Carthagène des Indes, deux points de vue

Sur le site everything, nous trouvons deux intéressants points de vue sur la bataille de Carthagène des Indes.

La fameuse médaille frappée en Angleterre pour fêter la prise de Carthagène des Indes.

Le premier, de la part d'un Espagnol

I have been wondering to know, in English spoken forums and English history websites, if it is true that the War of Jenkins' Ear was hidden from English historians through time.

I was not surprised I read nothing more than "began with an ear cut off" and end with the beginning of the war of the Austrian succession, at every english spoken website. Of course, in that war ocurred the biggest and worse humilliation and defeat made to British navy at war.

We already know the war began with an historic ear but in fact it was an excuse. The real motive been the ambition of English businessmen for controlling the Spanish empire due to their weakened power in America after the war of the Spanish succession

The most important episode on this war was the battle of Cartagena de Indias (Colombia). For those who want to know this episode of history, it is necesary to introduce the figures of the Spanish admiral Blas de Lezo, the English admiral Edward Vernon, and the place: Cartagena de Indias, the main port for Spaniards in America.

After the Jenkin's ear episode at the British parliament, the English king George II sent a huge armada, the biggest amphibious invassion to the Battle of Normandy of 1944, composed of 186 ships, 26400 men and 3000 artillery pieces.

The king of Spain, Felipe V ordered Blas de Lezo to defend the city of Cartagena de indias from the English attack, counting for that task with only 3000 infantry soldiers and recruits and 600 indians archers.

Blas de Lezo's legend started during a long period of continuous victories over the English and Dutch navys during "the Spanish sucession war". In those combats Lezo lost one of his legs, his left eye and a shot in the shoulder leave him a useless arm as well. For all that, he was called half-man or woodleg.

Lezo prepared de port's defence for one year. British arrived at Cartagena on may 5 1741 and in march 13, the English vessels started firing with their canons to the San Luis de Bocachica castle at a rate of 62 canon shots/hour.

After a month of continous bombing, the English disembark and took Bocachica and Bocagrande castles.

Lawrence Washington, half-brother of George Washington, in charge of the 4000 Virginian colonists, spread their troops at La Popa hill. This was the time Vernon commited the mistake of sending a ship with the message of victory to Jamaica. This news were sent to Great Britain where it took an enormous relevance, and George II ordered to fabricate coins and medals conmemorating the victory at Cartagena.

So overconfident was the English admiral about the victory over the outnumbered Spaniards that in April 19 1741 Vernon decided to send their soldiers to the final assault to San Felipe fortress helped for their warships batteries. Meanwhile the Spanish sunk their remaining ships at the ports entrance to divide English troops and hinder their attack.

When they arrived to the fortress walls they realized these beeing bigger as they thought because the Spanish dag up a hole around the fortress and british ladders were too short and useless to take the Fortress.

With that advantage and the British surprised and ensnared, Spaniards opened fire over them, and abandoning their positions, charged against the British, slaughtering them and forcing the reminders to scape back to their ships.

Finally, on may 9th 1741, after 57 battle days, with no food, half of his troops and sailors dead or sick by tropical plagues, Vernon decided to sail back to Jamaica, abandoned many vessels in the way out, due to the lack of people to steer them.

The result:

In the British side:

6000 British died

only 300 of the 4000 Virginian colonist survived.

7500 were wounded or sick and most of them died later on.

50 ships were taken or sunk for the Spanish defences or the British who had not enough men to steer them.

1500 destroyed or captured canons.

At the end, about 16000 British died.

In the Spanish side:

800 died

1200 wounded or sick
6 ships sunk

350 canons temporarily taken by the enemy.



In that battle each Spanish soldier and vessel fought and defeated ten English and American colonists.

The English historians hid the battle by order of the king George II with great succes to the present day as far as we can see.

The defeated admiral Vernon was given a hero's burial with the fallacious legend: "He subdued Chagre and at Cartagena conquered as far as naval forces could carry victory."...Neither victory nor conquest, but he became a hero.

Blas de Lezo died months later for the plagues at Cartagena and was forgotten in history until now. Nobody knows his burial site.
And I can now make sure that if English speakers want to know about this crucial battle for Spanish colonies must go to Spanish history books or websites, although it is quite unknown for common Spaniards.

Some links in english:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Cartagena_de_Indias

http://es.youtube.com/watch?v=YeywbYKq-NQ

http://www.pieceofeight.com/phpBB2/viewtopic.php?t=10

http://members.aol.com/GlobTreasr/history.html

Carthagène des Indes, ville prise par les Français mais que les Anglais n'ont pas réussi à prendre en dépit d'une supériorité militaire écrasante.

Et voici une réponse anglaise bien argumentée.

This post is intended as a reply to the above article. Specifically I'm challenging the assertion that the War of Jenkin's Ear and specifically the Battle of Cartagena de Indias have been deliberately hidden from the English-speaking world's history books as sensationally claimed.

The battle is certainly forgotten in the British perspective, but it's definitely there in the books. One notable account is given by Sir John Fortescue in his 'History of the British Army', it also turns up as a chapter in the many books about the British navy and army and their Caribbean ventures. It's not covered that much on the Internet but there are a few sites, starting with Wikipedia, as well as Google Book previews. Try searching under 'wentworth, vernon, Cartagena'.

But basically the 18th century just isn't a popular period in British popular culture, unlike the Napoleonic or Agincourt eras. Even the era's victories get little coverage online. If you look for accounts of the 1782 'grand assault' on Gibraltar, which was like Cartagena with the roles reversed (and the British even more outnumbered) you'll find very little – and searching gives you mostly books rather than Internet write-ups. And if you try to find accounts of 'successful Cartagenas' such as the captures of Havana and Manila you'll find virtually nothing, these, like Cartagena, are forgotten in the UK.

