In 1850, after serving successively on the warships Inflexible, Friedland, Océan and Psyché with the escadre d'évolution, he took part in the Senegal campaign aboard the brig Aigle.

[1] During the Crimean War (1854-6) he saw service aboard the warship Valmy in the Black Sea, and also distinguished himself ashore with the French naval batteries at the Siege of Sebastopol.

[2] He was posted to the Far East in 1857 and saw active service in the Second Opium War and the Cochinchina campaign, serving successively aboard the warships Audacieux, Némésis, Dordogne and Duchayla.

[5] In 1869 he sailed for Shanghai with the corvette Dupleix as flag captain and chief of staff to Rear Admiral Krantz, who had recently assumed command of the China and Japan Seas naval division.

Revanche was seriously damaged by a boiler explosion in May 1877, and Lespès was subsequently given command of the ironclad Héroïne, also with the squadron of evolutions (May 1877–May 1878).

[10] On 7 March 1884 Lespès arrived in Hong Kong aboard his flagship La Galissonnière to replace Admiral Charles Meyer in command of France's Far East naval division.

After his arrival the naval division consisted of the ironclads La Galissonnière and Triomphante, the cruisers d'Estaing, Duguay-Trouin and Volta, and the gunboat Lutin.

Lespès did not possess Admiral Courbet's tactical brilliance, and his record as a naval commander during the Sino-French War was mixed.

He delivered a moving tribute to his predecessor at a memorial service for Courbet at Makung on 13 June attended by the sailors of the Far East Squadron and the marine infantry of the Formosa expeditionary corps that had fought the Pescadores Campaign.

MacKay, who was accompanied by a Taiwanese student, was struck by the French admiral's humanity:Four days after the bombardment, in company with an Englishman, I went around the coast in a steamship, and was allowed to go on shore to examine the smoking fortifications.

This was also Fournier's view (he called the coercion of China 'a disgusting affair'), though it was not an opinion espoused by the majority of the officers of the Far East Squadron.