Levée en Masse

Read that decree again slowly, because it is one of the most important sentences in modern history and it is usually filed under military administration.

It does not conscript an age cohort. It requisitions everyone, permanently, until the state says otherwise. The text goes on to allocate roles: young men to fight, married men to forge weapons and move supplies, women to make tents and serve in hospitals, children to tear old linen into bandages, old men to be carried into the squares to preach hatred of kings. Public buildings become barracks, cellars are dug up for saltpetre, the nation's horses are taken.

Before 1793, European wars were fought by professional armies of limited size, paid for out of a treasury, and a peasant might not notice one had happened until the foragers arrived. After 1793 the entire human and material stock of a society is a war resource by default. Everything that follows in this chronicle's fourth movement (the school of chapter 13, the racial ideology of chapter 14, the two industrial wars) is downstream of that redefinition.

Why the Republic did it

Not from theory. From panic.

By the spring of 1793 revolutionary France was at war with Austria, Prussia, Britain, Spain, the Dutch Republic and Sardinia; the Vendée was in armed revolt; Lyon, Marseille and Toulon were in rebellion, with Toulon handed to a British fleet; and the old royal officer corps had substantially emigrated. An earlier levy of 300,000 men in February had itself helped ignite the Vendée.

The Convention's answer was to convert a crisis of manpower into a claim about who the army was. If sovereignty resides in the nation, then defending the nation is not a service the citizen sells; it is a duty the nation may command. Lazare Carnot, the "organiser of victory," built the machinery: fourteen armies, the amalgamation of raw volunteers with surviving regulars, promotion by demonstrated competence rather than birth, and requisitioned industry. By 1794 France had put something on the order of 750,000 men under arms, far beyond anything its rivals could match.¹

The word for the human side of the method was the amalgame: instead of leaving the enthusiastic but untrained volunteers of 1791 and 1792 in their own battalions, Carnot brigaded them with the remnants of the old royal line regiments, so that discipline and conviction were made to teach each other. The material side was mobilised with the same totality the decree had announced. Paris became an arsenal; church bells came down to be recast as cannon; requisitioned labour scraped saltpetre from cellar walls; the Republic's scientists, Monge and Berthollet among them, wrote crash manuals on steel-making and gunpowder; and at Fleurus in June 1794 a French observation balloon hung over the battlefield, the first military aircraft in European history. Little of this was efficient by later standards. All of it established the principle: in wartime there is no civilian economy, only the war economy and its temporary remainders.

Napoleon industrialises it

What the Republic improvised, Napoleon systematised. The 1798 Jourdan law made conscription a permanent institution with annual classes and registers, and its first article stated the doctrine flat: every Frenchman is a soldier and owes himself to the defence of the fatherland. The corps system let very large forces move separately and concentrate for battle. Living off the requisitioned countryside let armies move faster than supply trains allowed. Promotion remained relatively open, which meant competence at the top and motivated soldiers below.

The scale of the extraction can be stated precisely, because extraction requires ledgers. Between 1800 and 1814 the Empire's prefects inducted somewhere around two million Frenchmen, drawn by lot from annual classes of twenty-year-olds whose names the state now knew. The ledgers also record what the population thought of it: young men who cut off trigger fingers or had front teeth pulled (a soldier needed them to tear open a paper cartridge); waves of suspiciously timed marriages, since married men were exempt; whole cohorts of réfractaires hiding in the woods and uplands, fed by villages that regarded them as sons rather than criminals. The state's reply was administrative rather than rhetorical: mobile columns, gendarmes, and garnisaires, soldiers billeted at a defaulting family's expense until the missing man presented himself. By about 1810 the machine had substantially won; evasion rates that had approached a third of some early levies fell to a few per cent. Alan Forrest's history of the conscripts and deserters draws the conclusion this chronicle needs: universal military service was the most sustained encounter the modern state ever had with its own rural population, and the state built much of its modern nervous system in the course of winning it.²

The results between 1805 and 1807 (Ulm, Austerlitz, Jena–Auerstedt, Friedland) were not a series of lucky days. They were a professional eighteenth-century military culture meeting a mobilised nineteenth-century one.

The cost is the part usually left out. The Napoleonic wars killed somewhere between three and six million people; the 1812 Russian campaign alone destroyed an army of around 600,000. In Spain, a French army that had beaten every conventional force in Europe was ground down by a popular insurgency that gave the world the word guerrilla, and Goya recorded what counter-insurgency looked like from underneath.

The most exact witness to what had changed was a young Prussian officer taken prisoner when his army collapsed in 1806. Carl von Clausewitz spent the rest of his life measuring the event, and On War reports the finding without decoration: in 1793 a force appeared that beggared all imagination, because war had suddenly become again "the business of the people", thirty million of them, each now counting himself a citizen of the state. Once the population participates, he argued, war tends toward its absolute form, because everything that had kept eighteenth-century wars small (dynastic aims, expensive mercenaries, the irrelevance of the subject population) is gone. A cabinet fighting for a province can stop; a nation fighting for its existence, or taught that it is, cannot.³ Every government in Europe now faced the choice Clausewitz's own had already failed: match the mobilisation, or be destroyed by it.

