What was the French Navy good at?

What was the French Navy good at besides supplying captured ships to the Royal Navy?

It had real skill, but political upheaval and losses repeatedly broke the transmission of institutional knowledge between generations.

French officers and sailors could be capable opponents, but repeated upheaval and losses prevented knowledge from passing reliably between generations. Skill existed without a stable institution able to accumulate and reproduce it. Each purge, defeat, or forced promotion narrowed the opportunities for experienced personnel to teach their successors. Repeated breaks in knowledge transfer help explain uneven performance without treating the navy as inherently incompetent.