From Subjects to Citizens

At Jemappes on 6 November 1792, the French victory, following Valmy in September, helped save the Revolution and allowed French armies temporarily to occupy foreign territory. The force was not yet a finished national army. It combined volunteers and line soldiers, political enthusiasm and inherited expertise: the unstable mixture from which later forms of national service would emerge. 

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Eight years later, at about three o’clock on the afternoon of 14 June 1800, the battle of Marengo appeared lost. The Austrian army had broken out from Alessandria in unexpected strength, driven the French from their original position, and forced them into a retreat across the Piedmontese plain. General Louis Desaix, returning after being sent away on a fruitless reconnaissance, found Bonaparte’s army bruised and falling back. His division gave it a fresh line. Auguste de Marmont concentrated the available guns; Desaix attacked and was killed; François-Étienne Kellermann’s cavalry then struck the Austrian column as it tried to resume its advance. A victory that seemed secure became a rout. The reversal owed much to veteran steadiness, competent staff work, concentrated artillery, independent initiative, and chance. There was nothing automatic about it.¹

Yet Marengo was also the work of a new military order. The men fighting there had been assembled by institutions created during the previous decade. Veterans of the Revolutionary Wars stood beside recent conscripts. Officers who had risen through service commanded formations combining inherited professional skills with the Revolution’s new language of national duty. The state that sent them across the Alps claimed their service in the name of France rather than the personal authority of a king. Bonaparte had not invented that army. He inherited it, concentrated it, and turned its victories into political legitimacy.²

The French Revolution’s transformation of war is often reduced to a simple equation: the levée en masse produced huge armies, which overwhelmed the smaller professional forces of dynastic Europe. The scale of mobilization mattered, but that equation confuses one emergency decree with a decade-long political and institutional change. Between 1789 and 1800, sovereignty passed from the king to the nation; bearing arms became an attribute of male citizenship; volunteers, requisition, and finally regular conscription translated that principle into different forms; and the army became one of the institutions through which a still-incomplete national community could be made. Military service promised participation, equality, and advancement. It also allowed the state to reach more deeply into households and villages, to discipline citizens in the name of their own sovereignty, and to turn an exceptional demand for national survival into a durable obligation. The revolutionary citizen entered public life with rights, but also with a musket and an increasingly insistent summons.

This is not an attempt to make citizenship a self-sufficient explanation of French victory. Demographic resources, strategic depth, logistics, command, and the changing conduct of the coalitions set the material and operational conditions of particular campaigns. The question here is narrower: how did the Revolution change the political legitimacy, administrative reach, and human resources through which France could mobilize and use those conditions? Marengo is the essay’s endpoint rather than its hidden explanation—a battlefield test of that inheritance, in which it met professional skill and contingency.

The King’s Soldiers

Before 1789, the Frenchman’s political relationship to the state ran upward toward the king. A subject owed obedience and received protection within a society of orders, corporate rights, provincial distinctions, and privilege. Royal authority could demand military resources, but it did not usually explain those demands through an equal obligation belonging to every member of a sovereign nation. The army was the king’s army, even when most of its rank and file were French. It contained foreign regiments, preserved aristocratic preference in its officer corps, and recruited long-service soldiers whose social and professional world stood apart from ordinary civil life.³

Compulsion was hardly unknown. The militia selected men from rural communities, while billeting, transport, taxation, and the other burdens of war reached far beyond the barracks. These obligations were conspicuously unequal. Exemptions protected privileged groups and favored occupations; communities bargained over quotas; substitution enabled men with resources to transfer the danger to poorer neighbors. The lottery made the militia an object of dread without making it a civic institution. Its victims experienced a royal burden imposed upon particular localities and households, rather than a common duty derived from political membership.⁴

