(^200) Chapter Six
it became standard to draw lots to determine who would march off to
the army; but revolutionary equality was modified after 1799 by mak
ing it legal for a man whose number had been called to find a substi
tute by paying whatever sum of money the two could agree upon. In
this fashion the military draft was modulated by resort to the market,
so as to allow the rich to escape the burden and risk of personal
service. This system remained in force in France until after 1871,
though in most years after 1815, when few or none were called up, the
draft affected only a small portion of the eligible male population.
No one, of course, conceived of the annual draft as a way of ex
porting surplus young Frenchmen to foreign lands and thereby
ameliorating social frictions arising from rapid population growth. All
the same, it had that effect throughout the Napoleonic years; and,
conversely, the success of the draft depended on the annual matura
tion of enough young men to fill the ranks of the army and also
perform essential tasks at home. By 1814 Napoleon was scraping the
bottom of the barrel; but until 1812 his ever renewed demands on
the French nation for more recruits did not disrupt civil life very
noticeably. For twenty years the surge in population dating from the
mid-eighteenth century continued to supply sufficient numbers of
able-bodied young men to meet both military and civil demands for
manpower.
Within France itself, the demographic impact of the draft was di
minished by expanding the geographic area to which it was applied.
Annexations to France almost doubled the number of “French
men”—from about 25 million in 1789 to 44 million in 1810—and
these new citizens under Napoleon’s jurisdiction supplied their share
of the 1.3 million conscripts Napoleon enrolled between 1800 and
- In addition, allied states were induced or compelled to contrib
ute armed contingents to the Grande Armée of 1812, so that only
a minority of the forces invading Russia in 1812 actually spoke
French.^34
In effect, therefore, Napoleon applied the revolutionary device for
defusing social tensions arising from rapid population growth to all the - Ibid., pp. 191, 195, 379, 513–14. According to Lefebvre, the Grande Armée
totaled 700,000, of whom 611,000 crossed the Russian frontier. Of this number, only
300,000 were French and 230,000 were from “old France.” The really heavy draft hit
France only in 1812–13 when Napoleon called up more than 1 million new soldiers, and
succeeded in mobilizing about 41 percent of all the men registered with the Ministry of
War. On population pressure in Germany and its political expression see Karl H.
Wegert, “Patrimonial Rule, Popular Self-Interest and Jacobinism in Germany, 1763—
1800,” Journal of Modern History 53 (1981): 450 ff.