The sinking of Vengeur du Peuple was used as propaganda by the National Convention and Bertrand Barère, who gave birth to the legend that the crew had gone down with the ship fighting, rather than surrender.

The Scottish historian Thomas Carlyle repeated the tale in his The French Revolution: A History, yielding a rebuttal by Rear-Admiral John Griffiths, who had witnessed the events.

Although discredited in naval history circles, the legend lived on as a folk tale, inspiring numerous representations and a fictional account by Jules Verne in his 1870 novel Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Seas.

To replace these losses, in 1761 the Duke of Choiseul launched subscriptions, called don des vaisseaux, whereby French individuals and organisations could donate to the Crown the funds necessary to build and equip a warship.

[1][Note 3] Marseillois was ordered on 16 January 1762, originally intended to be built in Toulon on a design by the engineer Joseph-Marie-Blaise Coulomb, and named the same day by Louis XV, following the request of her patrons.

[2] The outbreak of the American War of Independence had caused relations between France and Great Britain to deteriorate, and diplomatic ties were broken on 16 March 1778.

D'Estaing wished to press the attack, but his pilots advised that the harbour was too shallow for his ships, so the squadron spent two weeks at anchor blockading Howe, resupplying and conferring with the American government.

[17] On 6 November, Marseillois departed Cadiz with a joint Franco-Spanish fleet under Admiral d'Estaing, bound for Brest, where she arrived on 3 January 1781.

At Cap-Français, the fleet joined with the frigate Concorde, under Captain de Tanouarn, which brought news of the status and plans of the Continental Army.

She was sailing at the rear of the fleet, and the French and British ships were already trading shots for ten minutes when she took her position in the line of battle.

[27] By February 1794 the still decommissioned, Marseillois had been renamed Vengeur du Peuple, probably a response to the participation of the city of Marseille in the Federalist revolts of 1793.

[27] On 16 May 1794, the fleet departed from Brest with the mission of protecting a convoy of ships carrying food to France, beginning the Atlantic campaign of May 1794.

Only the timely arrival of boats from the undamaged HMS Alfred and Culloden, as well as the services of the cutter Rattler, saved any of the Vengeur's crew from drowning, these ships taking off nearly 500 sailors between them.

[41] Alfred rescued about 100 men; Rattler, about 40; and Culloden, 127, including Captain Renaudin, who abandoned his ship and left in the very first British boat.

("Long live the nation, long live the republic") from the bow of the ship as she foundered; this was bloated out of proportion by French politicians, who added that the sailors had waved the tricolour, sung La Marseillaise in defiance, and even continued firing guns until water reached them while the ship foundered, to eventually sink with her rather than surrender.

[45] They also extrapolated that the entire crew had disappeared with the Vengeur, a claim disproved by the return of captured crewmembers as they were quickly released from British captivity.

[46][47] The origin of the legend is a speech made by Bertrand Barère at the National Convention on 21 messidor (9 July), Rapport sur l'héroïsme des Républicains montant le vaisseau le Vengeur,[47][48] where he claimed that Vengeur had refused to surrender, nailing her flag, and that all the sailors had died with the ship, giving a last shout of "long live the Republic" and waving all sorts of flags and pennants while the ship disappeared.

Carlyle concluded that Barère had concocted a "cunningly devised fable", and changed his account of the sinking of the Vengeur in subsequent editions.

Though Jean François Renaudin never explicitly states that he surrendered, he does mention that he had his flag flown half-mast in distress when he was surrounded by British ships, indicating that he was requesting assistance from the enemy.

"[33] In any case, the superstructures were very much battered, prompting Lieutenant Rotheram, of Culloden, to report that he "could not place a two-feet rule in any direction, he thought, that would not touch two shot-holes".

[64] The later study conducted by Captain Diaz de Soria in the 1950s suggests that water did enter from the gun ports of the lower battery, ripped off in the collision with Culloden and shattered by artillery fire, and that the crew failed to obstruct them with temporary contrivances.

[64] Guérin proposes a variation, that knowing themselves doomed, the sailors remaining on Vengeur made a last display of patriotic and political fervour before dying.

[65] William James provides an alternative theory when he suggests that any person who behaved in such a manner on the stricken ship was acting under the influence of alcohol;[40] Troude, otherwise very critical of Barère's account, vehemently dismissed this idea.

[43] In 1795, Loutherbourg depicted the rescue of Vengeur's crew by British ships in his large canvas of the battle, Lord Howe's action, or the Glorious First of June.

The National Convention calls for artists, painters, sculptors and poets to concourse to transmit to posterity the sublime trait of republican dedication of the citizen who composed the crew of Vengeur.

[78]In spite of these facts, the myth lived on: in his Histoire de la révolution française, Adolphe Thiers wrote an account repeating Barère's version, where Vengeur refused to surrender.

[80] Some reports however indicate that the legend was not seriously accepted: Carlyle suggests one near-eyewitness French account amounted to "not a recantation of an impudent amazing falsehood, but to some vague faint murmur or whimper of admission that it is probably false".

[74][Note 12] In Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Seas, published in 1870, Jules Verne reported the incident with its revolutionary slant: What was this ship?

On 16 April of the same year, she joined in Brest the squadron under Villaret-Joyeuse, in charge of escorting a convoy of wheat inbound from American under Admiral Van Stabel.

Seventy-four years ago, on that exact day, at this very place, by 47°24’ of latitude and 17°28’ of longitude, this ship, after a heroic fight, dismasted of all her three masts, water in her hull, a third of her crew hors de combat, preferred to founder with her three hundred fifty-six sailors than to surrender, and nailing her flag to her aft, she disappeared under the waves at the cry of "Long live the Republic!