Do the wars of the ancien régime and/or French Revolution include the elements you identified in question 1? The wars of the ancien régime were destructive and could produce mass casualties. The Thirty Years’ War, for example, produced mass devastation but it is not considered a total war because societies were not mobilized against an enemy and dedicated to the complete destruction of that enemy. However, the wars prior to the French Revolution did use similar weapons and before the eighteenth-century civilians and their property were subject to attack. The important caveat to that last point is that prior to cultural changes, largely encouraged by the Enlightenment, European society did not separate military and civilian life in the way …show more content…
The Revolution allowed more men to pursue a military career as promotional opportunities arose for men outside of the upper classes. Members of the Revolution worked to promote the idea of a civilian army, which eventually manifested, in part, as the new National Guard. Literate soldiers, and presumably some, if not most, illiterate soldiers, came to view military service as separate from civilian life. The view that civilian and military lives are distinct and different from one another shaped how both groups perceived the other. While the government sought to significantly increase the manpower of the army, they had to order a levée en masse, which was not always well received by the public. Through the attempts to create a citizen army the French government of the Revolutionary period began to blur the earlier civilian/military distinctions in France that were created by Enlightenment thinkers of the ancien régime. Rhetoric, which I discuss below, also allowed them to blur that line with when discussing their