The Levée en Masse

AUG 23 1793 · 12:00

The levee en masse of 1793. Watercolour by Jean-Baptiste Lesueur depicting the Republic mobilising its citizens for war. Place: Convention nationale, Paris Figures: Bertrand Barère, rapporteur of the Committee of Public Safety · Lazare Carnot, the Convention's organizer of armies · the conscripted, perhaps 750,000 men under arms by 1794 Every Frenchman in Permanent Requisition France in August 1793 faces the First Coalition on every frontier, royalist insurrection in the Vendée, and federalist revolts in Lyon, Marseille, Bordeaux, Caen. The Committee of Public Safety responds with a decree of seventeen articles drafted by Barère. Article 1: Dès ce moment jusqu'à celui où les ennemis auront été chassés du territoire de la République, tous les Français sont en réquisition permanente pour le service des armées. From this moment until the enemy has been driven from the territory of the Republic, all Frenchmen are in permanent requisition for army service. The articles continue with a division of labor that no European state has ever decreed: Les jeunes hommes iront au combat; les hommes mariés forgeront les armes et transporteront les subsistances; les femmes feront des tentes, des habits, et serviront dans les hôpitaux; les enfants mettront le vieux linge en charpie; les vieillards se feront porter sur les places publiques, pour exciter le courage des guerriers. The young to combat, married men to forging and supply, women to tents and hospitals, children to bandages, the old to public squares to rouse the soldiers. What the State Can Now Demand Within twelve months France fields roughly three-quarters of a million soldiers, far larger than any of its dynastic opponents can match. Carnot reorganizes the army around the amalgame, mixing royal regulars with revolutionary volunteers and conscripts into a single force. Promotion is by merit and survival rather than birth. By 1794 the coalition is pushed off French soil; by 1795 French armies are operating in the Netherlands, the Rhineland, and northern Italy. Conscription is not a French invention in the abstract sense. Sweden and Prussia had used selective systems. The novelty is the universality and the framing. The Westphalian state of the seventeenth century could demand taxes and obedience; the Westphalian state after 1793 can demand the bodies of its entire male population, justified by the principle that the nation in arms is defending its own sovereignty. The technological ceiling on what wars can mobilize is removed. Every subsequent total war (1914, 1939) operates on Barère's basic permission.