Nationalizing France's Army by Christopher J. Tozzi

Author:Christopher J. Tozzi [Tozzi, Christopher J.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: History, Modern, 18th Century
ISBN: 9780813938349
Google: FFrSCgAAQBAJ
Publisher: University of Virginia Press
Published: 2016-05-30T00:15:32+00:00

FOR FOREIGN TROOPS IN THE FRENCH ARMY, the era of the Directory and the Consulate was a relatively unremarkable one, despite the dramatic overseas expeditions that constituted much of France’s military activities at the time. Compared to the earlier part of the revolutionary decade and to the Napoleonic Empire, the number of foreigners who retained active posts in the French army during the late 1790s and early 1800s was minimal. Meanwhile, foreigners who bore arms on behalf of France by serving under the flags of sister-republics were of little political or ideological concern for French officials, who had ushered responsibility for these troops into the hands of allied governments precisely because they wished to resolve the complications of foreign recruitment.

Yet the period of the Directory and Consulate illuminated the relationship between military service and nationality that had emerged out of the Revolution in sharper perspective than ever. By adopting and enforcing strict policies prohibiting the recruitment of foreigners for the army during much of this time, French officials affirmed military service as the privilege and duty of French citizens alone to an extent of which their predecessors had only dreamed. At the same time, by deploying the army as a tool for bolstering the integration of new citizens into France, the government made military enlistment not just contingent upon French nationality, but actually a constitutive element of French citizenship. Just as foreigners could not serve because they were not French, men who had only recently received citizenship, and who were effectively in the process of becoming French, received special consideration within the military regime as a means of promoting that process.

On the surface, the reintroduction of foreign units to the French army beginning in 1799 implied a return to the policies that had been in place before the Terror, when France had last maintained foreign legions and regiments. Yet by relegating foreigners mostly to peculiar corps that policed the interior of France or were dispatched to fight the Republic’s brutal overseas wars, as well as by drawing stark distinctions between foreigners and French citizens when applying laws on conscription, the state in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century continued to exclude noncitizens from full participation in France’s military and political institutions. As the next chapter shows, this situation changed little under the Napoleonic Empire, when the state revived large-scale foreign recruitment yet remained suspicious of foreign troops regardless of their political loyalties.

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