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The world’s leading professors explain the latest thinking in the humanities and social sciences in just 10 minutes.
The Man Who Shot Nelson: A French Take on Trafalgar
Hello. I’m Dr David McCallam, Reader in French Eighteenth-Century Studies at the University of Sheffield and a Fellow of the British Academy.
I am recording a 10-Minute Talk. It’s about the 'The Man Who Shot Nelson: A French Perspective on The Battle of Trafalgar’.
The battle itself took place on 21 October 1805, during the Napoleonic Wars, with Admiral Horatio Nelson leading the British and Admiral Pierre-Charles de Villeneuve leading the Franco Spanish Fleet. Apart from saying that clearly it didn’t go very well for the French, I didn’t know what to say. But when I researched the topic a bit more, and tugged at a few loose threads, a fascinating story unravelled.
Here’s what I found.
The very first report of the Battle of Trafalgar that claimed to come from France was fake news. In fact, it was the mother of fake news. It appeared in The Naval Chronicle, allegedly posted from Cadiz, and dated 25 October, so just four days after the clash of fleets in the Atlantic. The source of the article is given as the official imperial French newssheet, Le Moniteur.
Its anonymous author cuts to the chase: ‘The English fleet is annihilated!’ And it goes on in high picaresque fashion to detail how the dashing French out-manoeuvred and out-fought the British. With Nelson’s own death coming in the deeply counterfactual circumstances of a personal duel with his French counterpart Admiral de Villeneuve. The article recounts:
‘Villeneuve flew to the quarter-deck [of the Victory] – with the usual generosity of the French, he carried a brace of pistols in his hands, for he knew the Admiral had lost his arm, and could not use his sword – he offered one to Nelson: they fought, and at the second fire Nelson fell; he was immediately carried below. Oliva, Gravina, [Spanish commanders] and Villeneuve, attended him with the accustomed French humanity.’
Poppycock! As they might say (later) in the 19th century. This ludicrous account and its exalted praise of the French was most likely British in origin, designed to ridicule the preening, self-aggrandizing enemy and frustrate any impulse towards seeking peace with them, especially among the more progressive MPs in Parliament.
In fact, as a heavily censored organ of the State, Le Moniteur made no mention at all of Trafalgar through November-December 1805. And Napoleon himself only heard of his fleet’s crushing defeat in Moravia on 18 November. But he was little troubled by it at the time, basking as he was in the success of his army’s victory at Ulm on 19 October and preparing for his most brilliant victory to come at Austerlitz on 2 December (a year to the day after his coronation as Emperor).
Even in his more expansive recollections in exile, such as they are set down in Emmanuel Las Cases’s Le Mémorial de Sainte-Hélène (1823), Napoleon shrugs off defeat at Trafalgar as the fault of Decrès, his minister for the Navy, and of Villeneuve, whom he portrays a bit unfairly as weak, indecisive, and cowardly. He says, according to Las Cases:
‘Moi-même j’ai jeté le manche après la cognée lors du désastre de Trafalgar. Je ne pouvais pas être partout, j’avais trop à faire avec les armées du continent.’
‘I myself gave up after the disaster of Trafalgar. I couldn’t be everywhere at once, I had too much to do with the armies on the Continent’.
In other words, if only the Emperor had been personally in charge, the French would have won.
But this relative silence on the part of the authorities has the effect of opening up imaginative spaces elsewhere in French culture regarding Trafalgar. This is particularly the case with the one scrap of glory to be salvaged from the debacle: the killing of Nelson, the naval nemesis of the French from the Nile to Naples to the Spanish Cape.
As we know, Nelson was fatally shot in the heat of battle as the Victory engaged in close combat with the French ship of the line, the Redoutable. The standard story, popularized by Robert Southey’s 1813 best-selling biography of Nelson, was that a crack French sniper had killed Nelson from the mizzen top of the Redoutable, possibly drawn to the admiral’s racks of bright medals.
Improbable as it is, that someone swaying in the ship’s rigging in a violent naval battle, on a heavy swell, swathed in clouds of gun smoke and deafening noise, could nail his target cleanly, this story had the advantage of suggesting that Nelson could only have been killed by an act of exceptional skill – and, in the process, it reminded its British audience of the dirty, dirty deviousness of the French.
However, for the French themselves, this same act would stand as an enormous badge of honour for a highly skilled marksman to have dispatched France’s greatest enemy at sea. And so, belatedly, in 1826, steps forward one Robert Guillemard, the colourful subject of the Mémoires de Robert Guillemard, sergent en retraite who makes precisely this unique claim to fame.