The intellectual materials for a different army already existed. Rousseau gave the principle its most memorable form: every citizen should be a soldier by duty, and no one should become one by profession. Military reformers such as Guibert imagined that a national force, animated by public spirit, might surpass the rigid armies of courts. Joseph Servan proposed a citizen soldier integrated into civil society and subject to a more humane discipline. Reformers also criticized an officer system that frustrated talent and weakened professional competence. These ideas exposed the monarchy’s problems, but they could not by themselves create the nation whose army they invoked. As long as sovereignty remained embodied in the king and society remained legally divided by status, a citizen army was an aspiration without a constitutional foundation. Nor did 1789 simply implement a settled Enlightenment program. Revolutionary ideas acquired their force through institutional conflict and political participation; contemporaries selected and reworked older arguments while trying to solve crises for which they had no agreed plan.⁵

Sovereignty Changes Hands

The summer of 1789 supplied that foundation. The Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen announced equality before the law, located sovereignty in the nation, and defined law as the expression of the general will in whose formation citizens might participate. It also declared a public force necessary to guarantee rights and required common contributions for its maintenance. These clauses were not a conscription law, nor did they create an inclusive democracy: political participation and electoral rights remained restricted, were repeatedly remade, and excluded women. Taken together, however, they changed the grammar of legitimate coercion. Armed force belonged neither to a ruler’s household nor to a privileged military caste. It existed for the common advantage and drew its authority, money, and ultimately its personnel from the nation.⁶

The National Guard gave the principle an institutional and visible form. In Paris and across France, the municipal revolution armed citizens under local authority. Federation ceremonies joined guards from different provinces in public oaths and represented the country as a voluntary union of armed communities. Eligibility remained restricted, and possession of arms did not erase divisions between active and passive citizens, rich and poor, or men and women. Even so, the uniformed citizen became a central revolutionary figure. He claimed the capacity to defend order because he belonged to the political community that made the law.⁷

The regular army underwent a related change. Its soldiers no longer swore themselves simply into the service of a monarch. Their contract was increasingly understood as one with the nation, mediated by law and the state. The National Assembly initially resisted compulsory service and retained voluntary enlistment, yet it also declared personal participation in defense a civic duty. This apparent contradiction marked the unsettled meaning of revolutionary liberty. Citizens should willingly defend a community that was their own; a free nation ought not need the recruiting methods of despotism. Once war and rebellion made willingness insufficient, the same theory of popular sovereignty would justify compulsion on an unprecedented scale. Citizenship was thus learned as a practice before its implications were stable. Deputies learned to act for the nation in the Assembly; guardsmen enacted it through oaths and patrols; soldiers would enact it through enlistment, political speech, and obedience to laws presented as their own. Such participation was unequally available and did not make political authority fully democratic, but it could help produce revolutionary identity rather than merely express it.⁸

Citizenship also entered the army through advancement. The emigration and resignation of many noble officers opened opportunities, while the abolition of status privilege made merit and service more defensible grounds of command. The transformation was neither immediate nor complete. A substantial proportion of officers in the revolutionary armies had served before 1789, and military expertise could not be improvised by decree. Thousands nevertheless rose from the ranks during the 1790s. The resulting officer corps joined social mobility to professional experience, turning a career in arms into one of the Revolution’s most consequential forms of participation.⁹

War Makes the Citizen-Soldier

War converted constitutional principles into urgent choices. Its advocates in 1791 and early 1792 presented conflict as a way to expose treachery, restore national honor, spread liberty, or resolve the Revolution’s internal paralysis. The decision was reckless. France faced experienced enemies while its own army suffered from distrust, officer flight, indiscipline, and administrative confusion. Initial operations in the spring of 1792 ended in panic. Yet the invasion that followed also made military defense inseparable from the survival of the new political order. The soldier could now imagine that he defended laws in which he had a share, a homeland identified with liberty, and a nation threatened by kings. This fusion of politics and war encouraged escalation. Defeat threatened a social and constitutional order, while victory appeared capable of vindicating or exporting it. Enemies ceased to be merely rival governments and became enemies of liberty or, from the other side, agents of revolutionary subversion. The widening conflict was driven by this political dynamic as well as by increased French manpower.¹⁰

