In recent years a number of major studies have appeared of the army of the French Revolution and Napoleon of which readers of NNQ ought to be aware, especially as many of them seriously affect popular perceptions of the French war-machine in the period 1792- 1815. Furthermore, their importance is enhanced by the fact that they conclusively show that a view of military history that is based solely on guns, flags and battles is woefully inadequate.

In this respect the weakest of the works considered here is the only one whose focus is centered on the army of Napoleon, viz J. Elting's Swords around a Throne: Napoleon's Grande Armee' (Free Press, 1988). Elting, a retired American army officer who literally dates from the days when the US cavalry still had horses is not a professional historian, and it shows.

The first problem is his language, which is as irritating as it is bizarre, but, setting that aside, one is also faced by the question of his approach. Thus, Elting is an uncritical admirer of the Napoleonic army, for whom the Grande Armee ranks among the few 'greatest of the great' (xi). As will become apparent, this attitude seriously damages his conclusions, and this is, in fact, a great pity: Swords around a Throne is packed with useful information and could be a useful reference work. Whilst it is true that most of the factual content is not particularly new, being available in a wide range of other secondary sources, at least Elting has brought it all together under a single cover, and has added some useful comments of his own he is, for example, the only commentator that I know of to have realised the true significance of the multiplicity of troop types in the French army (thus, in function the French light infantry regiments were in practice indistinguishable from their line infantry counterparts, their survival as a separate arm being based far more on Napoleon's need constantly to stimulate competiton and rivalry within his forces).

Yet despite such insights, Elting flies in the face of logic. Whilst explicitly recognising that inter unit rivalry and personal gain acted as a constant spur to the army's motivation and morale, he is blind to the implications that this poses for his hero-worship. As John Lynn, another of the historians considered here, has shown in a series of scholarly articles, between 1792 and 1805 the army underwent a dramatic transformation. In the period 1792-94 the age of the greatest revolutionary enthusiasm it is arguable that the army was motivated above all by the concept of civic virtue, i.e. that it regarded itself primarily as a tool of the nation and, indeed, conceived itself to be indistinguishable from that nation.

After that, however, matters began to change. In the first place, although conscription continued, it became less all pervasive and more and more inclined to affect only the poorer sections of society, whilst, as the conscripts remained permanently under arms and increasingly served outside metropolitan France, the army became more and more professional and less and less identified with civilian society. Meanwhile, particularly in its higher echelons the officer corps was increasingly drawn into politics and corrupted by the immense opportunities for personal enrichment offered by the French occupation of the Low Countries, the Rhineland, Switzerland and Italy. From all this there emerged what Lynn calls an 'army of honour' i.e. an army whose members were fighting primarily for themselves, 'honour' being identified in terms of promotion, decoration, higher pay, plunder of all sorts, and even, to return to Elting's point, fancy uniforms.

Under Napoleon, all this was institutionalised, the creation of the Imperial Guard and the Legion of Honour being prime examples of this process. In so far as the army's behaviour towards the civilian population of the areas through which it passed (and here one must include not only such countries as Germany, Italy and Spain, but also France herself) is concerned, the results could not but be extremely serious. Of course, as Elting points out, many individual officers were decent human beings who sought to restrain their men; of course, again, there were numerous decrees against pillaging and other forms of misbehaviour; but the fact is that for the most part the civilian population, not to mention whatever financial and material resources came to hand, was regarded as fair game.

Indeed, especially outside France, given the official policy of living off the land and the sense of cultural superiority inherited from the Revolution, how could matters be otherwise. All this, however, is ignored by Elting. Whilst he is prepared to admit that Napoleon's soldiers were not all saints, he yet paints a picture of civil military relations that is essentially as roseate as that which he presents of the army's motivation. Working as he does solely from the numerous memoirs penned by veterans of the Grande Armee, this is not surprising, but the fact remains that his conclusions are more than somewhat wide of the mark, all the evidence suggesting that occupation by the the French army was a highly unpleasant business hence in part the massive popular resistance to the empire that was occasioned in Spain, Portugal and parts of' Italy.

