Given the efforts and resources spent by Colbert and Seignelay to rebuild and sustain the French navy between the late 1660s and early 1690s, historians have found the French government's decision to abandon fleet operations during the Nine Years’ War deeply problematic. Indeed, the drawdown of the fleet in 1694–95 appears even more striking following the French navy's victory over the earl of Torrington's fleet off Beachy Head (Bévéziers) in July 1690, which created great political pressure and unease in London. Traditional accounts of Louis XIV's navy fixate on rationalising the halt to the Colbertian naval expansion and subsequently question the government's decision to encourage an alternative, decentralised form of naval organisation, in the form of privateering, just as the fleet was reaching its peak strength. In reconciling the Colbertian project's successful revival of naval power with the fleet's demobilisation by 1695, historians place an overwhelming emphasis on identifying an abrupt strategic shift, if not transformation, from the guerre d’escadre to the guerre de course in the 1690s.

According to conventional wisdom, the guerre d’escadre and guerre de course diverged greatly in strategic and operational terms. In the guerre d’escadre, the standing fleet's objective was to engage and destroy the enemy's force in order to gain control of the seas or, more feasibly for the early modern state, to temporarily deny the enemy access to vital maritime corridors and chokepoints. As a direct contrast with these large-scale strategic ambitions, the guerre de course purposely avoided fleet engagements. In this strategy, the enemy's trade routes and merchant vessels were specifically targeted and destroyed or captured, with the objective being to inflict economic damage on the enemy. Private initiative, enticed by a state-sanctioned opportunity for profit-making through the sale of prizes and cargo, played a greater role since the economic barriers to entry into maritime violence, raised by the development of line-of-battle tactics, were lower in a guerre de course. As a result, naval operations were not under the strict purview of the state and could be undertaken by privateers armed with state commissions, acting individually or backed by large syndicates. By transferring presumably non-negotiable sovereignty to private individuals and allowing them an explicit role in the conduct of war, the guerre de course lacked the centralised state control typically associated with the Colbertian navy.