Successive calls for volunteers began this mobilization before the famous decree of August 1793. About 100,000 volunteers raised in 1791 entered battalions distinct from the old line army. Further levies followed as the crisis deepened. The distinction was politically charged: volunteers appeared to embody enthusiasm and civic virtue, while regulars carried the habits of royal service. In practice, the revolutionary army depended on both. Former royal soldiers supplied drill, technical knowledge, and combat experience. Artillerymen, engineers, noncommissioned officers, and many officers preserved professional continuities that patriotic rhetoric obscured. The victories at Valmy and Jemappes did not demonstrate that enthusiasm had made military craft obsolete.¹¹

The process known as amalgamation eventually mixed volunteer battalions with regular units. Its importance exceeded organization. Men recruited under different regimes, from different regions, and with different reputations learned to serve in common formations. Service could create new bonds among men who might otherwise never have met, without necessarily displacing local attachments. It also regularized the volunteers and altered the old soldiers. The line army’s knowledge survived, while its corporate separation from civilian society became harder to sustain. The citizen-soldier was therefore a hybrid: endowed with new claims to political membership and wider avenues of mobility, increasingly framed by national administration, yet trained and held together by much of the professional inheritance of the monarchy.

This hybrid character helps explain why the revolutionary armies cannot be understood as crowds whose fervor simply swept away professionals. Political conviction could encourage endurance, initiative, and acceptance of hardship. It could also disintegrate under hunger, defeat, unpaid wages, or an unpopular mission. Battlefield effectiveness required administration, officers, weapons, training, and cohesion; the material and operational circumstances of each campaign remained decisive. Numbers expanded the state’s strategic possibilities, but troops had to be organized before they could be useful. The Revolution’s achievement lay partly in joining new sources of manpower and legitimacy to surviving military skills. Its wars also spread the problem outward. French claims to fight for nations and peoples provoked resistance framed in similar terms, especially once liberation became occupation. National war helped generate counter-national war; France’s innovation altered the political vocabulary of its opponents as well as the composition of its own armies.¹²

A Nation in Permanent Requisition

By the summer of 1793, France faced invasion, civil war, political revolt, and economic crisis. An earlier levy of 300,000 men had produced resistance and helped ignite rebellion in the west. On 23 August, the National Convention answered with the levée en masse. Its opening declaration made the French people permanently available for military service until the enemy had been driven from the Republic’s territory. The decree then distributed labor across society: young men would fight; married men would manufacture arms and move supplies; women would make tents and clothing and serve in hospitals; children would turn linen into lint; and the old would be carried into public places to arouse courage and preach hatred of kings. It was a vision of total social mobilization in which age and gender assigned every person a wartime function.¹³

The decree’s political scope has often swallowed its administrative reality. The levée en masse did not establish a routine system in which each annual class of Frenchmen became liable for a fixed period of service. It was an exceptional response to national emergency. Actual incorporation concentrated on unmarried men and childless widowers between eighteen and twenty-five. The larger society was “in requisition,” but not every man became a soldier and the obligations of women, children, and the elderly were supporting rather than equal military roles. The decree dramatized the nation in arms more completely than it realized universal conscription.¹⁴

Even within the designated group, the state’s reach was uneven. Officials struggled to enumerate men, enforce departure, equip recruits, and prevent desertion. Local authorities might protect their own inhabitants, while families concealed sons or pleaded indispensable agricultural need. Hundreds of thousands were incorporated, while very large numbers evaded or deserted; surviving totals remain approximate because officials used shifting categories and could not count absentees reliably. What matters is that the Republic claimed men as citizens and then had to construct the administrative and coercive means to make that claim effective.¹⁵

