A Spark Unseen

Author's note

Charles-Louis Napoléon Bonaparte, the man who became Napoléon III, was born in 1808 to Louis Bonaparte, brother of Napoléon I, and Hortense de Beauharnais Bonaparte, who was Napoléon I’s stepdaughter. After two attempts in his early life to recapture the rule of France, one of which resulted in exile to London and the other in life imprisonment (from which he escaped), Charles-Louis was rumored to have left at least two sons behind him in England when he was elected president of France in 1848. By December 1852, Charles-Louis had dissolved the French Parliament and proclaimed himself Napoléon III, emperor of France, just as Napoléon I had crowned himself emperor forty-eight years earlier.

The uncertainty created by Napoléon III’s coronation fueled a French and British race to naval supremacy, even as the two countries allied themselves against Russia in the Crimean War. The war began as a dispute over influence in the declining Ottoman Empire, quickly becoming a full-scale conflict known for its gross tactical miscalculations, one of the most famous being chronicled in Tennyson’s poem, “The Charge of the Light Brigade.” But it was also the first “modern” war, with the use of steam-powered ships, floating ironclad batteries, railways, and also daily documentation for the public newspapers by telegraph and photography. Florence Nightingale began using modern nursing techniques on the Crimean battlefields, where more men died of disease than of their wounds. The British-French alliance declared victory in 1856. In 1859, the French launched the first steam-powered, ironclad ship, La Gloire, after the close of the Crimean War. Britian’s first ironclad, the HMS Warrior, made its appearance the following year. During the reign of Napoléon III, naval supremacy meant European dominance.

With the advent of steam-powered ironclads also came the race for the ability to destroy them. British engineer Robert Whitehead was the first to design a swimming, clockwork torpedo “fish,” the earliest plans of which show a section marked “secret chamber,” where the gyroscope was housed. But it wasn’t until the addition of a pendulum in 1868 that the fish became a reliable weapon. Filled with the new and volatile nitrocellulose, or “guncotton,” Whitehead’s torpedo could swim a straight line, holding its depth beneath the water to stealthily blow a hole in an ironclad ship. The first torpedoes were purchased by Britain’s Royal Navy in 1870, filling the vacuum of power created by the invincible ironclads. The way the balance of power was maintained and naval battles were fought changed forever, not only for Britain and France, but for the world.