Summary: The Constituante and the "Revolutionizing” of the French Armed Forces from 1789 to 1791
Markus J. Prutsch
In the wake of the French Revolution the complete social order of the Ancien régime was rearranged, and the armed forces were subject to revision, too. Thus, the army ceased to be the monarch’s personal instrument of power and was transformed into a national institution. In this case the national assembly, and, within its framework, the military committee, played the most important role.
In the autumn of 1789 the Assemblée nationale constituante, feeling the need to defuse the army as a potential tool of the counter-revolution and to increase its efficiency by remedying existing abuses, started a reform, which took an inconsistent course without an assigned work schedule, in the course of which the conservatives prevailed in the end.
The reform’s result was a "nationalizing” of the army, control being transferred from the king to the national assembly. This was achieved by passing the constitution of 1791, which more or less limited the monarch to the role of formal supreme commander, taking away from him the possibility of doing with the army what he wanted. The decisive areas of authority being vested in the Assemblée nationale, the military administration with the minister for war on top was no longer responsible to the king, but to the legislative body.
Considering the permanently present dread of a possible counter-revolutionary deployment of the armed forces, the Assemblée tried to keep the army’s extent to a minimum and to find alternatives for military power. These efforts led to the formation of the force publique, and the national guard was supposed to be its backbone. The process of "nationalization” got special drive because of the universalization of military service: from then on, all citizens over the age of 18 years were pledged to participate in the garde nationale, which was exemplary for compulsory military service constituting the modern-style mass armies. Thus, the transition from an old-fashioned standing army to "an army of the people” and "an army of the masses” began, the "mercenary soldier” was replaced by a "citizen soldier”, the soldat citoyen, and this development actually is the core of this military reform act of the national assembly.
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