The Arsenal, the Empereur and the wheels of History

A reader asked me why before Napoleon the Gulf had never been thought of as the site of a Navy military establishment given the positive features that our inlet presents in this regard: favorable winds, favorable seabed, ease of water supply.
The answer for me is simple: before L’Empereur there had never been any motivations that pointed things in that direction.
When the Gulf was fortified (this happened between the second half of the 1500s and the early 1700s), it happened to respond to possible interference from Spain which, in addition to controlling the coast, was interested in governing the Lunigiana territory behind it, an essential chessboard for move the armies safely along the peninsula: Madrid then controlled Milan and Naples.
At the beginning of the nineteenth century, however, the international scenario changed completely. Napoleon’s hegemonic dream shattered against the power of the British Royal Navy which had routed the French fleet at Aboukir in 1799 and at Trafalgar in 1806.
Here then Napoleon conceived a broad plan to contain the English Navy: three arsenals located in as many strategic points to block the ships in the service of His British Majesty.
Mind you, he is not thinking of building an arsenal in La Spezia but of an offensive line that extends from the Mediterranean to the English Channel (a plant in Cherbourg on the Cotentin peninsula facing Ireland) and to the North Sea (a plant in Antwerp on the Scheldt estuary in front of London). The Arsenal in the Mediterranean (Varignano) is designed to function in synergy with the other two: alone it would not have made sense.
The ambitious project does not come to fruition due to military (the disaster in Russia) and economic reasons (the costs of implementing the great project prevent it from being able to be completed).
A few years later, the idea was taken up again by Cavour because there was a trigger to support it.
In fact, in addition to the desire to fight Austria also at sea, there is the construction of the Suez Canal. It will be inaugurated three months after our Arsenal but the works began much earlier and even before that the Lesseps project was the subject of European debate, opening up new scenarios from a military and commercial perspective because the control of the new routes changed the political and existing economic ones outlining others that were hitherto unsuspected. It is in the context of the imminent prospects that the idea of ​​building a Military Arsenal in the Gulf, which the wheels of history had suggested, takes shape.