Levée en masse
The Levée en masse ( French for 'mass conscription ') was a form of conscription that was introduced in France in 1793 during the First Coalition War .
Historical background
After the Battle of Valmy on September 20, 1792, the French revolutionary army, composed of volunteers and active royal soldiers, the premier amalgam under General Dumouriez conquered the Austrian Netherlands . In addition, Savoy was annexed by the French Republic. The turning point came in 1793 when Great Britain joined the coalition in February and a Prussian - Austrian counter-offensive, which had been underway since March 1793, pushed the revolutionary army back beyond the borders of France. Only the numerous frontier forts built by Vauban slowed the advance of the coalition troops. In addition to the external threat to the French Republic, there were internal unrest, such as the royalist uprising in the Vendée .
Against this background, Lazare Carnot proposed the introduction of the Levée en masse to the Welfare Committee . On August 23, 1793, the Levée order was passed by the National Convention and the Welfare Committee. The Levée en masse obliged all unmarried men between the ages of 18 and 25 to do military service. As a result, the French army with a total population of 25 million could be enlarged to a strength of one million soldiers within a short time, which contributed significantly to France's victory in the First Coalition War. The conscripts made up for their lack of combat experience with their patriotic motivation. War losses and desertions let the French army shrink to a strength of 400,000 men by 1796, which roughly corresponded to the size of the standing army under Louis XIV .
Conscription was modified in 1798 by the Jourdan Law . All young men were required to register. The government set the quota for recruiting annually. This created the conditions for the huge armies of the Napoleonic Wars, which enabled Napoleon to conquer large parts of Western and Central Europe. From 1806 to 1814 alone, two million French served under Napoleon, of whom more than 400,000 were killed. The death rate among French soldiers in the Napoleonic wars was higher than in the First World War .
The levée en masse served as a model for other European countries to introduce conscription. This happened in Prussia with the army reform of 1814 . The democratic movement in Germany was inspired by the Levée en masse in the March Revolution of 1848 to set up people's and vigilante groups .
See also: French Revolution
Hague Land Warfare Regulations
According to Art. 2 of the Hague Land Warfare Regulations , civilians as well as regular troops of a warring party are combatants in an international armed conflict if the population of an unoccupied area takes up arms of their own accord when the enemy approaches, in order to fight the invading troops without time to have had to organize like regular troops. This mass uprising (in the French text of the treaty: “Levée en masse”) is considered belligerent if the individual fighter wields his weapons openly and observes the laws and customs of war.
Behind this is the idea of the “citoyen soldat”, developed since the French Revolution, who is called to arms by his state and who opposes the enemy because he sees himself as part of the political community and wants to defend its ideals. In this view, war is no longer just the armed confrontation of rulers or states with mercenary armies, but also a matter of the people who are resisting foreign rule. The resistance struggle for political and cultural independence has been widely recognized as a legitimate motive for waging war since the Hague Land Warfare Regulations.
literature
- Ambrogio A. Caiani: Levée en Masse. In: Institute for European History (Mainz) (Ed.): European History Online . 2011, accessed November 28, 2011.
- Gerd Krumeich : On the development of the “nation armée” in France up to the First World War. In: Roland G. Förster (ed.): The conscription. Origin, manifestations and politico-military effect (= contributions to military history. Vol. 43). R. Oldenbourg Verlag, Munich 1994, ISBN 3-486-56042-5 , pp. 133-145.
- Scott Lytle: Robespierre , Danton and the Levée en masse. In: The Journal of Modern History. Vol. 30, No. 4, 1958, ISSN 0022-2801 , pp. 325-337.
