Reinterpreting the French Revolution: A global-historical perspective (47 page)

peasant. (For sublieutenants, the percentages were similar.) About half of

these company-level officers had known something of the trade of arms

before 1789, but they largely owed their promotions to the Revolution: for

instance, “only 4.6 percent of the captains had been officers in 1789, and

most of them . . . had been only corporals.”71

If war more than any other factor modernized the army’s officer corps,

it just as deeply affected its overall social makeup. Inevitably, France’s ex-

ploding manpower needs meant that voluntary enlistment (the Volunteers

of 1791 and 1792) would be followed by conscription. The turning point

here came in 1793. The vestiges of voluntary enlistment were maintained

even as the Convention decreed a levy of 300,000 men on 24 February

1793 to bring the army up to full strength. Yet, Bertaud has argued, the

legislators on this occasion were introducing the principle of conscription,

for “all men of ages 18 to 40, unmarried or widowers without children,

were put in a state of permanent requisition.”72 With the famous
levée en

masse
of 23 August, conscription would become a more massive (if not yet

permanently institutionalized) reality.

“We have only fragmentary information on the social origin of the

draftees,” Bertaud has written. Nonetheless, what he has unearthed sug-

gests to us an army increasingly reflective of French civil society. Even

with the February 1793 “levy of the 300,000,” fewer lawyers, teachers,

students, and state bureaucrats appeared than had among the Volunteers

of 1792; most of the new enrolees were “farm laborers and workers in the

70 Ibid., esp. pp. 111–20.

71 Bertaud,
The Army of the French Revolution
, pp. 178–79, 182–87, and 189. Research on the army officer corps in this period is also summarized in John A. Lynn,
The Bayonets
of the Republic: Motivation and Tactics in the Army of Revolutionary France, 1791–1794

(Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1984), pp. 67–96.

72 Bertaud,
The Army of the French Revolution
, pp. 90–96.

192

Reinterpreting the French Revolution

most ordinary trades.” The “leveling” tendency was only confirmed with

the
levée en masse
. Perhaps 16 percent of the draftees had urban origins,

corresponding more or less to the proportion of the French population

reckoned then as urban. Some of these individuals continued as before to

hail from the “respectable” middle class – merchants, teachers, notaries,

and so forth – but increasingly they tended to be artisans and workers.

Moreover, the artisans now serving under the colors represented an un-

precedented variety of occupations. Nonetheless, the army of the early

Republic, however much it might style itself as the “patriotic” nation in

miniature, was heavily peasant in its composition, differing markedly in this

respect from the institution of 1789–91. Rural plebeians thus dominated in

military as in civil society. We should also note here that the levies of 1793

brought in young men from
all
departments in the country, even if those

rallying most enthusiastically to France’s martial standards came dispro-

portionately from the Parisian basin and from regions (in the northeast and

the west) menaced most directly by invasion and/or domestic rebellion.73

Thus the war crucially affected both the command structure and the

overall composition of the Revolution’s armies. It also profoundly influ-

enced the mentality of the
militaires
, producing in the long run a profes-

sional outlook that would leave Jacobin idealism far behind. Even Bertaud,

for all his republican sympathies, has seen signs of this evolution predating

Robespierre’s final days. He has pointed, for example, to Carnot’s decision

in July 1794 to launch a new journal, the
Soirée du camp
, for mass con-

sumption in the ranks. Carnot apparently intended thereby to popularize

the notion of the army as an institution distinct in its ways of thinking

and managing problems from the “nation.” For Carnot – as, later, for the

Thermidorians – the men serving in the camps were to see themselves no

longer as political militants, as bearers of an ideological message, but rather

as professional soldiers who had mastered the technical aspects of a

vocation they could now proudly exercise in common.74

Other historians have corroborated Bertaud’s findings. Some of them,

generalizing from studies of motivation and morale in the Republic’s field

armies, have detected in the weeks preceding the drama of Thermidor,

Year II, a gradual weakening of the emotional ties that, hitherto, had bound

civilians and
militaires
together in a common defense of the Revolution.

Henceforth, army and civil society would begin to diverge.75 Other

scholars, tracing the relationship between the Jacobins and the military,

have noted that, even at the height of the Terror, the Jacobins subordi-

nated democratic/participatory ideals to the requirements of discipline.

73 On all these points, see ibid., pp. 66–74, 90–96, 130–32. Refer also to Lynn,
The Bayonets
of the Republic
, pp. 43–66.

74 Bertaud,
The Army of the French Revolution
, pp. 217–19.

75 Lynn,
The Bayonets of the Republic
, p. 285.

The “revolutionizing” of the Revolution

193

Officers during this period were increasingly selected for their professional

merit – that is, for their grasp of strategic issues, their technical knowledge,

their discipline and efficiency – and the men in the ranks, if encouraged

to involve themselves in the politics prescribed from Paris, were expected

above all to obey those in authority.76 Already, then, we can see in the

making the army that would stand by quietly as the Robespierrists were

marched to their doom in late July 1794, and that would be instrumental

later on in the cynical coups d’état of the Directory.

