
Contents
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The Army of the Old Regime The Army of the Old Regime
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Noble Officers and Professionalization Noble Officers and Professionalization
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The Reform Debate The Reform Debate
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The National Assembly and the Army The National Assembly and the Army
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Crisis in the Armies Crisis in the Armies
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An Army for the Revolution An Army for the Revolution
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Notes Notes
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Suggested Reading Suggested Reading
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22 Military Trauma
Get accessAlan Forrest is a professor of modern history at the University of York (Emeritus). He has published widely on modern French history, especially on the French Revolution and empire and on the history of war. Authored recent books include The Legacy of the French Revolutionary Wars: The Nation-in-Arms in French Republican Memory (2009); Napoleon (2011); Waterloo (2015); and The Death of the French Atlantic: Trade, War, and Slavery in the Age of Revolution (2020). Among the volumes he has published are Soldiers, Citizens and Civilians: Experiences and Perceptions of the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars, 1790–1820, edited with Karen Hagemann and Jane Rendall (2009); War Memories: The Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars in Modern European Culture, edited with Étienne François and Karen Hagemann (2012); and The Routledge Companion to the French Revolution in World History, edited with Matthias Middell (2015).
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Published:16 December 2013
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Abstract
The Old Regime army had been battered by serial defeats during the eighteenth century, and was open to proposals for reform. When 1789 came it was not army reforms that spread despair and trauma but the political situation created in the early years of the French Revolution: the assault on privilege, the ambivalent attitude of the king, the crisis of loyalty which this created for the officers, and the gaping void in the army’s ranks caused by desertion, emigration and the ideology of the Rights of Man. The defeats that followed the declaration of war added to despair, and it was only by resort to further traumatic measures—radicalizing recruitment, promoting officers from the ranks, and amalgamating the line army with the new volunteers, and ultimately the resort to Terror—that the fortunes of the army were turned around.
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