French Fleet Breakout at Brest and Toulon

What if the French fleets bloackaded at Brest and Toulon could break through the British blockades that impeded them from being able to combine and head to the English Channel? If they could have could a Napoleonic Invasion of England happen?
 
Ganteaume escaping Brest would had 21 ships to Villeneuve's fleet. The French would thus have around 50 ships in the combined Franco-Spanish fleet when they come back to Europe.

Even with Nelson on the French's trail, I'm not sure the British could face such a number of ships in the Channel. The Battle of Cape Finistere, which forced Villeneuve to retreat OTL, might end up in a French Victory or not happen. This might give Napoleon what he's wishing for : enough ships to have the Channel clear for six hours, allowing him to land on British soil and invade. And if Napoleon lands, the British are screwed.
 
And if Napoleon lands, the British are screwed.

I would debate this point, because Napoleon's invasion plans (the crossing the Channel part) were...well...stupid. His plans relied on a large amount of barges which would not have been towed across the Channel but essentially paddled - I don't think they were even oared IIRC - that would have made the crossing turn into frankly a giant mess. A number of his barges were really thin in a way that would have only been sea-worthy in the most quiet of crossings, I believe he also had plans for circular, shallow-draft barges to seat 50 plans which would have just been disastrous, and the essential result would have been thousands of men drifting off down the Channel to either wash up 50 miles away and get instantly captured, or possibly even wash out into the North Sea, and that's not to mention the literal probable hundreds of barges which would have capsized, drowning all aboard. Added onto that that it would have been a national imperative for the Royal Navy to interrupt the crossing, so they would have gone in for the attack on the French Navy anyway, suicidal or not, knowing that their Captains would've been court-marshalled for not doing so if Britain survived the invasion, and would probably have spent half their time doing everything they could do disperse the barges - firing broadsides at them, ramming barges, and generally sailing between them to force the French Navy to assist in dispersing them, while making the entire clump of invasion barges gradually break up, increasing the chances of extra barges drifting off to their ultimate doom. Oh, and just to make it all worse, IIRC I think Napoleon's plan was for them to cross at night...because, you know...the barges would have surely been far less prone to getting confused and sailing in the wrong directions when they couldn't see their target...

Oh, and then there's the 130,000 men of the British militia who would have fought alongside the regular army.

It could have succeeded, I'll grant you. But a lot of people think that Napoleon's problem was that he thought that a naval invasion could be organised with as much accuracy and control as a land movement of forces, and the result would have been him losing half his army to the sea crossing.
 

archaeogeek

Banned
Oh, and then there's the 130,000 men of the British militia who would have fought alongside the regular army.

While every other objection raised is reasonable, I really have no idea what 130k yeomen would provide to the army. The british militia was very much not germanic landwehr units.
 
While every other objection raised is reasonable, I really have no idea what 130k yeomen would provide to the army. The british militia was very much not germanic landwehr units.

You have a lot of disorganized soldiers, many of them exhausted, wet and freezing from paddling across the Channel, not entirely sure where they are or where the rest of the army is, and probably a lot of them have lost their supplies or had most of their ammunition soaked in the crossing.
Throwing enough even lightly trained yeomen at them would hurt most of these units and cause them to surrender or hole up somewhere out of the way waiting for reinforcements.
The regular army could handle the more organized French units and then take their time to dig out the ones that haven't been overrun by cannon fodder militia.
 
While every other objection raised is reasonable, I really have no idea what 130k yeomen would provide to the army. The british militia was very much not germanic landwehr units.

No, it wasn't, it would fire slowly, break under little pressure etc, but it would be put into battle and wouldn't exactly be entirely useless. Most particularly it would give the British the advantage of numbers, although if the invasion truly went terribly for Napoleon then that might happen anyway. It would give the British a situation where, in any given battle, they could put large numbers of militia on their wings, hold regiments of regulars in reserve, wait for the French to move up their mixed columns and step in the regulars behind or amongst the militia regiments, essentially giving them a reinforcement of steeled men who wouldn't break so easily and thus preventing the wings from being rolled up nearly so easily. If the French couldn't be defeated in the first battle they would still probably have to give 10,000 casualties to the battle (admittedly not as bad as what the British would surely sustain by the casualties and desertions on their side) which would mean that in the next battle, they would be that less able to operate and would likely sustain higher casualties the second time around. It's entirely feasible there could be a third battle too.

Consider also that this would be the first time that England had been properly invaded in a serious way since 1066 (1688 hardly counts since Parliament had requested that invasion, and James made no attempt to fight it on English soil). There would therefore be a panic about conquest that would likely give additional strength to the militiamen too as they worked themselves into a fury over fears of being "annexed to France" as the press surely would be painting it, and such. You only need to look at the ridiculous ideas that the Home Guard came up with during WW2 for examples of this. Those militia would likely be that much less prone to breaking as they had never seen their country invaded before and were scared of the consequences - unlike on the continent where people knew that in war, foreign armies could march through your land and it didn't necessarily mean that you would be swapped in a peace deal or would have your houses burned down and your families killed.

I'm not saying that the French could not win. I'm not even using the spectre of the term "sea mammal". I'm just trying to combat the assertion that a lot here have that as soon as Napoleon lands one troop on British soil all British troops become powerless to prevent the inevitable French conquest.
 
Napoleon never wanted to conquer Great Britain or even Europe for that matter. The Napoleonian wars are merely a continuation of the french revolutionary wars. He wanted to secure France gains.
euro1805.GIF

If he managed to get a lasting peace his empire could have lasted longuer.
 
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