Patriotism could nevertheless be real. Some soldiers’ letters, unit politics, ceremonies, and continued service under appalling conditions reveal commitments that cannot be reduced to fear of punishment. The defensive struggle of 1793–94 fused the Republic with the patrie for many combatants. The language of liberty allowed hardship to become sacrifice and obedience to become an act performed for one’s own political community. Jacobin civic culture gave self-denial a positive meaning: the individual could realize himself through service to a nation, republic, or humanity larger than himself. It gave recruits and veterans a standard by which to judge officers, commissaries, and representatives. Men who regarded themselves as citizens did not necessarily obey less; they could expect obedience to be justified in different terms. This ideal could sustain genuine courage while also making dissent appear selfish or morally corrupt.¹⁶

Coercion was equally real. Gendarmes hunted deserters. Municipalities assembled contingents under pressure. Representatives on mission demanded supplies and punished resistance. The Republic’s appeal to universal principle intensified rather than eliminated these practices, because refusal could now be described as betrayal of the collective self. A monarchy compelled subjects for reasons of state; the Republic compelled citizens in the name of a sovereign nation to which they supposedly belonged. Political participation and state extraction grew together.

The combination was especially powerful because emergency became a school of administration. Requisition required lists, certificates, correspondence, inspections, routes, depots, and judgments about eligibility. It brought central demands into direct negotiation and conflict with mayors, districts, families, and individuals. The resulting apparatus was often improvised and corrupt, yet it accustomed both government and population to the idea that military need could classify society and assign duties across it. The levée en masse was therefore transformative even though it was not modern conscription. It made national survival a comprehensive social claim and revealed the machinery needed to enforce it.

The Army as a School of the Nation

The nation invoked by these decrees was not already a uniform community waiting to be mobilized. France remained divided by language, region, religion, occupation, wealth, and memories of provincial autonomy. Revolutionary leaders tried to create common identity through schools, festivals, symbols, newspapers, songs, oaths, and a new political vocabulary. The army gathered many of these practices in concentrated form. Recruits encountered national law, tricolor insignia, civic ceremonies, political speeches, and comrades from distant departments. Some learned French in service. For some men, the routines of the unit supplied an experience of the Republic before it became a fully articulated abstraction; for others, local, religious, and family loyalties remained at least as immediate. The state’s project was concentrated and ambitious, but its reception varied sharply across armies, units, campaigns, and individuals.¹⁷

Political education was organized, especially during the emergency of 1793–94, but it was neither uniform in reach nor demonstrably effective in the same way everywhere. Newspapers were read aloud; songs and celebrations translated political principles into shared emotion; clubs and meetings allowed some soldiers to debate events; representatives and commissioners explained policy and watched loyalty. Such practices were instruments of persuasion and surveillance, not proof that every recruit absorbed a finished ideology. They could invite men to act as political subjects—to petition, denounce, elect in certain contexts, praise civic virtue, and condemn aristocracy or treason. Revolutionary festivals operated in the same fashion beyond the army, arranging bodies, symbols, and collective memory so that participants might experience an abstract nation as a visible community. The army could therefore function as one of the Revolution’s “schools”: some of its members rehearsed national membership as conduct, while the institution also tried to enforce the unity it celebrated. ¹⁸

Discipline posed the central paradox. The citizen-soldier was imagined as a man who obeyed from reason and consent, recognizing military necessity as part of the common good. His obedience was meant to be self-willed rather than servile. Armies, however, cannot negotiate every order, and campaigns made deliberative ideals collide with hierarchy, punishment, fatigue, and fear. Revolutionary commanders struggled to distinguish civic vigilance from insubordination. Over time, military discipline recovered much of its authority, but it did so inside a changed moral framework. An officer increasingly commanded citizens whose dignity he was expected to recognize, even when the practical balance favored command.¹⁹

Promotion offered a more tangible experience of the new order. The rapid expansion of the army, wartime losses, and the opening of careers created thousands of opportunities for men of modest origin. Talent, courage, literacy, patronage, political reliability, and luck all played roles. The outcome was never a pure meritocracy, yet it sharply widened access to command. By the middle of the decade, the Republic combined citizen rank and file with an increasingly seasoned officer corps, much of it formed through war. Bonaparte himself rose within this environment, though his technical education and connections remind us that revolutionary opportunity built upon inherited skills as well as demolished privilege.²⁰

