entry Nov 1 2013
The Neapolitan Navy under Murat and the French (1806-1815)
A minimum of historical background is necessary. You may read the general entry on Murat (photo, right), two items (here and here) on the Battle of Capri, and the second article on the Bourbons, which is largely about Napoleon. OR—you can read the following time-line!
—1796. Napoleon invades Italy. He enters Milan and sets up the Lombard republic and, the following year, other client states.
—1798. Napoleon occupies Rome and proclaims the Roman Republic. He assembles an army at Boulogne-sur-Mer on the northern French coast to prepare to invade England. He calls that off and sails from Toulon with 35,000 troops, lands in Egypt and captures Alexandria, but the French fleet is then destroyed at the Battle of the Nile by the British fleet.
—1799. In spite of the defeat at sea, Napoleon and his cavalry commander, Murat, defeat a Turkish/British force at the Battle of Akubir (in Egypt). Napoleon leaves for France and becomes First Consul in the famous coup d’etat of November 9, still known to students of French history and strange calendars as Brumaire 18. (It was the second month of the French revolutionary calendar and means ‘foggy’.) He becomes dictator of France.
—1799. A French-sponsored revolution in Naples drives the Bourbon royal family and court from the capital. They flee to Sicily, largely aboard English ships. The fleeing royals order that the fleet be burnt rather than fall into the hands of republican revolutionaries. A Neapolitan (or Parthenopean) Republic is declared, led by Eleonora Fonseca Pimentel. It lasts from late January to late August, when it is overthrown by counter-revolutionary Bourbon forces from Sicily under Cardinal Ruffo.
—1802. Bonaparte is made First Consul for life with the right to name his successor.
—1804. Napoleon is made emperor. The Napoleonic Code is proclaimed on the 30th of Windy of the year XII. It has great effect throughout the realm and is one of the most far-reaching legal codes in human history.
—1805. French troops mass to cross the channel to invade the British Isles. Again, the invasion is miscalculated and abandoned. The sea battle of Trafalgar takes place in October between the British fleet and a combined French and Spanish fleet. The British fleet is victorious.
—1806. Under threat of French invasion, the Bourbon royal family and followers again flee to Sicily. They take most of the fleet with them. (It had been partially rebuilt after 1799.) Napoleon places his older brother, Joseph, on the throne of Naples. The lack of a real navy renders the new Neapolitan rulers unable to stop the British from taking and garrisoning the island of Capri in the Bay of Naples.
—1808. Murat replaces Joseph Bonaparte as king of Naples. The Battle of Capri takes place. Neapolitan and French forces take Capri back from the British.
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This, then, is about the attempt to rebuild the
Neapolitan navy, first under Joseph Bonaparte in
1806-7 and then under Murat from 1808 until 1815 at
the end of the Napoleonic Wars when he was deposed
as king of Naples. As noted in the time-line (1806),
when the Bourbons left for Sicily they took the navy
with them. It wasn't much, since they had destroyed
their earlier large fleet in 1799, but it left the
French rulers of Naples with almost no navy at all
except what they could borrow from the French. The
need for a good French navy and good navies in the
French maritime client states (such as the kingdom
of Naples) was clear to most. After all, not only
could the British fleet pretty much do as it pleased
in the waters off of Naples, but the British held
the massive island of Sicily, where it sheltered the
Bourbon royal family and openly supported remnant
Bourbon sympathizers across the waters on the
Calabrian mainland. That was a thorn in the side to
Napoleon and the new rulers of Naples.The first attempt by the French and Neapolitans to take Sicily came almost immediately after Joseph Bonaparte took over the kingdom of Naples in 1806. Napoleon sent him the naval engineer, Pierre Forfait, the one who had prepared the grand flotilla in Boulogne-sur-Mer for the aborted French invasion of Britain the previous year. If Napoleon couldn’t take the British isles, he could at least take Sicily and greatly diminish the power of the British fleet in the Mediterranean. It was to be a small-scale version of the aborted invasion of Britain (and maybe even a dress rehearsal for another attempt at the real thing!). And, after all, how hard could it be? “Crossing the straits of Messina is just like crossing a river,” Napoleon had said.
