Impact of Political and Industrial Revolutions^187this divergence; it developed as a result of hasty improvisation and
desperate actions in the face of overwhelming emergency.
Yet it is also the case that the market basis of British power, both
economic and military, reflected a bias apparent from Elizabethan
times or even earlier. As for the French, their revolutionary resort to
command mobilization was never complete, despite the rhetoric of- The French revolutionary governments’ mix between compul
sion and reliance upon a more or less free market for mobilizing
resources for state purposes was, in fact, a fairly faithful replica of
similar mixes the royal governments of Louis XIV and earlier French
kings had resorted to in time of foreign war and internal crisis. The
British-French divergence unquestionably had geographic roots and
reflected a recurrent difference between island and continental states
that can be traced as far back as the second millennium B.C.^6 But in the
late eighteenth century, the divergence became especially marked,
presumably because of the new horizons of the possible that ac
cumulating skills and a growing population created for both countries.
The French Formula for Relieving
Population PressureThe French revolutionary solution to an excess of manpower and a
deficiency of economically productive jobs did not emerge clearly
until 1794 and became firmly established only with the rise of Napo
leon. Between the initial defiance of royal authority in June 1789,
when the National Assembly constituted itself from the Estates Gen
eral, and the victorious advance of French armies into Belgium and the
Rhinelands in 1793–94, important changes came to the army and navy
inherited from the Old Regime.
The first such change was absolutely critical to the success of the
revolutionary cause, for it made the army unwilling to defend the Old
Regime against its assailants.^7 In ways largely untraceable, soldiers of
- The Minoan civilization of Crete appears to have concentrated resources at Knos
sos more by trade than by raid. Sea empires of Java and Sumatra did the same in the first
millenium A.D. But islands divided among rival political masters, as Japan was through
most of its history, characteristically conform to continental patterns of mobilization, in
which command plays a more prominent part and the market remains subordinate. - Use of regular troops against civilian crowds was an awkward matter for
eighteenth-century armies. Cf. Tony Haytor, The Army and the Crowd in Mid-Georgian
England (London, 19^7 8). A volley of muskets at close range was murderous; yet no
other tactics were available. Crowd control was not systematically developed by Euro
pean police forces until the 1880s. The London dock strike (1889) established the
principles of “Keep moving, please,” i.e., of allowing marches and peaceful demonstra-