Abstract
French consumption and depictions of the American Revolution had fueled the desire and likelihood of creating a citizen army in France. Representations of the American Revolution showcased a working citizen army in the modern world, encouraged civilians to see military service in a positive light, and recast the French army as an army of liberty that allied with citizen forces to repulse a tyrant. French writers folded American Revolutionary imagery and myths into the ongoing discussions about improvements for the army and society, confirming that reformers were on the right path. Since the Seven Years’ War, officers of the French line army had become more focused on the status and happiness of soldiers, and saw them as the key to reforming the French army into a more ‘natural’ fighting force, fueled by patriotism and love of country. Reforming the army would likewise lead to a more virtuous society. By the 1780s, officers’ and civilians’ opinions of soldiers had improved, bringing the French army and civilian society into greater familiarity with and closer proximity to the citizen-army model they had admired in ancient societies. With the American example confirming their suspicions, civilian and military writers had begun to see the citizen army not just as a lovely dream, but an actual possibility.
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Notes
Rafe Blaufarb, The French Army, 1750–1820: Careers, Talent, Merit (New York: Manchester University Press, 2002), 22–4;
Jay M. Smith, The Culture of Merit: nobility, royal service, and the making of absolute monarchy in France, 1600–1789 (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1996), 243–4.
Albert Latreille, L’Armée et la Nation à la fin de l’Ancien Régime: Les derniers Ministres de la Guerre de la Monarchie (Paris, 1914), 3–22.
David D. Bien, ‘La réaction aristocratique avant 1789: l’exemple de l’armée’ Annales, E.S.C. 29 (1974): 23–48, 505–34; see also Blaufarb, The French Army, 34–5.
Colin Jones, ‘Bourgeois Revolution Revivified: 1789 and social change,’ in The French Revolution: Recent Debates and New Controversies, ed. Gary Kates (New York: Routledge, 1998), 94.
Munro Price, ‘Politics: Louis XIV’ in Old Regime France ed. William Doyle (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), 241, 244.
For more on the organization and purpose of the Council of War, see Howard Brown, War, Revolution, and the Bureaucratic State (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995), 19–20.
Alan Forrest, Paris, the Provinces, and the French Revolution (New York, Oxford University Press, 2004), 59;
Jacques Godechot, The Taking of the Bastille July 14th, 1789 trans. Jean Stewart (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1970), 128.
Jean Paul Bertaud, La Révolution Armée: Les soldats-citoyens et la Révolution française (Paris, 1979), 41–2.
Jacques Godechot views the American Revolution as a significant contributor to the soldiers’ new attitudes toward civilians. See Godechot, The Taking of the Bastille, 131; Forrest McDonald saw a direct correlation between where American Revolutionary veterans returned to France to the regions that saw the most violence during the French Revolution. Forrest McDonald, ‘The Relation of the French Peasant Veterans of the American Revolution to the Fall of Feudalism in France 1789–1792,’ Agricultural History Magazine 51 (1951): 151–61.
For more on the Cahiers de Doléances and the milice, see Annie Crépin, Défendre la France: Les Français, la guerre et le service militaire, de la guerre de Sept Ans à Verdun (Presses Universitaires de Rennes, 2005), 49–70.
Hervé Leuwers, ‘Les formes de la Citoyenneté (1789–1791)’ in Histoire des provinces français du Nord: La Révolution et L’Empire Le Nord-Pas-de-Calais entre Révolution et Contre-Révolution, eds Annie Crépin, Hervé Leuwers, Alain Lottin, Dominique Rosselle (Artois Press Université 2008), 50–1.
SHD, Vincennes, A454, Lille, 27 July 1789; For more examples of communities who followed a similar pattern as Lille, see Godechot, The Taking of the Bastille, 132–3; for more on the creation of the National Guard in the provinces, see Roger Dupuy, La garde nationale, 1789–1872 (Gallimard, 2010), 66–87.
Lucien de Chilly, Le premier ministre constitutionnel de la guerre: La Tour du Pin. Les origines de l’armée nouvelle sous la constitution (Paris, 1909), 39.
Thomas Hippler, Citizens, Soldiers and National Armies: Military service in France and Germany, 1789–1830 (New York: Routledge, 2008), 46, 49–50, 62–3.
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© 2015 Julia Osman
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Osman, J. (2015). Aristocratic Rupture. In: Citizen Soldiers and the Key to the Bastille. War, Culture and Society, 1750–1850. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137486240_6
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137486240_6
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