It's true that King George did attempt to 'cover up' the battle at the time, but hiding defeats from the people was standard practise back then, in fact kings and governments have continued doing it up to today. He was, however, unsuccessful. The expedition's two commanders, Admiral Vernon and General Wentworth, were very quick to publish and distribute pamphlets blaming the debacle on the other. These were followed up by pamphlets penned by resentful veterans condemning the expedition's mismanagement.

So it was no secret then, and hasn't been since. British historians do acknowledge it, but of course don't quite see it the same way as the winning side.

Justifiably proud Spaniards view Cartagena with the winners' mythology – as the English do the Armada, Waterloo and the Battle of Britain. And when stripped of that mythology and put in the context of military history, Cartagena, though a brilliant and heroic defence, doesn't quite match up to the superhuman event some portray it as (one Spanish acquaintance of mine calls it: "The greatest victory in the history of victories in all the ages.")

There are a number of myths attached to it (besides the cover-up one), some of which are repeated in the article above - which I should add is very good and far more objective than many.

For example, the event is sometimes termed Britain's worst naval defeat, when it wasn't really a naval battle at all. The Royal Navy did suffer heavily, but due to onshore batteries surrounding them in the narrow harbour. In fact, as pompous and ridiculous as Vernon's epitaph that at Cartagena he "conquered as far as naval forces could carry victory" seems, it is essentially correct. The Royal Navy did achieve its objectives of securing the harbour and landing troops. The Spanish only had six ships, and these were soon scuttled to block the harbour.

It's on land that the 'battle', more correctly a siege, was lost. Essentially that boiled down to the failure of the 5-6000-strong landing force to capture the town before tropical diseases like yellow fever destroyed it, and the rainy season forced the fleet to depart.

And it certainly wasn't the largest amphibious assault before D-Day as suggested on some sites. The Ottoman assaults on Rhodes and Malta and the Mongol invasions of Japan are just a sample of pre-WW2 expeditions that used fleets of a comparable or larger size and carried a lot more troops than Vernon's (and Gallipoli in WW1 dwarfed them all). Even the British expeditionary force to New York at the start of the American Revolution far exceeded Vernon/Wentworth's in terms of men and munitions.

Then there is very loose interpretation of the numbers involved on both sides. Of course it's tempting to count every sailor and cabin boy as the British 'assault force'(estimates range from 23-31,000 men). But only 12,000 of these were infantry, half were British regulars and marines with the remainder made up of American militia and machete-armed Jamaican slaves. The British commanders held the latter two components of their force in utter contempt, which may explain the fact they only landed 4-6000 troops.

The major battle of Cartagena involved the British assault on San Felipe, which though not fully developed at the time was well on its way to becoming the era's largest fortification in the western hemisphere. It was a sensationally bloody failure.

British sources put the number of troops committed to the San Felipe assault at 1,400; Spanish sources, when they mention numbers at all, tend to assume the full 4-6000 strong landing force was committed. Of course some less objective Spanish sources remain studiously silent on the actual numbers involved, leaving the reader to infer there were 23,000 British soldiers swarming up the fort walls (which were held by around 600 men).

It's really no wonder that with this kind of misinformation some Spanish people feel the fact Cartagena isn't counted as one of the world's greatest victories can only be the product of some kind of Anglo-conspiracy.

Spanish numbers also get played down. They are often given as only 3600, but besides his regulars, marines and native auxiliaries, Admiral de Lezo also had sailors, armed townspeople and slaves. According to the Cartagena Tourist Board there were up to 6,000 defenders - fighting from well-prepared fortifications with hundreds of guns.

Taken in the context of other siege situations in history, de Lezo wasn't in too bad a position, especially as he knew he only had to delay the attackers until the onset of disease and the rainy season. He was certainly aided in this by the grotesquely incompetent Admiral Vernon, whose bickering with the oddly dithering infantry commander Wentworth wasted a lot of time they didn't have. Notably he refused to supply battery support for the assault on San Felipe on the dubious grounds the harbour was too shallow.

This meant the infantry force had to attack without artillery forcing them to storm the walls with ladders - a brave but suicidal tactic thwarted by de Lezo's digging around the walls so the ladders couldn't reach. The Spanish then appear to have launched a bayonet charge into the shattered and retreating British as they became entangled in the trenches outside the fort. I say 'appear' because a minority of modern Spanish sources present a very different account of the bayonet charge, describing it as a surprise assault on the British camp - this is an intriguing discrepancy because the latter is actually what the British defenders did to the Franco-Spanish force at Gibraltar, and it would be somewhat ironic if the two assaults had become conflated.

The article above repeats the fiction that the Spanish bayonet charge drove the British back to their ships. Not quite true, once they were clear of the killing zone of San Felipe's walls and trenches the British actually made an orderly covered retreat the long distance back to their camp. After all, they still had more than enough troops to finish the job. Or so their commanders thought. Following the assault's failure, Vernon ordered a siege and bombardment of San Felipe only to be told yellow fever had reduced the artillery and infantry to a point that it simply wasn't possible. The landing force returned to their ships and the British eventually departed, utterly defeated, their numbers halved by disease.

British battle casualties (estimates are up to about 3000 killed, up to 7000 wounded over three months fighting on land and sea - though accounts are confused regarding the ratio of battle-disease casualties) were heavy but not extraordinary for an amphibious siege assault on multiple heavily-fortified and -gunned strongholds. At Gibraltar the Franco-Spanish assault force lost a similar number in a couple of days.

It was diseases such as yellow fever that cut down the British fleet and army in the thousands, not for the first or last time during Britain's Caribbean ventures. It's no wonder British sailors and soldiers considered posting to the Caribbean to be the equivalent of a death sentence. As one historian wryly noted, had the British been successful in capturing the city they would simply have had the privilege of dying a diseased death inside its walls, as their more 'successful' compatriots did in Havana, rather than in the harbour and on the voyage back to Jamaica.

