Levée en masse

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Levée en masse (literally "Mass uprising") is a French term for mass conscription during the French Revolutionary Wars, particularly for the one from 23 August 1793.

[edit] Terminology

The term Levée en masse denotes a short-term requisition of all able-bodied men to defend the nation and has to be viewed in connection with the political events in revolutionary France, namely the new concept of the democratic citizen as opposed to a royal subject.

Central to the understanding of the Levée is the idea that the new political rights given to the mass of the French people also created new obligations to the state. As the nation now understood itself as a community of all people, its defense also was assumed to become a responsibility of all. Thus, the Levée en masse was created and understood as a means to defend the nation for the nation by the nation.

Historically, the Levée en masse heralded the age of the people's war and displaced prior restricted forms of warfare as the cabinet wars (1715 - 1792) when armies of professional soldiers fought without general participation of the population.

[edit] The French Revolutionary Wars

The levée en masse was born in the French Revolutionary War. Under the Ancient Regime there had been some conscription (by ballot) to a militia, milice, to supplement the large standing army in times of war. This had been unpopular with the peasant communities on which it fell, and was one of their grievances which they expected to be addressed by the French States-General, when these were convened in 1789 to put the French monarchy on a sounder footing. When things turned out rather differently (see French Revolution), the milice was duly abolished by the National Assembly.

As the Revolution progressed, external enemies appeared prepared to invade France to restore the French monarchy. They were resisted by a mixture of what remained of the old professional army and volunteers (it was these, not the levée en masse army that won the battle of Valmy and saved the Revolution). By March 1793 France was at war with Austria, Prussia, Spain, Britain, Piedmont and the United Provinces: it was recognised that volunteering could no longer be relied upon, and the National Convention called upon each French département to supply a quota of recruits (totaling about 300,000); with the means of selection unspecified. By some accounts, only about half this number appears to have been actually raised, bringing the army strength up to about 645,000 in mid-1793, and the military situation continued to worsen (not helped by internal difficulties such as the revolt in the Vendée which were in part triggered by this re-introduction of conscription).

In response to this, a levée en masse was decreed by the National Convention on 23 August 1793 in ringing terms, beginning:

From this moment until such time as its enemies shall have been driven from the soil of the Republic, all Frenchmen are in permanent requisition for the services of the armies. The young men shall fight; the married men shall forge arms and transport provisions; the women shall make tents and clothes and shall serve in the hospitals; the children shall turn linen into lint; the old men shall betake themselves to the public squares in order to arouse the courage of the warriors and preach hatred of kings and the unity of the Republic.

All unmarried able-bodied men between 18 and 25 were requisitioned with immediate effect for military service. This significantly increased the number of men in the army, reaching a peak of about 1,500,000 in September 1794, although the actual fighting strength probably peaked at no more than 800,000. In addition, as the decree suggests, much of the civilian population was turned towards supporting the armies through armaments production and other war industries as well as supplying food and provisions to the front. For all the rhetoric, the levée en masse was not popular; desertion and evasion were high. But the effort was sufficient to turn the tide of the war, and there was no need for any further conscription until 1797, when a more systematic system of annual intake was instituted.

Though not a novel idea—cf. thinkers as diverse as Plato, above and the lawyer and linguist Sir William Jones (who thought every adult male should be armed with a musket at public expense)—the actual practice of a levée en masse was rare before the French Revolution. The French levée was a key development in modern warfare and would lead to steadily larger armies with each successive war - culminating in the enormous bloodbaths of World Wars One and Two during the first half of the 20th century. But it was the Prussians in the wake of their defeat by Napoleon who made the crucial improvement of systematic short-term peace-time conscription to create large numbers of trained men who could be mobilised on the outbreak of war. Unfortunately, the advantage this gave to the first to mobilise did nothing to make war less likely.