Available documentation may never enable naval historians to character-

ize the social origins and motivation of French sailors in analogous fashion,

but it does permit conclusions regarding the Revolution’s impact upon the

officers of the French fleet. Clearly, resignations, desertions, and emigra-

tion by noble officers had by 1792 left the navy as dangerously weakened

as was the army. In May 1791, the Constituent Assembly had envisioned

a naval officer corps of 9 vice-admirals, 18 counter-admirals, 170 captains,

and 530 lieutenants. The Legislative Assembly determined, the following

March, that of the officers accounted for in May 1791, only 2 vice-admirals,

3 counter-admirals, 42 captains, and 356 lieutenants remained. By the

autumn of 1792, it now appears, the navy could not even provide one

captain per warship or two lieutenants per warship or frigate.77

The French, haunted once again by the specter (and, soon, the reality)

of war, reacted to the crisis in the navy as they did to that in the army: by

greasing the tracks of upward mobility and favoring selective criteria of

professionalism over those of ideological purity. As one of its final actions

in September 1792, the Legislative Assembly passed emergency decrees to

deal with the situation. The government recalled some retired officers to

duty, accelerated the promotion of lieutenants, and invited officers of the

merchant marine to compete for places as
enseignes
who could one day earn

further promotion. There would also be an unlimited number of
aspirants

(roughly equivalent to British midshipmen) entitled to compete for further

promotion, and this grade was opened to all. The Convention, pressed

by the same military exigencies, legislated in a similar vein. It expedited

the elevation to lieutenancies of both “military” and “merchant marine”

officers, and authorized the naval minister to choose for the
Grands Corps

deserving officers of any of the lower grades. True, at the height of the

Terror, Jeanbon St.-André, naval “specialist” for the Committee of Public

Safety, came under tremendous pressure to promote individuals on the

basis of ideological considerations. Yet those most knowledgeable on the

subject insist that Jeanbon’s promotion to the highest grades of such men as

76 Alan Forrest,
The Soldiers of the French Revolution
(Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1990), pp. 55–56, 76, and 123–24.

77 Hampson,
La Marine de l’An II
, pp. 43–45. See also Cormack,
Revolution and Political
Conflict in the French Navy
, pp. 117–22, 145–47.

194

Reinterpreting the French Revolution

Villaret-Joyeuse, Van Stabel, Cornic-Dumoulin, and Pierre Martin shows

the Jacobin government’s paramount concern for talent, initiative, and

discipline in the naval officer corps.78

Unfortunately, all the government’s efforts to fill the gaps in the naval

officer corps left by the desertions of aristocratic officers could not give

the French, in 1793–94, a fleet capable of realistically challenging British

supremacy on the seas. Manpower deficiencies on shipboard and in the

arsenals, and failures in administrative discipline in the Naval Ministry and

in the ports, were among the many problems that dogged French naval

strategists throughout the Revolution.79 We can see nonetheless that, in

the case of the navy as in that of the army, France’s reversion to war created

new opportunities for professional advancement even as it reconfirmed

the importance of old professional standards. The two phenomena were

complementary parts of the same process.

To sum up, in weighing the need for domestic changes, the men gov-

erning France in its years of intensifying revolution showed themselves to

be driven as much by geostrategic concerns as by the tug-and-pull of do-

mestic interests and ideals. As we shall see in the following pages, foreign

and internal pressures also asserted themselves in the increasingly radical

politics of that period.

g e o p o l i t i c s , d o m e s t i c p o l i t i c s , a n d ‘ ‘ t e r r o r ’ ’

In seeking to explain the radicalization of French politics from the summer

of 1791 into Thermidor, Year II ( July 1794), some historians, abandoning

notions of dialectical class conflict, have posited a competition of discourses

stressing the virtues of popular sovereignty. For these scholars, ideology,

rather than socioeconomic interest, drove revolutionary politics ever left-

ward.80 We shall argue, instead, that a mix of international and domestic

factors (with the accent on the former) led, first, to the triumph of militant

Brissotins over moderate Feuillants in the Legislative Assembly and, then,

to the more decisive victory of Robespierrist Jacobins (Montagnards) over

Brissotins (Girondists) in the Convention. We shall also see that, in the

critical year 1793, war, more than any other issue, dictated the terms of a

contentious political dialogue between Paris and the provinces.

Truth to tell, there is no need to expand greatly upon what we have

already said regarding a struggle for power in the Legislative Assembly

78 See again, on all of this, Hampson,
La Marine de l’An II
, pp. 188–201; and Cormack,
Revolution and Political Conflict in the French Navy
, pp. 145–47, 269–71.

79 On the sorry overall state of the French navy in this period, see again Hampson,
La Marine
de l’An II
, pp. 64–65.

80 Again, see Furet,
Interpreting the French Revolution
, for the most stimulating articulation of this thesis.

The “revolutionizing” of the Revolution

195

so obviously dominated by the war question. C. J. Mitchell, certainly, has

usefully reminded us of the problems inherent in assigning deputies of

that period to factions identified too readily as the “Feuillants” and the

“Brissotins.”81 His cautionary insight notwithstanding, there can be little

doubt that a clique of politicians associated with Jacques-Pierre Brissot,

employing a variety of arguments but relying above all on the chauvin-

istic instincts of the majority of Assemblymen, ran roughshod over the

attempts of a few delegates (whether “Feuillants” or not) to preserve pa-

cific Franco-Austrian and Franco-Prussian relations. In this parliamentary

confrontation, of course, key diplomatic and domestic issues were – as

always – tightly joined. The indefinite maintenance of peace might have

meant the indefinite prolongation of constitutional arrangements appor-

tioning state power between a monarch and an elected national assembly.

But a reversion to the hallowed ways of war would (and did) discredit

irredeemably a sovereign whose flight to Varennes had already exposed

his rejection of revolutionary changes. Significantly, the downfall of the

monarchy in August 1792 was precipitated by the intervention of Parisians

moved in part by economic distress but especially maddened by the news

of Prussian and Austrian incursions into France. In subsequent months,

Louis XVI’s fate would be sealed by the discovery, at the Tuileries, of