Disease also hit the Spanish side, with the heroic de Lezo succumbing soon after seeing the British off.

So it was a brilliant victory crowning the career of a brilliant man. But Britain has suffered worst defeats, and in open battle situations, and for that reason Cartagena de Indias is remembered in British perceptions more for the shocking disease toll, and is cited as a lesson in what happens when different armed branches (in this case the navy and army) don't cooperate. But in general it has been largely forgotten, just as few Spanish people are aware of the reverse event at Gibraltar despite that occurring on what is, at least rightfully, their soil.

As for the coins? Once again, reporting victories before the fact was common practice before modern communications, though in that case it went spectacularly wrong. I'll never understand why George Washington's half-brother named his estate after Vernon, he was there after all, and Vernon tried to put some of the blame on the American forces. In fact Cartagena sometimes turns up in books exploring the build-up to the American Revolutionary War, as an example of the intense ill-will between British regular troops and colonial forces.

Ultimately, in Brtish eyes, Cartagena de Indias just goes down in the long list of failed/successful imperialistic land grabs that modern Britain no longer wants to think about. Spain would pay it back in kind during the American Revolutionary War and neither side can claim moral superiority - there's no honour amongst thieves and frankly that's all colonialist and imperialist powers are.

Had Vernon been successful, what then? Perhaps Columbia would have been another Belize or Jamaica with English-speaking masters rather than Spanish, for a while at least. Both England and Spain's days in the New World were already numbered.

Ultimately my main point is that Cartagena de Indias hasn't been struck from the history books as some have sensationally claimed. It's just viewed with the loser's pragmatism rather than the winner's mythology.

L'histoire truquée par les Anglais

Cartagena de Indias, le pire désastre militaire de l'âge de la voile. Une défaite que les Anglais s'obstinent à cacher au monde.

L'histoire maritime est le domaine des Anglais et ils veillent à ce que la réputation de leur pays soit sans tache.

Je suis le seul à révéler qu'en plus de deux siècles, les historiens anglais, si prompts à décortiquer la moindre des campagnes de Nelson ou encore les malheurs de l'Armada d'Angleterre, se gardent bien de s'intéresser au pire désastre du XVIIIe siècle, la défaite humiliante de l'invincible armada anglaise qui, sous le commandement de lord Vernon, a fait voile vers le Nouveau Monde pour s'emparer des provinces américaines de l'Espagne.

Les Nord-Américains, qui ont perdu beaucoup de jeunes gens de bonne famille dans cette déconfiture anglaise, sont les seuls à aborder la question à travers le sort de leurs soldats.

Après avoir rappelé que sur 5000 jeunes colons anglais ayant rejoint lord Vernon, moins de 500 sont revenus, l'auteur américain Charles Winslow Hall dans son roman publié en 1898 Cartagena : or, The lost brigade; a story of heroism in the British war with Spain, 1740-1742, écrit :

Of the failure of the several expeditions under the direction of Lord Vernon, history has heretofore been remarkably silent; and for some reason, with the exception of the attempt on Cartagena, the operations of the English fleet and army in the West Indies from 1740-44, inclusive, seem to have been kept from the English public with astonishing success.

Une traduction rapide : « L'histoire [anglaise] est restée remarquablement silencieuse sur l'échec des différentes expéditions conduites par lord Vernon. A l'exception de la tentative sur Carthagène, les opérations de marine et de l'armée royales dans les Indes occcidentales entre 1740 et 1744 ont été occultées pour quelque raison au public anglais avec un succès étonnant. »

Cet ouvrage s'inscrit dans l'effort de mobilisation du public des Etats-Unis contre l'Espagne dans cette guerre de conquête et de rapine où la puissante Amérique va s'emparer de Cuba, de Porto-Rico et des Philippines.



Pour lire l'intégralité du roman de Charles Winslow Hall, cliquer ici.

Crime : opération vérité à Londres

Hier nous avons évoqué cet accès inattendu d'honnêteté du New York Times qui accepte de publier une tribune libre démontrant que la majorité des crimes commis dans la grande métropole américaine le sont par des criminels Noirs ou Hispaniques.

Le fait que les personnes de couleur soient davantage interpelées puis condamnées ne constitue donc pas une preuve du racisme de la police et de la judicature mais bien la conséquence d'un comportement plus crimonogène de ces populations.

Aujourd'hui, Andrew Alderson dans le Daily Telegraph publie les statistiques officielles révélant ce que les bien-pensants de gauche veulent céler, que les Noirs commettent la majorité des crimes violents à Londres. Dans le même temps, toutefois, des Noirs constituent également une fraction importante des victimes.

Aucun des papiers ne s'interroge sur les causes de cette plus grande criminalité des personnes de couleur. Pour le moment, le lien entre un QI (quotient intellectuel) inférieur à celui, par exemple, des Chinois, ou d'un niveau moyen de testostérone supérieur à celui, par exemple, des Japonais, n'est abordé que par des universitaires dont les travaux sont victimes d'un ostracisme absolu.

Les révélations anglaises ont été accueillies d'une manière positive par un homme politique noir conservateur et travailleur social, Shaun Bailey, qui en appelle à la communauté noire à un travail d'introspection pour tenter de trouver des solutions à ce drame social.

Sans suprise, la gauche bien-pensante représentée par Richard Garside a renvoyé toute la responsabilité sur le « racisme et l'impérialisme anglais ».

Qu'en est-il de la France ?

Violent inner-city crime, the figures, and a question of race


The reality of violent inner-city crime is indicated today by statistics obtained by The Sunday Telegraph. The official figures, which examine the ethnicity of those accused of violent offences in London, suggest the majority of men held responsible by police for gun crimes, robberies and street crimes are black. Black men are also disproportionately the victims of violent crime in the capital.