The reaction, which is the real subject

On 14 October 1806, Napoleon destroyed the Prussian army at Jena and Auerstedt in a single day. Prussia (the model military state of the eighteenth century, Frederick the Great's own instrument) lost half its territory, was occupied, and was made to pay an indemnity.

The Prussian response is the hinge of this chapter. A group of reformers around Stein, Hardenberg, Scharnhorst and Gneisenau concluded that Prussia had lost because France had something Prussia did not: a population that considered the state its own. French soldiers could be trusted to forage and skirmish without deserting because they believed they were the nation. Prussian soldiers, drilled subjects of a monarch, could not.

So the reformers proposed to manufacture one. Serfdom was abolished in 1807; corporal punishment in the army was restricted; the officer corps was opened, in principle, to merit; the Krümper system rotated men rapidly through the 42,000-man army that the treaty with Napoleon permitted, quietly training a reserve the treaty had not imagined; municipal self-government was introduced. And, crucially for chapter 13, a wholesale reconstruction of education was set in motion under Wilhelm von Humboldt.⁴

The test came in 1813, and the manufactured nation worked. In December 1812 General Yorck, commanding the Prussian corps attached to Napoleon's wrecked Grande Armée, signed a convention of neutrality with the Russians at Tauroggen on his own authority: an army deciding that it answered to the nation before it answered to the king, which was precisely the transfer of loyalty the reforms had, half deliberately, engineered. In March 1813 the cornered king issued the appeal An Mein Volk, "to my people", a phrase no Prussian monarch had previously needed; a Landwehr edict conscripted the male population into territorial regiments; the Iron Cross was instituted, a decoration open for the first time to every rank. Prussia put something like six per cent of its entire population under arms that year, a proportion the age had never seen, and the propaganda of the wars of liberation supplied the founding myth in a phrase repeated for a century: the king called, and all, all came. Afterwards the monarchy quietly took back what it could. The promised constitution was withheld for a generation, the Landwehr was brought to heel, the patriotic student societies were policed. A nation had been manufactured for war and was expected to demobilise politically. It did not entirely comply, which is a large part of the history of the nineteenth century.

Nationalism is written in an occupied city

In the winter of 1807–08, in Berlin, under French occupation, the philosopher Johann Gottlieb Fichte delivered his Addresses to the German Nation. It is one of the founding texts of modern nationalism, and its structure is worth stating precisely.

Fichte addresses a nation that does not politically exist: there is no Germany, only a scatter of states, some of them Napoleon's clients. He locates its reality instead in language: Germans, he argues, speak an original, unbroken tongue and therefore constitute an Urvolk, an original people, in contrast to those whose languages are derived. And he proposes a remedy: a completely new national education, applied to every child, to produce Germans where there had been Saxons, Bavarians and Prussians. The pedagogy he recommended was adapted from the Swiss reformer Pestalozzi, and it was to be total: children withdrawn from the formative influence of their families into national schools, where the new German could be built before the old, local human being had time to be transmitted.⁵

Three features of that argument recur everywhere afterwards. The nation is defined against an occupier or rival. It is grounded in something claimed as primordial (language, blood, soil) rather than in a political agreement. And it is to be produced by schooling children, which is an admission that it does not yet exist.

The other pieces arrive on the same schedule. Herder had already supplied the idea of the Volk with its own spirit expressed in folk song, and the Grimm brothers went out collecting the tales that would prove it, heavily edited for publication, which is the standard operating procedure of national tradition. Ernst Moritz Arndt asked what the German's fatherland was and answered: as far as the German tongue is heard. In 1817 students burned "un-German" books at the Wartburg. Turnvater Jahn organised gymnastics clubs to build the bodies of the coming nation.

Traditions manufactured to order

Almost everything that now signals ancient national identity in Europe dates from this period or later, and the scholarship on this is settled. Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger's The Invention of Tradition assembled the cases: the Scottish clan tartan system, largely a nineteenth-century commercial and romantic construction; most royal ceremonial, redesigned in the late nineteenth century for mass audiences; national anthems, flags and founding myths, mostly nineteenth-century products.⁶

Benedict Anderson gave the mechanism its name: the nation as an imagined community, imagined because no member will ever meet most of the others, yet each believes in a shared, simultaneous life with them. What made that belief technically possible was print capitalism: newspapers and novels in a standardised vernacular, read by strangers on the same morning.⁷ Ernest Gellner put the causal claim more bluntly still: nationalism is not the awakening of nations to self-consciousness, it invents nations where they do not exist, and it does so because industrial society requires a mobile, literate, culturally standardised population.⁸

The Italian statesman Massimo d'Azeglio, after unification, is supposed to have said that Italy having been made, it remained to make Italians. Whether or not he said it in those words, it is an exact description of the programme, and the instrument for making them was the school.

