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durable peace with that country which aims at supremacy
    in the four quarters of the globe.”7
    Accordingly, Choiseul and his collaborators prepared for a resumption
    of war “in the four quarters of the globe.”8 They carried out sweeping
    army and naval reforms and urged their Spanish counterparts to do the
    same. They annexed the island of Corsica in 1768, thereby reinforcing
    France’s strategic position in the western Mediterranean. Choiseul sent
    secret agents to the British colonists in America, whose rebellion against
    London he was one of the first to foresee. He also incited Hyder-Ali,
    an Indian prince, to rebel against British influence in the Eurasian sub-
    continent. He established even closer relations between Versailles and
    Madrid, and strengthened as best he could the traditionally pro-Bourbon
    monarchist faction in Sweden. In addition, Choiseul’s ministry fortified
    several strategic islands in the Indian Ocean, upgraded the defenses of
    the Caribbean colonies, and sponsored settlers in Guyana on the South
    American mainland. In all of this, we should reiterate, the duke envisioned
    7 Quoted in R. John Singh, French Diplomacy in the Caribbean and the American Revolution (Hicksville, N.Y.: Exposition Press, 1977), p. 35.
    8 For additional sources on this subject, see: Roger Soltau, The Duc de Choiseul (Oxford: Blackwell, 1908); John Fraser Ramsey, Anglo-French Relations 1763–1770: A Study of Choiseul’s Foreign Policy (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1936); and Thadd Hall, France and the Eighteenth-Century Corsican Question (New York: New York University Press, 1971). Eventually, interested readers may also want to consult the next volume in Rohan Butler’s three-volume biography of Choiseul.
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    Reinterpreting the French Revolution
    England as the cardinal antagonist of the future. Yet the sheer scope of the
    Choiseulist global vision is also indicated by the fact that it posited a grand
    interlocking of events in the overseas world, where British power was wax-
    ing, with tendencies in eastern Europe, menaced by Austria, Prussia, and,
    especially, Russia. Hence, when Choiseul exhorted Turkey after 1766 to
    make war on Russia, he did so both to challenge St. Petersburg directly
    and to put pressure on a British state viewed at Versailles as being far too
    friendly toward the Romanov colossus.
    A British diplomatic historian has argued that, at the start of 1770, the
    French foreign minister saw only one more year of peace remaining to
    Louis XV and Britain’s George III.9 Whether or not this was true, the
    French and British undeniably came close to war in the course of that
    year over the Falkland question. For some time, Madrid and London had
    been contesting control over the Falkland Islands, whose location in the
    far South Atlantic made them a strategic gateway to the South Pacific and a
    vast region hitherto monopolized commercially by the Spanish. Bourbon
    Spain, not unreasonably, requested support on the issue from its Bourbon
    French confederate. Although there is much about the resultant diplomatic
    confrontation between London and Versailles – and the associated crisis
    within the French government – that remains obscure, what is certain is
    that a cabal of Choiseul’s domestic enemies was able at this juncture to
    engineer his disgrace.10
    However, Choiseul’s fall from power really changed nothing. In corre-
    sponding with his Spanish cousin Charles III in the early 1770s, Louis XV
    repeatedly stressed the need for the two Bourbon governments to continue
    with naval rearmament as they looked forward eagerly to “making war
    against England,” thereby retrieving the “honor” compromised in the most
    recent war. That, at the same time, France could also argue at London
    the case for intervening in eastern Europe against Russia underscored its
    commitment to a grandiose – if ultimately contradictory – foreign policy.11
    And this problematic commitment would