One prominent black politician said that the black community needed to face up to major challenges.
Shaun Bailey, a Tory election candidate in London and a charity worker, said: “The black community has to look at itself and say that, at the end of the day, these figures suggest we are heavily – not casually – involved in violent crime. We are also involved in crime against ourselves – and we regularly attack each other.”
The data provide a breakdown of the ethnicity of the 18,091 men and boys who police took action against for a range of violent and sexual offences in London in 2009-10.
They show that among those proceeded against for street crimes, 54 per cent were black; for robbery, 59 per cent; and for gun crimes, 67 per cent. Street crimes include muggings, assault with intent to rob and snatching property.
Just over 12 per cent of London’s 7.5 million population is black, including those of mixed black and white parentage, while 69 per cent is white, according to the Office for National Statistics.
The police figures also show that black men are twice as likely to be victims. They made up 29 per cent of the male victims of gun crime and 24 per cent of the male victims of knife crime.
The Met declined to comment on the statistics. However, some officers will see them as a justification for Operation Trident, a unit targeting black-on-black murder and violent crime.
Others will see it as justification for targeting a disproportionate number of black men under stop and search powers. Figures released annually have shown black people are at least six times more likely to be stopped and searched than their white counterparts.
On sex offences, black men made up 32 per cent of male suspects proceeded against, and white men 49 per cent. The statistics also suggest that black women are responsible for a disproportionate amount of violent crime committed by females.
Richard Garside, of the Centre for Crime and Justice Studies at King’s College London, said: “Given Britain’s long history of racism and imperialism it should not greatly surprise us that black and minority ethnic groups are disproportionately members of social classes that have tended to experience greater victimisation and to be the subject of police attention.
“Just because the police treat black men as more criminal than white men, it does not mean that they are.” Simon Woolley, speaking as the director of the Operation Black Vote pressure group, but who is also a commissioner on the Equality and Human Rights Commission, said: “Although the charge rates for some criminal acts amongst black men are high, black people are more than twice as likely to have their cases dismissed, suggesting unfairness in the system.”
The Sunday Telegraph obtained the figures via a Freedom of Information request after Rod Liddle, the writer, caused controversy last year when he claimed in an online blog published on The Spectator website that “the overwhelming majority of street crime, knife crime, gun crime, robbery and crimes of sexual violence in London is carried out by young men from the African-Caribbean community”.
The comments led to claims that Mr Liddle was racist, However, Mr Liddle said: “I cannot think of anything more vile than racism. The issue here is not racism, it is one of multiculturalism.”
The statistics suggest that Mr Liddle was largely right on some of his claims – notably those on gun crimes, robberies and street crimes.
The figures suggest, however, that he was probably wrong on his claims about knife crimes and violent sex crimes.
The figures relate to those “proceeded against”.
This includes those prosecuted in court, whether convicted or acquitted; those issued with a caution, warning or penalty notice; those the Crown Prosecution Service decided not to charge; and those whose crimes were “taken into consideration” after a further offence.
Unsolved crimes are not included.
The figures do not take into account that any one perpetrator may have committed numerous offences .

La mort de l'historien François Crouzet

The Independent publie la necrologie de l'historien François Crouzet, spécialiste de l'histoire britannique, agrégé d'histoire, professeur d'histoire de l'Europe du Nord à l'université de Paris IV-Sorbonne et directeur du Centre de recherches sur la civilisation de l'Europe moderne, décédé le 20 mars 2010.

Parmi ses livres, on peut citer :

Le concept de révolution, 1991
Le Conflit de Chypre, 1973
De Guillaume le Conquérant au Marché commun, : dix siècles d'histoire franco-britannique / [textes choisis et présentés par] François Bédarida, François Crouzet, Douglas Johnson, 1979
De la supériorité de l'Angleterre sur la France, 1985
L'Économie de la Grande-Bretagne victorienne, 1975
La grande inflation , : la monnaie en France de Louis XVI à Napoléon , 1993
Les Hommes d'État célèbres. 5, De la Révolution française à la Première guerre mondiale ? 1975
Les Paysages culturels européens, héritage et devenir, 1995

Professor François Crouzet: Celebrated anglophile French historian of Britain


Professor François Crouzet was the greatest French historian of Britain of his generation, and he will probably be the last. In the introduction to one of his books he quoted his characterisation by an American historian as "a French francophobe anglophile", and he did not demure. He was certainly an anglophile, but he was by no means a francophobe. He loved France, and he loved Britain. He loved speaking perfect and precise English with a very strong French accent.

It does not fall often to a Frenchman to produce a successful textbook on British history, but Crouzet achieved this with his The Victorian Economy (1982). His long introduction to the book he edited on Capital Formation in the Industrial Revolution (1972) has stood several generations of students of economic history in very good stead. His The First Industrialists (1985), developed from the Ellen McArthur lectures that he gave in Cambridge in 1983, is full of insight as well as information.

François Crouzet left school just before the war broke out in 1939, and he spent the war as a student in Paris. His father was a teacher of history and an Inspector of Schools. The summer before he entered the élite Ecole Normale Supérieur in the dark days of 1941, he discovered economic history by reading his father's copies of Annales, the great journal begun by Marc Bloch and Georges Lefebvre in 1929 which revolutionised the French approach to economic and social history.

He was not, however, seduced by la nouvelle histoire. After a foray into medieval history for his master's degree under Jean Meuvret, Crouzet struck out for British empiricism. After the end of the war he was awarded a fellowship to undertake research into British history, and he found British economic history – combining, as it did, gentle theory with sensible quantification and a careful regard for facts – much to his taste. He found himself happily in the tradition of J H Clapham and T S Ashton. Not for him the self-important "Parisian gurus" (his own phrase).

