Impact of Political and Industrial Revolutions 195
tories were improvised in Paris and other cities.^24 Something like the
program envisioned by the levée en masse was, at least temporarily,
realized. The decree had declared that married men would "forge
weapons and transport munitions.” Clearly, not all of them did so, or
could have produced a worthwhile musket had they tried. But many
did, and muskets were produced in improvised workshops—often
former convents and other religious buildings.
Arms supply problems were accentuated by the fact that the main
royal arsenals were located far from Paris, in parts of France where
revolutionary sentiment was not always strong. In the area around
Lyons, for example, a bitter revolt broke out against Paris in the
autumn of 1793, disrupting arms manufacture at nearby St. Etienne,
where by far the largest French armory was located. When new
supplies of metal were delivered to the gunsmiths of St. Etienne,
however, production picked up again rapidly and soon exceeded
older ceilings. Under the Old Regime, for example, St. Etienne’s an
nual production of handguns had oscillated between 10,000 and
26,000; in 1792–93 production plummeted, but since records were
not kept, exactly what happened is unknowable. Then, between 1794
and 1796 production rose above prewar levels, averaging 56,600 per
annum. Output slacked off subsequently, varying from year to year
according to the demand. The peak came in 1810 when Napoleon’s
officials procured no fewer than 97,000 handguns from the artisan
producers of St. Etienne.^25 Other Old Regime arsenals, like Charle
ville near the Belgian frontier, were occupied by invading armies at
the height of the crisis in 1792–93 and only began to serve the revolu
tion after the French had driven back the foe.
Improvisation and reliance on inexperienced labor was, therefore,
the norm at the height of the revolutionary crisis, from August 1793
to July 1794. During those months, the principles of a command
economy were blended in remarkable fashion with voluntary and
semivoluntary behavior. When the army needed something badly,
representatives on mission, as well as army personnel and other agents
of the government, tried desperately to find the needed items. Louis
Antoine de St. Just, a member of the Committee of Public Safety, for
example, managed to collect 20,000 pairs of shoes from the citizens of
Strasbourg by demanding that they contribute to the army’s urgent
- Theodore Wertime, The Coming of Age of Steel (Leiden, 1961), p. 249, says that
Paris produced 1,100 muskets a day under the Committee of Public Safety.
- These figures come from Louis Joseph Gras, Historique de l’armurerie stéphanoise
(St. Etienne, 1905), pp. 99, 225–27.
