Impact of Political and Industrial Revolutions 191A tip point came after June 1791 when the king’s attempted flight
from Paris ended ignominiously in his capture at Varennes. That
event damped aristocratic hopes of being able to rally the army behind
the king for an attack upon the revolutionaries of Paris, whereupon
multiplying signs of revolutionary sympathies among the soldiers led
increasing numbers of French army officers to throw up their commis
sions and flee the country. By the end of 1791 more than half of the
French officer corps had gone into exile. Their place was taken by
sergeants and corporals promoted to commissioned ranks. As a result,
in the course of 1792 outbreaks of insubordination dwindled to insig
nificance and the army achieved a far greater internal cohesion than it
had known in the three preceding years.^13
The new officers were professionally competent and experienced
men. They proved numerous enough and hardbitten enough to
transmit old army ways to the horde of newcomers who poured into
the ranks in 1792 and 1793 when foreign and domestic enemies began
to threaten the revolution. This upshot was not, however, im
mediately apparent. In 1791, even before war with Austria and Prussia
broke out, the Legislative Assembly decreed a new volunteer army,
enlisted initially for only six months. In 1792 volunteers were again
enrolled, this time for a year’s service; and since quotas were assigned
to each département, an element of compulsion was added to the vol
untary principle. One result was to bring significant numbers of peas
ants’ sons into the ranks of the revolutionary armies for the first time.
In the first phases of the revolution, the new armed forces were
aimed at domestic enemies. When, however, after April 1792, Aus
trians and Prussians joined the domestic foes of the revolution, the
role and character of the French armed forces underwent yet another
rapid transformation. On the one hand, the recruitment of bourgeois
volunteers into the National Guard had to yield to a policy of arming a
broader segment of the population. As the leaders of the revolution
became more dependent on the lower classes of Paris, this seemed no
more than a prudent guarantee of their continuance in power. On the
other hand, it also seemed necessary to rally the whole nation against
the foreign enemy. The awkward distinction between the regular
army, inherited from the Old Regime, and the separate revolutionary
armed force of volunteers became meaningless when a foreign rather
than a domestic foe had to be met. Accordingly, in February 1793, the
Convention decreed an amalgamation between the regulars and the
- Scott, Response of the Royal Army, pp. 98–120; Henry S. Wilkinson, The French
Army before Napoleon (Oxford, 1915), pp. 99–143.