“The inhabitants of a territory not under occupation who on the approach of the enemy spontaneously take up arms to resist the invading troops without having had the time to organize themselves into regular armed units are entitled to be regarded as belligerents provided they carry arms openly and respect the laws and customs of war.”
This definition of the levée en masse as “the spontaneous springing to arms of the population in defense of the country”, still valid today, is based on the idea of the French Revolution, embodied in the Proclamation of the National Convention of 16 August 1793 which, as regards the enfranchised citizen, laid down inter alia “tout citoyen est soldat quand il s'agit de combattre la tyrannie”; a concept that stood in contradiction to the then current calculable “cabinet wars” conducted by the State, in which to the recruited subject used by the army, itself a tool of the State, was allocated only the role of a passive object, the remainder of the population being considered, in Ford's term, as “quantité négligable”.