Quote of the Day - Vengeance

How many barrels will thy vengeance yield thee even if thou gettest it, Captain Ahab? it will not fetch thee much in our Nantucket market. Herman Melville, Moby Dick

Revenge is one of the most worthless, time-wasting, and futile pursuits one can engage in. It is attractive on the surface. Getting back your hurts by hurting the person who hurt you. Retaliation in kind is negative, an activity in which both parties are left worse off than before, and neither party is left better off. It entails using your energies to tear down rather than build up. Destruction is easy. Creation is difficult.

This is one reason I neither like nor review books about revenge and vengeance. The realistic books about vengeance (like Moby Dick) reveal its nihilism. In Melville's classic almost everyone dies because of Ahab's obsessive pursuit of vengeance against the whale that took his leg. Those stories are depressing. The majority of books about vengeance conclude with a happily-ever-after ending based on artificial constraints placed on the real-life consequences of seeking vengeance by the author. I find that genre even more depressing. It leads to a trap for fools who believe the author's happy ending is likely—or even possible.

In real life vengeance rarely works out well. I am currently writing a book about the Battle of the Chesapeake, and the naval campaign leading up to it. That battle had a happy ending - for the Continental Congress and its supporters seeking independence from Britain. For the French who fought it? Not so much.

France had no interest in a rebellion of British North American colonists against the British government. In 1775 when the rebellion started, or in 1778 when France entered the war, France had no holdings on the North American continent. They had lost them all in the Seven Years' War that concluded a decade earlier. They had no realistic hope of regaining those territories by helping the nascent United States. If the colonists won, they planned to claim those territories, not hand them over to France.

It was possible to regain some of the West Indies sugar islands they lost in the Seven Years' War. They were not valuable enough to merit the costs of an all-out war. But France went to war anyway, instead of pursuing the low-cost, low-risk option of providing the rebels munitions and supplies. Even offering Continental privateers shelter in French harbors offered little risk of British intervention against France. Yet France declared war on Britain, even inducing their Spanish allies to enter the war a year later.

Why? Purely for vengeance. France had not just been beaten in the Seven Years' War; it had suffered a humiliation. And just like the loss of Ahab's leg was largely self-inflicted, so was the magnitude of France's loss in the Seven Years' War due to the French crown's spectacularly bad decisions.

For twelve years the French government had been looking for an opportunity to get theirs back against Perfidious Albion. The rebellion of a people against its king was something the French monarchy should not have encouraged. It was just too perfect an opportunity to hit back at Britain, and remove a chunk of Britain's empire, even if France did not benefit.

The Spanish, by contrast, had specific goals. They wanted British Florida and Minorca back, both lost in the prior conflict. They wanted Gibraltar, which the British had taken even earlier. They declared war on Britain, and entered the war allied to France but not the continental government. Spain's king wanted no active part in encouraging rebels against a crown.

The French got their revenge, and very little else. They stripped Britain of the 13 rebelling colonies and Britain's North American holdings west of those colonies to the Mississippi River. Britain lost Florida and Minorca to Spain, and a few West Indies islands to France, but held everything else, including Gibraltar and the Canadian territories they seized from France in 1763.

The price of that vengeance? The war bankrupted France. It also established a precedent that commoners had the right to overthrow a wicked king, a precedent set by the French-backed independence of the new United States. That precedent was turned against the French monarch in 1789. The debts incurred by war with Britain forced Louis XVI to call an assembly of the Estates General to raise taxes—the French equivalent to Britain's Parliament would meet for the first time in 175 years and the French Revolution followed. Ultimately, the French monarch who started a war in search of vengeance lost his head, by his own people. They sought a different sort of vengeance, one which spiraled out of control in its own way.