Imagine that all along Rue de Bonaparte – formerly George Street – tricolours are snapping to attention in the summer breeze. It is early yet, but the street is already filling with citizens come to celebrate the anniversary of that glorious day when Port Decaen – formerly Sydney – was liberated from the English yoke.
Today, amid the feasting and fireworks, the tale will be told and retold of how history was made when, just before dawn on that famous day, a squadron of warships from Isle de France – the frigates Bellone, Manche, Minerve and Astrée, now household names – sailed into Baie Péron – formerly Botany Bay – to begin the invasion of New South Wales, since renamed Terre Napoleon.
At first light, 800 troops of the Regiment of Isle de France, in the blue-trimmed beige jackets of the colonial battalions, swarmed ashore while the drummers of a military band of African and Indian slaves beat a tattoo. With the colonial infantry were some 500 men of the island militia and allied Irish rebels who had found refuge on Isle de France. Armed with .69-calibre Charleville muskets, bayonets and pikes, they set off on the 30-kilometre march to Sydney, led by their commander General Charles Decaen, an imposing figure mounted on a grey Arabian cavalry horse, like Napoleon on Marengo, sunlight glinting on his sabre.
At a pace of 75 steps a minute, as specified by Napoleon for an army en route to battle, the French made it to the British settlement by early afternoon. Along the way, the Irish allies rallied scores of their convict countrymen, who armed themselves with hoes, scythes or whatever they could lay their hands on, swelling the size of the invasion force to almost 2000. Decaen ordered his companies into position and prepared to take the town.
The general was only too aware that his ragtag force was no Grande Armée, but he knew from recent intelligence that it was most likely all he needed to rout an unsuspecting and unprepared enemy. It was to his great advantage that the soldiers of the British garrison had only lately arrived in the colony and, like their Scottish commander, Indian army veteran Lachlan Macquarie, were distracted from defence duties by domestic disturbances. Colonel Macquarie, as newly minted military governor of New South Wales, had been sent out from England with his regiment, the 73rd Regiment of Foot, to restore order to a colony riven by dissent and rank with corruption.
The 1st battalion of his regiment was despatched to relieve the disgraced New South Wales Corps, better known as the Rum Corps, which had illegally arrested the previous governor, William Bligh, and ruled the colony by a military junta. Bligh, of Bounty fame, had provoked the second mutiny in his career by attempting to crack down on the Rum Corps’ blatant profiteering, smuggling and other illicit activities.
The Rum Corps was more than 500 strong, but many were posted elsewhere throughout the colony, and most had fought only one battle – at the 1804 uprising by convicts at Castle Hill. In the years since, as little more than glorified prison guards, few had fired a shot in anger, and many had grown dissolute and disillusioned while their officers seemed interested in nothing but enriching themselves.
Unlike this largely undisciplined rabble, most of the 1223 officers and men of Macquarie’s 73rd Regiment were hardened veterans of campaigns in India and Ceylon, and had always given a good account of themselves.
They were not outnumbered by any significant amount, and they were not outgunned. Their Brown Bess muskets were certainly a match for the French Charlevilles. Both weapons were accurate at 100 metres; both were devastating in a fusillade; and soldiers on both sides could fire three volleys a minute.
They were, however, outmanoeuvred – caught with their backs to the enemy. Their commander, distracted by the political minefield he had walked into, had not yet deployed his men to defensive positions along the harbour, and no pickets had been posted at the perimeters of the settlement. In a nutshell, no one was watching.
The capture of Sydney would not involve storming a citadel. After the Castle Hill Rebellion, Governor King ordered that a fortress be built on a hill overlooking the town, in which the garrison and free settlers could withstand a siege.
King had informed the Secretary of State for the Colonies, Lord Hobart: ‘I have also caused a citadel to be commenced (and on which a considerable progress is made) on the highest windmill hill, which circumstances may eventually render necessary, as it commands the town and country around, and the approach of the harbour.’1
It did not take long for complacency to set in, however. The fortress, named Fort Phillip, was never finished, and all but the eastern rampart was later demolished.
With no fortress to besiege, and no pickets or rearguard to engage, Decaen met no resistance as he led his troops through the settlement and down towards the cove.
Convicts on chain gangs looked on in amazement, women stood in cottage doorways staring in disbelief, civilian officials ducked for cover, and soldiers scuttled to their barracks where they would find only confusion among the ranks and their officers absent – off somewhere soaking up the hospitality of the colonial elite.
With his military band striking up ‘La Marseillaise’, Decaen marched his men right up to the doors of Government House, crashing through the timber fence and trampling the gardens. The hapless new governor, on hearing the clamour and looking out to see his yard full of French soldiers, had no recourse but to surrender his sword.