Indeed, he found himself sitting at the feet of Ashton, since he had been attached to the London School of Economics, whence Ashton had just moved from Manchester to be Professor of Economic History. Crouzet spent many happy days in the post-war years dividing his time between the Public Record Office and the Institute of Historical Research, with a cup of tea and the odd visit to the LSE in between. Without losing interest in the French Revolution, he was now immersed in the Industrial Revolution.

When I once asked him flippantly whether he needed food parcels sent from France to sustain him in post-war London, he pointed out that I had quite misunderstood the situation. Coming to London with its efficient system of rationing and price control in restaurants meant that he could be well-fed after years of near-starvation in Paris, with its domineering black market and corruption. He added that the situation, however, changed after 1948.

During his London years he married Françoise, grand-daughter of Emile Levasseur, the first professor of economic history at the Sorbonne, from 1919. They quickly became and remained a devoted couple. Together they extended his researches into the provinces – Manchester (McConnell and Kennedy papers), Birmingham (Boulton and Watt), Aberystwyth (south Wales ironmasters), and elsewhere.

In 1949 he returned to Paris as an assistant in the faculté des lettres. Between 1956 and 1969 he served as a professor successively at Bordeaux, Lille and Nanterre, before returning to the Sorbonne as Professor of the History of Northern Europe. He took this to mean Britain; he held this chair with distinction until his retirement in 1992. His course on "Britain from Churchill to Thatcher" was remarkably popular.

His first great work was his doctorate on the economic impact of the Napoleonic blockade of Britain in the early 19th century, published in two large volumes in 1958. There followed a steady flow of major publications dealing not just with the history of Britain; he also wrote about French history and about comparative global history. Many of his most important and thought-provoking articles are collected in his Britain Ascendant: Comparative Studies in Franco-British Economic History (1990). The title of the French edition was more provocative: De la Superiorité de l'Angleterre sur la France (1985).

He held visiting appointments at Harvard, Columbia, Berkeley, Geneva and Leuven, as well as at Cambridge and Oxford, where he was a Visiting Fellow of All Souls. He became very well-known at conferences in Britain and throughout the world. In 1993 he gave the Neale lecture at University College London on a topic of comparative international finance; his inability to pronounce Rothschild in anything like the English manner meant that many students had no idea what he was talking about.

He received honorary doctorates from Birmingham, Kent, Edinburgh and Leicester, an honorary CBE and was made a Chevalier of the Legion d'Honneur. He particularly despised French caricatures of the English, and vice versa. He worked consistently for Anglo-French understanding, with considerable personal success.

A man of great charm, he always lived in Paris, where he and Françoise entertained with style and elegance, as well as bringing up their devoted family (who are now on the way to forming an historical dynasty). For some years they also had a gîte in Kent.

Negley Harte

François Marie-Joseph Crouzet, economic historian: born Monts-sur-Guesnes, Vienne 20 October 1922; research fellowship in England 1945-49; assistant in the faculté des lettres in Paris 1949-55; professor at Bordeaux 1956-58, at Lille 1958-64, at Nanterre 1964-69; Professor of the History of Northern Europe at the Sorbonne 1969-92; Emeritus Professor 1992; Honorary CBE; married 1947 Françoise Dabert-Hauser (one daughter, two sons); died Paris 19 March 2010.

La Seconde Guerre mondiale était-elle inévitable ?

Il y a une part d'exercice intellectuel un peu vain dans cette question. Après tout, la Seconde Guerre mondiale a bien eu lieu. Pourquoi alors s'interroger sur l'inévitabilité des événements qui ont conduit à son déclenchement ?

Probablement parce qu'en savoir plus sur les circonstances qui ont conduit à ce sauvage déclenchement de violence peut nous permettre d'éviter de recommencer.

Or la diabolisation absolue du régime hitlérien rend l'analyse difficile car elle conduit inévitablement à accorder à la dictature hitlérienne une rationalité et une légitimité qui lui est refusée par la vulgate actuelle.

A posteriori, la victoire a validé la déclaration de guerre à l'Allemagne par le Royaume-Uni et par son client, la France tout comme l'alliance avec l'Union soviétique. La terrible épreuve subie par le peuple juif d'Europe est avancée comme justification de la guerre.

Pourtant il est légitime possible d'avancer l'hypothèse que le génocide des Juifs ne fut pas la cause de la guerre, mais une conséquence de la guerre totale voulue par les Alliés et de leur refus de toute paix négociée (la capitulation sans conditions).

Des auteurs avancent que sans cet enchaînement fatal d'évenements, les Juifs de l'Europe allemande auraient connu un sort terrible, mais en grande partie auraient survécu tout comme les Palestiniens qui ont payé le prix fort lors de la naissance de l'Etat d'Israël en 1947.

L'écrivain conservateur Peter Hitchens avance sur son blog du Daily Telegraph que la guerre trouve son origine dans les garanties accordées par le Royaume Uni à la Pologne en mars 1939.

Selon Hitchens, sans cette garantie, le gouvernement polonais serait probablement parvenu à un accord avec l'Allemagne sur la question de Dantzig et du corridor pour relier ce territoire au Reich et, ce faisant, aurait préservé le pacte de non-agression avec l'Allemagne.

L'analyse de Peter Hitchens est plus subtile que ces quelques lignes de présentation et je vous engage vivement à la lire. D'autant plus que ce débat est impensable en France où le mythe de la France victorieuse dans la Seconde Guerre mondiale ne supporte pas le moindre doute car il est consubstentiel avec les deux régimes mis en place après 1945 avec la double onction gaulliste et communiste.

