(^194) Chapter Six
Urban unrest and distress, which had done so much to set the
revolution in motion, did not disappear; but the fighting manpower
that could make the anger of the crowd effective was missing from the
streets after 1794, making repression relatively easy. Something like
600,000 French soldiers died between 1792 and 1799;^21 the sur
vivors, stationed outside France for the most part, lived on plunder
and forced contributions from the “liberated” people of Belgium,
Germany, and Italy. When that did not suffice, supplies could come
from within France itself, where, after 1794, a rapid recovery of
market-regulated economic activity took place. As purchase replaced
forcible requisition a new clique of war profiteers grew rich by sup
plying the armies, and French military administration at home again
conformed to Old Regime patterns, despite the substantial increase in
numbers that the levée en masse made possible.
French victories amazed contemporaries, but in retrospect the rev
olutionary success in creating vast armies seems relatively simple and
straightforward, given the dynamic of expanding population and eco
nomic dislocation from which France both profited and suffered. The
parallel task of creating enough arms to make French numbers mean
ingful on the battlefield was, on the whole, far more remarkable, for
when the war began, royal arsenals were depleted as a result of deliv
eries to the American forces during the War of Independence.^22 In the
six years between the victorious conclusion of that war and the out
break of the revolution, the fiscal embarrassments of the government
had been such as to prevent any significant build-up of reserve stocks.
Hence the revolutionaries found the cupboard almost bare,^23 and
current production was entirely inadequate to equip the hundreds of
thousands of new soldiers called up by the mobilizations of 1791 and
the following years.
The general disruption of orderly administration and the prevalence
of local self-help in the first days of the new revolutionary armies
means that no very plausible statistics about arms production can be
discovered. In the white heat of the “revolution in danger” arms fac-
p. 145. On the weakening of crowd action by withdrawal of young men into the armies
see his remarks, ibid., p. 70. Jacques Godechot, Les revolutions, 1770–1799 (Paris,
1970), pp. 94–95.
- Lefebvre, French Revolution, p. 315.
- One hundred thousand muskets had been sent from French armories to the
Americans between 1778 and 1783, according to Gunther Rothenberg, The Art of
Warfare in the Age of Napoleon (Bloomington, Ind., 1978), pp. 120–21. - In 1789 the French army possessed only 1,300 pieces of Gribeauval s new field
artillery; by 1795 the number almost doubled, thanks to an intense revolutionary effort,
using melted-down church bells as the prime source of metal. Ibid., p. 123.