Ebook: The Army Of The French Revolution: From Citizen Soldiers To Instrument Of Power

Jean-Paul Bertaud is the leading French authority on the army of the French Revolution, and La Revolution armee is the authoritative treatment of the first great national, patriotic, revolutionary, and mass army, engaged in what has been called the first total war: that between revolutionary France and the other European powers. The book is a successful attempt to integrate military history with social and political history and thereby to depict the army as a "school for the republic" that by subtle changes after 1795 made way for the Napoleonic regime. The distinguished historian R. R. Palmer presents the first translation of this work into English in a volume that will quickly become indispensable for French historians, historical sociologists, and political scientists interested in armies and revolutions.


The theme of the book is suggested by its French title: "the Revolution armed." That is, the book is primarily about the Revolution, and specifically the Revolution in its relation to armed force. This revolution, and this army, activated the idea of the citizen-soldier exemplified by the ancient classical republics, and favored by Jean-Jacques Rousseau and other eighteenth-century thinkers, but never before realized on so large and portentous a scale as in France in the 1790s.