Pour en revenir au preésent, la triste expérience de la Seconde Guerre mondiale nous apprend que le sentiment d'impunité et la diabolisation sont les deux ingrédients du cocktail qui conduit au désastre.

Aujourd'hui, la politique israélienne se conduit à l'abri d'un sentiment d'invulnérabilité accordé par l'absolue sujetion dans laquelle se trouvent les Etats-Unis. La diabolisation réciproque des acteurs majeurs du conflit israélo-musulman interdit le dialogue et la négociation. Comment parvenir à une solution avec l'Iran si le régime est diabolisé ?

De même que la garantie accordée à la Pologne a envenimé les choses, l'appui inconditionnel des Etats-Unis à Israël rend vain tout espoir de paix reposant sur un accord sur le fond.

• What might have been
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• A few responses to contributors on the Dunkirk matter. 'Stan' argues: ‘Germany would still have invaded Norway, Denmark and France and the low countries whether we promised to defend Poland or not. The invasion of France would have required our entry into the war, but even if we tried to keep out of it we could not have committed any more of the RN, RAF or army to protect our Far East interests in case we left ourselves defenceless against invasion by Germany - so Singapore et al would have fallen to the Japanese anyway.
• ‘We would have gained nothing by not declaring war in 1939 - just delayed it until May 1940. And seeing how we didn't actually do much until then (other than build up our depleted armed forces) it would have made absolutely no difference whatsoever.’
• Once again, he is taking the guarantee to Poland and the resulting September declaration of war by Britain and France as unavoidable givens. Why did Hitler invade France in May 1940? Because France had declared war on Germany in September 1939. Would he have done so if France had not declared war? My whole argument is that these events are not unavoidable givens. There was no political, military or other good reason for the guarantee to Poland, which was a sort of emotional spasm by Neville Chamberlain when he realised he had been fooled over Czechoslovakia (the only excuse for Chamberlain would have been if he had genuinely concluded the Munich agreement as a cynical way of delaying war till we were ready. But it wasn't so. He genuinely trusted Hitler to keep his word).
• If the guarantee to Poland wasn't inevitable (and it wasn't) then that means that our declaration of war in September 1939 (and France's) were likewise not inevitable. I'd add that, without our guarantee, the Polish government might well have behaved differently. It might even have conceded Danzig. It had by then developed a Polish-controlled port at Gdynia. And then what? I am as much of an admirer of modern Poland as anybody, and I regard the Nazi-Soviet (or Russo-German) partition of that country in 1939 as an act of appalling cruelty and barbarism.
• But the pre-1939 Polish state was not a specially lovely thing, and we should recall this, not least to avoid sentimentality about diplomacy.
• Hitler had regarded Poland as an ally, or at least as no trouble, for some years, and with reason. And that wasn't just because many Polish politicians were nearly as Judophobic as he was. He signed a non-aggression pact with Warsaw in 1934. Joachim von Ribbentrop offered to renew that pact in October 1938 while 'heroic' Poland was also squalidly gobbling up Czech land, scavenging after the break-up of Czechoslovakia.
• A brief note on this neglected incident. When Czechoslovakia was on its knees after Munich, Poland (as an ally of the Reich) demanded that it be given the ethnically-mixed Czech region known as Zaolzie - an old Versailles grievance. The Czechs, powerless and broken, caved in and (to German glee, as this spread the guilt of Munich) Polish tanks rolled into Cesky Tesin on 1st October 1938. The usual stuff followed - language persecution etc - and thousands of Czechs either left or were forced out.
• The Poles also refused Ribbentrop's Danzig offer at this time, apparently confident that their good relations with Berlin would survive.
• Then at the end of March 1939, having been fooled over Munich, which Chamberlain had genuinely believed was a permanent peace, Britain and France suddenly guaranteed Poland's independence (though not, interestingly, its territorial integrity, an implicit assumption that a deal might be done over Danzig. What's more the guarantee didn't apply to an attack by the USSR, luckily for Britain which would otherwise have had to declare war on Stalin in late September 1939).
• A month later, the Warsaw-Berlin non-aggression pact was unilaterally abrogated by Hitler (April 28, 1939, during an address before the Reichstag). Germany then renewed its territorial claims in Poland, which had been shelved during the period of the pact.
• Without the Franco-British guarantee to Poland, would events have followed this course? Impossible to be sure, but without that guarantee (which they touchingly believed would be fulfilled) the rather unprincipled Polish government might well have been more willing to give up Danzig, and so preserve the pact with Berlin (which until 31st March 1939 had been their principal foreign engagement). That concession, plus allowing the Germans unhampered roads and railways across the corridor, would have been a much less serious loss to Poland than the Sudetenland had been to Czechoslovakia. And, while it most certainly would not have been the end of Hitler's demands on Poland, it would certainly have delayed war in the East, and altered its shape and direction.
• In that case, the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact - a direct consequence of the decision by Britain and France to refuse Hitler a free hand in the East, without possessing the forces to carry out this policy - might never have taken place. Germany's drive into the USSR might have come earlier (and perhaps through Poland).
• But what Stan doesn't explain is why, without the guarantee to Poland and the declaration of war on Germany by Britain and France (not the other way round, remember), Germany would have felt any urgent need to invade a largely passive France, hunkered down behind its Maginot fortifications, let alone to attack Britain. The German seizure of Norway and Denmark was also a consequence of the Polish guarantee. There is no reason to believe it would have happened had there been no Polish guarantee. Also, 'building up our depleted armed forces', as he dismissively describes it, was no small thing.
• Then we have D.G.Harthill, who posted: ‘Keith Rogers informs that Hitler “admired Britain” ’. He had an odd way of showing it. E.g. in his Directive No.13 of May 24, 1940: ‘The next object of our operations is to annihilate the French, English and Belgian forces that are encircled in Artois and Flanders.’ On learning the ineffectiveness of artillery shells in Dunkirk’s sand dunes, ‘he suggested that anti-aircraft shells with time fuses be used instead’ in order ‘to cause a mass bloodbath among the English who were waiting for rescue’. His army aide recorded that he particularly wanted ‘SS units to participate in the final annihilation’ of the encircled British. Göring recorded Hitler’s objections to the Heer’s humane treatment of British POWs: ‘They round up the British as prisoners with as little harm to them as possible. The Führer wants them to be taught a lesson they won’t easily forget.’ (‘The Blitzkrieg Legend’, Karl-Heinz Frieser, p. 312)
• Karl-Heinz Frieser, a colonel in the Bundeswehr and head of the Department of World Wars I & II at the Potsdam Military History Research Institute wrote: ‘Hitler’s decision to launch the Polish campaign is one of the most catastrophically wrong decisions in German history.’ (Frieser, p.17) It was ‘catastrophically wrong’ because the Anglo–French guarantees to Poland turned a two day campaign into the start of the Second World War leading to Germany’s destruction. Hitler had gambled that after the repeated surrenders by the Western powers since 1935 they would surrender yet again—he was surprised as any when they did not. Hitler’s chief interpreter, Paul Schmidt, described the ‘ghostlike scene in the Reich Chancellery’ following the translation of Britain’s declaration of war: ‘[T]here was total silence … Hitler sat there as if petrified and stared straight ahead. … After a while, which seemed like an eternity to me, he turned to Ribbentrop who kept standing at the window as if frozen. “What now?” Hitler asked … Göring turned to me and said: “If we lose this war, may Heaven have mercy on us!” ’ (Frieser, p.12)’
• Again, Mr Harthill refuses to go back to the real point of decision - the Anglo-French guarantee to Poland in early 1939. He presupposes the inevitability of the Polish guarantee, and thus the inevitability of war in September 1939 and the inevitability of combat between British and German forces in May 1940. All this is quite correct if you assume the Polish guarantee was inevitable. My point is that it wasn't, and that it was unwise.
• Of course, once we were engaged in war, Hitler would not have hesitated to use maximum violence against us. His 'admiration' for the empire was conditional on the Empire staying out of continental affairs.
• As for the thoughts of Karl-Heinz Frieser, it is perfectly true that Hitler was amazed that Britain actually declared war in September 1939 (Ribbentrop had told him it wouldn't happen). But he (and the world) were soon afterwards still more amazed by the swift collapse of French and British arms in France (read William Shirer's account of it all, in his Berlin Diary - it is now impossible to imagine a world in which France was viewed - as it was in September 1939 - as a near-invincible military power. But it was so.
• As for Goering's remark, the Germans did not, of course lose *that* war. They won it almost totally. Britain was defeated, but not actually occupied or subjugated, and had no realistic hope of bringing troops into direct combat with the Germans on the European continent - the only way in which we could actually have won. (Does anyone have any thoughts about what would have happened to Britain if Hitler had decided to launch against her one half of the forces he sent into the USSR in 1941?)
• So the invasion of Poland and the war which followed, and which really ended at Compiegne with the French surrender on 21st June 1940, did not 'lead to their destruction'. The war that they lost was the subsequent war, against the USSR (which they also started) and eventually the USA (against whom they also declared war). Had they been content with their May 1940 victories, they would probably have endured unchallenged until now. And there's another line of speculation for anyone who's interested.
• It's also true that with a very few small things turning out differently, they could have been holding a victory parade in Red Square by October 1941, soon afterwards in possession of the Caucasus oilfields and most of the Soviet industrial and extractive economy, plus millions of new slaves, and so more or less invincible on European soil.
• But once again, I doubt if either of these things would have been possible if France and Britain had remained in powerful armed neutrality, building up their forces, repairing their alliance with Belgium, manoeuvring Roosevelt into engagement and gaining knowledge of Hitler's methods, on Germany's Western flank. And if this position is so immoral, then surely so was that of the USA, which stayed out of the European war until Hitler declared war on the United States after Pearl Harbor, one of the few instances when he actually fulfilled a diplomatic obligation that didn't suit him.
• 31st March 1939 is the day to think about. From then on, all that happened was more or less inevitable. But without that guarantee, things could have been very, very different. The question is, would it have been better or worse? And in my view that is the subject under discussion.

