attend an open rupture with the Marquis’.

(#litres_trial_promo) In this Vaudreuil was right, Montcalm made no secret of his dislike of the Governor General. He talked openly of it with his junior officers and his official journal is littered with snide comments. It was unprofessional and deeply harmful to relations between the French and the Canadians.

Vaudreuil’s policy of raids deep into British-held territories had proved remarkably successful in the first few years of the war. A smattering of French officers brought gold, trade goods, and brandy to the Native Americans along the British frontier from the Great Lakes down to Georgia, to encourage them to hurl back vulnerable British settlements. The British sphere of influence had been shrunk by a hundred miles as Native raids had burnt homes and scalped farmers deep into Pennsylvania, Massachusetts, and New York. Fort Granville, in modern Lewistown, Pennsylvania, just over one hundred miles from Philadelphia, was captured and burnt by Native Americans and Canadians. All the resources, manpower, and treasure of the wealthy and populous central colonies, in particular of Virginia and Pennsylvania, were poured into protecting their own frontiers, largely without success.

In northern New York, the other front between the British and French zones of influence in North America, along the traditional invasion route of Lake George, or Lac du Saint-Sacrement as the French called it, the lumbering red-coated armies of King George II had been fought to a standstill over three consecutive campaigns. Raids by the mixed war parties of Natives and Canadians had slowed British movements to a crawl, terrified the British soldiers and commanders alike and destroyed convoys of supplies on which any thrust up towards Canada depended. In 1756, Vaudreuil had sent a reluctant Montcalm to attack the British fort of Oswego, their toehold on Lake Ontario. It had fallen but Montcalm was appalled by the behaviour of the Natives who massacred some of the British prisoners after the surrender of the fort. In 1757, a massive force of Native Americans from as far away as the western prairies gathered south of Montreal, recruited by the promise of scalps, slaves, and plunder on a huge scale. Montcalm took Fort William Henry at the foot of Lake George and desperately tried to prevent an even larger massacre by Native Americans furious that the Europeans had made peace between themselves, while not a scalp had been taken. He was only partially successful; despite his personal intervention and that of Bougainville and other officers, unarmed British soldiers were enslaved or slaughtered and their corpses maimed. This infamous incident, gruesomely exaggerated in the British press at the time, poisoned relations between the British and French. Montcalm could have followed up his success with a drive towards Albany but blamed the Canadians’ desire to return to collect the harvest and withdrew. In 1758, a British attack on Fort Carillon at the north end of Lake George ended in slaughter as the British threw themselves time and again on a barricade through which the French kept up a regular, terrible musketry. The British commander, Abercrombie, squandered a very favourable situation with this bizarre head-on attack, and then compounded his mistake by panicking and retreating south in headlong flight, leaving much heavy equipment behind. Again Montcalm was cautious. Rather than march south to pursue his stricken enemy he stayed put. He did not want to risk his small force on offensive operations so for the third year running there was no follow-up to a successful encounter.

In the winter of 1758/9 reports from prisoners suggested that the relentless build-up of British forces for an assault on Canada was continuing. The British seemed likely to strike in no less than three places. There was Wolfe’s attack up the St Lawrence. A major overland invasion would move up Lake George, aiming for Montreal. Last, there would be a strike at the forts of the west, with Fort Niagara being the most obvious target. Niagara was the vital link in the chain that led from the main body of the colony on the St Lawrence River to the vast hinterland of forts and trading posts that stretched to the Mississippi and up into present-day Alberta. This was the pays d’en haut, the upper country, an area under the strong influence, if not the control, of France. Both the French and the Native Americans regarded themselves as sovereign. The Natives accepted French forts as a necessary evil to ensure the flow of gunpowder, muskets, and metal work which the French exchanged for furs and without which life was indescribably hard. Were the Frenchmen guests or masters? The answer could wait until after the common British enemy was defeated.

