Impact of Political and Industrial Revolutions^197sticks, much of the effort was undoubtedly inefficient. But all the
same, things got done, and on a mass scale. Men joined the army, and
food and supplies were found for their support, even when the size of
the army swelled to about 650,000 by July 1793. This figure was more
than twice what Louis XIV had ever been able to put into uniform.
Doubling of the army’s size (on the basis of a population only about 30
percent greater in 1789 than in 1700) offers a rough measure of the
intensification of mobilization for war that the revolution wrought in
France.^28
The revolutionary war effort of 1793–94 was like a breaking wave:
it rose very high but could not be long sustained. Once Maximilien
Robespierre had been overthrown and the Terror relaxed, hectoring
methods of wringing further supplies from the French public met with
mounting resistance. The Law of the Maximum was repealed and the
government fell back (willingly enough) on private contractors who
had to pay inflated prices for the commodities they gathered for the
army and other government uses, and added a handsome profit for
themselves. Rampant inflation and the rise of a class of nouveaux riches
resulted, giving a character of its own to the years of the Directory
(1795–99).
But as the government fell back on market incentives to manage the
French economy, it, in effect, exported the emergency command
economy to neighboring lands—Belgium, the Rhinelands, and, after
1797, to Italy as well. To do so, of course, it was first necessary to win
victories over the republic s enemies. The first success came in Sep
tember 1792, at Valmy, when forty of Gribeauval’s artillery pieces,
firing at extreme range, so discomfited the Prussians as to persuade
them to withdraw from French soil.^29
In subsequent battles, revolutionary ardor and numbers played a
more conspicuous role than any kind of expertise. Yet here, too,
- In 1694 Louis XIV’s army totaled about 300,000 men, the highest figure of his
reign according to David Chandler, The Art of War in the Age of Marlborough (New
York, 1976), p. 65. I take the figure for the size of the revolutionary army from
Lefebvre, French Revolution, p. 81. - Other considerations, notably widespread illness in the Prussian army, also af
fected this decision. Curt Jany, Geschichte der Koniglich Preussischen Armee (Berlin,
1928–37), 3:257 says that, on 20 October 1792, 12,864 men out of 15,068 reported in
sick! In general, Prussia and Austria found it impossible to concentrate attention on
France when the final partitioning of Poland was still in process (1793, 1795). Nonethe
less, it is symbolic of the continuity in matters military between the Old Regime and the
revolutionary management of armed force that this initial success against the vaunted
Prussian army depended on superior weaponry, inherited from Gribeauval’s reforms.
The recovery of Toulon (1793), where Napoleon played his first conspicuous role, also
turned upon the accuracy and rate of fire of the new French field artillery.