Service also nationalized through mixture. The amalgamation of units, movement across fronts, and dispersal of recruits weakened the identification of battalions with a single locality. White uniforms and blue uniforms, regulars and volunteers, early enthusiasts and later requisitioned men were pressed into common structures. The process was neither gentle nor complete. Regional solidarities persisted, and veterans often despised newcomers. Still, the army made national unity a lived problem. It forced men to cooperate across divisions that revolutionary rhetoric declared obsolete, and its effectiveness depended on making that declaration partly true.

The Blood Tax

The equality of military duty gave the new system its legitimacy and supplied its most damaging criticism. Old Regime militia service had been hated because privilege and purchase distributed danger unfairly. Revolutionary law promised common obligation, but practice repeatedly recreated difference. Occupation, family status, official influence, physical standards, timing, and geography affected who actually departed. Later systems of replacement allowed wealthier men to pay substitutes. The language of equal citizenship did not prevent inequality; it made unequal sacrifice more visible and politically explosive.²¹

For families and villages, conscription was experienced less as constitutional theory than as the removal of labor, companionship, and future security. A son’s departure could threaten a harvest or a household economy. Long and indefinite service deepened resentment. Local resistance ranged from delayed paperwork and false medical claims to hiding, flight, desertion, and armed revolt. These actions do not prove the absence of national feeling. The same person might defend the Revolution in one moment and resist a levy in another. Citizens belonged simultaneously to families, communes, regions, occupations, churches, and the nation, and those obligations did not line up neatly.²²

Women’s place in the levée en masse made the gendered boundary of citizenship especially clear. The decree assigned women work essential to the war effort, from making clothing and tents to hospital service. Women also maintained households, negotiated with officials, petitioned for relatives, and bore the economic consequences of absence. They were therefore not merely passive auxiliaries: their practical and political activity made the limits placed on female citizenship visible and contestable. Yet military duty was becoming a privileged proof of male citizenship. The reciprocity between bearing arms and possessing political rights strengthened an account of the citizen as male, even as the Republic depended on women’s labor. Mobilization widened participation while helping to close one route to equality.²³

The national ideal was also more complete on paper than in social consciousness. Shared law and military service could accelerate integration, but they did not dissolve local languages or identities in a decade. Later French governments continued the work through schools, roads, markets, administration, and repeated conscription. The endurance of that long process warns against treating the revolutionary nation as a finished cause of mobilization. In important respects, mass politics and mass service produced the nation they claimed merely to summon. This does not make national allegiance fictitious. It means that “France” became consequential through repeated encounters with institutions—tax offices, elections, courts, festivals, schools, and recruiting authorities—that connected a distant political whole to ordinary life. Conscription was among the most forceful of those encounters because it attached national membership to a personal, measurable, and potentially fatal duty.²⁴

This incompleteness changes how nationalism should be understood. The revolutionary army did not require every soldier to possess an identical, fully articulated French identity. It required institutions capable of framing varied motives—defense of home, hatred of invasion, loyalty to comrades, hope of advancement, pay, adventure, fear of arrest—as service to the nation. Nationalism worked as a political language and administrative practice before it became a uniform inner conviction. It could include, persuade, and educate; it could also label reluctance as backwardness or treason.

The meaning of sacrifice shifted as French war aims changed. In 1793, defending the Republic’s territory against invasion gave the claim of necessity unusual force. Later victories carried armies beyond France’s frontiers. Liberation, security, indemnities, annexation, and conquest blurred together. Men still served under national law, but the relationship between their citizenship and the purposes of war grew harder to sustain. The same institutions that defended popular sovereignty made long campaigns of expansion possible. Citizenship transformed war without ensuring that citizens controlled it.