Qualitatively far superior though his work is, the second author considered by this article in part shares Elting's vices. if Elting's Swords around a Throne is a hymn of praise to the Grande Armee, Jean Paul Bertaud's The Army of the French Revolution: from Citizen Soldiers to Instrument of Power (Princeton, 1988) adopts a somewhat similar attitude to the 'levee en masse' of 1793-4. A dedicated admirer of the Jacobins, Bertaud argues that France's victories in the early period of the Revolutionary Wars essentially stemmed from the ideological commitment of her soldiery and the superiority of her political system and institutions to those of the 'ancien regime'. Whilst recognising the influence of some of the developments on which Lynn comments, he can therefore write even of the troops of the last years of the Republic: But above this 'esprit de corps' and traditional ethic there was now and henceforth, among all soldiers, the pride of being sons of the Great Nation.

They thought of themselves as the vanguard of a France which, by them and through them, had imposed the Rights of Man and the Citizen on the kings of the earth. Sacrifice was accepted in the name of the principles expressed in this Declaration. Every victory proved for them that men who were free and equal were superior to the mercenaries of kings ... Those men were sons of an egalitarian revolution, and well into the Consulate and Empire, it was still the hymn of the Marseillaise ... that drove them forward. We therefore learn a great deal about the transformation of the French into a Nation in Arms and the intense efforts that were made both to politicise the troops and to galvanise the civilian population into support for the war effort, as well as to develop new tactics that suited the forces of the Revolution (pride of place here goes to the constant stress that was placed on the offensive and the use of the 'arme blanche').

At the same time Bertaud makes an important contribution by showing conclusively that the large contingent of the old regular army that fought at Valmy in 1792 was as revolutionary in politics and composition as the National Guards and patriotic volunteers who backed them up, thereby spiking the guns of those conservative historians who have tried to denigrate the efficacy of revolutionary military institutions by arguing that the real fighting always had to be done by the regulars.

Yet, for all that, Bertaud's analysis remains unconvincing. Whilst he recognises that resistance to the 'levee en masse' was widespread, that the rate of draft evasion and desertion was enormous, and that whole regions of the country rose in revolt in protest at the imposition of conscription, he continues to give the impression that such resistance was a minority reaction, that the constant propaganda produced universally positive results, and, in short, that, at least in 1793-94, France was indeed a Nation in Arms. How this was from the truth may be gauged by reference to the work of the leading British historian of the Revolution, Alan Forrest.

In two major works Conscripts and Deserters: the Army and French Society during the Revolution and Empire (Oxford, 1989) and Soldiers of the Revolution (Durham, N.C., 1990), Forrest badly undermines the myths of both the Nation in Arms and the ideological army. Thus, in the former we see a France in which resistance was not just limited to certain inherently hostile backward areas such as the Vendee, or for that matter to periods of Jacobin domination such as 1793-94, but rather extended across most of the country under Republic and Empire alike.

Thus, young men threatened by the draft resorted to a wide variety of more or less nefarious and/or drastic devices to get themselves out of trouble, or, failing that, went into hiding or took to the forests and hills by the thousand, whilst those of their fellows who unlucky enough to be caught out often fled from the ranks at the first possible opportunity.

Meanwhile, their defiance of the government was often aided and abetted by peasant communities desperate for labour, eager to defend the integrity of the family, and generally hostile to a centralising and modernising regime. By 1799 the problem had become so serious that large parts of the country were to all intents and purposes out of the government's control, and it was only with the advent of Napoleon as First Consul that matters began to improve thanks first of all to a significant improvement in the machinery of repression and, secondly, to the relatively modest demands that his access to the manpower of large parts of Italy, Germany and the Low Countries allowed him to make of France.

