Impact of Political and Industrial Revolutions 189To be able to prevail on that famous day, the attackers required the
tacit acquiescence of the soldiers, some 7,000 strong, who were
stationed in Paris to guard the royal palaces and perform other duties
for the king. Detachments of the French Guard actually joined the
crowd, and by bringing artillery pieces up against the Bastille played
an important role in its capture.^10 In the aftermath, Louis XVI prom
ised to withdraw his soldiers from Paris and Versailles so as to quiet
fears of armed counterrevolution. The king’s decision (or indecision,
for he wavered often enough in private) blunted the plots and plans
army officers and other aristocrats harbored for using the royal army
to repress the revolutionaries by force; and such plans became more
and more illusory as time passed, since the processes that had led
soldiers of the French Guard to support the revolution swiftly under
mined the loyalty of the army’s rank and file to the Old Regime in
other parts of France. The noncoms thus made the army revolutionary
by almost imperceptible degrees, and deprived the Old Regime of its
ultimate basis for survival before officers and ministers really noticed
what was occurring.
The second circumstance that facilitated the merger of army opin
ion with public opinion was that army units did not usually reside in
separate barracks but were quartered in towns and lived amidst the
humbler ranks of urban society when off duty—sometimes indeed
engaging in handicraft work to supplement their pay. Most of the
soldiers were townsmen when they enlisted,^11 and the experience and
discipline of military life did not suffice to cut them off from ordinary
contacts with the urban populace whence they had come; whereas, by
way of contrast, rural recruits were effectually severed from their
village ties in those armies (Prussian and Russian) that depended on
peasant manpower.
In the field French soldiers could, like the Old Regime armies,
become an encapsulated, autonomous society, only slenderly con
nected with civil society back home. This is what happened after 1794
and made Napoleon’s career possible. But under the circumstances of
1789–92 the distance between soldiery and urban revolutionaries was
reduced to the disappearing point, with results fatal to Louis XVI’s
monarchy.
The Paris National Guard was the revolutionaries’ first effort to
create an armed force of their own. Volunteers came from the house
- Godechot, La prise de la Bastille, pp. 289 ff.
- Scott, Response of the Royal Army, pp. 17, 45.