From Emergency to Institution

The emergency system could not provide a stable settlement. The first requisitioned cohorts remained in service for years, while casualties, sickness, desertion, and demobilization reduced the armies. The government repeatedly imposed demands for men. By the late 1790s, the problem was no longer how to announce a nation in arms but how to reproduce military manpower regularly. The solution came with the law sponsored by Jean-Baptiste Jourdan on 7 September 1798. It declared that every Frenchman was a soldier and owed himself to the defense of the patrie.²⁵

The law registered men in annual classes from the ages of twenty to twenty-five. Liability was general, while the legislature could determine how many from the eligible classes would actually be called. A nominal five-year maximum gave the obligation a more regular shape than the indefinite emergency requisition. This was the decisive institutional step toward modern conscription: recurring classification, selective annual incorporation, and an enduring legal claim upon the citizen’s body. It separated the principle of liability from the number required in a particular year. That distinction allowed governments to present service as universal even when only a fraction of eligible men entered the army, and it made the unused liability available for future crises. The levée en masse had proclaimed total mobilization; the Jourdan system sought to administer it.²⁶

Its early results were disappointing. Evasion remained widespread, local officials were unreliable, and the Directory lacked the authority and machinery to obtain every man it demanded. Yet failure should not obscure the magnitude of the claim. The law tied an individual’s age, residence, health, occupation, and family position to a national military ledger. It encouraged a chain of responsibility running from the central government through territorial administration to the commune and household. Napoleon would make that chain far more effective, combining lists, quotas, policing, and increasingly forceful supervision.²⁷

The burden continued to be described as a civic obligation even as its coercive face became unmistakable. Conscription could resemble a “blood tax,” assessed in bodies rather than money. That phrase captured both equality and extraction. Like taxation, the levy was supposed to fall according to general law for a common purpose; like taxation, it generated exemptions, bargaining, concealment, and resentment. The citizen’s formal equality before the state expanded the state’s capacity to count, compare, and claim him.

Napoleon did not discard the revolutionary military settlement. He regularized and redirected it. His armies inherited amalgamated formations, experienced cadres, open careers, national administration, and the principle of citizen liability. Imperial authority narrowed political participation and turned republican defense into repeated campaigns of conquest, but it continued to demand men through institutions whose legitimacy had been forged in the Revolution. The citizen-soldier survived the weakening of republican citizenship because compulsory service had become useful to the state in its own right.²⁸

Marengo’s Army

The Army of the Reserve illustrates, rather than exhaustively represents, the mature hybrid. Bonaparte’s government assembled it under conditions of secrecy and shortage, drew on experienced formations and newer levies, and moved it across the Alps with an operational boldness that belonged to a professional command system. Jourdan-law conscripts helped replenish the armies, but the levy did not translate mechanically into battlefield power. The force available at Marengo was smaller than administrative totals suggested, and its survival depended on veterans who had already endured years of revolutionary war.²⁹

The battle itself supplies a final warning against easy stories of mass. The Austrians achieved local superiority, surprised French assumptions, and drove the army back. The French recovered because dispersed forces returned at the critical moment, officers acted with initiative, infantry held long enough to counterattack, artillery was rapidly concentrated, and cavalry exploited a fleeting opportunity. Kellermann’s few hundred horsemen did not represent demographic weight. Their charge worked because training, timing, terrain, and Austrian disorder briefly aligned.³⁰

One revolutionary legacy stood behind that contingency. It had widened the pool of officers, fused volunteers and regulars, normalized the movement of men between civilian and military identities, and taught governments to treat manpower as a national resource. It had also created an army conscious of its political importance. Victorious generals possessed fame, armed followers, and claims to embody the nation more effectively than unstable civilian institutions. By 1799, the army had become a potential counterpower within the Republic. Bonaparte’s coup and subsequent victories showed the danger contained in the citizen army: a force created to defend popular sovereignty could help place political authority in the hands of its most successful commander.³¹

Marengo, therefore, belongs in the history of citizenship as well as operations. The men who recovered the field were neither the king’s detached professionals nor a spontaneous mass of armed patriots. They were products of a decade in which military service had become, for some men, a route into recognized national membership, an object of political instruction and supervision, a claim to status, and a compulsory obligation administered by the state. Their army could fight with the inherited skills of the old regime and the human resources of the new. It could also sustain a ruler who increasingly asked citizens to serve without allowing them meaningful control over the wars they fought.