At best, however, the improvement was modest, and, once the emperor's demands for manpower once more began to rise and then, after 1812, to soar the situation spiralled completely out of control, eventually playing a significant role in Napoleon's downfall. Once a soldier was actually in the army, there is some evidence to suggest that by a variety of means he could often be brought to accept his fate (though it should be noted that the rate of desertion always remained very high in The Napoleonic Empire (London, 1991), Geoffery Ellis has even suggested that under the Empire the total number of draft evaders and deserters may have been as high as 500,000, a figure which amounts to twenty per cent of all those mobilised by Napoleon). In Soldiers of the French Revolution, however, Alan Forrest casts grave doubt on the idea that revolutionary propaganda contributed very much in this field. Rather than being used to politicise the soldiery, he suggests that political propaganda was rather intended to reinforce the bonds of military discipline, the consequence being that its positive effects were rather limited.

To quote from his conclusion: If some soldiers talked effusively of the liberties they were bringing to the benighted peoples of Europe and boasted of their Republican ideals, they were relatively few in number. Most restricted themselves to discussing the everyday concerns of military life... and the almost permanent penury which they suffered. From their diaries and correspondence, they emerge less as Revolutionary activists than as a cross section of the youth of France, passively accepting the duties prescribed for them. Their reactions extended across the entitle gamut of human response, from keenness to apathy, from commitment to reaction.

At best, then, Forrest is prepared only to concede that the endless proselytization helped give the army of the Revolution a very strong identity that helped it to incorporate large numbers of raw conscripts into its ranks. What it certainly did not do was to produce scrried ranks of men committed to a particular regime or ideology as Forrest points out, throughout the series of political convulsions and military coups that marred the later years of the Republic, the common soldiers remained entirely quiescent, being content to follow the orders of their superiors.

French Army Success

So what did make the French army so successful? The answer seems largely to lie in its internal ethos and structure. Here Forrest and, to be fair, Elting and Bertaud as well places much emphasis on the reforms that took place iin the treatment of the soldiery in the aftermath of the Revolution: in contrast to the situation before 1789, they had the chance of promotion and reward, their dependants were looked after, and they were no longer subject to brutal physical punishment and endless personal humiliation.

As the last work to be surveyed here John Lynn's The Bayonets of the Republic: Motivation and Tactics in the Armies of Revolutionary France, 1791 (Chicago, 1984) rightly points out, further assistance was provided by the Revolutionary authorities' decision to place much stress upon the so called 'ordinaire' the squad of 1416 men in which the soldier lived and fought.

Kept permanently in being, these squads ate together from a common cookpot, in so far as possible occupied a single tent, billet or barrack room, and fought side by side on the battlefield. Newcomers could be received by them and shown the ropes, whilst at all times soldiers who had been plucked from the security and intimacy of traditional peasant society could find in them comfort and friendship.

At the same time, too, they acted as a spur to discipline and motivation: soldiers might remain indifferent to the barrage of propaganda to which they were subjected and hostile to the discipline imposed by their officers, but they were far less likely to be willing to let down their friends and to risk the ostracization and scorn that might result. Continued into the Empire, the 'ordinaire'was clearly crucial to the army's success, and, in fact, an excellent picture of its working in the Napoleonic period may be found in R. F. Delderfield's novel, Seven Men of Gascony.

What does all this add up to? Clearly, France was not a Nation in Arms, or, at least, not a very willing one, and it is clear that after the fall of the Jacobins in 1794 she was never again mobilised for total war until Napoleon tired desperately and unsuccessfully to do so in the dark days of 1814. Very large and based on conscription though it was, her army was rather a professional one that, as even Bertaud recognises, increasingly drifted apart from civilian society.

As such it was driven not so much by a self-conscious political awareness but rather by a code of values that was entirely its own, whilst it was also able to develop highly sophisticated tactical systems that would have been beyond the grasp of mere citizens in uniform (for example, Lynn also stresses the importance of training in the Revolutionary armies, pointing out that even in 1793 the troops were able to fight not just in column but also in line).

Under Napoleon all this reached its apogee, and, whilst the problem of desertion was never overcome, on the whole the army fought well for him right to the end. But the end still came: if the troops fought bravely in 1814, the vast majority of the civilian population remained aloof or actively hostile to the Emperor's attempts to recreate 1793, and in consequence the Grande Armee was overcome.

Charles Esdaile, University of Liverpool.