Between the outbreak of war with Austria in 1792 and Napoleon's final debacle in 1814, France remained almost continously at war, recruiting in the process some two to three million frenchmen--a level of recruitment unknown to previous generations and widely resented as an attack on the liberties of rural communities. Forrest challenges the notion of a nation heroically rushing to arms by examining the massive rates of desertion and avoidance of service as well as their consequences on French society--on military campaigns and the morale of armies, on political opinion at home, on the social...

This book provides an interpretation of the French Revolution that is both thematic and accessible to the general reader. The discussion includes an analysis of the historiography of the subject, and reviews the range of literature produced around the recent Bicentenary. Insisting that the French Revolution had an important social dimension, Alan Forrest demonstrates that the revolutionaries, even the most extreme of them, were committed to an ordered society. He argues that in destroying the political institutions and the corporate structures of the Ancien Regime, they were conscious of the...