Later that afternoon, when the French naval squadron, after sailing north from Botany Bay, dipped through the Heads into Port Jackson, the guns of the harbour batteries were eerily silent. Sydney’s first line of defence had been breached without engaging the enemy, but were the British simply not paying attention, the French wondered, or had the squadron sailed into a trap?
The frigates Bellone, Manche, Minerve and Astrée approached the cove with their 12-pounders primed for action, gunners at the ready, powder boys standing by below to run gunpowder from the armoury up to the gun decks, and with sailors ready to shoot and hurl grenades from the topmasts. But the sight of the tricolour flying from Government House made it clear that the fight was over before it began. Sydney had fallen without a shot being fired.
British ships in port, now captive of the French, included the frigates Hindostan and Dromedary, which had so recently brought Macquarie and his troops to Sydney. In the days to follow, these ships, with the redcoats and the deposed governor on board, would be sent packing, back to the land from whence they came.
When the people of Sydney woke to find themselves in the French colonial empire, any who expected to be granted full French citizenship were bound to be disappointed. The 1794 republican policy of assimilation, which stated that the rights to liberty, equality and fraternity enjoyed by the people of France should apply equally to people in the colonies, regardless of race or colour, had been amended by Napoleon. Concerned that political equality could lead to a push for independence, he had devised separate laws governing the colonies, with strict constraints on political powers and civil rights.
And even this second-class citizenship had a catch. To earn it, colonial residents had to reject their own culture and embrace that of France – assumed to be the apogee of civilisation. To become French, one had to speak French, act French and think French. Anything less was barbarism.
Many among the British colonial elite of Port Jackson went home soon after the invasion, some even abandoning lucrative estates rather than live under the old enemy. A few stayed – eschewing roast beef for coq au vin, and reciting ‘La plume de ma tante’ until they get the accent right – but they needn’t have bothered.
Administration of the colony was in the hands of bureaucrats sent out from France. Former British officials found their services were no longer required, or were reduced to the lowest ranks of the new regime; mere lackeys without power or influence.
For the convicts, little would change. Their new overseers were less fond of the lash, thankfully, but the French had inherited an economy based on cheap, forced labour – not unlike their slave plantations in the Caribbean and Isle de France – and were keen to exploit it. The convict would not lose his chains, and that included the Irish convict, who would learn that those he considered allies considered him too fractious to be set free.
And it wasn’t long before ships arrived bringing convicts from France and her vassal states, courtesy of the Emperor. ‘Transportation is in accord with public opinion, and is prescribed by humane considerations,’ Napoleon said when proposing sweeping law reforms – the Civil Code. ‘The need for it is so obvious that we should provide for it at once in the Civil Code. We have now in our prisons 6000 persons who are doing nothing, who cost a great deal of money, and who are always escaping. There are 30 to 40 highwaymen in the south who are ready to surrender to justice on condition that they are transported.
‘Certainly we ought to settle the question now, while we have it in our minds. Transportation is imprisonment, but in a cell more than 30 feet square.’
For the Aboriginal people of New Holland, however, the coming of the French was a potential game changer. The French, unlike Spanish, English and Dutch colonialists, had a relatively enlightened attitude towards native cultures, notably evident in their dealings with indigenous tribes in North America.
While sharing the prevalent European view of native societies as naturally inferior, the French had generally respected native territory as sovereign, and sought to exploit the resources of the New World not by enslavement and extermination but with mutually beneficial alliances for trade and military advantage. For Indigenous Australians who had been fighting an undeclared war since the arrival of the British in 1788, the French conquest brought hope of peace and tolerance between black and white. Only time would tell.
For the conquered British colonists, there was hope that the Francification of New South Wales would be short-lived. Britannia ruled the waves, after all, and the Royal Navy was surely well on its way to blow those damned frogs out of the water. But it was a forlorn hope. Mother England, with its forces stretched to capacity on the continent, and under continual threat of invasion, was not coming to the aid of what many considered a human garbage dump at the end of the Earth. The powers that be had come to the unpalatable conclusion that for a fly-speck of an outpost to claim possession of an entire continent was hubris in the extreme. Port Jackson was now, as it was in the beginning, expendable.
As for Lachlan Macquarie, the ambitious Scot who had grand plans of changing this outpost from a ramshackle penal settlement to a thriving free colony was denied a chance to leave his mark on Australian history. Returning home to a mediocre career and a modest epitaph, he would be remembered, if at all, as the man who lost New South Wales to the French.