Phase 2 of the Battle of Marengo (as shown in Napoleonic Battles: Campaign Marengo)

Conclusion

The Revolution changed the scale of European war because it first changed the political meaning and administrative organization of service. National sovereignty made the nation’s force public. The volunteer embodied civic enthusiasm; the requisitioned man revealed the demands hidden inside collective sovereignty; the conscript turned emergency into a recurring institution. Through them, the army could become one of the institutions through which French citizenship and national membership were made.

That achievement was inseparable from its contradictions. Equal duty coexisted with replacement and evasion. Political participation coexisted with military discipline. National belonging coexisted with regional resistance and gender exclusion. Defense of liberty created machinery suited to imperial conquest. The passage from subject to citizen did not free the individual from the state’s demands. It gave those demands a new legitimacy, a wider reach, and a language in which service could be experienced at once as right, sacrifice, opportunity, and compulsion. The armies of the French Revolution were revolutionary because they carried that settlement into war.

Battle of Jemappes (as shown in Napoleonic Battles: Republican Bayonets on the Rhine)

Napoleonic Battles: Republican Bayonets on the Rhine will be on sale September 21-27.

Notes

1. David G. Chandler, The Campaigns of Napoleon (New York: Scribner, 1973), 288–96; David Hollins, Marengo 1800: Napoleon’s Day of Fate, illustrated by Christa Hook (Oxford: Osprey, 2000), 16–18.↩︎

2. Alan Forrest, Napoleon’s Men: The Soldiers of the Revolution and Empire (London: Hambledon and London, 2002), 14–18; Jean-Paul Bertaud, The Army of the French Revolution: From Citizen-Soldiers to Instrument of Power, trans. Robert R. Palmer (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2019), 349.↩︎

3. Michael Rapport, Nationality and Citizenship in Revolutionary France: The Treatment of Foreigners 1789–1799 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2000), 20–21; William Doyle, The Oxford History of the French Revolution, 3rd ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018), chap. 1.↩︎

4. Alan Forrest, The Soldiers of the French Revolution (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1990), 38–41; Charles Esdaile, The Wars of the French Revolution, 1792–1801 (London: Routledge, 2019), 35, 50–52.↩︎

5. Bertaud, Army of the French Revolution, 40–41; Forrest, Soldiers of the French Revolution, 40–45; Martin Boycott-Brown, The Road to Rivoli: Napoleon’s First Campaign (London: Cassell, 2001), 49–53; Timothy Tackett, Becoming a Revolutionary: The Deputies of the French National Assembly and the Emergence of a Revolutionary Culture (1789–1790) (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2014), 13–14.↩︎

6. Lynn Hunt, ed., The French Revolution and Human Rights: A Brief Documentary History (Boston: Bedford Books, 1996), 78–79.↩︎

7. Georges Lefebvre, The French Revolution: From Its Origins to 1793, trans. Elizabeth Moss Evanson (London: Routledge, 2005), 120–34; Doyle, Oxford History, chap. 5.↩︎

8. Forrest, Soldiers of the French Revolution, 44–45; Boycott-Brown, Road to Rivoli, 49–53; Tackett, Becoming a Revolutionary, 13–14.↩︎

9. Samuel F. Scott, From Yorktown to Valmy: The Transformation of the French Army in an Age of Revolution (Niwot: University Press of Colorado, 1998), 159–82.↩︎

