"The Concept of ‘Total War’ in the Revolutionary–Napoleonic" Topic

…Period.

"On 23 August 1793 the National Convention decreed the levée enmasse. This was the declaration of war on a new scale, in two quitedistinct ways. The term of course means mass conscription, which was first embodied by the revolutionary decree of February 1793, when the Convention had called for 350 000 men – a levée in the usually understood sense. As R. R. Palmer pointed out long ago, however, levée has another, more profound meaning, that of a mass rising, a phenomenon quite the reverse of conscription. The latter sense was what was intended in the
decree of 23 August. The French were exhorted to rise up as one nation, to do more than render unto Paris their sons for the front, but for all and sundry to join in a collective war effort. Married men were to make munitions;
women were to be nurses and seamstresses for the armies; old men were to tell tales in the market place of heroic deeds, thus arousing loyalty to the republic as the children listened and learned.

These are two faces of the hydra head of total war: on the one hand the relentless imposition of the machinery of the bureaucratic state on hitherto seemingly unassailable hinterlands; on the other, the hope that none of this will be needed, that the people will rise spontaneously as one, in a people's war, without coercion, without resistance
or recalcitrance. The first happened; the second did not, if not for …"
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Amicalement
Armand

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Amicalement
Armand