Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Dedication
- Contents
- Preface
- Introduction: Understanding Changes in Military Recruitment and Employment Worldwide
- Military Labor in China, c. 1500
- From the Mamluks to the Mansabdars: A Social History of Military Service in South Asia, c. 1500 to c. 1650
- On the Ottoman Janissaries (Fourteenth-nineteenth Centuries)
- Soldiers in Western Europe, c. 1500-17901
- The Scottish Mercenary as a Migrant Labourer in Europe, 1550-1650
- Change and Continuity in Mercenary Armies: Central Europe, 1650-1750
- Peasants Fighting for a Living in Early Modern North India
- “True to Their Salt”: Mechanisms for Recruiting and Managing Military Labour in the Army of the East India Company During the Carnatic Wars in India
- “The Scum of Every County, the Refuse of Mankind”: Recruiting the British Army in the Eighteenth Century
- Mobilization of Warrior Populations in the Ottoman Context, 1750-1850
- Military Employment in Qing Dynasty China
- Military Service and the Russian Social Order, 1649-1861
- The French army, 1789-1914: Volunteers, Pressed Soldiers, and Conscripts
- The Dutch Army in Transition: From All-volunteer Force to Cadre-militia Army, 1795-1830
- The Draft and Draftees in Italy, 1861-1914
- Nation-building, War Experiences, and European Models: The Rejection of Conscription in Britain
- Mobilizing Military Labor in the Age of Total War: Ottoman Conscription Before and During the Great War
- Soldiering as Work: The All-volunteer Force in the United States
- Private Contractors in War From the 1990s to the Present: A Review Essay
- Collective Bibliography
- Notes on Contributors
The French army, 1789-1914: Volunteers, Pressed Soldiers, and Conscripts
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 12 December 2020
- Frontmatter
- Dedication
- Contents
- Preface
- Introduction: Understanding Changes in Military Recruitment and Employment Worldwide
- Military Labor in China, c. 1500
- From the Mamluks to the Mansabdars: A Social History of Military Service in South Asia, c. 1500 to c. 1650
- On the Ottoman Janissaries (Fourteenth-nineteenth Centuries)
- Soldiers in Western Europe, c. 1500-17901
- The Scottish Mercenary as a Migrant Labourer in Europe, 1550-1650
- Change and Continuity in Mercenary Armies: Central Europe, 1650-1750
- Peasants Fighting for a Living in Early Modern North India
- “True to Their Salt”: Mechanisms for Recruiting and Managing Military Labour in the Army of the East India Company During the Carnatic Wars in India
- “The Scum of Every County, the Refuse of Mankind”: Recruiting the British Army in the Eighteenth Century
- Mobilization of Warrior Populations in the Ottoman Context, 1750-1850
- Military Employment in Qing Dynasty China
- Military Service and the Russian Social Order, 1649-1861
- The French army, 1789-1914: Volunteers, Pressed Soldiers, and Conscripts
- The Dutch Army in Transition: From All-volunteer Force to Cadre-militia Army, 1795-1830
- The Draft and Draftees in Italy, 1861-1914
- Nation-building, War Experiences, and European Models: The Rejection of Conscription in Britain
- Mobilizing Military Labor in the Age of Total War: Ottoman Conscription Before and During the Great War
- Soldiering as Work: The All-volunteer Force in the United States
- Private Contractors in War From the 1990s to the Present: A Review Essay
- Collective Bibliography
- Notes on Contributors
Summary
According to a common belief, modern military conscription was invented during the French Revolution. Subsequently it became a cornerstone of republicanism in the French understanding. Without any doubt, there is some truth in this view; however, there is also much confusion about the terms of the debate. If we have a closer look at actual recruitment practices in France in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and if we compare these to practices in other historical periods or geographical contexts the distinctions quickly become less clear. The first question to be addressed is thus how to distinguish in a historically convincing way different forms of military labour, which are enslavement, professionals, mercenaries, and conscription. It will actually turn out that these distinctions have necessarily to be linked to systems of social representation, and they are inseparable from social norms and values, as well as from representations of social justice and of legitimate social orders. Things get worse if we keep in mind that historical scholarship in itself is always and necessarily linked to and indeed involved in the construction of these normative and symbolic orders themselves. To stick to the French case: there has been a constant tendency to link the setting-up of the cadre/conscript system during the last third of the nineteenth century to the legacy of the French Revolution and, more particularly, to the category of “national volunteers” fighting for liberty. In the light of this imaginary genealogy, recruitment practices of the ancien régime have been dismissed as military “enslavement” by a despotic state. The outcome was obviously the construction of a normative dichotomy between legitimate and illegitimate forms of recruitment. If we take a closer look at what had actually been going on in terms of recruitment practices, it appears in many cases that the differences between the earlier and the later practices were less important than commonly believed. On the contrary, there is a great deal of continuity between the ancien régime and the modern republic.
However, the analysis should not stop there. It is obviously not the same thing to serve in the military as a pressed soldier or to accomplish one's civic duty through military service, although the concrete practices, of military drill for instance, may, from another point of view, be strictly the same.
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- Information
- Fighting for a LivingA Comparative Study of Military Labour 1500–2000, pp. 419 - 446Publisher: Amsterdam University PressPrint publication year: 2013
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