190 Chapter Six
holders of Paris, who had to be well enough off to buy their own
uniforms and weapons. But, from its inception, the Paris National
Guard also included a core of sixty paid professional companies which
enrolled many former members of the king’s French Guards, as well as
some veterans and deserters from line units of the army. Election of
officers by voters of the district of the city where each National Guard
company was stationed represented a radical change from old princi
ples of army administration. Yet in practice the Marquis de Lafayette,
duly elected as commander of the Paris National Guard at its very
inception, played a large role in deciding who got elected, even
though his command over the Parisian Guard remained open to chal
lenge, whenever popular excitement again rose to fever pitch.^12
Veterans of the royal army became drillmasters for the new volun
teer units. They played an important role in making the National
Guard a significant military force in Paris and, on occasion, also out
side the city boundaries, as when the Guard marched to Versailles on
5–6 October 1789 along with other angry Parisians and brought the
king back with them as a kind of hostage to the revolution. Assuredly
revolutionary ideals and popular insurgency strained older military
institutions in Paris to the breaking point. But the paid core units of
the National Guard together with the drillmasters assigned to the
volunteer battalions maintained real continuities between old and new
armed establishments. At the top a few individuals like Lafayette,
who had held the rank of major general in the king’s service in 1789,
also provided a patina of legitimacy to the changes that came thick and
fast.
Outside of Paris, a parallel transformation spread throughout the
whole of the French army. Continuities were stronger than in the
capital since only a few of the Old Regime units, mostly foreign regi
ments, were suppressed. Between 1789 and 1791 relations between
officers and men grew tense as revolutionary ideas and sympathies
began to filter into provincial garrisons. Different units accepted rev
olutionary notions at different times and with different degrees of
warmth, depending in part on the political tone of the towns in which
they were stationed, and in part on internal dynamics among officers,
noncoms, and the rank and file within particular units. At first, the
soldiers expressed their alienation from their officers by deserting,
often seeking to join the National Guard in Paris. When this was
prohibited, acts of overt insubordination began to multiply.
- Louis Gottschalk and Margaret Maddox, Lafayette in the French Revolution:
Through the October Days (Chicago, 1969), pp. 159–90, 256–340.
