Levée en Masse 1793: Revolutionary France Drafts an Entire Nation

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Before the French Revolution, Europe fought cabinet wars with small professional armies, and French peasants hated the royal militia, which made parishes draw lots to send men. The National Assembly abolished it in 1789. That December, Edmond Louis Alexis Dubois-Crancé argued for a people's army raised by universal conscription: a subject owed the king nothing, but a citizen owned the nation and had to defend it. By 1793 France was at war with Austria, Prussia, Britain, Spain, Piedmont and the Dutch Republic. A February levy of 300,000 men set off revolt in the Catholic Vendée, and the fall of Mainz in July left the road to Paris open.

The decree of August 23, 1793, drafted by men including Bertrand Barère and Lazare Carnot, placed all French people in permanent requisition. Unmarried men aged 18 to 25 went to battle, married men forged weapons and hauled food, women made tents and uniforms, and old men were sent to public squares to preach hatred of kings. Against roughly 87,000 coalition troops France authorized 450,000 men, and realistic estimates put about 800,000 available. Untrained conscripts attacked in massive columns, while battlefield promotion built the officer corps Napoleon later inherited.

• Citizens were ordered to wash cellar soil in lye to extract saltpeter for gunpowder while British ships blockaded imports.
• Army ledgers were padded with the hospitalized, the captured, deserters and dead men kept on the payroll.
• Article 6 banned substitutes, yet wealthy men paid poor men to serve and literate officials won exemptions.
• Carnot reported 175,000 known deserters in 1800, and some regions saw desertion near 60 percent.
• In 1945 Hitler raised the Volkssturm of boys and old men over Albert Speer's objections, with Joseph Goebbels in support.