CHAPTER V

THE FRENCH IN INDIA UNDER DUPLEIX

SECTION I. War between France and England.

THE war between England and Spain, which had begun in 1739 over commercial and maritime quarrels, was now gradually drawing France into open hostilities with England. But as the English had a larger and more powerful navy, the rupture between the two countries placed France in the dangerous position of holding great transmarine possessions and interests by insecure lines of support and communication. In America and the West Indies the colonial dominions of France were more extensive than those of England; in India there was no great difference as to strength or settlements; and the French had the advantage of a most valuable though rather distant base of operations at the islands of Bourbon and Mauritius, with a station on the Madagascar coast.

At Mauritius, Labourdonnais, as governor, had since 1740 been accumulating naval stores, and preparing, with the aid and approval of the French government, to fall upon the English merchant vessels, or to attack the English settlements in India. In 1743, however, the Directors of the French East India Company, anxious to preserve neutrality in the East Indies, had procured the despatch of orders which held back

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Labourdonnais; and although, when war had been actually declared in 1744, he received authority to take the offensive, he was not ready until 1746, when he mustered his fleet at Madagascar and sailed in June for the Coromandel coast. Meanwhile a squadron sent out from England had appeared in 1745 off Pondicherry, which had a weak garrison and unfinished fortifications. Dupleix, in order to gain time, induced the Nawab of the Carnatic to interpose with an order forbidding hostilities within his jurisdiction; and in deference to this prohibition the English commodore was persuaded by the authorities at Madras to suspend his attack. The stormy season compelled him to leave the coast; but when the British fleet returned next year it was met by the French squadron from the Mauritius. The English Company now in their turn appealed to the Nawab, but they found him lukewarm; he had not been properly bribed; his own position was insecure ; nor was it in any case possible for him to prevent the two hostile fleets from fighting or bombarding each other's factories on the sea-shore. After an indecisive naval action the English ships withdrew to Ceylon. Labourdonnais now landed some two thousand men, and Madras was besieged by land and sea, until it was surrendered on terms permitting the English to regain their town on payment of a ransom1. But this compromise was violently opposed by Dupleix, who saw plainly enough that to build up solidly a French dominion in India he must begin by clearing away the English, and who therefore insisted that the fortifications of Madras should be razed to the ground. The Nawab of the Carnatic also interposed on his side, professing much indignation at this private war within his sove1 September, 1746.

reignty, and demanding that the town should be given up to him, which Dupleix promised to do. After a sharp quarrel over this question Labourdonnais, whose fleet was shattered by a tremendous storm, sailed back with the surviving ships to the Mauritius, leaving the French in temporary possession of Madras, under an agreement, made by Labourdonnais, that if the ransom were paid it should be restored to the English within three months.

The next incident was important. Dupleix, who had now 3,000 French soldiers at his disposal, and who had been positively ordered by a secret despatch from his government on no account to give up Madras, had not the least intention of relinquishing it either to the Nawab or the English Company. When the Nawáb invested the town Dupleix drove off the native troops so effectually as to establish, at one blow, an immense military reputation for the French in the Carnatic, since the ease and rapidity with which the Nawáb's army was dispersed at this first collision between the regular battalions of Europe and the loose Indian levies proved at once the formidable quality of European arms and discipline. Dupleix made unsparing and audacious use of his advantage; he declared null and void the agreement with the English, seized all the Company's property, carried the Madras governor and his officers to Pondicherry, where they figured as captives in a triumphal procession, and despatched a large force against the English fortress of St. David, the only fortified post still held by the English, about twelve miles south of Pondicherry. But the French were surprised in their march, and the expedition was so sharply checked that the troops lay thereafter encamped inactively in the neighbourhood of the Fort, which they never succeeded

in besieging. In the meantime, as the English squadron was returning with reinforcements from Ceylon, Dupleix sent his four ships out of its way to the west coast, so that the sea was now open. When, therefore, in 1747, the French commander, Paradis, was about to move again on Fort St. David, he was stopped by the appearance of the English squadron, which threw supplies and troops into the place, and compelled him to retire for the protection of Pondicherry. From this moment the tide turned. In attempting to take Cuddalore by a dashing blow the French were outwitted by Lawrence and beaten back with loss; Admiral Boscawen arrived with a formidable fleet and 1,500 soldiers; and Pondicherry was invested, in 1748, by land and sea. But as the French had failed before Fort St. David, so the English failed before Pondicherry; the place was so clumsily besieged by the English and so gallantly defended by the French that the assailants had at last to draw off with serious loss.

In 1749 the news of the peace of Aix-la-Chapelle stopped the fighting in India, and restored Madras to the English in exchange for the restitution of Louisburg in North America to the French. The chief outcome of this sharp wrestle between the two Companies at close quarters on a narrow strip of sea-coast, was a notable augmentation of the French prestige in India, and great encouragement to Dupleix in his project of employing his troops as irresistible auxiliaries to any native prince whose cause he might choose to adopt. He was already in close correspondence with one of the parties in the civil war that was just beginning to spread over the Carnatic; he took care to keep on foot his disciplined troops, whose decisive value in the field had now been abundantly manifested; he had overawed

the neighbouring chiefs, depressed the English credit, and seemed to have struck out with the boldness and perspicacity of political genius the straight way toward establishing a French dominion in the Indian peninsula.

So far as it related to facts and circumstances on the Coromandel coast, his judgment of the situation was correct; the opportunity had come, and Dupleix had discerned the right methods of using it. The Moghul empire had finally disappeared in all the southern provinces; the whole realm was torn by internal dissensions; the Marathas, whose mission it was to prepare the way for a foreign domination by riding down and ruining all the Mahomedan powers, were spoiling the country and bleeding away its strength; the native armies in the south were no better than irregular illarmed hordes of mercenaries; the coasts lay open and defenceless. Not only Dupleix, but others (as will be shown later on) were beginning to see the practicability of turning this state of things to the advantage of some European power. But Dupleix had not perceived or taken into account certain larger considerations which inevitably controlled the working out of his ambitious schemes and which soon began to counterbalance his local successes. Any plan of establishing the territorial supremacy in India of a maritime European power must be fundamentally defective, must necessarily suffer from dangerous constitutional weakness, so long as it does not rest upon a secure line of communication by sea Until this prime condition of stability is fulfilled, the aggrandizement of dominion in a distant land only places a heavier and more perilous strain on the weak supports, and the whole fabric is liable to be toppled over by a stroke at its base.