Les historiens anglais remettent ça

Des chronomètres de marine exposés au musée de la Marine à Paris.

Voici un exemple typique de l'esprit insulaire des Anglais quand ils écrivent l'Histoire et plus particulièrement l'histoire maritime.

Dans cet article de Steve Connor pour The Independent, qui relate les efforts faits par les historiens de la perfide Albion pour déterminer la part du Bureau des longitudes britannique dans la découverte du chronographe de marine, l'auteur donne l'impression à ses lecteurs que l'invention de cet instrument est purement insulaire alors qu'il n'en est rien.

Les Anglais passent sous silence les travaux et résultats obtenus sur le continent, notamment en France. Des noms comme Ferdinand Berthoud ou Pierre Le Roy sont sciemment ignorés alors qu'ils ont joué un rôle critique.

Un point de vue suisse, ici.

Un point de vue français, ici.

How Britannia came to rule the waves

History has it that a clockmaker beat the scientific establishment to crack the longitude problem. But did he really?


Hero worship at the expense of historical accuracy? Surely not. It has been portrayed as the story of the lone genius who solved the greatest scientific problem of his day despite the hindering efforts of those ranged against him, saving thousands of lives.

On the one side was John Harrison, the self-taught clockmaker from a humble Yorkshire background. On the other, the 18th Century’s wealthy elite charged with the task of presiding over the problem of longitude – the knotty task of working out how far west or east a ship has sailed.

