Capricieuse circumnavigated the globe during this period and cruised for several months along the China Coast, giving Courbet his first experience of the seas in which, thirty years later, he would win fame.

In December 1855, at Smyrna, he intervened to quell a mutiny aboard the Messageries impériales packet Tancrède, and was subsequently commended for his conduct by the navy ministry.

From 1864 to 1866 Courbet served on the two-deck broadside ironclad battleship Solferino as aide-de-camp and secretary to Admiral Bouët-Willaumez, commander of the escadre d'évolutions.

The French government was attempting to impose a protectorate in Tonkin (northern Vietnam) at this period, in the face of bitter opposition from Liu Yongfu's Black Flag Army.

The Tonkin Coasts naval division included the ironclads Bayard and Atalante from Courbet's Mediterranean command and the cruiser Châteaurenault from Algiers.

Although the Chinese and Vietnamese contingents at Sơn Tây played little part in the defence, Liu Yongfu's Black Flags fought ferociously to hold the city.

Jules Ferry's cabinet approved this recommendation, and Courbet was replaced in command of the expeditionary corps on 16 December 1883 by General Charles-Théodore Millot—ironically, on the very day on which he captured Sơn Tây.

Courbet's squadron initially included the ironclads Bayard (the flagship), Atalante, La Galissonnière and Triomphante, the cruisers Châteaurenault, D'Estaing, Duguay-Trouin and Volta, the light frigates Hamelin and Parseval, the gunboats Lynx, Vipère, Lutin and Aspic, the troopships Drac and Saône and Torpedo Boats Nos.

Courbet then successfully withdrew down the Min River to the open sea, destroying several Chinese shore batteries from behind as he took the French squadron through the Min'an and Jinpai passes.

[5] In late September 1884, much to his distaste, Courbet was ordered to use the Far East Squadron to support the landing of a French expeditionary corps at Keelung and Tamsui in northern Formosa (Taiwan).

On 11 February Courbet's task force met the cruisers Kaiji, Nanchen and Nanrui, three of the most modern ships in the Chinese fleet, near Shipu Bay, accompanied by the frigate Yuyuan and the composite sloop Chengqing.

[7] Courbet followed up this success on 1 March by locating Kaiji, Nanchen and Nanrui, which had taken refuge with four other Chinese warships in Zhenhai Bay, near the port of Ningbo.

Courbet considered forcing the Chinese defences, but finally decided to guard the entrance to the bay to keep the enemy vessels bottled up there for the duration of hostilities.

[8] In February 1885, under diplomatic pressure from China, Britain invoked the provisions of the 1870 Foreign Enlistment Act and closed Hong Kong and other ports in the Far East to French warships.

The French government retaliated by ordering Courbet to implement a 'rice blockade' of the Yangzi River, hoping to bring the Qing court to terms by provoking serious rice shortages in northern China.

Courbet directed operations in person, and this brief colonial campaign was fought in the traditional style, by ships of the French navy and by the troupes de marine.

Strategically, the Pescadores Campaign was an important victory, which would have prevented the Chinese from further reinforcing their army in Formosa, but it came too late to affect the outcome of the war.

A proposal to use the Far East squadron to make a landing in the Gulf of Petchili was cancelled on the news of the French defeat in the Battle of Bang Bo (24 March 1885) and the subsequent retreat from Lạng Sơn, and Courbet was on the point of evacuating Keelung to reinforce the Tonkin expeditionary corps, leaving only a minimum garrison at Makung in the Pescadores, when hostilities came to an end in April 1885.

On 8 June he walked with his head bared under the hot sun of the Pescadores in the funeral procession of sous-commissaire Dert, a marine infantry officer who had just died of cholera, and this duty critically weakened him.

Admiral Sébastien Lespès assumed command of the Far East Squadron, and presided at a memorial service for Courbet at Makung on 13 June.

[10] On 23 June Bayard left Makung, to a 19-gun salute from more than thirty French warships, to take Courbet's body back to France for a state funeral in Paris.

After a two-month voyage back to France that included stops at Singapore, Mahé (in the Seychelles), Aden, Suez, Alexandria and Bône, Bayard reached the coast of Provence on 24 August and joined the French Mediterranean fleet in the harbour of Les Salins d'Hyères.

The funeral oration was pronounced by Charles Émile Freppel, bishop of Angers, one of the most fervent supporters of Jules Ferry's policy of colonial conquest in Tonkin.

Following a further oration by bishop Freppel, the final eulogy to Courbet was delivered in Abbeville's collegiate church of Saint Vulfran by the recently appointed navy minister, Admiral Charles-Eugène Galiber.

[13] Enseigne de vaisseau Louis-Marie-Julien Viaud (1850–1923), who served under Courbet's command in Tonkin and described his experiences in a number of popular articles published under the pen name Pierre Loti, discerned Courbet's more human side: He set a very high price on the lives of the sailors and soldiers, which after two years seemed not to be rated at their true value in far-off France, and begrudged spilling a drop of French blood.