10. T. C. W. Blanning, The Origins of the French Revolutionary Wars (London: Longman, 1997), 99–100; Esdaile, Wars of the French Revolution, 13; David A. Bell, The First Total War: Napoleon’s Europe and the Birth of Warfare as We Know It (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2007), 7–11.↩︎

11. Scott, From Yorktown to Valmy, 159–76; John R. Elting, Swords Around a Throne: Napoleon’s Grande Armée (New York: Da Capo Press, 1997), 18, 23.↩︎

12. Bertaud, Army of the French Revolution, 229; Scott, From Yorktown to Valmy, 176–82; Bell, First Total War, 10.↩︎

13. Bertaud, Army of the French Revolution, 104–05; Isser Woloch, The New Regime: Transformations of the French Civic Order, 1789–1820s (New York: W. W. Norton, 1995), 385–86.↩︎

14. Alan Forrest, Conscripts and Deserters: The Army and French Society during the Revolution and Empire (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989), 20, 33–35; Woloch, New Regime, 385–86.↩︎

15. Woloch, New Regime, 380–90; Forrest, Conscripts and Deserters, 33–38.↩︎

16. Peter McPhee, Liberty or Death: The French Revolution (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2016), 211; John A. Lynn, The Bayonets of the Republic: Motivation and Tactics in the Army of Revolutionary France, 1791–94 (Abingdon: Routledge, 2019), 24, 43, 118–19, 142; Patrice L. R. Higonnet, Goodness Beyond Virtue: Jacobins during the French Revolution (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998), 1, 16.↩︎

17. David A. Bell, The Cult of the Nation in France: Inventing Nationalism, 1680–1800 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001), 2, 11–15; McPhee, Liberty or Death, 211.↩︎

18. Lynn, Bayonets of the Republic, 118–19; Lynn Hunt, Politics, Culture, and Class in the French Revolution (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2016), 2, 12–15; Mona Ozouf, Festivals and the French Revolution, trans. Alan Sheridan (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1988), 197–204.↩︎

19. Lynn, Bayonets of the Republic, 24, 43; Thomas Hippler, Citizens, Soldiers and National Armies: Military Service in France and Germany, 1789–1830 (London: Routledge, 2008), 1–7, 213–14.↩︎

20. Scott, From Yorktown to Valmy, 176–82; Boycott-Brown, Road to Rivoli, 49–53.↩︎

21. Forrest, Conscripts and Deserters, 35–38; Bertaud, Army of the French Revolution, 40–41.↩︎

22. Forrest, Conscripts and Deserters, 18–20, 33–38; Woloch, New Regime, 380–90.↩︎

23. Hippler, Citizens, Soldiers and National Armies, 7, 213–14; Rapport, Nationality and Citizenship, 7–8; Bertaud, Army of the French Revolution, 104–05.↩︎

24. Eric J. Hobsbawm, Nations and Nationalism since 1780: Programme, Myth, Reality, 2nd ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 10–20; Eugen Weber, Peasants into Frenchmen: The Modernization of Rural France, 1870–1914 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1976), 292–97; François Furet, Interpreting the French Revolution, trans. Elborg Forster (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 3–5.↩︎

25. Woloch, New Regime, 389–90, 432–33; Forrest, Conscripts and Deserters, 34–36.↩︎

26. Woloch, New Regime, 389–90; Forrest, Conscripts and Deserters, 34–36.↩︎

27. Forrest, Conscripts and Deserters, 18–20, 35–38; Forrest, Napoleon’s Men, 5–6.↩︎

28. Forrest, Napoleon’s Men, 5–18; Bertaud, Army of the French Revolution, 349.↩︎

29. Hollins, Marengo 1800, 16–18; Chandler, Campaigns of Napoleon, 288–91.↩︎

30. Chandler, Campaigns of Napoleon, 292–96; Hollins, Marengo 1800, 16–18.↩︎

31. Bertaud, Army of the French Revolution, 349; Forrest, Napoleon’s Men, 14–18.↩︎

Bibliography

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