Thus, on April 17, 1806, the few former Bourbon ships that were left in the kingdom of Naples reinforced by two large French ships of the line (the forerunner of the “battleship”) sent down from Toulon set out from Civitavecchia (the port in the client Roman Republic). The invasion fleet was barely underway when it was met and decisively beaten by British ships sent up from Messina to meet the invasion. It was this episode that occasioned the creation of a true Neapolitan navy. It was a union of the new French naval mission in Naples (1 ship of the line captain, 2 frigate captains, 6 lieutenants, 12 ships of the line ensigns and 5 naval engineers) and 2 Neapolitan brigantine vessels abandoned in Civitavecchia by the Bourbons plus whatever could be recovered from former Bourbon naval facilities in Naples or at the Castellammare shipyards (which Queen Caroline had in vain ordered to be burnt behind the Bourbon retreat from the city). There were a number of Bourbon naval officers left in Naples, as well, including some Republican refugees from the 1799 revolution who now returned with the French. Two frigates were recovered, including the famous Cerere; as well, 4 minor vessels were recovered as were 22 smaller gun-boats with half their crews. The fleet as well as six regiments of a new Armée de Naples were reconstituted on June 24, 1806. A flurry of construction ensued in the shipyards of Naples and Castellammare, activity that then led to the successful retaking of Capri in 1808.
The failed
invasion of Sicily had been so poorly thought
out that we wonder if Napoleon, not to mention
Murat, had any real naval acumen at all. Both
totally underestimated the task of landing
forces at Messina. No cohesive plan had been
drawn up by the dépôt de la Marine in
Paris; there was not even a minimum amount of
hydrographic information on sea conditions and
ports on the island. It is not clear what lesson
Napoleon took away from his failed plans to
invade Britain or from defeats in the naval
battles of the Nile and Trafalgar or from the
first attempt to invade Sicily; the second
attempt wasn’t much better. On September 18,
1810, Murat, at the behest of Napoleon, tried to
land 2500 men at Messina as an avant-garde of a
larger invasion force. The invasion failed and
Murat withdrew. Yet he still maintained that his
fleet had kept the British fleet bottled up on
Sicily for months, and that even a failed
invasion had shown the mettle of his ships and
men. Murat witnessed —indeed, directed— the epic victory at Capri in 1808, and no doubt enjoyed looking at his own image on the medal struck to commemorate that victory. Besides the Battle of Capri, another bright light in Murat’s naval endeavors was the successful repelling of a Sicilian/British force that landed in Reggio Calabria on June 11, 1809 in an attempt to foment revolution against the French. The British fleet then sailed as far north as the Bay of Naples and occupied the islands of Procida and Ischia. On June 24 a decisive naval battle took place off of Procida between the Neapolitan ship, the Cerere, and the British Cyane. Both ships were badly damaged, but the British vessel withdrew. There are paintings immortalizing the Neapolitan victory; they show Murat, surrounded by the wounded, on the bridge of the Cerere embracing the captain, Giovanni Bausan. But Murat was a former cavalry officer and in spite of those moments of naval glory, he may not have understood navies and their function. Later, when the tide of the Napoleonic Wars had turned against the emperor, and Murat was worried about his own future without Napoleon, he told the British that it had been Napoleon who had forced him to construct a fleet of ships-of-the-line. Personally, Murat said he felt no need for such a fleet and said he was quite prepared to dismantle it. Indeed, as the king of Naples, he considered himself England’s natural ally and was prepared to put his land-forces at her [England’s] disposal in the Mediterranean.
Whatever the case, under Murat the navy of the kingdom of Naples increased in manpower from 3,000 to 6,000 officers and men. Two battle-ships of the line, a number of frigates and smaller gunboats were built. Shipbuilding facilities at Castellammare were increased and coastal batteries were improved. Also, when Napoleon commissioned ships from Naples to be built, furnished with crews and sent to Toulon as soon as possible, Murat often managed —as they say in Italian— “to listen with a merchant’s ears”; that is, he heard only what he wanted to hear. He built the ships but often forgot to send them. After the failed invasion of Sicily in 1810 he was no longer content just to be a client king, an appendage of the great emperor. Friction grew as he became aware that the emperor didn’t really want a Neapolitan navy; he wanted a French Navy in Naples. In only nine years, Murat wound up with a good navy, ships that eventually found their way back into the hands of the restored Bourbon monarchy after 1815.
sources:
Clark, Hewson. An impartial history of the naval, military and political events in Europe from the commencement of the French revolution to the ... conclusion of a general peace. Brightly & Childs, Suffolk. c.1820
Ilari, Virgilo and Piero Crociani. La Marina Napoletana di Murat (1806-1815). c.1901
Randàccio , Carlo. Le marinerie militari italiane: nei tempi moderni, 1730-1860, memorie storiche.
second edition, Luigi Beuf, Genova, Torino. 1870.
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