Jeune École
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The Jeune Ecole ("Young School") was a French naval school of thought developed during the 19th century. The concept, born from the naval rivalry between Britain and France (respectively the first and second navies of their time), advocated for the use of small, powerfully equipped units to combat larger battleship fleet, and commerce raiders capable of suffocating the trade of the rival power ("Poussière navale", "naval dust").
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[edit] Small units against battleships
One of the first proponents of the Jeune Ecole was the artillery general Paixhans, who invented the explosive shell gun for warships in the 1820s. He advocated the use of these powerful guns on numerous small steam warships that could destroy much larger battleships.
Later, the French Navy developed the concept further as it experimented with torpedoes and torpedo boats. The French Navy became one of the strongest proponents of these combat system by the end of the 19th century [1] The naval successes of the French Navy against China in the Sino-French War of 1883–85 also tended to validate the potential of torpedo boats against regular navies.
Further, France was particularly active in the development of a submarine fleet, again trying to rely on technical development to compensate for British numerical superiority in battleships. By the beginning of the 20th century, France was "undoubtedly the first navy to have an effective submarine force" (Conway Marine "Steam, Steel and Shellfire").
[edit] Commerce raiders
The other constitutive part of the "Jeune Ecole" concept then called for the raiding of the commercial fleets of the enemy so as to asphyxiate its trade and economy, here again a tactic particularly designed against Great Britain.
Raiding ships, such as the Dupuy de Lome were designed for this role. Dupuy de Lôme, an armored cruiser, laid down in 1888, was capable of 23 kts, and designed to raid on enemy commerce ships during extended forays afloat.
[edit] Influences
The "Jeune Ecole" was particularly influential on the development of smaller navies in the 19th century, particularly as they tried to compensate for weaknesses in battleships.
The Imperial Japanese Navy developed her first modern fleet by hiring the services of the French engineer Louis-Emile Bertin in 1886, who designed and built the fleet that would allow Japan to win her first major modern conflict, the First Sino-Japanese War. This fleet was designed around relatively small units with a powerful armament, which prevailed on a Chinese Navy equipped with larger, foreign-built units.
[edit] Notes
- ^ "the revolutionary new technologies embodied in torpedoes, torpedo-boats and mines, of which the French at the time were probably the world's best exponents" (Howe, p281).
[edit] References
- Howe, Christopher (1996) The origins of Japanese Trade Supremacy, Development and technology in Asia from 1540 to the Pacific War, The University of Chicago Press ISBN 0-226-35485-7
- Steam, Steel and Shellfire: The steam warship 1815-1905, Conway's History of the Ship, ISBN 0-7858-1413-2
