French Military Institutions before the Franco-Prussian War

Abstract

THE great paradox of military legislation in the nineteenth century is that the principle of the nation-in-arms established by the French Revolution in I793 with the levee en masse was subsequently developed by Prussia but repudiated by the country of its birth.1 Only after the catastrophic defeats of I870 did the French again acknowledge the importance of mass in war. The law of i872 marked the first step toward the re-establishment of the armed nation. However, opposition remained strong, and not until I905, and even then only because of the political upheaval of the Dreyfus affair, could parliament make military service really equal and compulsory for all. The National Assembly in i872 and, a generation later, the parliament of the Coalition des gauches carefully examined the reasons why the leve'e en masse of the Revolution had been abandoned.2 The reasons were, so they concluded, distrust of the masses and of the democratic and equalitarian tendencies of the national army born of Revolutionary enthusiasm. Adolphe Thiers, first president of the Third Republic, summed up this attitude by saying that it was not safe to place a gun on the shoulder of every Socialist. With the memories of the Paris Commune fresh in their minds many Frenchmen readily agreed. Previous regimes, plagued by memories of other mob violence, had professed even more extreme views. They had taken great care to organize politically reliable troops useful for conducting foreign wars or for suppressing revolutions at home. From i 8o5, when Napoleon I abolished the system of the nation-in-arms, to I9o5, when it was fully restored, France had different military organizations depending on the interests of the ruling classes or individuals. Prior to the rise of national armies there were two types of soldiers,