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by clandestinely encouraging Bavarian demands on
    the Habsburgs in the 1730s, but also by appointing the young and bellicose
    comte de Belle-Isle to represent Versailles among the German states of the
    empire. Belle-Isle had been charged only with securing the election of a
    French candidate to the vacant imperial throne; but the count, “who knew
    that he spoke with the authority of public approval,”5 exceeded his min-
    isterial mandate by putting together in central Europe a coalition of states
    (including, eventually, France) that aimed at nothing less than the dismem-
    berment of the Habsburg possessions. In the end, the French, proving true
    to their past, would try to have it both ways, warring simultaneously on
    land and sea.
    And, just as predictably, many in France saw the strategic stalemate they
    extracted from involvement in the war of 1740–48 as inadequate. That the
    French and the British “switched partners” in the so-called Diplomatic
    Revolution of 1756, with France embracing the traditional continental ad-
    versary Austria and England establishing ties with Prussia, was less momen-
    tous than the fact that French foreign policy (unlike that of any other power)
    continued to portend major aggression in both the overseas and the con-
    tinental arenas. In the midst of the Seven Years’ War (1756–63), one diplo-
    matic servant of Louis XV was to articulate to a colleague the philosophy
    underlying this policy. “The object of the politics of this crown,” wrote
    Franc¸ois-Joachim de Pierre, cardinal de Bernis to Etienne-Franc¸ois, duc
    de Choiseul, in 1759, “has been and always will be to play in Europe
    the superior role which suits its seniority, its dignity, and its grandeur; to
    reduce every power which attempts to force itself above her, whether by
    trying to take away her possessions, or by arrogating to itself an unjust pre-
    eminence, or, finally, by seeking to take away . . . her influence and general
    credit in the affairs [of Europe].”6 Inspired by such a canon, the French once
    4 See Jeremy Black, “French Foreign Policy in the Age of Fleury Reassessed,” English Historical Review 103 (1988): 359–84.
    5 Arthur M. Wilson, French Foreign Policy during the Administration of Cardinal Fleury, 1726–1743 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1936), p. 331.
    6 Cited in Orville T. Murphy, Charles Gravier, Comte de Vergennes: French Diplomacy in the Age of Revolution, 1719–1787 (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1982), p. 213.
    The ancien régime
    17
    again made war on both sea and land, striving to curb British expansion in
    North America, eject the British altogether from India, and drive London’s
    vessels from the seas even as they abetted Austria’s war of revenge against
    Frederician Prussia. That the duc de Choiseul, who took over Versailles’s
    foreign policy in the midst of this conflict, should have conceived a spec-
    tacular scheme to end it to France’s advantage by invading the British Isles,
    bespoke his country’s current discomfiture as eloquently as it did the per-
    sistence of French ambitions. How often during the “Second Hundred
    Years’ War” of 1689–1815 did the French, hopelessly overextended, dream
    of resurrecting their fading prospects by the deceptively simple means of
    a sudden thrust across the Channel!
    Yet it was probably with Choiseul’s tenure in the foreign ministry after
    the Seven Years’ War that France’s commitment to a world vision in strate-
    gic affairs became most unequivocal. The ink was scarcely dry on the Peace
    of Paris, registering genuinely disastrous French reverses, before Choiseul
    was once more at work weaving ambitious geopolitical designs – designs
    aimed primarily against the hated islanders across the Channel. “England,”
    he declared in a memo of 1765 to Louis XV, “is the declared enemy of your
    power and of your state; she always will be. . . . Centuries will pass before
    you can make a