Harrison’s story has been the subject of a best-selling book and an award-winning film but science historians believe that the true account of how the problem of longitude was solved has yet to be told.

To uncover the full story, they have started dusting off the forgotten archives of the British Board of Longitude, the panel of distinguished experts set up in 1714 to sit in judgement over proposed solutions to the Longitude Problem. The Board was responsible for awarding the £20,000 prize – equivalent to about £3m today – to the first person to come up with a way for ships to navigate safely at sea by knowing longitude.

“Think of The X Factor, but much more money and much more important,” said Professor Simon Schaffer of the University of Cambridge. He is the principle investigator on the archival research project which is being jointly conducted with the National Maritime Museum in Greenwich. The prize was the first time the government had used legislation to address a specific scientific problem.

In Dava Sobel’s 1995 book Longitude, and the later film based on it, carpenter’s son Harrison is depicted as the solitary virtuoso pitched against the scientific establishment of a society suffocated by class, exemplified by the eminent gentlemen who sat on the Board of Longitude.

But Professor Schaffer and his colleagues believe that the important role of the Board of Longitude in finding a solution has been largely forgotten or downplayed in the rush to promote Harrison as the unsung hero of the popular story. Far from being a force of conservatism, the board, they believe, did much to generate the climate of open inquiry that allowed pioneering scientific research to flourish – a climate that fostered Harrison’s historic achievement.

“The Board of Longitude has had a pretty bad history because it has either been forgotten or condemned. Its creation was a turning point in British history, but after it was abolished in 1828 it was largely forgotten and its impact was never properly assessed,” Professor Schaffer said.

Indeed, Professor Schaffer goes as far as to suggest that British science today owes the Board a debt of gratitude rather than contempt, because in effect it laid much of the groundwork for the kind of state-funded scientific research that we now take for granted. The precedent of the Board of Longitude may indeed have led Britain to become one of the global leaders of modern science.

“It has been forgotten, I think, because we don’t like remembering how important the state is in promoting science and technology in British history. And we ignore or condemn the Board of Longitude because there is a hero in this story and his name is John Harrison.”

He added: “We still like to believe that we are a nation of enthusiastic amateurs like Harrison, making huge breakthroughs against the odds and in spite of a state hostile to scientific progress. In fact, we have a long history of state-sponsored ingenuity which made Britain into a military and technological world player. The Board is in many ways that history.”

It was a naval disaster in 1707 that led to the Board of Longitude being set up in 1714. A fleet of four large ships led by Admiral Sir Cloudesley Shovell foundered on the rocks of the Isles of Scilly, with the loss of nearly 2,000 lives. An investigation later concluded that it was the inability to determine longitude accurately that caused the disaster, and this led the Parliament of the day to establish a substantial Longitude Prize to be given “for such person or persons as shall discover the Longitude”.

Although it was easy to determine latitude on a ship’s rolling deck by analysing the height of the midday sun, determining longitude was far more difficult using classical astronomical techniques. Another way was to have an accurate clock that could keep the time of the home port, where the longitude is known, and compare this time with the time on board the ship – as determined by another clock set regularly to the local midday sun.

As Dava Sobel describes: “The two clock times enable the navigator to convert the hour difference into geographical separation. Since the Earth takes 24 hours to revolve 360 degrees, one hour marks 1/24 of a revolution or 15 degrees. And so each hour’s time difference between the ship and the starting point marks a progress of 15 degrees of longitude to the east or west.”

The problem in the 18th Century was getting accurate enough clocks that could work at sea. Pendulum clocks would speed up or slow down with the motions of the ship, and the lubricants used by clockmakers performed differently in various temperatures and humidities.

Harrison’s genius was to make a marine chronometer that was compact enough to take on a ship; that worked on springs rather than a pendulum; and that did not require the lubricants used by standard clockmakers. His fourth prototype, the H4 chronometer that resembled an oversized pocket watch, eventually led to him winning most of the money assigned to the Longitude Prize. But this was despite the considerable delay and fudge by the Board, which suggested the chronometer’s success in two transatlantic sea trials – when it determined longitude to within one nautical mile – was down to luck.

The popular account of the episode makes much of the role played by Reverend Nevil Maskelyne, a member of the Board and the Astronomer Royal. Maskelyne was a proponent of the lunar distance method of determining longitude. Sobel’s account portrays him as obstructive to the point of being unfair on Harrison. Indeed, Harrison had to petition both Parliament and King George III to get the full amount he rightly felt he deserved – but he never received the official award, which in fact was not given to anyone.

As part of the new investigation into the archives of the Board of Longitude, experts will also dismantle the chronometers made by Harrison in pursuit of the prize. Richard Dunn, curator of the history of navigation at the National Maritime Museum, said that it is clear from earlier work on some of the prototypes that Harrison was not working alone.

“One of the things we will be doing is taking apart the timekeepers Harrison made, which can give us an alternative version of the story. If you look inside the first clock, it quickly becomes clear that several people were involved in making it. Clearly this wasn’t just about a lone genius working by himself,” Mr Dunn said.

As for the Board, longitude was not its only scientific success. It was also involved in stimulating interest in other fields of research, such as the expeditions of Captain Cook, which led to the discovery of Australia, the invention of the sextant, the global survey of geomagnetism, the building of the first overseas astronomical observatory and the search for a North-West passage.

Professor Schafer said that we live in a culture were we prefer to see success as the achievement of a unique author rather than the fruits of collective action. Yet without the board, British science could have been very different today.

“Essentially the Board represents the germs of our national science policy,” Professor Schafer said. “State-backed science is still an issue which matters a lot now, whether it’s on stem cell research or climate change. We don’t know whether to trust it, and we don’t know how to respond when scientists and the state fall out.

“If we can find out what worked as that relationship was beginning – and why – then we will have lessons to teach from the project we are starting now.”