The paperwork of the nation

Notice what every stage of this story has quietly required. You cannot requisition all Frenchmen until you know who the Frenchmen are. An annual conscription class presupposes that every birth in the country is registered, with a date; a lottery over names presupposes lists of names, which presupposes fixed surnames and fixed addresses; hunting a réfractaire presupposes knowing which household owes a son. The Revolution took the registers of birth, marriage and death away from the parish priest in 1792 and gave them to the mayor, and the Napoleonic administration perfected the rest of the machinery: the census, the cadastre, the prefect, the dossier. James C. Scott's name for the general project is legibility: the long effort by which states simplified the societies beneath them (standard names, standard measures, standard language, mapped land) into a form that could be read from the capital, and therefore taxed and conscripted from it. Charles Tilly compressed the causal history into an aphorism: war made the state, and the state made war. The nation in arms is the point where those two machines fuse, because the same registry that finds the conscript delivers the schoolchild.⁹

Which is why the school and the barracks kept appearing together for the next hundred years. Eugen Weber's Peasants into Frenchmen established the astonishing fact that France itself was not culturally French until late in the nineteenth century: around 1870, by official surveys, French was a foreign or second language for something approaching half the citizens of France. The Third Republic closed the gap with exactly two instruments, the compulsory school and universal military service, the barracks functioning as a second school in uniform, mixing Bretons, Gascons and Provençaux into one language, one map and one story. The nation that marched in 1914 believing it was ancient had, in large part, been assembled within living memory by those two institutions.¹⁰

And the template travelled, because templates that win wars always do. After 1870, when Prussia's short-service conscripts and reserves crushed France's long-service professional army in a matter of weeks, every continental power adopted the Prussian model: mass conscription, trained reserves, a general staff, and railway timetables to deliver the whole nation to the frontier on schedule. Meiji Japan promulgated universal conscription in 1873 as one of the first acts of its self-modernisation, importing Prussian advisers along with the doctrine; Egypt, the Ottoman empire and the new Latin American republics built their own versions; by 1914 the mobilisation timetable had become so decisive that it constrained the diplomacy meant to control it. Chapter 14 follows what happened when the mobilised nations finally met each other. And when this administrative technology reached Rwanda, it arrived in the form chapter 24 describes: a census, and an identity card with a category printed on it. The paperwork of the nation does not care what the category is.

Forward

By 1815 the template is complete and available for export. A state that wants to survive needs a nation; a nation requires a shared language, a shared story and a shared enemy; and the way to produce all three in a population that does not yet have them is to take the children and teach them.

That is not a cynical reading imposed afterwards. It is what the reformers said they were doing, in print, at the time. Chapter 13 examines the institution they built.

Footnotes

1. Decree of 23 August 1793, text in J. M. Thompson, French Revolution Documents (Oxford: Blackwell, 1948). On the military transformation, Jean-Paul Bertaud, The Army of the French Revolution (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1988), and David A. Bell, The First Total War (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2007). ↩
2. Alan Forrest, Conscripts and Deserters: The Army and French Society during the Revolution and Empire (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989); Isser Woloch, "Napoleonic Conscription: State Power and Civil Society," Past & Present 111 (1986). ↩
3. Carl von Clausewitz, Vom Kriege (Berlin, 1832); in English, On War, trans. Michael Howard and Peter Paret (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1976), book VIII, ch. 3B, on the transformation of war after 1793. ↩
4. Peter Paret, Yorck and the Era of Prussian Reform, 1807–1815 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1966); Christopher Clark, Iron Kingdom: The Rise and Downfall of Prussia, 1600–1947 (London: Allen Lane, 2006), ch. 10. ↩
5. Johann Gottlieb Fichte, Reden an die deutsche Nation (Berlin, 1808), esp. addresses 2, 4 and 7; the debt to Pestalozzi is explicit in the addresses on education. ↩
6. Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger (eds.), The Invention of Tradition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), esp. Hugh Trevor-Roper on Highland tradition and David Cannadine on royal ritual. ↩
7. Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities, rev. ed. (London: Verso, 1991), chs. 2–3. ↩
8. Ernest Gellner, Nations and Nationalism (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1983), p. 49 and ch. 3. ↩
9. James C. Scott, Seeing Like a State (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998), part 1; Charles Tilly, Coercion, Capital, and European States, AD 990–1992 (Oxford: Blackwell, rev. ed. 1992); the aphorism is from Tilly's essay "Reflections on the History of European State-Making," in Tilly (ed.), The Formation of National States in Western Europe (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1975). ↩
10. Eugen Weber, Peasants into Frenchmen: The Modernization of Rural France, 1870–1914 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1976), esp. the chapters on schooling and military service. ↩