Faced with this triple attack the debate over strategy grew ever fiercer. Vaudreuil wanted to hold the British everywhere; every yard of his precious Canada ceded to the British was too great a sacrifice. He urged the use of irregular troops, Native Americans and Canadians, to launch pre-emptive attacks to sow confusion among the British as they prepared for the invasion. Montcalm took entirely the opposite view. ‘Considering our inferiority,’ he wrote to Versailles, they ought to ‘contract our defensive [perimeter], in order to preserve at least, the body of the colony, and retard its loss’. He was thinking as a European statesman of bargaining chips on an eventual peace table, not of hunting and fishing grounds that were part of the Canadians’ DNA. He was fatalistic about Canada’s chances, and increasingly melodramatic about his own role: ‘prejudice’ or ‘councils of quacks are followed’, he complained, but he would play the martyr, ‘I shall none the less exert myself, as I have always done’ even if it meant he must ‘sacrifice myself for the [public] good’.

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Montcalm and Vaudreuil had reached such an impasse that at the end of 1758 the French court was petitioned to arbitrate. In case Versailles doubted the seriousness of the issue Montcalm effectively offered his resignation by requesting his own recall to France. Two emissaries were sent, one from the Governor, the other from the General. Both carried letters and dispatches brimming with opprobrium towards the other and pleas to ignore whatever they wrote. Montcalm made the wiser choice of messenger; his letters were carried by his 29-year-old aide-de-camp, Captain Bougainville. The young ADC had enjoyed an unusual career. Born into a glittering family he showed an early aptitude for mathematics and in his mid-twenties had published a treatise on integral calculus for which he was elected to the Royal Society in London. He had also established a reputation as a brilliant lawyer. On first meeting Bougainville, Montcalm described him as ‘witty and well educated’.

(#litres_trial_promo) This bright, young star would prove an able diplomat for Montcalm, while Vaudreuil’s emissary was ignored.

Bougainville had joined the army at the age of 21, which was far too old to get ahead. However, his unusual talents secured him a series of appointments as ADC to senior officers. He had been assigned to Montcalm and had joined him in Brest before they had sailed for Canada together in 1756. He did not look like a soldier; he was short, overweight, and asthmatic. But he did not flinch during his first battle, at Oswego, where he served alongside Montcalm, and subsequently proved himself an able student of war. Montcalm wrote that his young ADC,

exposes himself readily to gunfire, a matter on which he needs to be restrained rather than encouraged. I shall be much mistaken if he does not have a good head for soldiering when experience has taught him to foresee the potential for difficulties. In the meantime there is hardly a young man who, having received only the theory, knows as much about it as he.

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He was an adept handler of the Native Americans too. He sat on councils, sang the war songs and had even been adopted into the Nipissing tribe. Despite being wounded during the French victory at Carillon in the summer of 1758, Bougainville was the obvious choice to return to France that winter to plead for more military assistance for Canada. Bougainville’s passage was not a pleasant one. Battered by gales as soon as they left the St Lawrence he wrote that ‘we suffer in this wretched machine beyond anything words can express. The rolling is horrible and unceasing…an imagination most prolific in troublesome ideas could not come within a hundredth of outlining the unbearable details of our position.’

(#litres_trial_promo) In fact, their actual position was worse than he thought; the captain was mistaken in his navigation and sailed his ship into the Bristol Channel, home to a nest of privateers. Luckily, they realized their mistake, turned round and soon arrived in Morlaix. Within hours Bougainville was on the road to Paris.

In the French capital he received compliments, promotions, and fine parties but little substance. Louis XV’s armies had been defeated in Europe and his fleet was being slowly strangled at sea. The state was rudderless. France was still an autocratic monarchy. All lines of government converged only in the person of the king. Louis’ greatgrandfather, the mighty Louis XIV, had created this system and he alone had had the self-discipline and intelligence to control it. Despite insisting that, ‘in my person alone resides the sovereign power, of which the essence is the spirit of counsel, wisdom, and reason…to me alone belongs the legislative power, independent and entire…public order emanates from me; I am its supreme guardian,’ Louis XV was unequal to the task.