Guillemard recounts how, as battle is joined, he ends up replacing shot topmen in the mizzen mast of the Redoutable, from where he surveys the deck of the opposing Victory and sees an officer covered in medals with only one arm… He aims and fires at the group of officers on the quarter-deck. Mayhem ensues, English fire redoubles, and the Redoutable is surrounded, outgunned and surrenders. That evening, as a prisoner on the Victory, Guillemard comes to the shocking realisation that (as the French text has it):
‘le moment où Nelson fut frappé, la position de sa blessure, tout me prouvait, à n’en pas douter un instant, qu’il était mort de ma main.’
‘from the moment in which he [Nelson] received his wound, and the position of the wound itself, I could not doubt for a moment that I was the author’.
At the same time, however, Guillemard recognizes that any Frenchman in the mêlée of battle could lay claim to the same feat; and that, if he made this claim, he would not be believed, only mocked for his delusional vanity. Hence this ‘false shame’, as he calls it, prevented him from reaping the rewards of having taken Nelson’s life.
Guillemard’s Mémoires were immensely successful, and immediately translated into German and English.
There was only one problem. Guillemard didn’t exist. He was the invention of a hack writer called Alexandre Lardier. And as Guillemard’s notoriety spread across Europe, and parts of his life-story were challenged, Lardier got spooked and in 1830 issued a short public confession in the Annales maritimes et coloniales that Guillemard was indeed a fiction of his own making.
Patriotically in France, this hasn’t stopped two streets being named after Guillemard in Six-Tours in the Var (his fictional birthplace) and in Toulon, France’s premier naval port. Check them out on Google Maps.
Yet the story of the sailor who killed Nelson doesn’t stop there, since a much greater Alexandre, one of France’s most famous historical novelists, Alexandre Dumas, revisits Guillemard’s narrative over 30 years later in one of his final unfinished novels, Le Chevalier de Sainte-Hermine. This story was serialized in 1869 – the penultimate year of the reign of Napoleon’s nephew, Napoleon III.
From 11 to 16 September, Le Moniteur Universel serialized Dumas’s fictionalisation of Trafalgar. That is, it appeared in the same journal, Le Moniteur, that had stayed so resolutely stumm about the battle in 1805.
Nelson’s fatal shooting is the centrepiece for the episode of Tuesday 14 September. We see it initially from the perspective of the Victory’s chaplain. As he runs towards Nelson on the quarterdeck, the admiral suddenly falls ‘comme foudroyé’ – as though struck by lightning.
It’s exactly 1.15pm and we’re told that the bullet that hit him came from the mizzen top of the Redoutable – where we know the novel’s hero, Hector de la Saint-Hermine, had earlier taken up his post.
If this wasn’t clear enough, the episode ends on this revelation and with a triumphant cry:
Au moment où Nelson tombait sur le pont, une voix forte, qui fut entendue de tout l’équipage, cria de la hune d’artimon: - Capitaine Lucas, à l’abordage! Nelson est tué.
‘At the very moment Nelson fell to the deck, a loud voice, which all the crew heard, cried from the mizzen top: “Captain Lucas, stand by to board! Nelson is killed.”’
Can you imagine the satisfaction of a Frenchman saying or reading those words in the Bonapartist Second Empire?
Of course, both Robert Guillemard and Hector de Sainte Hermine’s fictional accounts of shooting Nelson are wonderful pieces of 19th-century French melodrama. But their tales of improvised marksmanship to take down France’s naval enemy No. 1 do confirm one historical detail from the admiral’s assassination.
It wasn’t the work of a trained sharp-shooter, since the bullet that killed Nelson – held as a grisly treasure in the Royal Collection in Windsor Castle – has no rifling on it, which would have been present if the shot had been fired from the French marksmen’s more accurate ‘carabine de Versailles’. Nelson fell to a, quite possibly random, standard-issue musket shot…
Nonetheless, to conclude, the works by Lardier and Dumas attest to a persistent and peculiar French fantasy born of Trafalgar: to put yourself in the shoes of the man shooting Nelson; and to do so by great chance, rather than design, as a sort of Bonapartist Forrest Gump straying naively into History, with a capital H.
In this sense, as is made particularly clear in Robert Guillemard’s fake memoirs, the desire to retell this deadly act is also a begrudging tribute to the special power of Nelson’s dazzling historical aura. That, at least, appears to have been shared on both sides of La Manche.